Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  “You’re certain? There can be no doubt?”

  He had let the fear come on full force, as if he was plunging through the ice into the freezing water.

  “Dear God in Heaven!” he had exclaimed, but very quietly.

  He had taken several deep breaths, regaining his self-control, allowing some vigor to flow back and wash away the fear.

  “I thought it was all over. I thought it was all behind me.”

  He had changed the look in his eyes and had indicated that his strength was returning.

  “Forgive me,” he had said. “You took me by surprise. I did not realize that they still have such a hold over me. One does not truly escape Lubianka, I see.”

  He had stood up and walked slowly across the room so that the lamplight would strike his countenance correctly when he turned to face Coogan. But, for a moment, he had kept his back to him, dropping his shoulders with just the slightest suggestion of discouragement. But not defeat. He had let the room fill up with silence and had let the silence work, had let it deepen. Then he had turned slowly, letting the light do its work with his eyes.

  “Mister Coogan, what could they possibly want from me now?”

  “We don’t know, Father. No one has approached you or tried to make contact with you?”

  “No,” he had said, slowly. “No one has approached me. No one has asked me to do anything.”

  He had then taken a long pause.

  “I cannot begin to describe the terror I feel.”

  That had worked well, judging by the agent’s reaction. Coogan had tried to reassure him, but in so doing, Coogan had revealed his thinking and his plans.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Now, kneeling in his room, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz rubbed his eyes and looked about. His room was dark, save for the light from the goose-necked lamp on his desk. His room was silent, save for the moths and flying beetles outside that flung themselves against his window screen trying to reach his light. He had performed well, he decided. He had taken Coogan in completely, of that he had no doubt whatsoever.

  Coogan, obviously, was deeply concerned about the Jesuit priest he portrayed and that, he had to admit, he found quite moving. The man was so concerned that he had delivered his own son to the novitiate to try to help protect a priest in danger.

  His heart had gone out to Coogan and his son. He could not help it. The fact that there was no threat to his life was beside the point. He had felt the need to comfort the FBI agent, to relieve some of his anxiety.

  “There is something that you must remember,” he had said to Coogan. “Whatever else I may be, I am at heart a zek, a convict. I survived for many years in the harshest conditions and in the company of the worst kinds of men. In many ways, some of my fellow zeks were more dangerous than the guards. But I did not die at their hands. Others did, but I survived.

  “In the camps, I became a tough, hard man. I have the zek’s cunning and the instincts of a reptile. I can sense danger in the slightest change of light and shadow. And I have a will to live, Mister Coogan. I will be harder to kill than they think.”

  He had been speaking rapidly, with intensity. And so he had paused to let the emotion build. He had grasped Coogan’s arm.

  “You have sent your son to watch my back. I appreciate that, Mister Coogan. And I swear to you before God Almighty that I will do the same for him.”

  Coogan had been so moved he could not speak.

  Now, in his room, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz made the Sign of the Cross and, as he had trained himself to do even when alone, recited the Latin words to himself with a proper air of reverence. He hauled himself to his feet. His Examen was over. Tomorrow, before dawn, during morning meditation, he would make his plans. For now, it seemed, he was safe enough, but only for as long as he continued to play his part.

  C H A P T E R • 9

  Clang-clang! Clang-clang! Clang-clang!

  Charley Coogan pressed his eyes shut as tightly as he could. Clang-clang! It was coming closer. Clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang!

  Charley knew what it was now: the big brass bell swung by the Beadle sweeping through the dark hallways of the novitiate. Charley could hear voices in distant dormitory rooms responding to the Beadle’s call to rise.

  Clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang! Charley tried to hang on to sleep, but the Beadle was coming through the door as he did every morning at five.

  Clang-clang! The brass bell opened Charley’s eyes and the Beadle sang out: “Benedicamus Domino!” Charley managed a muffled “Deo gratias!”

  Thanking the Lord, he swung his bare feet onto the cold floor. The sun had not yet risen, but the dormitory room was abruptly flooded with hard white light. Judging from the grunts, croaks and coughs he heard, nobody was “leaping out of bed as if it were on fire.”

  Charley stretched and peered over the partition curtain of his cubicle and checked the pendulum clock on the wall by the windows. It was already four minutes past five. Another late start. Hardly enough time to do what had to be done before the first period began. At five-thirty, electric gongs would sound the Angelus and the start of his morning meditation. Charley had no time to waste.

  He stripped off his pajamas and slipped into the clean underwear he had placed on his chest of drawers. He put his folded pajamas on the shelf of his coffin. That was what the novices called their tall, wooden wardrobes because that’s what they looked like. He took his trousers off their hook, pulled them on, sat down on the side of his bed and put on his socks and shoes.

  Should he wear a shirt under his cassock? No, the morning chill would not last long, so a T-shirt would be enough. He took his patched, hand-me-down cassock from his coffin and put it on.

  He wrapped his cincture around his waist and secured it, folding it over itself the way he had been taught. Then he hooked his rosary onto his cincture. It was the kind of long rosaries the nuns at his grammar school had worn. At Milford, only the novices wore such rosaries. The priests and the scholastics—they were called “juniors”—wore the regular Roman collars. Novices had to struggle with narrow celluloid collars that folded across the front just below the Adam’s apple. Charley found that especially difficult this morning because he had an urgent need to piss.

  Some of the other novices, he had noticed, did not put on their collars just to run down to the bathroom. But Charley was not about to cut corners. He wanted to play his part as best he could. In his rush, he almost forgot to pick up the stainless steel washbasin that rested inverted on the white cloth atop his chest of drawers. Concealed beneath the bowl were his soap dish, shaving cream, razor, toothpaste and toothbrush. Charley shoved his toiletries aside so that he would have a place to put his basin of hot water when he returned from the lavatory.

  With downcast eyes, he hurried along the hall from his cubiculum to the castellum in the main corridor. No one had told him why the bathroom was called a castle. Some forgotten punster, he supposed, had tried to translate “crystal palace” into Latin, and castellum was as close as he could come. Lavatorium would not have been accurate because the novices were not allowed to wash their faces in the castellum, only their hands. That would have made life too easy and taking it easy was not the purpose of the novitiate.

  In spite of its grand name, the castellum was a standard institutional men’s room with sinks, toilet stalls and a row of urinals. Charley wasted no time there. He urinated, washed and dried his hands, filled his basin with hot water from the faucet of one of the large sinks and, walking cautiously, carried the basin back to his cubiculum without spilling a drop.

  Now came the day’s first challenge. With only one basin of hot water, he would have to shave, wash his face and upper body, and rinse clean. At home, he was used to a bracing morning shower. He did not like starting the day without one. This morning, he completed his morning ablutio more quickly and efficiently than the morning before, but he had to fight off a few surges of frustration and anger.

  He dried hi
s face, put the hand towel over the wooden dowel on the rack above the chest of drawers and left it there to dry next to the washcloth. He draped his bath towel over a dowel on the side of the chest, carefully picked up his wash basin, carried it back down the hall to the castellum, emptied the waste water, wiped the basin with a paper towel, returned to the dormitory, rearranged his toilet articles and placed the inverted basin on top of them.

  He checked the clock on the wall. There was still time to dash to the basement and brush his teeth; his one self-indulgence. He’d make his bed later, after breakfast.

  Teeth, according to the novitiate rules, were never to be cleaned in the castles. A novice could, if he could figure out how to use his drinking glass in conjunction with his washbasin, brush his teeth in his cubicle. Charley had found that it was quicker and less frustrating to brush his teeth in the basement splash room.

  This room, which adjoined the larger shower room, had four large, circular sinks with spigots in the center, the sort of sinks often found in factories. Novices were allowed to use the sinks in the splash room to scrub themselves clean after performing manual labors during the day. They were not permitted to use the big sinks for their morning ablutions. But they could brush their teeth there in the morning. None of the other first-year novices had discovered this shortcut yet, so Charley and some second-year novices had the splash room to themselves. There was plenty of room in the sinks to spit.

  Mouth refreshed, Charley rushed upstairs to his dormitory room and was standing at his desk when the electric gongs began ringing the Angelus. The overhead lights had been turned off, the sky outside was dark and the only illumination came from the small goose-necked lamps on the novices’ desks. It was Charley’s turn to lead the morning prayer.

  “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” he read aloud from the small prayer book each novice had been issued. “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” He waited for the Latin response from the other five novices in the dormitory room. Charley felt comfortable leading the morning devotion, comfortable in reciting the thrice-repeated Ave Maria, comfortable in the ritual that was always the same and easily followed, like calisthenics at football practice.

  But then the Angelus was over and the silence returned, punctuated by the slow tick-tocking of the pendulum clock that would mark every second of the fifty minutes set aside for meditation.

  For Charley, it was the most uncomfortable period of the day. He could do nothing except kneel or stand or sit at his desk by the window and pretend. It was his job to make sure that no one suspected that he was not really meditating. But he worried that the novices in his dormitory room might somehow find him out. It was during this hour that he felt most isolated.

  Each morning, as he waited for the dawn, he felt alone in the world. He dreaded the visits of the Beadle, that ominous black figure drifting through the darkened dormitory rooms to rouse any novice who might have fallen asleep. Charley, the pretender, dared not doze off. The Beadle might find him out.

  Charley never got a clear look at the Beadle. His stride was so smooth and stealthy that Charley could never hear him coming. Only after he passed by in the darkness was Charley aware of him. The black biretta on his head made him seem taller than he was and the sudden appearance of this ominous figure always shocked Charley fully awake.

  What the other novices did during this hour of meditation, Charley could not imagine. He understood about praying. He had been saying his prayers since earliest childhood. But meditation was beyond his experience or comprehension. He had listened carefully while Father Samozvanyetz was explaining meditation in his lectures, but Charley could not get the point. He felt as if he was trying to read a book that had several chapters missing.

  But it doesn’t matter, he told himself. He had picked up the physical drill, the correct posture, the externals of the interior exercise. The Beadle observing him at this moment would be certain that he was, like the rest of the novices, meditating. What he was actually doing was fighting off sleep.

  Without a morning shower, Charley found it hard to stay awake and, when he became sleepy, warm memories of girls he had known would come to him. But he’d discovered that they’d go away if he changed his position. If he was kneeling, he would stand up or sit down. If he was standing or seated, he would return to the wooden kneeler. Then he would find his mind clear, but empty. He decided it would be better to think about something, anything at all, so that the impure thoughts would not return.

  He tried to concentrate on what the novices had been instructed to think about. The subject of this morning’s meditation was Simeon, the old man at the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the notes Father Samozvanyetz had given to the novices the night before, God had promised Simeon that he would not die without having met the Messiah.

  Simeon was in the temple when Mary and Joseph brought the Infant Jesus there and the old man took the Baby in his arms and blessed God and said: “Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace; because my eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou has prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the story of Thy people Israel.”

  What, Charley wondered, was he supposed to make of that? He looked again at the notes he had made in the Novice Chapel during last night’s short lecture. “Puncta,” he had written at the top of the page. “Points for Meditation.”

  An independent man won’t feel shackled by laws or rules. Conformity to rule pleases.

  Eg to God. Imitate Christ and Simeon, not Scribes etc. Simeon observed Law, religious, but spiritual. Waiting for consolation of Israel. So received promise from Holy Ghost. Not only sees Messiah, holds M in arms. Constant fidelity. God never stingy re: promises. Simeon = Old Testa guy speaks of death w/o horror. NB! Got something extra he didn’t even ask for.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Charley, kneeling now, frowned and gritted his teeth. He put pressure on his brain to make something happen. He gave up finally and sat down in his chair.

  One thing did occur to him. If Simeon worked at the Temple, he had really stuck his neck out to say somebody’s little baby was the Messiah. The Hebrews had been waiting for centuries for the Messiah. Then old Simeon takes one look at this baby and says: “That’s Him!”

  Simeon must have had a lot of guts to do that. How could he have been so sure? Did somebody tell him? There was no angel in this story. Maybe God told Simeon directly. But how would Simeon know he was listening to God? And not just listening to himself? How would anybody know if God was talking to him?

  The ticking of the pendulum clock grew softer, a sign that he was drifting off to sleep. He had made the mistake of looking out the window. The half-light that precedes the dawn always made his eyes heavy.

  Charley drew back from the brink of oblivion. He forced himself to his feet and took stock of his surroundings without moving his head too much. His was the fourth desk in a row of five standing alongside the five tall windows on his left. The windows had venetian blinds, pulled all the way up now; but no curtains.

  The five desks faced the clock on the wall. A sixth desk along the wall behind him faced away from the building wall toward the cubicles. Charley was glad he hadn’t been given that one. If the novice at that desk succumbed to temptation and gazed about the room, he’d have a clear view of the novices along the windows. Charley was glad he couldn’t see directly forward while kneeling or sitting. His desk had a wooden hutch about thirty inches high and it blocked his view. The hutch held the few books the novices were allowed to keep.

  Charley’s most secular books were his Latin and Greek texts. The rest were scriptural, instructional and devotional. A total of ten. Tacked onto the side of his bookcase was a white, hand-lettered card, which read: “Cr. Coogan.”

  Carissime meant: “Dearly beloved.” That’s what Saint Paul called the people he wrote his Epistles to and that was what Charley was called now that he’d completed his postulancy and had received his cassock an
d rosary beads and celluloid collar.

  During those two weeks, eight postulants had dropped out and gone home, but not Charley. He was now Carissime Charles Coogan, N.S.J., a novice in the Society of Jesus. Or, at least, he was pretending to be one. It was some sort of accomplishment and he was proud of it.

  But “Dearly Beloved” reminded him of the girl he had taken to his Senior Prom. The Glenn Miller record of that ballad was her mother’s favorite—and hers too. “Our song,” she’d called it. He wished he could stop thinking about her every time somebody called him “Cris-may,” which was pretty often.

  In the novitiate, first names were never used. So, it was “Cris-may This” and “Cris-may That” and the novices were getting used to “Cris-may,” just as they were getting used to speaking Latin all the time, except during recreation. Nobody was flinching at the sissy sound of “Cris-may” anymore.

  Thank God for Latin, Charley thought. Deo gratias a lot. The rule that all necessary conversations had to be conducted in Latin (except when dealing with the lay brothers) was a big plus.

  How much could I say in Latin, anyway? Not enough to give myself away, that’s for sure. But he had to stay alert during the recreation periods when the novices were allowed to speak English. A whole of twenty minutes after the noon meal and a half hour after supper.

  Charley tried to play the strong, silent type. He smiled a lot, laughed at the jokes and puns and word games, nodded seriously when one of the pious ones wanted to talk about religious stuff. So far, he’d managed to say very little about his personal life. But on Thursdays and Sundays there was long recreation.

  During the morning hikes in the countryside and the afternoon ball games on the novitiate playing fields, English was also permitted. That was a strain. Too much opportunity to give himself away, especially when he got excited and competitive. He was amazed that the other novices hadn’t caught on to him yet, but so far he’d managed to fit in.

  He was, quite suddenly, hungry. He wondered what would be served for breakfast that morning. He hoped it would be cornbread and stew. He really liked that a lot better than the chipped beef on cornbread. But he’d better not think about food. Breakfast was still more than an hour away.