Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “It all got done,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Half an hour before Mass last night, I looked around and thought, this is it, we’re finally going to blow it, and in a Cathedral, for Heaven’s sake. In a Cathedral. I was ready to shoot myself.”

  “I think you’re overtired,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, I know I’m overtired.” Dolan tried on a smile, failed with it, and gave it up. “The problem is, it doesn’t matter if I’m overtired. It’s all got to be done. Like the statues, for instance.”

  Dolan waved his hand in the air, and Gregor took a look around the foyer. He hadn’t paid any attention to it before, because it was very hard to see, nothing more than a square box of shadows. There was only one light burning, and that was more properly in the hall that led off to the right than in the foyer. Now Gregor looked around and saw that some of the “shadows” weren’t shadows at all, but large bulky figures covered with black cloth.

  “It’s all got to be covered up, you see,” Dolan said. “All the statues and all the crucifixes and the paintings, too. Unless it can be removed, and then we do that. Usually I get set up for it after the Chrism Mass, get the shrouds put out and that sort of thing, but yesterday it was just impossible. The Chrism Mass was late, and then the police—”

  “Doesn’t the Cardinal give you anyone to help with all this?”

  Dolan looked surprised. “Of course he does. I have nuns and seminarians. But they have their schedules, too, Mr. Demarkian. Holy Thursday—”

  “I know, I know. Holy Thursday is a busy day. It still looks to me as if you’re being asked to do much more than any one person could.”

  “It usually isn’t more than any one person could.” Dolan tried a smile again. “And I didn’t mind. The Church saved me. It took me out of poverty, away from a father who drank and beat me up.” This time, it worked. “Yesterday was a very unusual day, Mr. Demarkian, even for a Holy Thursday. There were—extras—to be attended to.”

  “I suppose there would be.”

  “Aside from the run of the mill annoyances after an—incident—of that land. Do you know what I did between five and six yesterday afternoon? I got the Bishop of Buffalo to loan the Cardinal two of his priests.”

  “To take Father Walsh’s place at Masses?”

  “To stand next to that chalice of consecrated wine in St. Agnes’s Church. We wouldn’t let the police examine it and the police wouldn’t let us move it anywhere. It’s still there, covered, of course, with a police escort and an ecclesiastical one. Cop on one side, priest on the other. The only thing is, there seem to be an infinite number of cops to take turns watching, and practically no priests. What we’re going to do when these two drop dead of exhaustion, I don’t know.”

  They had been walking the length of the foyer all during this conversation. Now they had come to the intersection with the hall. Tom Dolan stopped just under the dim light and pointed across the shadows to the foyer’s far side, where there was a door.

  “That’s the rectory through there, in case you want to get oriented. Rectory in the north wing, Chancery offices in the south, foyer and chapel in the middle. Although what we need a chapel for with the Cathedral right next door, I’ve never been able to figure out.”

  Dolan turned around again, marched down the hall, and stopped under the next dim light. It burned above a patch of marble right in front of a set of elevator doors. Dolan jabbed the call button and the doors opened immediately.

  “Come on in,” he said. “The Cardinal’s been at work since five or six. Unlike me, he doesn’t need any sleep.”

  “Unlike you, he probably gets it.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” Gregor asked curiously, stepping into the elevator.

  “If you’re going to make like Sherlock Holmes,” Dolan said, “I’m not going to be much help. I wasn’t concentrating on Andy Walsh yesterday, you know. I was concentrating on the Cardinal.”

  For at least some of the time, he had been concentrating on helping set up for Mass. Gregor had seen him. The fact that he had seen him, however, made questions about all that unnecessary—at least for the moment—and they weren’t what Gregor wanted to ask.

  “What I want to know,” he told Dolan, “is, what’s ‘Primitive Observance.’”

  This time, Tom Dolan managed not only a smile, but a full-throated laugh. He almost sounded awake. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Well. The Benedictines of the Primitive Observance are an order of nuns. They’ve got an abbey out in Connecticut somewhere and Papal permission to live the Benedictine Rule as established in, I don’t know twelve-something, I think. Full habits. Six layers of underwear. Medieval penance practices. Prayers in Latin. The whole bit. The Cardinal’s private secretary—also known as Sister, also known as the nun who unlocks the Chancery in the morning—is a Benedictine of the Primitive Observance.”

  “But shouldn’t she be cloistered?”

  “The Benedictines were never as cloistered as, say, the Carmelites or the Poor Clares. But yes, she should be, except that she’s got Papal permission to be here, because the Cardinal wants her here. Cardinals, especially cardinals popular with their Pope, do tend to get what they want.”

  “Your Cardinal gives the impression—”

  “Of being the kind of man who always got what he wanted? He was. With Sister, however, we have a couple of problems.”

  “Such as?”

  “She’s here, but she’s supposed to follow her rule as much as possible. So, she keeps silence from ten o’clock every night until after breakfast in the morning, and she lives in a convent halfway across town that’s practically as primitive as she is and doesn’t allow Sisters to answer the phone. Then there’s the Tridium. We’re in the Tridium now. At three o’clock this afternoon, Sister will make the Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral with a few hundred other people. Then she’ll make a confession. Then she’ll shut up, completely. From then until the end of the Easter Vigil Mass, meaning one o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday, she won’t say a word for anything less drastic than the Second Coming.”

  By now, the elevator had creaked its way up to the third floor. Now it opened its doors on a hall much more magnificent than the one downstairs, with ceilings twenty feet high and patterns of crosses mosaicked into the marble of the floor. Gregor found himself staring into it, appalled.

  “But she’s the Cardinal’s secretary,” he said. “What about the—”

  “Phones?” Tom Dolan laughed again. “I, Mr. Demarkian, will answer the Cardinal’s phones. Last year I managed to get Scholastica to loan me a nun. This year, it didn’t work out. There just aren’t enough nuns to go around anymore. Make the turn to your left. The Cardinal’s smack at the end of the hall.”

  Gregor made the turn to the left, and even managed to notice the beauty of the architecture around him, but all the time he was thinking the Cardinal deserved to be shot.

  [3]

  Sitting tilted back in the “executive” swivel chair that sat incongruously behind his highly polished, solid mahogany Victorian desk, the Cardinal almost looked like a man who had been shot. Either the strain of the Tridium weekend or the murder of Andy Walsh had gotten to him. He didn’t look as tired as Father Tom Dolan—nobody could look that tired, Gregor thought; Dolan had that cornered—but he did look worried. Gregor was sure worry was an emotion the Cardinal didn’t often allow to register on his face. He also looked fat and out of shape instead of magnificently solid, as he had yesterday in St. Agnes’s Church. Red robes suited him better than the sweater and baggy pants he wore now outside of working hours.

  There was a cigar, in an ashtray in the middle of the green felt desk blotter that covered half the desk, lit and sending streams of smoke into the air like incense. The Cardinal was staring at the smoke when Gregor came in. He didn’t stop staring at it just because his door had opened and Tom Dolan had started on a stream of inanities that was meant to serve as a reintroduction. He waited until Dol
an was finished—or had petered out, which was closer to the truth—and on his way out the door again. Then he picked up the cigar, sucked on it until his cheeks were full, and blew a stream of smoke out of each of the corners of his mouth.

  It was an impressive performance, so impressive Gregor wanted to applaud. Instead, he sat down in the nearest suitable chair and got comfortable. The chair was very suitable and he got very comfortable. That was one of the advantages of dealing with fat men. They never surrounded themselves with the kind of fashionable furniture that looked like it was made out of matchsticks.

  Obviously, the Cardinal was waiting for him to say something. Just as obviously, Gregor had no intention of obliging. He was getting more than a little tired of the Cardinal’s ceaseless efforts to manipulate the smallest details of existence to his advantage.

  The Cardinal, being no fool, decided to give in. He sat forward over the desk, dropped his cigar in the ashtray, and said, “Just tell me one tiling. How much shit do you figure we’re in?”

  Gregor felt a grin spreading across his face, the kind of grin he used to get when his hunches turned out right and his reasoning turned out impeccable. “I’d say,” he told the Cardinal, “that you’re in enough shit to use a word like shit and expect it to make a difference.”

  The Cardinal flushed, started to be angry, and then dropped it. He looked sheepishly at Gregor and picked up his cigar again. “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “I do. I expected you to be more intelligent.”

  “Right now I don’t feel intelligent at all.” The Cardinal sighed. “I haven’t had any sleep. I haven’t had any peace. Andy’s dead and I’m beginning to worry Tom’s on the verge of a breakdown. My nun—”

  “Father Dolan told me about your nun.”

  “Sister is a wonderful woman.” The Cardinal did his best to sound pious. “She’s probably a saint, and she’s not one of these wimps the ‘new’ nuns try to make out the old ones were. She runs my life with admirable efficiency, and I can count on her absolutely, except during these three days of the year.”

  “Which, this year, turn out to be the three worst days of any year.”

  “It’s hardly Sister’s fault. I don’t know if you realize it, Mr. Demarkian, but for all the nonsense I’ve got to spend my time on playing Cardinal Archbishop, what I’m supposed to be doing here is looking after the spiritual welfare of the people of this Archdiocese. Lately there doesn’t seem to have been much time for that.”

  “There might not be, Your Eminence. At least for a while.”

  “I know that.” The smoke from the cigar was getting in the Cardinal’s eyes. He put it back in the ashtray again. “Have you talked to the police? I have talked to them, of course, but I can’t get anything out of them. That Smith person doesn’t like me a bit.”

  “Even if he did, he probably couldn’t have told you anything yet,” Gregor said. “Even with a rush job on the tests, they wouldn’t have all the answers until this morning some time. And that assumes their lab is very well run.”

  “And you don’t think it is? I don’t blame you. They’re a mess, that department. They always have been.”

  “I keep forgetting you’ve been in Colchester longer than you’ve been an Archbishop.”

  “Been and gone and been again,” the Cardinal said. “I was a parish priest in this Archdiocese when I started out, over at Holy Rosary on the north side. Then I was chaplain for the Cathedral High schools during the reign of my predecessor’s predecessor. Then I was an Auxiliary Bishop in Boston for a while.”

  “That seems strange, sending you all the way to Boston.”

  “Everything the Vatican does is strange, Mr. Demarkian. Even this Vatican, and I like this Pope. But you talk to these people from Rome, you begin to wonder if they’re all on drugs. They’re certainly not dealing with reality.”

  “I thought they were your reality.”

  “My theological persuasion, not my reality. I am a conservative. They are conservatives. Especially the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger, who are the two who really count. But reality, Mr. Demarkian, means knowing how people live in the everyday world. On that, the whole Curia might as well have arrived yesterday on a UFO.”

  “Hmm,” Gregor said.

  The Cardinal smiled at him. “Are you just softening me up for something, or does this have to do with Andy’s murder? Because Andy wasn’t a conservative.”

  “From what I hear, Father Andy Walsh wasn’t much of a Catholic. I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I’m just trying to get some things straight in my mind. You say you’re a conservative—”

  “A theological conservative,” the Cardinal corrected. “I was a charter member of the Democratic party—no, I’m not really that old, you know what I mean—anyway, I was an FDR man at least and a Democrat until all this abortion business came up. I’m still a big supporter of labor unions.”

  “Yes.” Gregor remembered what the Cardinal had done about the Democratic party and “all this abortion business.” He’d gone down to city hall and changed his party affiliation to Republican in front of half a dozen newspaper reporters. It had made the CBS Evening News two nights later. “What I want to know about is things closer to home. Define a ‘theological conservative.’”

  “I know exactly how to define it. A theological conservative is someone who thinks priests ought to be celibate even though there’s nothing in the Bible or the Tradition that says they have to be.”

  “There isn’t?”

  “Not in the least. Catholic priests married for hundreds of years before the Vatican thought to require them to remain single, although Bishops did tend to be taken from the ranks of unmarried men. Until a few years ago, priests in the Eastern Rite churches—churches in Orthodox countries that chose to remain loyal to Rome after the Greek Schism—were still allowed to marry. It’s only this Pope who’d decided to bring them into conformity with the rest of the church.”

  Good Lord, Gregor thought. The Greek Schism. No wonder the Cardinal got along with Father Tibor Kasparian. This wasn’t what Gregor had in mind at all.

  “Let’s try to get a little closer to home,” he said.

  The Cardinal was amused. “Closer to home,” he told Gregor, “a theological conservative is a clerical son of a bitch.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I punish infractions when I can and I punish them to the limit.”

  “What about Father Andy Walsh?”

  “Father Walsh always made it a point to stay just inside the safety line. Where I could catch him, that is.”

  “Oat bran muffins were inside the safety line?”

  “I’m afraid consecrating oat bran muffins is liturgical silliness, but not mortal sin. All you need to make a Host is bread made from ‘the finest wheat,’ to quote the New Code of Canon Law. Oat bran muffins are mostly wheat, and these were probably of the finest. Andy ordered them from Le Cher at fifteen dollars a pound.”

  Gregor frowned. This wasn’t getting him where he wanted to go, not anywhere near. And he couldn’t think what would. It was frustrating to have the Cardinal in such a cooperative mood and not know the questions to ask him.

  He was shifting in his seat, trying to think of what tack to take next, when the Cardinal suddenly sat forward and stared at his chest.

  “Good God,” the Cardinal said. “What happened to your tie?”

  FIVE

  [1]

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS IN a bad mood when he left the Cardinal’s office, frustrated and annoyed with himself, and the fact that he had to buy a tie on his way to Colchester Homicide didn’t help. Two ties. The tie he had around his neck, shredded and tattered, had belonged to George Telemakian. It had undoubtedly been bought at great expense at J. Press or Brooks Brothers by George’s grandson Martin. It would cost at least seventy-five dollars to replace. Gregor found himself wishing he were the kind of man who wore sweaters, or the kind who would look good in them. Instead, he was a tall, broa
d man who had been athletic only when forced to be—such as in the army—and was paying the price in middle age. He would have looked more gracious in the Cardinal’s robes than in a piece of stretchy wool that had been knitted to fit his form.

  He was annoyed because his conversation with the Cardinal had gone around in circles, but in the right circles, so that the answer always seemed to be waiting on the perimeter but never coming in. The Cardinal, he thought, was a man of too many of the wrong land of contradictions. In the day-to-day operation of his Archdiocese, he was intensely practical. Gregor had been made aware of that during the long, convoluted conversation that had followed the Cardinal’s astonishment at the state of Gregor’s tie. The Cardinal knew to the atom every ounce of sacramental wine, every catechism, every rosary, every altar cloth, every hymnal in official Church hands in the vast area he managed. He had had these things inventoried when he first ascended to the See and had their purchase and storage and distribution centralized since. It had been to the Chancery’s private warehouse that Judy Eagan had had to go to pick up the wine that had been used at the Holy Thursday Mass. The Cardinal kept coming back to this fact, irked out of all proportion, as if the missed delivery of two cases of wine was more shocking than the spectacular murder of Father Andy Walsh. “You just can’t let something like this pass unnoticed,” he said, again and again and again and again. “This Archdiocese is a geographical monster. If you don’t have organization, you have chaos.”

  Chaos, Gregor had concluded, was the proper description of the Cardinal’s mind—or that part of it that concerned nonarchdiocesan matters. O’Bannion’s personal style was so down-to-earth, his approach so pragmatically direct, it took Gregor a while to realize that the man was completely innocent of any idea of how the world outside the Church was run. Like the Rome he scorned, he, too, was unrealistic. O’Bannion didn’t even have the grace to take his notions of a police investigation from bad television or worse novels. Gregor wasn’t sure O’Bannion had ever read the one or watched the other. It was possible he’d spent his boyhood reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was constantly implying that he expected Gregor to do something dramatic, like whip out a magnifying glass and pace around the room staring at floorboards.