Assault with Intent

by William X. Kienzle

  “Too remarkable to be just coincidence, wouldn’t you agree?” Koesler pressed.

  “Perhaps. Yes, I would agree. However, we are left with one inevitable conclusion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We will not know, at least for the time being.”

  “Not know?”

  “No. The victim escaped. And I do not think he will come claiming his revolver.”

  There was a pause.

  “Keep in touch,” said Koznicki. Then he added, “and keep thinking.”

  The shades had been lowered, making the small room nearly dark.

  “Well, you did it again,” said the First Man.

  “I didn’t hear you fighting for a chance to go into that neighborhood,” said the Second Man. Hot ash had fallen from his cigarette, but in the dark he had not seen it. It was burning a hole in his trousers.

  “You could have been mugged after you shot him,” said the Third Man.

  “Look,” said the Second, “I didn’t arrange for my mugging. Besides, if I had been mugged after the shooting, I’d have been caught by the cops.”

  “We’re overlooking something,” said the Fourth Man, “it was just an accident that the gang picked that moment to mug him. It could have happened to any one of us.” He removed his glasses and laid them on the table.

  “But it didn’t happen to any one of us. It happened to him. It always happens to him,” said the Third. He flicked the ashes from his cigarette in the general direction of the ashtray. They fell in his coffee.

  “And on top of it all,” said the First, “they got the gun.”

  “What do you mean, on top of it all?” said the Second. “They went right for it. Like they knew I was carrying it. They didn’t even go for my wallet!”

  “If they’d had the time, they would have taken your money too,” said the Fourth. “But the cops came and you were able to escape. I’ll wager if they’d had more time, they would’ve gone for your wallet.”

  “It’s dark in here,” said the First Man. He moved to the wall light switch, tripping on the rug’s edge. He flipped on the switch. The bulb lit only a second, then with a pop!, burned out. “Ouch!” said the First Man.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the Fourth.

  “I got a shock.” He returned to the table, again tripping on the edge of the rug.

  “What are we going to do about the gun?” asked the Second Man.

  “What can we do about it?” said the Third. “It’s gone. One gun explodes in your hand and you lose another. We are going to keep the gunmakers of America in business.”

  “Look,” said the Second, “I feel bad enough without all of you rubbing it in. After all, I’m the one who got mugged.”

  “And this one was a complete waste,” said the First. “We didn’t even get his attention or scare him.” He slammed his fist against the table, breaking the Fourth Man’s glasses. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right; I always carry a spare pair.”

  “Yecch!” said the Third Man. “This coffee is terrible. Don’t you filter the grounds?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the coffee,” the First Man assured. He took a sip of his just-poured coffee. “Arggh!” It burned his mouth.

  “It’s that neighborhood,” the Fourth Man observed.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! The Second Man jumped up from his chair, slapping at his trousers where the cigarette ash had burned through.

  “The odds were against us from the beginning in that neighborhood,” the Fourth Man continued. “We didn’t stand a chance in that setting.”

  “Do you think it’s time?” asked the Third.

  “Yes, I think it is definitely time,” said the Fourth Man. “But it must be clearly understood by all,” he looked pointedly at the others, “that there never again can be a deviation from the plan such as we had a few weeks back. It is no longer important which of us was responsible for that. But it must never happen again.

  “And finally, let’s all remember what we learned in World War II: loose lips sink ships. We can’t afford any more slipups. From now on, we tell no one about anything that goes on. Not colleagues, not friends, not coworkers. Is that understood?”

  The other three nodded solemnly.

  “Then, with these understandings, it is time we move into Phase Two.”

  5

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Father Lyr Feeny, “Pope John XXIII should have been strangled in his crib.”

  “Oh, that’s going a bit far, don’t you think, Ly?” asked Father Charles O’Dowd.

  “Not quite far enough, really,” Feeny replied. “Better that he should never have been born.”

  “Absolutely,” Father Albert Budreau agreed. “Look what’s happened to the Church as a result of John’s aggiornamento. Look what’s happened to the seminary!”

  They were seated in the faculty dining room adjoining the student refectory at St. Joseph’s Seminary.

  “A shadow of its former self. A shadow!” Father Anthony Gennardo shook his head and snorted.

  “A shallow? A shallow what?” Father George Dye was getting on in years and no longer heard as well as he had.

  “A shadow!” Gennardo emphasized, and snorted.

  “It’s as Al says,” said Feeny, “you all should remember, we were the pioneers of this seminary. Almost all of us are charter members of the founding faculty. We’ve suffered through the changes that have come spewing out of the Vatican Council.”

  “Absolutely,” Budreau agreed. “Look at the syllabus. Compare that with the courses we offered years ago. Why, there’s no comparison at all. We’re offering fluff now.”

  “Oh, come now, Al,” said O’Dowd, “it’s not all that bad. The courses still have substance. We’re still offering moral and dogmatic theology, scripture, canon law. The staples are still here.”

  “But in English! Everything’s in English! Biblical Greek and Hebrew are électives. And not a word of Latin,” Gennardo grumbled. “In the beginning here, we taught, questioned, answered, tested, thought in Latin. Now, not a word of it.”

  “And remember, Fathers,” said Feeny, “Latin remains the official language of the Latin rite of the Catholic Church. A vernacular liturgy depends upon the official Latin text and may be used only with Rome’s permission.”

  “Exactly,” Budreau concurred. “Why, if you were to put a Latin missal in front of one of today’s students, he wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “It marks the death of the Latin liturgy,” said Gennardo.

  “The dearth of what?” Dye asked.

  “Death! Death! Death of the Latin liturgy!” Gennardo almost shouted. Then he snorted.

  “And the student body!” Budreau exclaimed. “As Tony suggested earlier, a shadow of its former self.”

  “What is this about a shallow?” asked Dye. “A shallow what? A shallow grave?”

  “Years ago,” Budreau ignored Dye, “we had students who were serious about the priesthood, ready to make a lifelong commitment. The young men we have now don’t know the meaning of a lifelong commitment.”

  “Al,” said O’Dowd, “you’re just lonesome for a more innocent era. Those were the days when society demanded commitment until death. Today is a day of handy divorce and priests and nuns deciding on a different lifestyle. A midlife career change. Besides, there is not that much difference between the students of yesterday and today.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to partially disagree,” said Feeny. “There is some difference. Maybe mostly in quantity, and as a result the overall quality suffers. The parishes out there are running dry of priests. In effect, they are demanding that we supply priests in numbers. So, although we have a few good men and true with us now, the problem is that we do not dismiss obviously second-rate seminarians as we once did. Sending a seminarian back to the lay life has become a luxury.”

  “Well, then,” said Budreau, “we are agreed on one point: Things are different than they were.”

&nb
sp; “But,” added Dye, “you’ve got to know the territory.”

  The four looked at Dye in surprise. There were times when they wondered about him.

  To train Detroit candidates for the Catholic priesthood, there were two seminary systems, a minor and a major.

  Sacred Heart was the minor seminary. At one time, it had comprised both high school and college departments. A sharp drop in the student population had forced Sacred Heart to circle its wagons more tightly. Now, only the college department survived, and that, barely.

  St. John’s, located on the outskirts of the Michigan township of Plymouth, had been the major seminary. It had had the distinction of being the only provincial seminary in the United States. It served the Roman Catholic province of Michigan, which, in Church circles, corresponds with the State of Michigan.

  Now, St. John’s, as an institution, was no longer in operation. Its huge complex of buildings, nine-hole golf course, wooded area, apple orchard, and spring-fed lake had been bought by the estate of the late General Amos Motors, the automotive tycoon. The closing was the result of the incapability of the provincial minor seminaries to funnel sufficient students into St. John’s.

  The Archdiocese of Detroit now had its own major seminary, St. Joseph’s, on Schoolcraft at the city’s northwest corner.

  Though St. Joseph’s had been built in recent years, it had already outgrown its student body. Both minor and major seminaries teetered on the brink of obsolescence. They were, in the words of Fathers Gennardo and Budreau, shadows of what they once had been—two rather peculiar white elephants.

  It was impossible to fix the blame for this situation on any one cause in particular. In their day, the buildings had bulged with students. A conglomeration of factors had combined to make the institutions redundant.

  One of the factors that had nearly emptied the seminaries was the significant number of priests who had resigned, particularly during the 1970s. An exodus that tended to create the impression that entering the seminary was tantamount to booking passage on the Titanic. Still another was a reluctance on the part of young men to make a long-term if not lifelong commitment to a clerical life in a celibate state.

  The presenting problem was how to make these huge, near-empty structures relevant again.

  Sacred Heart had addressed the problem by inviting other entities within its walls. Among these were the Department of Formation (of seminarians), the Office of Pastoral Ministry, the Hispanic Office, the Detroit Catholic newspaper, Michigan Welfare Reform, the New Center Academy, and Senior Citizens.

  Clearly, there was no sense of purpose, plan, or homogeneity here. Just the need to fill up the corners.

  Where Sacred Heart attempted to fill its empty spaces with other organizations, St. Joseph’s banked on bodies.

  Enrolled in various classes and programs at St. Joseph’s were more than a hundred nonseminarian students. The presence of nearly two hundred bodies, even if far less than one hundred of them were actually studying for the priesthood, made it appear the seminary was functioning at full tilt, even if at the end of the tunnel there was little light and few ordinations.

  The survival of the seminaries and the manner in which they conducted their affairs was of interest mainly to the Catholic community of Detroit—bishops, priests, nuns, and laity—including a watchdog Tridentine Society and four sinister men who met in a dark room.

  The Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit could boast of many magnificent pulpits. Most of them, anachronistically, were in the wrong churches.

  Enormous, vaulted, brick edifices stood throughout the inner city like relics, surrounded by decay, debris, and vacant land. They held magnificent pulpits. But, in most cases, the white parishioners who had built them were long gone. Now, only a relatively few black Catholics, with a sprinkling of whites, attended services. The era of these magnificent pulpits seemed to have perished. From time to time, Archbishop Mark Boyle could be heard to wish that these churches had been built on wheels, so they could be wheeled out to the suburbs.

  For that—the suburbs—was where the magnificent crowds could be found. On weekends, suburban parishes regularly offered as many as five to seven Masses—all of them jam-packed. The magnificent crowds, however, had to be content with wood ranch-style churches with a most ordinary lectern for a pulpit.

  Of course, it was possible to find places here and there where there were neither magnificent pulpits nor magnificent crowds.

  Chief example of such was the Detroit House of Correction—known as DeHoCo. A large, sprawling complex, DeHoCo was designated as the prison for Detroit’s convicts, although it sometimes housed county, state, and even, on occasion, federal prisoners. However, the general run of DeHoCo inmate was a vagrant, traffic offender, or wife-beater; the typical sentence ran from several months to several years.

  Somehow, St. Joseph’s Seminary had accepted responsibility, during the scholastic year, for providing Sunday Mass at DeHoCo.

  Those seminarians who had been ordained to the deacon-ate order, one rung removed from the priesthood, were empowered to preach. The better preachers among the deacons were sent to preach at the better parishes. Those who had problems preaching were sent to problem parishes.

  The Reverend Mr. Raphael Doody, a deacon for almost six months, had not yet been sent to preach anywhere. Today he would fulfill his first homiletic assignment: he would preach at DeHoCo. And, as his luck would have it, Father Anthony Gennardo would offer the Mass at which Deacon Doody would preach. Father Gennardo was acknowledged to be one of the faculty’s Last Angry Men.

  Other deacons, near the bottom of the homiletic barrel, who had had a crack at DeHoCo, warned Doody about the hazards of preaching there. However, they had not begun to plumb the depths of that experience.

  The floor of DeHoCo’s spacious gym was the nave; the gym’s stage was the sanctuary. On the stage was a small table, draped with a white cloth. The makeshift altar bore two lighted candles. A smaller table carried wine and water cruets, a small dish, a lectionary, and the chalice. Two chairs were on the stage, one for the priest, the other for the deacon.

  A few dozen gray folding chairs had been set up near the stage. Approximately twenty-five male prisoners were seated in no particular order. Many were stubble-bearded. Quite a few dozed. None seemed very interested in the religious ceremony. They were a captive audience in more than one sense.

  It was time for the homily.

  A very nervous Reverend Mr. Doody approached center stage. For the first time as a preacher, he beheld a live congregation. Or rather, he almost beheld it. A basketball backboard directly in front of him hid part of his congregation. Struts connecting the backboard to the wall obscured the rest.

  “Many centuries ago”—Doody cleared his throat; his voice was high from nervousness—“a man named Tall of Parsus … Paul of Tarsus gave a stirring sermon to the ancient pagans on the ‘Unknowing God’… er … the ‘Unknown God.’”

  That guy and speech are enemies, thought Father Gennardo.

  “Among the many … uh … wait …”—memory failed—“oh, yes, objects and idols worshiped by these pagans was an altar dedicated to the ‘Unknown God.’”

  Several dozing convicts slumped into deeper sleep as Doody’s high-pitched voice droned on.

  “With divorce, birth control, adultery, murder, and robbery so rampant, it would seem that we must be either atheists or insane!”

  What was that? one of the few prisoners paying attention wondered. Divorce, birth control, adultery, murder, and robbery? Well, four out of five ain’t bad.

  “There have been parishes that had to cancel perpetual adoration because none of the laity would come to adore.”

  This guy should turn to a life of crime, thought another convict. He would be perfect in a lineup. Even after this exposure, I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd of two.

  “And thus we go to the altar, to worship the same God the ancient pagans worshiped under the title of … er … wait … oh, yes … th
e ‘Unknown God.’

  “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost … uh … er … Spirit. Amen.”

  The remainder of the Mass was uneventful if one chose to overlook the moment when Doody, who also acted as acolyte, dropped the water cruet. Oh well; at least he waited until it had been used for the final time before he dropped it.

  Immediately after the Mass, Gennardo in silence drove Doody back to St. Joseph’s.

  Before they parted in the seminary vestibule, Doody hesitantly spoke.

  “Was it all right?”

  “Let me put it this way,” said Gennardo, “in DeHoCo I think you have found a home away from home.”

  And then he snorted.

  It was just 11:30 a.m., the regular time for Father Gennardo’s meditation. He entered the seminary’s inner courtyard and began pacing the brown brick walkway. His path would take him around and around in a squared circle.

  As he walked, he lit a cigarette and immediately thought of the old story of the Dominican and the Jesuit who were about to enter their periods of meditation. Each wanted to smoke; permission was required. The Dominican asked his superior if he might smoke while he meditated. Permission was refused. The Jesuit asked his superior if it were permissible to meditate while smoking. The superior allowed as how that seemed perfectly permissible.

  Gennardo snorted, shrugged away the anecdote, and got down to some serious meditation.

  “May I freshen the martini for you, Inspector?”

  No, thank you, Father; it is fine.”

  Walter Koznicki and his wife Wanda were seated in the small kitchen of St. Anselm’s rectory. Father Koesler was preparing Sunday dinner. In recent years, the three had formed a habit of dining together at least once a month. Sometimes, particularly in good weather, more frequently.

  Now that the Koznicki children were grown and on their own, the threesome’s dinners had become movable feasts. At times, they ate at the Koznickis’, sometimes at a restaurant; occasionally, they supped at St. Anselm’s, where Koesler prepared the simplest of meals.