The Frequency Of Stone

But diagnosis wasn't the problem. She knew what was wrong. The capacitor had failed. Simple. The solution was equally simple: replace it.

Except there were no replacement capacitors in Vatican City. The Radio building had spare parts for the main transmitter on the roof, but those were modern components, different specifications, incompatible with her father's 1938 design. She'd checked. Twice. The second time, Father Benedetti had given her a strange look, as if wondering why a junior archivist was so interested in radio equipment.

Which meant she needed to find parts in Rome. In occupied Rome, where every electronics shop had been requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, where vacuum tubes and capacitors were classified as strategic materials, where being caught with radio components without proper authorization could lead to immediate arrest on suspicion of operating a clandestine transmitter.

The irony would have been funny if it weren't so dangerous.

Elisa turned the capacitor over in her hands, examining it in the light from her desk lamp. The specifications were stamped on the casing: 0.1 microfarad, 600 volt rating, oil-filled. Common enough in the 1930s. Her father would have had a drawer full of them. But her father was five years dead, and his workshop had been cleared out by her mother, who had sold everything to pay for the funeral and the first year's rent on this apartment.