Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  “This is an unusual situation for all of us,” he said at last. “As far as the Society is concerned, your son’s being here has been unorthodox, to say the least. But he’s done no harm. Quite the contrary. His presence has been all to the good. He has made my job much easier and he has had a positive influence on his classmates.”

  “And I guess I’m glad to hear you say that, Father,” said Herb.

  “Charles has been an observer rather than a full participant, it’s true, Mister Coogan. But he’s been exposed to profound ideas during the Long Retreat. That couldn’t have been avoided, not if he was to do his job properly. So the question, I think, is what is our responsibility to him?”

  He bowed his head, clasped his hands behind his back and took six steps toward the door. He paused for a beat, turned and walked back.

  “Your son is something like a deep-sea diver, Mister Coogan. He’s been working under pressure out of his natural element. At a great depth, so to speak. It is dangerous to bring a diver to the surface too quickly. The sudden change in pressure could give him—what do they call it?”

  “The bends,” said Herb.

  “Yes, the bends. So it might be better to give Charles a chance to decompress before he goes home. I think we should give him some time here to collect his thoughts and get his wits about him before we thrust him back into the world. We could let him stay through the Christmas holidays and then decide what to do. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” said Herb. “That makes a lot of sense, Father.”

  “Good!” He shook the FBI agent’s hand. “Until after the holidays, then. I’ll leave you and Charles alone to enjoy the rest of your visit. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The man who played Father Samozvanyetz left the parlor and walked through the door into the cloister. As he climbed the staircase to Paters’ Row, he wondered if he had made a serious mistake.

  Why does young Coogan not want to go home? Is he seriously considering becoming a Jesuit? Young Coogan had seemed genuinely engrossed throughout the Long Retreat. Was my portrayal of Ignatius Loyola that impressive? Could it have been so dazzling that the agent’s son had fallen under the Basque soldier’s spell?

  Maybe young Coogan had been pretending to be enthralled by my performance. Or maybe the diligent young man observed something he thinks needs more investigation? Only time would tell what was going on in young Coogan’s mind. He would just have to be more careful from now on.

  Actually, he told himself, it is probably all to the good. Young Coogan will not be sitting at home trying to put two and two together. He will be here at Milford where I can watch him while he is watching me. His presence will—what’s the expression? Keep me on my toes?

  C H A P T E R • 8

  Charley Coogan did not leave Milford that Christmas nor did he set a date for his departure. Life was busy but predictable at the novitiate and Charley settled into the monastic routine of work and prayer, study and recreation. He had no need of a wristwatch or a calendar. The bells marked the segments of his day and every morning he found a new Epistle and Gospel in his Missale Romanum. As the weeks passed and the seasons changed, so did the games the novices played on Thursday afternoons.

  One dark Saturday night in February, a cold front sped across southern Ohio and instantly froze the Little Miami into thick ice, so clear that all the stones and pebbles on the bottom of the river were visible that bright Sunday morning. The surface of the ice was so level and smooth that the novices were able to skate upstream for several miles to explore the riverbanks. “An Ambulatio on ice,” Charley wrote in one of his weekly letters home.

  He kept those letters cheerful and a bit churchy by including a few pious or humorous anecdotes collected during the week, a reference to a passage in that week’s liturgy, a quote from an inspirational book he was reading and answers to questions he knew his mother might have.

  Yes, his health was excellent. The slight cold had gone away. Yes, he was dressing warmly. His appetite was fine. Yes, he always had enough to eat. The food was plain, but very good. His bed was comfortable. He slept like a log. Yes, he was a bit homesick from time to time, but it was not as bad as he thought it might be.

  The reports he sent to his father’s office tended to be brief. There was nothing of any consequence to report. Father Samozvanyetz had left the novitiate a few times, just for the day, never overnight. Otherwise, the Novice Master’s life, like his own, was following an established routine.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Kathleen Coogan looked between the lines of each letter that arrived from her son, trying to find the real reason for his “procrastination.” Why didn’t he want to come home? Was he afraid of being seen as a “quitter” or did he think he might have a real vocation?

  “Once you leave the Jesuits,” Herb explained to his wife, “you can’t go back. So Charley’s got to make an irrevocable decision. Stay and take his vows or leave forever. That’s got to be a hard decision to make.”

  “It must be very hard,” said Kathleen. “Honestly, I wish Charley hadn’t gone there in the first place.”

  “And I wish I’d done something to stop him. But now he has to make a decision that’s going to affect his whole life and we can’t help him.”

  “Oh, my God, no! We can’t interfere. It’s Charley’s life and his decision. We can’t make it for him. That would really be wrong. I can only pray that he makes the right one. Even if it isn’t the one I want.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. We can’t pressure him to decide one way or the other. We just have to let God handle it.”

  “Do you trust Him, Herb?”

  “God? Honestly? I’m afraid I don’t, not really.”

  “Neither do I,” she said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The man who played Father Samozvanyetz had slogged through the winter giving one successful performance after another. Someone, he recalled, once declared that an actor could never exhaust the possibilities of Hamlet. That, he had found, was not actually true. Even the most complicated role can become tedious if a production runs too long. The Danish prince might stay fresh but the actor portraying him could go stale.

  He had to guard against that. On this rickety stage in this cramped theater, missing a cue or stumbling out of character could be fatal, never more so than while dealing with Charles Coogan and John Kennedy. He worried about both of them, perhaps too much for his own good.

  If only John Kennedy would respond to moral guidance as eagerly as Charles Coogan. If only his zealous novice could shrug him off as easily as the President. Not that he saw Kennedy that often. An hour here and there when the President was traveling. In a hotel in some city, never in Washington. The President’s security men were adept at arranging clandestine meetings.

  Oksana Volkova had told him that they had many opportunities to perfect their skills. That baffled and troubled him. How could such an intelligent and controlled leader save the world from destruction and not be able to stop himself from engaging in such risky affairs?

  The President knew, or thought he knew, that the Jesuit he was meeting with somehow knew all about his women. So it would be completely in character to admonish the Catholic President about the moral danger he courted. But every time he tried, Kennedy would use his charm to divert the discussion to foreign affairs. There was always the smile, the quip or play on words and then some difficulty he was having with the Soviet Union or West Berlin or China.

  During one of their meetings, Kennedy expressed concern about Southeast Asia. That material, of course, was what he was there to dig out. His job was to satisfy Oksana Volkova’s insatiable appetite for information, not to save John Kennedy from himself. He shouldn’t care about that, but he did. The man who played Father Samozvanyetz genuinely liked the man he spied on.

  As for Charles Coogan, any suspicions he might have had about his Master of Novices seemed to have evaporated. It was obvious that the FBI agent’s son had c
eased pretending and had become infatuated with Jesuit spirituality. Not only did young Coogan swallow all his counterfeit sermons, instructions and observations, he seemed inspired by them. The lad was headed down the wrong path and he could see no way to disillusion him without endangering himself and his mission and, as he must never forget, his Anya.

  He could not save Charles Coogan or John Kennedy, no more than he could have saved John Beck or his son, Alexei. Much as that distressed him, he did not dare reveal his concerns to anyone, certainly not to the ruthless woman who controlled him. She never asked.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Spring brought baseball to the playing fields of Milford. There was an occasional hardball game, which Charley and the more athletic novices enjoyed. But mostly it was softball, a game everyone could play. Now and then, there was the wild-and-wooly Chicago game played with a 16-inch ball on a diamond with short base paths.

  “It takes a minor miracle to loft that mushy monster beyond the infield,” he wrote to his parents. “Even if you do, you have to run like old Chuck Dickens to get to first base. Forget about hitting a double.”

  As usual, he ended his “nothing-to-report” report with “AQ/MF” to signify that, so far as the Father Samozvanyetz situation was concerned, it was “All Quiet on the Milford Front.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Oksana Volkova opened a fresh package of Chesterfield king-sized cigarettes, extracted the coupon and added it to the others she kept secured with a rubber band in the right hand corner of the bottom shelf of her kitchen cabinet.

  She closed the cabinet door, lit her cigarette and walked through the dining room back to the living room. Now that everything was running so smoothly, there was nothing much for her to do except to wait for the next signal from her agent at Milford Novitiate.

  She sat quietly in her furnished flat in a neighborhood of wooden tenements near downtown Cincinnati. It was safe and it had a window air conditioner. The living room was dark, but she did not turn on the lamp on the table beside her chair. No need to close the blinds in the dining room. Its windows looked out on a blank wall.

  Oksana exhaled slowly and watched the smoke from her cigarette drift through the shaft of light from the kitchen. Everything was going well with her priest and his President. She had planned carefully and had opened up a gold mine. It was wonderful, more than she had ever dreamed of accomplishing. But now she was stuck in a golden rut. All she had to do now was to keep shipping out the ore.

  She kept wishing that something would happen to break the monotony. Her life was moving as slowly as the soap opera she was following on television. She had little interest in the story but she found the complex structure of the serial fascinating. She watched As the World Turns every day that summer and took notes.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In his weekly letters home, Charley tried to minimize the misery August brought to Milford. The unrelenting heat and humidity in southern Ohio was beyond anything he’d experienced in Lakewood where breezes off Lake Erie provided some relief during the night.

  He exaggerated the cooling effect of the novitiate’s high ceilings and increased the length and depth of the ornamental swimming pool left by the original owners of the property. He did acknowledge that hikes and the ball games were slower and shorter and he assured his mother that he was being careful not to do too much in the heat. “Everything here,” he wrote, “is moving at a slower pace.”

  But Charley was drawing closer to the end of his first year as a Jesuit novice and entering the annual period of change at Milford. The population began shifting and Charley got a glimpse of what his future might be if he decided to stay on this path.

  The novices who completed their second year were preparing to take their vows before moving to the Juniorate wing of the building to begin their two years of college. The scholastics who had completed their second year were packing up for the move to West Baden, Indiana, to begin their three years of Philosophy studies.

  In his letter home, Charley described the ceremony in the main chapel when the secundi anni became Jesuit scholastics: the Juniors’ choir singing the Suscipe in Latin, the novices kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament to profess their vows of perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience.

  He did not mention how moved he was at that moment nor how his eyes filled as the new scholastics in their Roman collars and birettas walked solemnly out of the chapel toward the future while the organist played Handel’s Largo.

  In his letters home, Charley Coogan kept such feelings to himself. As for the thoughts and prayers that occupied his mind and heart, he wrote not a single word.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Late that August, Oksana Volkova smelled a rat.

  She had detected and charted the interlocking relationships of a dozen families she had identified in As the World Turns and had constructed timelines of the slowly paced activities of all the episodes she had watched. So she was truly shocked on August 23, to learn that an automobile accident had killed Jeff Baker and left his wife Penny in a coma.

  This was no accident. She knew that instantly.

  On this program, she deduced, nothing happened suddenly. Every word, every movement, every development was plotted well in advance. Every “surprise” was skillfully foreshadowed during characters’ conversations several days, even weeks, before something actually happened.

  But not the death of this character. That was not the way this program worked. Yet someone, suddenly, wanted Jeff dead. But who? Oksana checked her notes and charts and could not find the answer.

  Only later did she read in a newspaper that the actor who played Jeff Baker had given notice that he wanted to quit doing soap operas. The article noted that the producer who created and controlled this make-believe world was a woman.

  “Good for her,” Oksana Volkova said to herself. Once aware that her program’s continuity was endangered, the woman acted decisively, created an automobile accident and terminated two birds with one stone. With Jeff suddenly dead and gone, Jeff’s wife Penny, Oksana reasoned, would have to linger in her coma until the producer’s writers revised the future of her fictional life.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The novices were still playing baseball when the new class arrived that September.

  “I feel like an old monk, indeed,” wrote Charley. “These new guys are truly green and awkward, but I guess I looked the same last year at this time, before I got used to wearing a cassock. Tempus really does fugit. Suddenly I’m an old-timer, a secundi anni who’s supposed to know all the answers and give them in Latin! I guess I’ll have to wait to answer queries at recreation when I can answer their questions in English.”

  As autumn approached, Charley’s baseball news gave way to weekly gridiron reports.

  “I guess it’s not a charitable thought,” Charley wrote, “but our brand of touch football (no tactus) will be a better game with only us secundi anni playing. We’ve all learned what not to do and when not to do it. There will be fewer arguments (they never last long) and more action. So we’re all looking forward to the day the primi anni start their Long Retreat in October.”

  Father Samozvanyetz would be leading the Long Retreat once again, Charley reported to his Dad. “I’ll still be able to keep a close eye on him. But really, Dad, I don’t think there’s anything to see. It’s still AQ/MF as it has been for a long time.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “I talked to Father Thornton at Milford while you were out,” the Provincial told his secretary. “He said that everything there is just fine. No problems of any kind.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear, isn’t it?” said Brother Krause.

  “Yeah, he was very pleased to tell me that. He said there are always some dropouts right about now, but here it is: mid-November and not one of the novices who made the Long Retreat with Father Samozvanyetz has quit and gone home.”

  “Just like last year,” said Brother Krause. “All the novices who finished the retreat last year are still there.
Even the Coogan boy.”

  “So why doesn’t that make me happy, Brother Al?”

  “Because it’s one more odd thing?”

  “I guess so,” said Father Novak. “It doesn’t make me unhappy, really. It’s just puzzling, that’s all.”

  He turned his attention to the letters his secretary had brought him, all perfectly typed as usual. One by one, he signed them and handed them back.

  “About Milford,” he said to Brother Krause, “if something’s not broken, don’t try to fix it, right?”

  And so, during most of November, nobody had any concerns about Father Samozvanyetz: not in Washington, not in Rome, not in Moscow. The only person asking questions about the man who played Father Samozvanyetz was the man himself.

  C H A P T E R • 9

  Oksana Volkova was watching As the World Turns while having her noon meal. The widowed Peggy, who had emerged from her coma, was now suffering from a case of amnesia somewhere offstage, waiting to edge back into the story with newly conceived romantic predicaments.

  This week the black-and-white world on the TV screen had been struggling with the problems of who among the interlocking families, friends and in-laws should (or should not) be invited to their Thanksgiving Day dinners. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, the two actors on the screen vanished. White lettering popped onto the black background.

  “This is a bulletin from CBS News,” a voice declared.

  Oksana Volkova leaned forward.

  “In Dallas, Texas,” another off-screen voice announced, “three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. First reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

  When the brief announcement ended, the two soap opera actors reappeared, obviously unaware of what had just happened in the real world. They were still deliberating about Thanksgiving Day dinner invitations.

  Oksana Volkova sat staring at the television screen and waited for the next news bulletin.