For Mercier it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer the ringing of the bell the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw he attended early mass at a small church near the apartment once or twice a month confessing to his vocational sins duplicity for example in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. Hed grown up an untroubled believer but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter But in time he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those hed lost for those he loved and for an end to evil in the world. Alan Furst The Spies of Warsaw