"Yao lingqiao like snake, xunliang like dove"

The expression “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” is invoked by Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli as he weighs how to protect Vincent Benítez’s secret. Its paired images frame a dilemma rather than resolve it: prudence might preserve secrecy temporarily, but the truth, Lomeli warns, will eventually surface.

Scriptural Counsel in a Practical Dilemma

Lomeli recalls the words from Matthew, Chapter 10, Verse 16 while considering the consequences of what he has learned. He turns the biblical injunction into an argument for strategic discretion: there is, he says, a reasonable chance of keeping the secret in the short term. His counsel is not to mistake that possibility for a lasting solution.

The expression’s two halves resonate with the situation in different ways. Serpentine wisdom suggests the caution needed to manage exposure; dove-like innocence remains an ideal placed under pressure by the contemplated concealment. The passage does not present the verse as an uncomplicated endorsement of secrecy. Instead, it makes prudence answer to the harder question of how long a secret can be kept.

The Limits of Concealment

Lomeli gives the danger a concrete outline. He proposes that O’Malley could be promoted to archbishop and sent away, adding that O’Malley will not talk and that Lomeli can deal with him. But the immediate plan cannot erase future traces: a visa application for Benítez’s stay in Switzerland gives the address of a clinic in Geneva. Benítez explains that the appointment was only a preliminary consultation, booked under an assumed name, and that he never went; the clinic would not know that he was its prospective patient.

Even that apparent safeguard does not settle the matter. Lomeli imagines the possibility that the visa application may one day be discovered, and points to the prospect of future medical treatment, a heart attack, and, eventually, Benítez’s death and embalming. The sequence turns a discussion of short-term concealment into a forecast of the secret’s vulnerability across a lifetime and beyond it.

A Revelation Left Open

After Lomeli’s warning, the two men sit in silence. Benítez then observes that they have forgotten one other person who knows the secret. Lomeli looks at him in alarm and asks who; the excerpt ends before Benítez names that person. The verse thus marks a moment when calculation reaches its limit: the plan has already accounted for possible records and future bodily scrutiny, yet another keeper of the secret remains unaccounted for.