The bricks traversed the Atlantic singly. They were each numbered on all six faces and packaged in individual crates. Before that, they were joined in a church in Fuentidueña, Spain. Cut from limestone in the 12th century, they formed the apse—the semicircular, easterly area that frames a church’s altar.

It may be physically impossible to keep a secret. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips,” wrote Freud over a century ago, perhaps of some calm-faced neurotic drumming anxiety into an armrest. Now that modern fingertips chatter their secrets into laptops and iPhones, the same principle applies.