The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  Laura remembered when they had been in Rome, when she had left Ray at the Hotel Columbus and gone to the Vatican to have lunch with John at the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lived. The man Brendan Crowe had worked for, Cardinal Maguire, had recently died, and Father Crowe was just back from his funeral in Ireland. In Saint Peter’s there had been a prolonged pontifical funeral Mass for Rampolla, the secretary of state who also had recently died. When Laura suggested that Vatican City seemed injurious to one’s health, John had mentioned the age of the secretary of state. But he clearly hadn’t wanted to talk about it. No more had she. But now, sitting in her apartment before the fire with Ray, she remembered that exchange and what seemed to her in retrospect John’s eagerness to drop the subject. She would press John on the matter tomorrow.

  “You think we’re making the right choice with Gabriel Faust?” Ray asked.

  “He’s got credentials out the gazoo.”

  “As well as Zelda. I make no mention of gazoos.”

  She punched his arm. “Ain’t love grand?”

  “She parades him around like a trophy.”

  “Brendan Crowe studied his dossier, interviewed him,” Laura said. “He said Faust was the real article.”

  “Well, Crowe certainly came up with the obvious solution to that list of paintings.”

  Have copies made, copies so perfect they would be as good as the originals. Faust knew all about it, another plus. Nate would have the depictions of the joyful mysteries of the rosary ordered and the new foundation could get under way. It occurred to Laura that she and Ray regarded Nate’s determination to add Refuge of Sinners to his accomplishments as a quirk, as if he had suddenly decided to collect antique cars or Civil War mementos.

  “Thank God for Heather,” Laura said, raising her glass.

  Her old classmate had always been serious, it was one of her charms, but even so, Laura had been surprised by the transformation in Heather. She reported to Ray, but Laura was her superior as well. Why then did she feel like such a kid when she talked to Heather? All the authority that had come along with her success at Empedocles, as Nate’s indispensable right hand, seemed to fade away before Heather’s manner. How to describe it? She was conscientious, reliable, efficient, and yet somehow otherworldly. She had become a Catholic.

  “Heather, I thought you always were.”

  “Sometimes I think the same.” That smile, that smile. If it were anyone else, Laura would feel condescended to, but it was because of Heather’s indifference to the usual jockeying and maneuvering in any corporation that, having first doubted it—there were so many ways to maneuver—she now accepted Heather’s attitude as the genuine article. And of course Heather and Nate could have intense conversations about their spiritual reading. Well, intense on Nate’s part. Once he learned there was a ladder of spiritual perfection, he was intent on the uppermost rung. And Nate could talk to Heather about his plans for Refuge of Sinners. He had actually proposed that Heather run the thing.

  “She turned me down,” Nate said, another new experience for him.

  The foundation would be a corporation separate from Empedocles, nonprofit of course, and Laura and Ray had tried to understand its purpose. Asking Nate was risky, since it led to one of his sermons: not unctuous, more like a business plan.

  “Why doesn’t he just underwrite Trepanier’s organization?” Ray had wondered.

  “Because it wouldn’t belong to Saint Ignatius.”

  Well, if Nate had been predictable, he probably would be a computer repairman trying to make ends meet. They had hoped the grotto would satisfy his new interest in the faith of his fathers, but it had been just the beginning.

  “I almost wish he had thought of John for the job,” Laura said.

  “Would he have taken it?”

  “No.”

  “There you are.”

  It had been Zelda’s surprising remark that Traeger had been in the CIA with husband numero uno that cast the events of the day in a new light. Or a new darkness. What she and Ray knew of the CIA didn’t amount to much. The agency was often in the news of late, portrayed as a check on if not a rival to the administration. Its critics pointed to the miserable record of the agency in assessing the situations in which they had involved the country. It was something to learn that not even members of Congress were privy to its operations or even knew the extent of its budget, let alone how the money was used. And they had covered themselves with shame in their estimate of Iraq, first in the Gulf War, now in the seemingly endless conflict in which our troops were engaged in the supposedly conquered country. All the talk about weapons of mass destruction had been revealed as so much blather. But it had been based on so-called intelligence. What did all that have to do with what had happened to Brendan Crowe in the guest building at Empedocles? If anything? But the mysterious disappearance of Vincent Traeger made Father Crowe’s horrible death seem an event in a game that Purcell and his colleagues were unlikely to understand.

  “That gets Purcell off the hook,” Ray said. “His relief at the thought is palpable.”

  “Us, too.” She snuggled closer. “Let’s talk about us.”

  “Not in front of the children.”

  Laura purred. What a lovely thought.

  III

  “And so to bed.”

  They went out to dinner, as they usually did, Zelda saying she did not want to spoil their honeymoon by revealing what a lousy cook she was. Honeymoon? What had begun in Corfu had continued nonstop ever since, gaining in intensity after the ceremony in the sacristy of Santa Susanna in Rome. Father Kiernan had been remarkably incurious about Gabriel, apparently assuming that he was as committed a Catholic as Zelda surprisingly was. No, not surprisingly. He remembered her agonies of remorse between bouts in bed after their relationship had altered from expert and client to sexual partners. Calling Zelda from Corfu, more out of boredom than anything, had proved a fateful step.

  “Another?” he asked when they had finished their Manhattans.

  “Let’s.” She hunched her shoulders and widened her eyes. But the implied naughtiness of a second preprandial drink was make-believe.

  “Tell me about your husband, Zelda.”

  “You’re my husband.”

  “I had no idea he had been with the CIA.”

  “He only told me after he retired. Can you believe it?”

  “What did you think he did?”

  “He said he was a lobbyist. And he was. But it turned out that was more a cover than a job.”

  “And he worked with Traeger?”

  “Gabriel, I am trying to forget about this awful day.”

  He put his hand on hers. “I thought it had been rather successful.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course it has been. And I am so delighted. I’ll tell you a secret. I had begun to worry how I could possibly avoid boring you to death. Now you have a wonderful position. What exactly are the arrangements?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He handed her the memorandum and contract Laura Burke had given him before they left Empedocles. Zelda’s plush lips rounded when she read the proposed salary. Gabriel realized how important to him that was. If she had feared the specter of boredom, he had not looked forward to her discovery of how modest his means were. How could he help but feel like a gigolo, particularly the way Zelda displayed him as if he represented some splendid catch? He had insisted on using his credit cards during these past weeks, dreading presenting her with the bills when they came. Now he would have an income beyond anything he had expected. Not even in his optimistic youth would he have imagined such a sinecure.

  “I wish I could understand exactly what it is that Ignatius expects you to do.”

  “He’s not too clear on that himself. Fatima is at the heart of it.”

  Zelda nodded. She knew about Fatima. So did Gabriel, now. He had made a little research project of it when he first got an inkling of what the aim of the new foundation would be.

  “But y
ou’ll work there in the Empedocles complex?”

  “For the nonce, my love. Hannan intends to house the foundation in a new complex.”

  Attractive, that. Gabriel had appreciated the effortless efficiency of Laura Burke, but the prospect of being under her surveillance was less than exhilarating. Or of Ray Sinclair’s for that matter.

  Zelda said, “I’m sure those two would be married if Ignatius ever gave them time for it.”

  “And what of Hannan himself in that regard?”

  Zelda inhaled, then adopted her little-girl expression. “I think he had his eye on me. You see what you saved me from.”

  She could have no idea what she had saved him from.

  “He said I could call on Heather as I set things up, Zelda. ‘We see eye to eye on these matters.’ I am quoting.”

  “Isn’t she a lovely girl?”

  Gabriel remembered seeing the lovely girl standing outside the administration building, taking keys from her purse and handing them to Traeger.

  “Where does she live?” he asked.

  “God knows. She’s a recluse, according to Laura.”

  But Heather’s handing her keys to Traeger in order that, as it transpired, he could make his getaway suggested that the two knew one another. If Traeger had been, perhaps still was, CIA, perhaps Heather was as well. Gabriel had spent much of his life in intrigue, but he found such speculation dizzying.

  They had their dinner, with a bottle of Barolo, then afterward drove to Zelda’s. Her place was fifty miles from Empedocles.

  She said, “I suppose we should relocate. To be nearer to your new job.”

  “I won’t mind commuting.”

  “I would hate to leave this place. The memories . . .”

  Did she mean her husband? Apparently not. The reference was to their making love here, in the bad old days.

  “Well,” Gabriel said. “You know how Pepys ended entries in his diary.”

  “How?”

  “And so to bed.”

  He drove to Empedocles the following day and talked again with Laura and with Ray Sinclair about the financing of Refuge of Sinners. Gabriel tried to look blasé as Sinclair gave him the figures. There would be a hundred-million-dollar endowment supporting the new foundation. Gabriel had found his salary breathtaking, but this was affluence indeed. Again, he was urged to sit down with Heather for a long talk.

  “I can’t imagine why,” she said. Ash brown hair framed her face, her eyes were like Spanish olives, and her lips seemed to involve more folds and indentations than necessary, like those of Michelangelo’s David, but they all enhanced her beauty.

  “Is Father Trepanier to be regarded as a competitor or what?” Gabriel asked Heather.

  Zelda had told him of the enthusiastic priest whose ministry she supported. Trepanier was practically in the neighborhood, but his operation, Fatima Now!, was largely electronic, a cable channel on which he broadcast twenty-four hours a day, not to mention the worldwide reach of shortwave stations.

  “If Mr. Hannan has any criticism of Father Trepanier, it is the tone of his criticism of the Church.”

  Heather explained. More Fatima. At the heart of Trepanier’s efforts was the demand that the Church fulfill the request that the Blessed Mother had made that Russia be dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  “Russia?”

  In 1917, when the apparitions had taken place at Fatima, mention of Russia—and not the Soviet Union—as the great menace to peace seemed odd, not that the three children would have seen it as such. Had they even known what or where Russia was? Of course, Sister Lucia’s latter communication, written under obedience, recalling events at a later date, when she had become a nun, the other two children dead, was the product of a woman whose natural gifts had profited from the education she had subsequently received. There were also accounts of subsequent apparitions when the Blessed Virgin appeared to her alone, but they were not part of the document that had been meant for the pope and that had contained what Sister Lucia called secrets, among them what had come to be called the third secret of Fatima.

  “Mr. Hannan has been swayed by those who feel the revelation of that third secret in two thousand was incomplete,” Heather told him.

  “What does he think was left out?”

  “I wonder.” Her eyes drifted away, then came back to him. “Isn’t it strange how people become fascinated with secrets?”

  Heather went on. “There are some who think that in two thousand the Church kept back Our Lady’s dismay at Vatican II.”

  “Is Hannan among them?”

  “To a degree. He has his own theory.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That Our Lady warned of the loss of Christendom to Islam.”

  IV

  “Any beeping messages?”

  Father Krucek was a wry but delightful host.

  “If you have any friends who need rooms, I can put them up, too.”

  John Burke forbore saying that his best friend was dead. The pastor of Saint Cyril’s had doubtless buried too many friends and family and parishioners to regard death as any great surprise. Of course, John had told him what had happened to Brendan.

  “I’ll say a Mass for him.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Krucek was a monsignor but did not use the title nor indeed wear the red piping he was entitled to on his cassock. He wore his white hair in a crew cut, was seventy-five and thus of retirement age, but he soldiered on as pastor. Once he had had two assistants—“When we still called them that”—but attrition in the ranks of the clergy had long since deprived him of such help. The rectory was large, with accommodations for three priests and a visitor, but now there were only Krucek and Mrs. Krapcinski, the housekeeper and cook whom he called affectionately Mrs. Krap. “My coeval,” he added. “She’s been here forever. She’s worse than a wife.”

  It was Mrs. Krapcinski’s taped voice that was heard on the parish phone, rattling off the hours of Sunday Masses and when confessions were heard, adding that any necessary messages could be recorded after the beep.

  “Any beeping messages?” was the pastor’s frequently asked question. He asked it now when they came into the dining room, which was redolent with the odor of ethnic fare.

  “You’ll be the first to know, Father.”

  They sat and Krucek said the grace in Latin, making no comment when John joined in. The pastor’s arthritic hand traced the sign of the cross over their empty plates, and then opened his napkin with a flourish. Mrs. Krapcinski had stood with bowed head during the prayer, then disappeared through the swinging door to her kitchen, to emerge a moment later with a steaming tureen of soup. She filled their bowls, the pastor’s first, then John’s. It was a delicious chowder, more solid than liquid in state.

  The pastor had said his Mass at five, the afternoon Mass a grudging concession to changing times.

  “I never concelebrate,” he said when John asked if the pastor minded if he said his own Mass. Nor was Communion given under both species at Saint Cyril’s. It was not simply that the common cup dared the Lord to prevent the spread of disease. Father Krucek knew the arguments of Reformation times and considered offering the consecrated wine as well as bread to the faithful a betrayal. There were no Eucharistic ministers at Saint Cyril’s. The pastor was delighted—if that was not too exuberant a word—to find that John was not a flaming liberal. His brows had lifted and that was all when John mentioned that his assignment was Rome.

  “Rome,” he said now. “Still a student?”

  “I work for Bishop Sanchez Sorrondo in the Office of Pontifical Academies.”

  “You hear that, Mrs. Krap? He works in the Vatican.”

  Mrs. Krap was deaf as a post—Krucek’s description—but she didn’t seem to miss much.

  “When I can’t hear I’ll let you know.”

  The arrangement was that John would say his Mass in the morning. “We won’t make an announcement. People will begin to expect it.”
>
  “I will only be with you a few days, Father.”

  The chowder was followed by pork chops, mashed potatoes, and corn. The bread was delicious, baked by the housekeeper, as was the apple pie that followed. John praised the food, but Mrs. Krap was as phlegmatic as the pastor. She made a little mock curtsy and went through the swinging doors. In his study, Krucek opened a liquor cabinet and asked John what his poison was.

  “Whatever you’re having, Father.”

  “Then you’ll go to bed sober. I never drink.”

  “Maybe a little brandy?”

  Krucek poured out a generous glass and handed it to John. “I do smoke, however.”

  “Good.” John got out his cigarettes. Krucek unwrapped a cigar and moistened it carefully before lighting it.

  “I studied in Louvain myself,” Krucek said, the words emerging like smoke rings.

  “Did you?”

  “Philosophy. I taught in the seminary for years. This is my reward. Captain of the Titanic.”

  “There seemed a good turnout for a weekday Mass.”

  “The walking wounded. How many young people did you see?”

  Somewhat to his surprise, John had noticed Heather among them. Of course she had driven him here from Empedocles, leaving him at the rectory, commending his host, and then, as John had thought, driving off. He mentioned her to Krucek.

  “A convert. Extraordinary woman. Most converts come into the Church for the sake of a marriage, and that’s a good thing of course, although some of them would become Mormons or Hottentots if that were required. Heather is the other kind.”

  “How so?”

  “What do you know of Edith Stein?”

  “Is Heather a philosopher?”

  “Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam,” Krucek said, adding “Colossians. No, her degree is in business.”

  John explained how he knew her. At the mention of Ignatius Hannan, Krucek closed his eyes and blew a series of perfect smoke rings. “He’s the third kind.”

  Under prodding, he elaborated. A convert like Heather was a tonic, someone who put a priest on his mettle. He looked at John, “She wants to be a saint. Not that she would put it so baldly. The questions she asked when she came for instruction . . .” His voice trailed off. “When a person like that comes to you, you realize how we’ve come to take it all for granted. All this hoopla for the last quarter of a century and more, changing this, changing that, until people don’t know up from down. Who can blame them for thinking we’ve jettisoned the whole thing. And then someone like Heather comes and it’s as if she is just brushing aside all the nonsense and wants the thing itself. Converts will save the Church, Father. You can quote me.”