by Jane Haddam
“In this job, I end up underestimating it, I think. I’m certainly getting a bad impression of what its normal state is.”
“‘I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’”
“He was God. He had a better grip on some things than I do.”
“True,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. He dragged himself away from the window and rubbed his temples. There was a small bottle of ibuprofen in the filing cabinet. He went there, got it out, and swallowed two caplets without water. The worst thing would be for him to go into the conference room in this mood, with his head pounding.
“Have you left him alone in there?” he asked Father Doheny.
Father Doheny shook his head. “Sister is in with him, pouring him coffee and murmuring at his every word. He’s one of those people. Give him a nun in a traditional habit, and he goes totally to pieces.”
“And Sister Harriet thinks we want her back in a habit because we want to—what’s the word?”
“Disempower. We want to disempower her,” Father Doheny said. “The word isn’t in Sister Marie Claire’s computer dictionary, so she’s decided it’s a mistake. Whenever Sister Harriet uses it in a letter, Sister Marie Claire circles it in red pen.”
“And lets Sister Harriet see it?”
“Not yet, but I’m waiting.”
The Cardinal Archbishop put the ibuprofen back into the filing cabinet. “I suppose we’d better go,” he said. “It seems to me to be a terrible way to spend the afternoon. Are we going to run through that press conference?”
“Probably. You know Andy.”
“I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“I wish I could understand what it is that people like Andy want,” Father Doheny said.
The Cardinal Archbishop felt his mouth twisting into a grimace. “Self-respect,” he said shortly. Then he shook his head, to soften his tone, because it wasn’t Father Doheny he was disgusted with, but himself.
The conference room was on the other end of this floor, in the corner where an office would have stood, but larger than any office in the building. It had windows on two sides and a thick pile carpet on the floor. The furniture consisted of a teakwood table, matching chairs, and a long low sideboard meant to serve as a place to park coffee and refreshments during meetings of boards and committees. There was coffee there now, in a big electric samovar to keep it warm, as well as china cups and saucers from the best set in the storeroom, and two large crystal plates piled high with cookies. Sister Marie Claire had worked for a Cardinal before. She knew what was expected when significant donors came to call.
Andy O‘Reilly was standing next to the conference table, balancing a china coffee cup on a china saucer. Sister Marie Claire was standing, too, and Andy wouldn’t feel right about sitting as long as she was. He was a short, wiry, gnarled Irishman, the kind played in the movies by James Cagney and Michael J. Pollock. He had looked forty on the day he was born, and he would look forty forever afterward. He would also never stop moving. For the Cardinal Archbishop, watching Andy O’Reilly was physically painful. He jumped around constantly. When he was sitting down, all his muscles seemed to twitch at once.
Andy saw Father Doheny and the Cardinal Archbishop come in, and put his coffee cup down on the conference table. “Your Eminence! Father! I was just talking to the Sister here about the terrible state of the parochial schools!”
Andy O’Reilly was the only person the Cardinal Archbishop had ever met who spoke in exclamation points. Sister Marie Claire made ready to go.
“Mr. O’Reilly was expressing his great concern that our parochial schools give their students a solid grounding in religion,” she said. “I’ve told him I couldn’t agree more.”
“Quite,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
Father Doheny went to the sideboard. “Why don’t you take some coffee and cookies with you, Sister? I know you’re not hungry now, but in another hour or two—”
“That’s very kind of you, Father, but I’m due at the refectory for a late lunch at any moment. If His Eminence doesn’t need anything—”
“I’m more than fine, Sister,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
Sister Marie Claire bowed slightly, then floated out as they watched her.
“That’s the real thing,” Andy said, when the door clicked shut behind her. “Nuns in habits, looking like nuns. Not these women with blue suits on that look like lesbian social workers. Not that they really are lesbians. If you know what I mean, Your Eminence.”
“Quite,” the Cardinal Archbishop said again.
Father Doheny was beginning to look nervous, and the Cardinal Archbishop didn’t blame him. Even with the ibuprofen, even with his headache receding into memory, he was still being too stiff, and the last thing he wanted was to be too stiff to the kind of donor who wanted most desperately to be able to feel that he was in on the inner workings of his archdiocese. He gave himself a mental order to unlink—did those ever work?—and gestured to Andy to sit down. Then he sat down himself.
“Well,” he said.
Andy got himself a cup of coffee and a saucer full of cookies, stacked high. He had to be one of those people who could eat endlessly without gaining weight.
“Look,” he said, sitting down and spreading out his things on the table. “I’m glad you got in touch with me. You know? I had no idea things were in the bad state they’re in. It always sounds in the papers like you’ve got the whole thing taped.”
“We’ve got some of it taped,” Father Doheny said.
“There are different problems that need to be solved,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “One was, of course, the legal and ethical situation pertaining to the actions of the priests involved in the criminal behavior—”
“It wasn’t criminal behavior then, was it?” Andy said. “Back in what, 1960 or whenever it was. It wasn’t criminal behavior then.”
“I think it was criminal behavior,” Father Doheny said. “I think it was just handled differently at the time than we would handle it now.”
“And nobody is ever going to know if those people were telling the truth,” Andy said. “It’s easy, I think, to file a lawsuit against a big institution like the Church. It pays, too. What did the archdiocese end up paying out? Millions of dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Twenty six and a half million dollars over a period of ten years,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
Andy banged his fist on the table, triumphant. “There, then. What did I say? And they could all have been lying. They could have made it all up. And they probably did. That whole bunch of them going to that gay church and getting their names in the papers. The Episcopalians have always had it in for the Catholics. I know you’ve got to honor the deals the old Archbishop made, Your Eminence, but if you ask me, his biggest mistake was caving in on the question of guilt. He should have stood his ground. They couldn’t have proved a thing. Not after all that time.”
The Cardinal Archbishop had a sudden vision of himself, sitting in a high-ceilinged room in an office building in the Vatican, only an hour after the Holy Father had told him he was going to receive this appointment, watching two blackcassocked priests lay out for him the extent of the evidence that existed to prove that the priests accused were indeed guilty, and guilty over and over again.
His headache seemed to be coming back, fighting with the ibuprofen for pride of place in his skull. He said, “I’m afraid stonewalling on guilt would not have been possible. There was more actual evidence than you realize. Much more than was ever allowed to come out.”
“But how could there have been?” Andy demanded. “After all this time.”
“There was evidence from the time. Doctor’s reports. And—letters.”
“Letters?”
“From three of the priests involved to some of the boys,” Father Doheny said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Andy said.
The Cardinal Archbishop rubbed his temples. He did it very carefully,
because part of him was convinced that if he did it the wrong way, it would make his reemerging headache worse. “The only mistake the old Archbishop made,” he said, “was in agreeing to financial arrangements the Archbishop was not equipped to handle. Those arrangements are now in place, and we cannot, for a number of reasons, change them. The result is that the archdiocese desperately needs money, and not the kind of money we generally need. To be specific, we need something on the order of a million dollars a year, over and above our usual intake.”
Andy Reilly blanched. “A million dollars a year? For how long? Can’t the Vatican put in some of that?”
“If Rome wasn’t putting in some of what we need,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “we would need twice as much. And we need it for ten years.”
“Jesus Christ,” Andy said again.
The Cardinal Archbishop felt a sudden rush of meanspirited satisfaction. Andy O’Reilly had been caught up short. This was entirely out of his league, and he was scared to death. The satisfaction receded almost immediately, to be replaced by a hot shame he was sure must have shown on his face. He hadn’t become a priest to despise his parishioners. Andy O’Reilly was out of his chair and pacing around.
“I can’t give a million dollars a year,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who can.”
“We aren’t asking you to give a million dollars a year,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “We’re asking you to put together a committee to raise it. Ten or so men, perhaps, with enough stature to contribute, say, fifty thousand dollars each—”
“I can do fifty thousand,” Andy said. “At least, I can do it this year.”
“—who could mount a long-term effort to cover what we need. Because quite frankly, if we don’t find some way to cover it, this archdiocese is finished. We’ll be bankrupt in six months. We’ll be absorbed into another archdiocese within a year.”
Andy sat down again, abruptly. “A committee,” he said.
“We thought you’d be a good person to head it,” Father Doheny said. “You know a lot of people. You belong to a lot of organizations. You’re active in the church. And you’re known to be a successful man. We thought there would be a number of other good Catholic laymen who would want to be part of anything you were part of.”
The Cardinal Archbishop blinked. Andy O’Reilly seemed to be swelling up in front of his eyes. “It’s very kind of you to say so,” he said. “Very kind of you. I have always tried to be a good Catholic and a supporter of the Church.”
“And you’ve succeeded,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“And I guess I could put together a committee. I don’t know if we could really raise a million dollars a year. But I could put together a committee.”
“That’s all we’re asking, really,” Father Doheny said. “We realize you can’t guarantee us results. We’re only hoping for somebody willing to try, and with a decent chance of making a success of it. You seemed to us to be the obvious choice. You’re one of the most committed laymen in the cathedral parish.”
Andy had brought a briefcase in with him. The Cardinal Archbishop hadn’t noticed it. Now Andy picked it up off the floor and put it on the conference table, and the Cardinal Archbishop was shocked to see that it was an exquisite Mark Cross number, made of black leather and probably costing the earth. It was totally at odds with the image Andy presented in his television ads, and with the image he had been careful to present here—the JC Penney suit, the Timex watch whose metal wristband was just a little too large for his wrist. Andy folded his arms across the briefcase and put his chin down on his hands.
“You should run it like the Knights Templar, or whatever it was,” he said. “A club of ten, and make it a club. Men who are on the inside. Who get information nobody else has. Like those secret societies are supposed to be.”
“Secret societies?” The Cardinal Archbishop was confused.
“You know,” Andy said. “Like Opus Dei. Or the old Jesuits. The Pope’s army. Except this time we’ll make it the Cardinal’s army. And we’ll meet here. Because they’ll want to be part of it. They’ll want to know that they belong. Don’t you see?”
“No,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“I see,” Father Doheny said. “It’s a very insightful idea.”
“Yeah.” Andy stood up. “The Church is under attack. She needs an army to defend her. We’ll be that army. You give me about a week, okay? I’ve got to work out who to ask. Then we can get started. There’s just one thing.”
“And what is that?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“If there’s more to this scandal, I want to know about it before I read it in the papers. We all will. We can’t be blindsided by press reports about issues you know are sitting in the closet waiting to fall out. If we’re not informed, we can’t help.”
But all they have to do to help is to raise money, the Cardinal Archbishop thought. What do they think they’re going to do with privileged information? But then it struck him, because he was not a stupid man, that what they were going to do with it was simply to have it, to be the people who knew when nobody else did, to be the people who could hint to their less fortunate colleagues that they were privy to all the inner workings of the chancery and of Rome. Suddenly, the Cardinal Archbishop’s distaste for Andy O’Reilly was overwhelming. The arrogance, the conceit, the soul so lacking in anything of value that the only thing it could think of when Holy Mother Church was in grave danger was how to use that danger for its own advantage. He expected that kind of thing out of newspaper reporters, and the president of the local chapter of the American Humanist Association, and the writers who fed stories to the tabloid television shows. For some reason, he had been convinced that no “real” Catholic could be anything like this, that the people who knelt in the pews in front of him as the bread and wine became the Body and Blood of their Lord Jesus Christ felt as he did, about Christ, about His Church, maybe even about their own souls.
He looked sideways at Father Doheny, and nodded slightly. Andy O’Reilly caught the look, and the nod.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is there more of the scandal still in the closet? Is there something else about to come out?”
“Not about the scandal, no,” Father Doheny said. “There is something else.”
“I think I’ll leave you to explain it,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “I’m wanted at the convent” He stood up and held out his hand to Andy O’Reilly, who kissed his ring and came close to kneeling while he did it, but stopped just short.
“You won’t be disappointed, bringing good laymen into your confidence,” Andy promised. “We’ve got the Church’s best interests at heart.”
The Cardinal Archbishop had no idea if that was true or not. He only knew he did not want to stay around here to find out. He didn’t want to be in this room any longer with the creature this man was. He nodded to both Andy and Father Doheny and went out, walking so quickly that the folds of his cassock beat against his legs like streamers in the wind. He was sick to his stomach, and what frightened him was that he might have to stay this way, for months, for years, until life would become one long exercise in nausea. Take up your cross and follow me, the man had said, but the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia was sure he couldn’t have meant anything like this.
3
For Roy Phipps, the decision to watch the medical examiner’s press conference on what the news stations were calling “the Kelly killings” wasn’t even a decision. Since the first he had known about what had happened up the street, he had been nearly obsessed with it. It had been bad enough on the day it happened, when the street was full of police cars and ambulances, and there had been nothing he could do to find out what was happening. He had sent Fred Havers into the crowd, but Fred was not an actor. Catholicism scared him. He looked on St. Anselm’s as the home of the devil, with a cloven-footed old goat seated right out in the open on a throne on the altar, and parishioners dancing naked to the accompaniment of a jingling tambourine. Of cours
e, there was no Mass going on at the time. Father Healy was standing right out on the sidewalk where both Roy and Fred could see him. So were a dozen nuns, in habits, and the stocky, angry woman who was addressed as “Sister” but wore ordinary suits. Fred still found it hard to believe that something was not going on in the sanctuary, even while the police were coming in and out. In the end, he had gone, because Roy asked him to, but Roy had watched him. He hadn’t gone any farther than the edges of the crowd, and even then he had held his arms stiffly at his sides, trying not to touch or be touched, as if Catholicism were a disease that could rub off on him. Whore of Babylon. Mark of the Beast. When the Antichrist came he would come in glory, and his instrument would be the Pope in Rome, and all men would bow down and worship him.
“Somebody died,” Fred had said, coming back, and then, “somebody committed suicide.”
That was all, and Roy had known better than to try to get something more out of him, or to send him back. There were members of Roy’s congregation who would love to be sent off as spies, but for that very reason they would have been unsuitable. Even Fred himself stuck out a little too much on this city street. There weren’t supposed to be real rubes and hayseeds anymore. That was all supposed to have been taken care of by movies and MTV. When Fred was growing up, though, his parents hadn’t had a television, and the only movies they had approved of had been the Disney animated features from the nineteen fifties. Then there had been home schooling, and church Sundays, and Bible college. It wasn’t hard for Roy to understand how Fred had come to be Fred. It only angered him sometimes, the way they all angered him, all the members of his congregation. Their lack of education was appalling. Their lack of sophistication would have been comical if it weren’t so dangerous. Their superstitions were tangled knots of confusion that couldn’t be hacked through with a sword, no matter how many sermons he gave on the sin of credulity, no matter how often he railed against astrology as a tool of the devil. They were committed to him, but he thought they wouldn’t have been, if they could have found someone who frightened them less. Then again, maybe not. They were used to living on fear. They were afraid of everything. Maybe a man they couldn’t fear would be, as well, a man they couldn’t respect.
