by Declan Finn
He strolled over to the other side of the picket line where a patrolman stood. In contrast to the other spectators, the cop seemed amused, concerned only with keeping warm while watching the demonstrators. James successfully chatted him up.
“Somebody told me they had their kids make the signs in the grade school art classes. But don’t go by me, I’m Jewish.” The officer glanced into the church and then hollered at the pickets: “Please move to the side. Casket’s coming out.”
The twelve women lined up six on each side like a protest guard of honor. As the funeral group came out, James ducked in the side door, successfully missing the Bishop, the Lessner/Saleski families, and most of the attendant clergy.
He cut down the side aisle and into the sacristy, where he found a youngish priest who looked up from packing the vestments case to say, “His Excellency has left already to go to the cemetery. I’m his secretary, can I help you?”
James flashed a smile and kept moving. “No, thanks. I work here. Goodbye.” He closed the door to the rectory behind him.
The ground floor was empty so he tried upstairs and found Gus in his room, changing his clothes.
The priest spotted him, and growled. “Worst hours of my life. I didn’t sweat this much at my ordination.” Gus closed his shirt roughly then started buttoning. “The reception for the clergy is being held at Lepanto, with all of his good left-leaning friends. So I’m downright ambivalent. I haven’t the time, staff, money or inclination to host a gathering of the clerical clan, so it was a relief when Mike Barry offered, but I’d feel much easier if it was held on neutral turf. The thought that Tim’s best friend is collecting IOUs, at my expense, doesn’t make me feel any better.” He jammed his collar into place. “Did I ever tell you about the time Barry buffaloed the entire priests’ senate of the diocese? The man is a very effective politician, outwitting a hundred colleagues like that.”
James snorted, “You overestimate him. The level of debate at any committee or larger group of people is the sum of the individuals divided by TWICE the number of people present.”
Gus laughed at the formula.
Then James told him about the pickets…
After Gus’s fit of near apoplexy passed, James offered to go see if the pickets were gone and to lock up the church. Gus agreed.
James systematically checked the side doors before going near the main entrance. No one was there. Almost no one.
“Hiya, doc.”
“Hello, An‑hell.”
Angel Gomez smiled. “Hey man, you rem’bered my name! Not too shabby for an Anglo.”
“And how could I forget one of my society members?” asked James with an exaggerated self-mocking flattery. James had no delicate way of informing Angel Gomez that he looked like a sane Charles Manson, with his Jesus hair and dot of goatee. “You catch the circus out here?”
Angel laughed. “You mean Mary Jane and her dirty dozen? Yeah, they show up at most local functions bitchin’ ’bout sumthin’ o’ other. Did you see the finale?”
“Finale?”
“Yeah. She went off with this mean motha’ from the precinct: a big black dude in an undercover car.”
James arched a brow. “She expected him?”
“Naw, she went, tho’, but you could see she wasn’t none too happy ’bout it. I be pushin’ off. Take care, doc.”
“So long An-hell.”
James locked the doors and hurried back to the rectory, locking the doors behind him. He threw the bolt on the rectory side of the sacristy door and found Gus in the office.
To hell with this ‘common room’ vocabulary, thought James. The recreational connotations of the phrase were wholly inapt, given Gus’s depressing conversations, much less the death.
Gus poured a double, James shook off the offer and waited for Gus to get his cigar lit. While thus engaged, James realized that his friend had no taste in cigars: twenty-five for a dollar or a hundred dollars a box, if it were called a cigar, Gus would smoke it to death via frequent relighting.
At least I have the good sense to tell my students that if I smoke too much during a seminar, it is a pedagogical device. If I have to keep relighting, it means I’m talking too much... and you are talking too little.
His thoughts slid from there to the obvious, that Gus talked too much. But what the hell we both make our respective livings—such as they are—by talking. Of course, that makes the differences between him and me purely stylistic.
At this realization, he shuddered.
“You came in here looking like the town crier,” began Gus, jerking him out of his reverie. “What is it?”
“You favorite nun was seen leaving the church in the company of Detective Washington.”
Gus took a long drag on his cigar, just the way he had when he was informed of Father Pedro’s transfer. James recognized the delay technique.
Why should that shake him so? wondered James. “Is that trouble for us or her?”
Gus shrugged, waving the cigar in the air, either dismissing the thought or clearing the smoke that hung around him. “If she has no alibi, then the odds are seventy-thirty the trouble is for her. If she can account for every blessed second of her time, then it’s one hundred percent that she will try to put me in the soup—or you. I saw her signs on the picket line: they have totally ignored all of Tim’s drinking. Of course, there is still the small problem that I never really knew him, and you would have had trouble throwing him down the stairs.”
“You didn’t do it, did you?” James smiled, encouraging Gus to share the flippancy. “Of course not. If I seriously thought that I’d be packed and moved and outta here tonight. You have any nominees for assassin?”
“Curious word, that,” ruminated Gus. “Of course you know that it comes from the Hashish plant used to psych-up the courage of Muslim kamikazes in the medieval wars. Hashish, hashashim, assassin.”
“No nominees?” James prodded, trying to get back on track. “Under the influence of reefer madness or otherwise?”
Gus shrugged. “Why in hell should I know? Why does there have to be anybody?” He paused, visibly composed himself and then, “Let’s change the topic to something less speculative and more immediately practical. It’s five days before you go. Would you consider signing on for an extended tour of duty?”
James braced himself. He wasn’t going to be caught flat-footed again. “I’d need some details.”
“There are no indications that they are going to send me… anyone. I haven’t even been sent a warm body to interview. I’ve started to make inquiries about importing a priest from Latin America, and I am going to need someone to help cover the house until then.”
James frowned. He was starting to wonder if this was personal. “Are you the only priest that they’ve done this to?”
“No, there’s…” Gus went on for seventeen minutes reviewing the seven parishes in the diocese where there were pastors solely in residence. Under James’ questioning, a pattern began to emerge: Are they possessed of advance degrees? Is anyone actually living in the house with them? What is the nature of the parish? And so on.
At the desk, James constructed a matrix for the multiple variables on a sheet of paper with his fountain pen. At the end of the extended analysis, he handed it over to Gus. “Not one of these pastors is in a wealthy parish. None have a white-bread congregation. All of them are in strongly ethnic neighborhoods or strongly mixed neighborhoods like ours. All of them have advanced degrees or are bookish by disposition, are at least bilingual, have a lay staff or active societies—and in one case there is a psychology prof who is my opposite number at Nova Hueta’s Polish parish.”
Gus frowned, not liking this pattern. “Does this means we have evidence of intelligent planning on the part of the personnel office? Pastors who are as educated as I am have, and lay staff, in essence become solo operators?”
“Sorry, no,” responded James, tossing the chart on the desk. “This is retroactive clarity. I wouldn’t dare generate
a prediction from it. If as you’ve said the head of personnel is that screwed up, then this is a chance pattern, not a planned one. I wouldn’t even say it’s biased on race, class, or education.”
“Chance is the atheist’s name for Providence.”
“Cute. It had better be Providence, because we haven’t given Him much to work with in this diocese from all that I’ve seen so far.”
“Speaking of which, does this mean you’ll stay because you can do a better job than the next moron they send me?”
James gave one laugh. “Flattery will get you everywhere. How long would you need me for?”
“Don’t know.”
“This is February. Not beyond September.”
“No sweat. The feelers are already out. As soon as possible, we’ll have a Spaniard or Hispanic here full time.”
“Not Merino?”
Gus shook his head. “As I said when you first arrived, it’ll be years before he’s fully recovered. Three days a week is the most that I can ask of him. And I’ll pay you the same $300 a month I get.”
James glowered at that, and gave a flat and simple “No.”
“‘The laborer is worthy of his hire,’ and you are one item on my budget that I’d love to see the bean counters at the Chancery get up the guts to challenge. And speaking of money, we’d better see to the envelopes.”
The routine was simple. Within the hour, yesterday’s collection of four hundred and sixty three dollars and eighty-four cents (consisting in one hundred and ten dollars in quarters, thirty in dimes, ten in nickles, six dollars worth of pennies and the rest in ratty singles and a dozen checks) was rolled, wrapped, listed, bagged, and labeled.
“Let’s drop this at the bank and then go out for an early dinner.”
“And leave the house unattended?!” exclaimed James in mock shock.
“It’s safe,” Gus answered. “Luraleen isn’t here.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“No, no,” said the priest patiently. “The house is safer without her. If she were here, I’d be afraid of her going through my rooms under the guise of cleaning them.”
“She steals from you, too?” Haven’t we had this conversation before? thought James.
“Is that news? John XXIII’s line ‘How many people work here? About half’ also applies to petty larceny. The Roman Catholic Church coined the expression ‘separated brethren,’ but under Papa Paolo Sesto we don’t practice it. We also invented the expression ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ and talk about the need for a ‘living wage’, but we are the last to pay it. So about half of the ‘church mice,’ lay and religious, practice a little larceny as a ‘fringe benefit.’ In New Orleans, they would call it ‘lagniappe’— a little something extra.”
“Louisiana culture? You want to take pointers from the most corrupt state in the Union, if not the world?”
Encino’s sold Kosher Tex-Mex according to the sign over the front door, and a full Italian menu inside… because Constantine Gustalvas Papathanasopolous saw no sense in giving the paint spray artists a fresh sign to ply their trade on. This short, stocky owner and chef took their order, cooked, served, and chatted with them until four that afternoon because the three of them were the only people in the building.
As if the day weren’t bad enough, the piece of odd-sized cardboard sticking in the windshield added incrementally to the misery.
“A parking ticket!!!” bellowed Gus, none the better for the two double martinis, three glasses of ‘dago red’ as their Greek host had called the polish remover, and four ounces of Sambucca Romano in his two espressos.
“The meter is probably fast,” offered James in an attempt at sober consolation, which was wasted on his pastor.
“A PARKING TICKET!!” bellowed Gus only the louder.
“Fer Christ’s sake, gimme the keys and get in the driver’s seat,” commanded James, in recognition that reason had severe limitations under the circumstances. “There is no way in hell that I am going to let you drive home in this downpour.”
James kept up a monologue about his hatred for winter: “Unless you are into skiing, you always lose. If it is bright and sunny, then it’s a cold as a loan shark’s heart. If the temperature is in the least bit mild, it’s because it’s so damn cloudy and overcast, you’d almost rather have the cold and wind back. Of course, at the rate this is coming down, it might as well be a September squall.”
As he maneuvered the aged Detroit dinosaur, laughably called the parish car, back to the rectory, James had concluded that his friend was only vulnerable to alcohol when under emotional strain. Not that the parish wasn’t a regular emotional strain, but Gus seemed used to the daily garbage delivery, only buckling under the dumpster-sized delivery of the last three days.
“Did you leave the water running in the kitchen sink?” asked James as he opened the back door to the basement.
They raced though the kitchen, the small room next to it where the washer and dryer hid themselves in antiquated shame, and found nothing amiss there or in the dining room in the very front of the basement.
“OH, NO!!!”
James stomach sank at the sound of Gus’s voice and he turned slowly in the doorway of the dining room until he saw the water oozing out from under the door of the ‘blue room’ where some of the societies held their Sunday meetings.
Gus had opened the door and three inches of water swept into the corridor. “I really didn’t need this, Lord,” moaned Gus in the nearest thing to total despair James had ever heard in his voice.
“What we need is a ladder,” responded James in a curt tone of command. “The downspout has fallen apart and the water from the roof is being fed in through the window it cracked.” Getting no response, James bellowed, “WHERE IS THE FREAKIN’ LADDER?”
Ten minutes to resurrect the twenty-foot ladder from its burial place in the school basement, another five to get it set up, and James held the ladder and tried to direct Gus’s attempt to straighten out the V in the two pieces of pipe and connect them to the spout on the roof was complicated by the rush of water up his sleeve and through his coat and down onto James.
As they walked up the stairs to their respective rooms, Gus explained that the first aid on the pipes had been even more necessary a few years earlier, when the price of copper had gone through the roof and the neighborhood gypsies harvested any copper left on the outside of the buildings.
Once dried and changed, the older man announced that he was going to stay up here and rest if James would mind the store.
Menken’s writings were polished off between phone calls and before the evening Mass. Hubert Grante-Scarf provided the light moment of the day with his long promised story of Sadowski the seminarian. Two stories, in fact.
The first was a now-nostalgic argument from the days when Lenten fasts were measured in portions, weighed in ounces, and of a black seminarian who gleefully polished off the spaghetti disdained by his pasta-snob Italian confreres. When reprimanded on the weight requirement by one of his peers, he shot back with a distinction between dry weight and cooked weight, which ended the discussion.
The second story recorded the only time Gus ever fully lost his temper. It reminded James of the times one laughs because a piece of malice or stupidity is just too dreadful to face. Only in the old days could an Irish priest counsel a seminarian to expect special difficulties with celibacy because of his negritude. The seminary officials never did find out where the hole at fist level in the plaster wall came from… at least, not officially.
James had no difficulty seeing the stupid Celt in his mind; more difficult was imagining a violent Gus. Neurotic, nervous, worried, inclined to bluster, aggravated and aggravating, heavy-handed in a Teutonic way on occasion… but physically violent? No!
At least, I don’t think so. No.
At least I hope not.
And what about Tim? What about all of the crap, both literal and metaphorical that Tim had left for Gus to clean up after?
No? NO! And never with a fellow priest.
That Psalm about “how sweet it is when brethren dwell as one” could have been written for Gus.
And yet, the abuse he must have taken from the Bishop’s bean counters, the nuisance of the “friendly” nuns, the malevolence of the unfriendlies, Tim drinking his fool head off, and on and on and on, would have driven me round the bend. Why not Gus?
When Gus finally came down for dinner, there was neither time nor a way to get his version of the hit-the-wall incident, but James began to feel something he hadn’t in ten years: respect for the clergy…
No, that was going too far, respect for a clergyman … No, why weasel about it: respect for a priest, something even pagan Rome had enough sense to fear, if not respect.
It was just luck, chance, (dare one say Providence?) that the next book on his list was a paperback of D. Keith Mano’s The Bridge, which had as a major character the last priest on an eco-freak Earth. James even called to make his peace with Abby for missing their previously daily schedule.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
INTERMEZZO
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19TH
AND BEYOND
Tuesday could have settled into a comfortable routine if the sensationalism and harassment by the media hadn’t created a siege at the rectory. It was the best-selling story of the winter: NUN CHARGED WITH KILLING PRIEST-LOVER. It wasn’t well written, and one would have to buy the paper to determine if the headline referred to a clerical paramour or to a presbyterophiliac as victim.
The arraignment on Thursday, February the 21st.
The hearing was in late March. The defendant stood mute, and was bound over for trial. In the absence of a death penalty, the defendant was released on bail.
The only sensations to come from the media were the absence of an alibi, a court-ordered medical exam, and the medical report. The TV stations downplayed it to avoid offending the FCC, since no one gave a damn about the Roman Catholics in the audience.
