Pontiff (A Thriller)

by Richard Bowker

  What was especially infuriating was that Monroe obviously didn't care about the sex; all he cared about was the potential bad publicity. More headlines in the Globe. Didn't these people ever learn? And where did he get this business about "fondling and kissing"? He and Kathleen had scarcely touched. Someone was hallucinating—or was out to get him.

  There was a knock on the door. "Yeah?" he called out.

  "It's Larry."

  "Go away."

  Doyle opened the door. More trouble, Hurley thought. Doyle didn't have his usual let's-work-it-out look; his expression was as grim as Hurley's mood. He took in the overturned wastebasket, then shut the door behind him. "Sit down, Joe," he said.

  Hurley didn't feel like sitting, but decided not to make an issue of it. He sat behind his desk. Doyle sat in the visitor's chair opposite. "Monroe got a call this morning," he said. "He won't tell me from who—but it must be some BCL, or he wouldn't have gotten through." "BCL" stood for Big Catholic Layman, Hurley knew. "The person must have recognized you and decided it was worth bringing to the cardinal's attention. This is not how His Eminence likes to start his day."

  "It's true I was with Lieutenant Morelli," Hurley admitted. "But it wasn't a date or anything. And we certainly weren't 'fondling and kissing.'" He realized that explaining exactly why he was at Fenway Park with Morelli wasn't going to cut it with Doyle, so he didn't bother trying to defend himself further.

  "Joe," Doyle said, "you have used up all your karma with me. Monroe thinks I'm an idiot for bringing a loose cannon like you onto my staff. I used up a large chunk of my own karma keeping him from firing you. You're a talented guy, but when I hired you I thought I was getting someone who was a lot more mature than you've turned out to be. I don't need these headaches. So let's get serious. One more slip and you're out. You will do only your assigned tasks, and no others. In particular, you will have nothing more to do with any aspect of the pope's visit. You should know that His Eminence called up your friend's boss and got her taken off the pope's visit as well. It's over, Joe. We're prepared to help you if you want help, but you have to make that decision. We can't force you to honor your vows. But we can tell you what the consequences are if you don't do what's expected of you. Am I making myself clear?"

  Hurley nodded wearily. "Clear enough."

  "Do you intend to resign, Joe? Do you need to take time off to think it over?"

  Hurley considered this for a moment. "No, I guess not," he said. "I'll stick it out. And I'll try to do better."

  Doyle stood up. "That's the right thing to say. I just hope you mean it. Come by anytime and talk if you need to get something off your chest. But above all we've got to be completely honest with each other. Okay?"

  "Okay. Thanks, Larry."

  Doyle strode out of the room. Hurley continued to sit behind his desk, brooding. Doyle was right. He had said the right things, but did he mean them? He didn't feel like a loose cannon, but maybe he was. Damn it, what he wanted to do right now was call up Kathleen and talk things over, feel sorry for each other, rage against the stupidity of their bosses. But that was precisely what he couldn't do.

  He noticed the message light on his phone. Maybe she had called already. If he couldn't call her back, at least he could listen to her voice, find out how she was taking it. He played back the message. It wasn't from Kathleen.

  "Hello, Father Hurley, this is Sandra McKee. It's been a while, and I thought I'd check in to see if you'd made any progress—you know, in getting an audience with the pope for my Erin. I can't tell you how important this is to us and, well, time is running out. I know you're busy, but if you could give me a call, I would be very grateful."

  Hurley hung up the phone and slumped down in his chair. He'd forgotten about Sandra McKee while dealing with his own problems. Not that he could think of any way to help her. He had as much chance of convincing Doyle or Monroe to grant her request as he had of getting one of them to officiate at a gay wedding.

  But he had to do something. So for a while he tried to forget about everything else and focused on little Erin McKee.

  Chapter 28

  The call from Father Hurley came late in the afternoon, when the long day was starting to weigh on Sandra, and all she could look forward to was Mike coming home from work and lifting some of the burden from her. From the moment Hurley said hello she knew it was no good, the archdiocese wasn't going to budge. He was sympathetic, and she didn't think he was faking his sympathy, but he gave her no reason to hope.

  She tried very hard to hold it together as she talked to him. She needed to focus on finding a solution, not on wallowing in despair. "What if I went over your head—directly to Cardinal Monroe?" she asked. "I know you did your best, Father, but maybe I could be a better advocate. If he met Erin, I'm sure he'd change his mind."

  "I can't tell you not to try," Hurley said, "but frankly, you have no chance of seeing him, and even less of convincing him, with or without Erin. Cardinal Monroe is—well, not someone who would be interested by Erin, much less inspired by her. At best he'd see her as a nuisance, at worst she represents a threat to his authority. He wants her—and you—to go away. I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. McKee, but that's the reality of it."

  "Then I'll have to go public," she said. "The Globe would love to run an article slamming the archdiocese on this—they've had a lot of practice. I'll have people write letters to the editor, call in to the talk shows. I'll have them picket the cardinal's residence. Erin has made a lot of friends, Father, and they'll take this as a personal affront. The Church doesn't belong to the bureaucrats; it belongs to the believers—when are they going to understand that?"

  "That might work, but I doubt it," Hurley said. "We all know that the Church can do a good job of resisting public pressure if it wants to. The cardinal doesn't answer to the people or the media; he answers only to the pope."

  "Well, maybe I can get the pope's attention." Sandra could feel her self-control starting to slip away. "I've put so much into this," she said. "I can't give up now. We've all tried too hard. I owe it to Erin." She closed her eyes and felt the tears leaking out.

  "Look," Hurley said, "I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm going to try something. Just give me a couple of days. If I can't get anything accomplished by then, sure, unleash a publicity campaign. Do whatever you think you have to. But not just yet."

  She considered. "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't want to say, in case I chicken out. But I'll let you know what happens. It's worth a shot, Mrs. McKee. Trust me."

  Was it? She felt as if she needed to trust somebody. And besides, she knew he was right about a publicity campaign. Anything more than she had already done was likely to be counter-productive. She doubted that someone like Cardinal Monroe responded well to bullying. "All right," she said finally. "I'm very grateful for anything you can do, Father. You know what this means to us."

  "Call me Joe," he said. "I'll be in touch."

  Sandra looked at Erin after she hung up. "Maybe, Princess," she said. "Maybe. Now I think we need to pray."

  Mike took the news quietly when he got home. Lately he was taking all news quietly. He had never been in favor of what she was doing, she knew, but he wouldn't say anything about it. Perhaps he was secretly pleased that the archdiocese had turned them down. She didn't want to ask; she didn't want to argue. As long as he didn't oppose her, that would have to be good enough for now.

  "Do you think this priest is telling the truth?" Mike asked. "Or is he just trying to let you down easy?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "But I want to think he's on our side."

  "Well," he said, "maybe it's worth waiting, then."

  "I guess it is."

  He went to turn on the TV then, and Sandra could feel the silence between them descend once again. She picked Erin up, hugged her, and silently began her prayers.

  * * *

  The message finally came from Kathleen. She was in tears. "Ryan reamed me out and then reassigned me
," she said on the tape. "I'm so embarrassed. I'm so—angry. I don't know what I am. Call me back, Joe, okay? Please? Please?"

  Hurley didn't call her back. But he was still thinking of her when he finally called Sandra McKee. And maybe that was why he made that rash promise to her—that, and the memory of the little girl's face, looking at him with—with something that was beyond little-girl prettiness. He needed to help. He needed to do some good for someone. Kathleen would tell him—screw the rules, screw the job, just do what you know is right. And he knew this was right.

  He went home and pondered his situation, and finally called Rick Kelliher. It was the middle of the night in Italy, and it took Rick a while to answer. "Rick, it's Joe Hurley again."

  "Geez, Joe," Rick mumbled sleepily, "you drunk or something? What's going on?"

  "I need a favor, Rick. Can you wake up and pay attention?"

  "I'm awake, I think. Don't want to be awake, but it doesn't look like I have a choice."

  "All right, now listen," Hurley said. "I know a little girl who is brain-damaged but performs miracles. Really. Plus, she seems to have some special psychic connection with the pope—don't ask me to explain. Her mother wants her to meet Pope John when he comes to Boston. Cardinal Monroe is a pill and won't even consider it. But I thought, your friend, the Pope's secretary—what's his name?"

  "Fieri. And I'll bet he's asleep. Wish I was."

  "I want you to give Fieri information about this girl, convince him to show it to the pope. I want him to talk the pope into seeing the girl during his visit."

  "Oh, okay, I thought you wanted something big. Why don't I have him talk the pope into naming you a bishop while he's at it? Come on, Joe. These visits are planned down to the microsecond. I don't care if she's the second coming of Mother Teresa, they're not going to fit her in, and Fieri's not going to want to deal with this."

  "Miracles, Rick," Hurley said. "Honest-to-God miracles. The family has all sorts of documentation. In the morning I'll fax you copies of the doctors' reports and everything, and you'll hand them over to Fieri with an explanation. That's all you have to do."

  "Do you really believe in miracles?" Kelliher asked.

  "We perform one every day when we say Mass, don't we?"

  "Oh, well, if you're going to get all spiritual on me, forget it. Fax me the stuff and I'll see what I can do. It all sounds very, I don't know, primitive, though. And Fieri is not the kind of guy who gets moony about little peasant girls seeing visions of the Virgin."

  "Do your best. But do it fast. And trust me—the girl is for real."

  "All right, if you say so. Speaking of girls—how's your honey?"

  "Well, things are a bit rocky on all fronts. I dumped her, and she was mad at me, and she went to—But that reminds me—does the Vatican have secret agents?"

  "Jesus God, Joe, you've gone totally off your rocker. Secret agents? You mean, like the Spanish Inquisition or something? They stopped that a while ago. I think."

  "No, like the CIA or something. Guys who scope out threats to the pope's safety and make sure the threats are taken care of."

  "How should I know? If they're secret, by definition they wouldn't tell me, right?"

  "Could you please find out?"

  "Good Lord. I'm going to sleep now, and in the morning this will all have been a bad dream. Good night, Joe."

  "Good night, Rick."

  Hurley hung up. There, he thought. He felt as if he'd accomplished something. A loose cannon. Oh, well.

  He thought about Larry Doyle. What was wrong with him, anyway? Monroe, Hurley could understand; he was what he was. But he'd expected more from Larry. He'd always been ultra-orthodox, but in the past this had been softened by a sense of humor, as well as a sense of, well, mercy. Today there had been an edge to his criticism, a hardness to his personality, that went beyond what Hurley thought the situation required. Maybe it was the pressure he was under as the pope's visit approached.

  Or maybe Hurley had never known the real Larry Doyle.

  The phone rang. Hurley closed his eyes and picked it up. It was, as he expected, Kathleen. "Hi," he said.

  "Hi."

  "You okay?"

  "Just barely."

  "Someone saw your little peck on the cheek last night and snitched to Monroe," he explained. "Monroe called your boss, I guess, then called me on the carpet. So I'm on double-secret probation, too."

  "You want to know something funny?" she said. "Remember the fingerprinting I had done on Bandini's apartment in Jamaica Plain? They got a match. Prouse was right: Bandini really is Robert Coulter. So now the FBI is crawling all over the place."

  "Well, that should make you a hero, right?"

  "You might think so. But so far I'm just a witness, telling them everything I know. And I'm still off the case. Captain Ryan is a lot like Monroe, I'm afraid. Finding one of America's most wanted criminals doesn't compensate for not following procedures."

  "If Bandini is Coulter," Hurley said, trying to think it through, "then I guess there still isn't a motive for killing the pope. Maybe we did have it wrong."

  "Maybe," Kathleen replied. "Anyway, the FBI will probably want to talk to you about McAllister."

  "I'm sure that'll thrill Monroe, too. The last thing he'll want is a manhunt for a Catholic murderer taking all the headlines just as the pope is getting ready to arrive. Have you told Prouse about this, by the way?"

  "I gave the FBI his number. He's not answering, apparently."

  "What do you think he's up to? I called the Vatican, by the way, and got nowhere."

  "Joe, you know what? I don't think I care at this point. I just want to take a warm bath and go to bed."

  Hurley shivered as he tried not to think of her in the bath. "Sounds good to me," he said. "I guess someone else is in charge now. Sorry I got you into this, Kathleen."

  "Don't be silly, Joe. We've accomplished something here, no matter what other people think."

  "Yeah, I guess you're right. Well, good night, Kathleen."

  "Good night, Joe."

  Hurley hung up, feeling a little better about his life, then decided to call Edzo's sister and bring her up to date. Ann, too, was impressed. "This'll break it all open, Joe, I just know it. Maybe Edzo figured out that Bandini was Coulter and—and—I don't know."

  "Well, I don't know, either, Ann. But I think my days as a private eye are over."

  "But now you have another career to fall back on if you ever leave the priesthood," she pointed out.

  He laughed. "If that's what I have to fall back on," he said, "I'm staying where I am."

  * * *

  Cardinal Monroe walked over to Larry Doyle's office that night. Doyle was still there, deeply engrossed in something on his computer screen, so Monroe tapped on the open door. Doyle looked up in surprise. "Your Eminence," he said, and he struggled to rise from his chair.

  Monroe entered the room, motioning for Doyle to be seated. Doyle was never anything but properly deferential in his presence, but he always somehow managed to make Monroe feel nervous, defensive, inferior. He relied too much on Doyle, he knew. But what was the alternative? Monroe also knew he could not hope to succeed on his own. Doyle understood what needed to be done, and how to get people to do it. Without Doyle, Monroe was nothing more than a competent administrator, and that was not enough in this world.

  "I think we need to talk some more," he said.

  Doyle nodded, folding his hands and preparing to listen.

  "I'm still worried about that priest," Monroe went on.

  "Hurley? Yes, he's been annoying, to say the least."

  "Tell me again what he said. About corruption."

  "He didn't really say anything. He just asked my opinion—whether corruption in the Vatican could be the source of a murder plot against the pope."

  "And he didn't mention where he got the idea?"

  Doyle shook his head.

  "And you didn't think to ask?"

  "I didn't think that probing for his sou
rce—if he had any—was a wise idea."

  Monroe shrugged, not quite willing to grant the point, but afraid to get into a disagreement with Doyle. "I've heard from Captain Ryan of the Boston Police," he said. "It seems that they've discovered that this man the policewoman was looking for—I forget his name, but it was really an alias—well, he's actually Robert Coulter, the fellow who murdered those abortion doctors."

  That seemed to break through Doyle's deferential facade. "Did they capture him?" he asked sharply.

  "No, not yet. I don't see what he would have to do with an attempt on the pope's life, do you?"

  "Doesn't make any sense," Doyle agreed. "I'm glad they finally got a lead on him, though."

  Monroe wasn't interested in Robert Coulter. "Do you think," he said, "that there is something going on in the Vatican?"

  Was the question too vague? No, if anything it was entirely too explicit. Doyle knew what he was talking about. "I don't know of anything we should be worried about," Doyle replied, evidently choosing his words carefully.

  "You've kept up your contacts more than I have," Monroe pointed out.

  "Your Eminence is extremely busy, of course," Doyle responded.

  "But if there is something going on," Monroe went on, "it's important for me to know."

  "Of course. Would you like me to see if I can find out?"

  Doyle seemed to be suggesting that this wasn't a good idea. Why? Monroe decided to back down. "No, no, I suppose—I suppose Hurley is just fantasizing. He seems rather unstable to me."

  "I do appear to have made a mistake there," Doyle said. "He did a great job at Saint Jerome's, and everyone loved him in the seminary, but I don't think he's cut out for a desk job. And obviously he has a problem with his celibacy."

  "Well, keep an eye on him, then. If he helps find Coulter, I suppose that's in his favor."