Excerpt from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was not the outer walls of the monastery, however, that liked to talk. It was the interior walls. It was the walls of the museum that no one frequented but me, and the archive rooms with the tens of thousands of papers and books and manuscripts and scrolls. It was the dark corners where secrets had been exchanged over the millennia, and where everything undocumented and hidden had produced their force.

The voices grew louder the deeper I went.

There were stairs. Too many to mention. I would open a wooden door and find stairs. I would see a wrought iron gate and behind it were stairs. There were stairs behind bookcases like in the old stories of haunted houses and there were stairs going down into places too dark to visit.

On that first day I covered as much ground as a child could and it was a miracle I even found the surface again. Over the months to follow, the abbey of Montecassino would become the building—the structure—I knew best in the world, better than my school in Rome. Better than the halls of the university where I would explore, bored, waiting for my father to emerge from one overwrought meeting or another.


"ARE YOU READY?" PIETRO ASKED me in the morning.

"For what?"

"Work. Perhaps you've heard of it?"

"What work?"

"You are the assistente del maestro di restauro e conservazione. Or have you forgotten already?"

"You were serious?"

"As far as you are aware, we are here to protect and safeguard the art of Montecassino from the challenges posed by the war around us. The rumbling. The pollution. The unforeseen."

"How?" I asked.

"I'll worry about that."

"I want to go to Naples," I said, though after four days in the peace and excitement of the monastery I was no longer so sure.

"No one's stopping you. But your timing is poor. Is someone waiting for you?"

I admitted they were not but I had people there.

"Are you certain they are there?"

I admitted I was not. But where else would they be?

The obvious answer—dead—eluded me then.

"I suggest you wait for the right moment," he said to me.

"When is that?"

"Moments present themselves. That's what makes them moments."

I didn't understand and the blankness on my face must have been readable because he responded to my silence: "The ancient Greeks had two words for time. One was 'chronos. ' That was like… time passing. Minutes and hours and such. The other was 'kairos. ' That meant the right or opportune moment, like the perfect instant to loose an arrow. Today we have lost that distinction but the Greeks were right, as usual. Put your trust in kairos, not chronos, Massimo. There really are opportune moments if you open yourself to seeing them. Now: I see from your shirt that you've had breakfast. So… if you're not leaving immediately, we can go be productive, yes?"

Excerpted from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller. Copyright © 2024 by Derek B. Miller. Excerpted by permission of Avid Reader Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.