by John Brady
“I am that, Your Eminence.”
“Tell me then, Inspector: why do you think he, Billy Fine, asked you to do the job? Do you have some expertise? Before you give me your answer, I should save you the trouble of asking me how I know this-we meet occasionally in the course of our jobs, Billy and I. Yes,” Burke raised both hands off the desk and used them as wands to indicate around the room, “jobs. This is a job as well as a vocation. I am a bureaucrat as well as a shepherd. This is my office. I’ve met the Fines and many others in the Jewish community in Ireland over the years. My heart goes out to Billy and Rosalie: they are the best that Ireland could hope for in respect of their learning and culture and religion. Billy Fine has the soul of a poet, a writer buried behind those robes. Rosalie Fine is one of the most cultured women I have met in my life. I went to see Billy on Monday night late after I heard the news, and passed on our prayers to them. He asked me then if I knew you. I didn’t.”
Minogue realised that his nervousness was going now. Something was taking its place, a tension, a feeling of some stretching.
“Your question, Your Eminence… I’m not sure. It may be a sentimental thing when all is said and done, to be honest with you. I had met Justice Fine in the Jewish Museum here just after it opened. I believe he knew something of my career background in the Murder Squad.”
“Modest of you, Inspector. Billy Fine seems to have a lot of faith in you. Tell me, are the policemen who do your line of work very different men from those we see helping the schoolchildren across the street?”
Minogue didn’t know whether the talk was toying. “Yes, Your Eminence, I believe that we are.”
“The job requires a certain flair,” Tynan said quietly.
“Flair? Are you very tough, you Gardai here on this work?” asked Burke.
“I don’t think so, Your Eminence. We’re the same as the next man in the street. I can say that my colleagues have a very strong sense of fairness. We try and deal with what people do to other people as best we can. I don’t understand certain things about people even after I see them through a trial.”
“Not an elite that’s used to getting what it wants quickly?”
“I feel very un-elite at the best of times,” replied Minogue. “I go home most evenings to my wife. We have two grown children. We read and watch a little bit of telly and do a bit of gardening if the rain holds off and the slugs don’t attack the cabbage. Sometimes we go on a holiday.”
“Billy Fine said he wanted you. He is no fool.”
“I’m flattered, Your Eminence. I’ll help him out as well as I can, but I work for the State also.”
Burke lolled back in his chair. Minogue heard him breathe out slowly as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his thumbs.
“Anyway, what are we here for? Brian Kelly and Opus Dei. Is that the menu you’d like, John?”
Tynan nodded. “We’d be obliged for your help.”
“They told you you’d have to apply to Rome to release the membership rolls, I suppose? You didn’t want a list of all the membership in Ireland, did you? You had a sideline interest.”
Minogue cleared his throat. Yes, that’s what the smell was: cough drops. “Brian Kelly’s friends and associates in the organization,” he said. “We’d be wanting to interview them. Perhaps the deceased was anxious, under some pressure.”
“You mean that it’s not certain that Brian Kelly didn’t take his own life?”
“Not entirely at all, Your Eminence. His is in a category of ‘suspected foul play’. It’s likely that we’ll want to investigate the death as soon as we have gleaned all the information we can from a forensic investigation of the remains. I expect that Brian’s death will be a murder investigation by midday tomorrow.”
“It’s a question of what the books call Forensic Pathology, Frank,” said Tynan mildly. “The body was very badly burned.”
Burke rubbed his eyes again. “But the gist of what you were wanting this morning was something else, wasn’t it, though?” he said laboriously, as though to a duller student.
Minogue’s chest was tight with alertness. Something was forming in his mind, quicker now, but he could not make out the contours.
“If I might know which members of Opus Dei are in the Gardai or the Army,” he said.
“And why?”
“There are clues to suggest that Paul Fine’s murder may have involved a person who is both an expert in firearms and had access to same. The murderer went to a lot of trouble to remove evidence from the murder site. It’s also apparent that the phone call to the newspaper blaming it on Palestinians may have been a hoax.”
Burke glared at Minogue with reddened, rheumy eyes. “Do you know anything about Opus Dei, Inspector? You, John,” he turned to Tynan, “you know a bit.”
“Little enough, Your Eminence. I believe that they are not directly accountable to their local dioceses, the local church hierarchy, I mean. They don’t advertise themselves. Naturally one has to be very devout to join-”
“And make no mistake about that,” Burke interrupted. His vehemence startled Minogue. “It’s not that they’re not accountable. They work within their own structure, parallel to our own diocesan work. We’re all pulling in the same direction, you know. The Church is involved as a social agency in a huge number of projects, Inspector. God comes to us in Tallaght, in Clondalkin where boys and girls sniff glue from bags in ditches; God is in the employment office where there are men who haven’t found work in ten years; God is meals-on-wheels to old people that our consumer society has no more time for. Commitment. Values. Altruism. Service. We’re all after the same goals: to serve God by serving our fellow-men and women in this world.”
Burke pointed a finger at the ceiling. “We’re after the will to carry things through, to resist the blandishments of the style of living we seem to have such appetites for now. You won’t shock me to tell me we’re not the Island of Saints and Scholars, but let me tell you this. The will to persevere amidst Ireland’s social upheavals is not the exclusive preserve of the well-intentioned. There is a will to do evil too. Our will is allied to and founded upon values we all hold dear, in the Church, in Irish history as a whole and it’s allied to the commitment that Irish people have shown throughout our history.”
Saints and scholars, like Kilmartin’s dreams. Was everybody in this damn country always ready to deliver a speech at the drop of a hat, Minogue wondered. Perhaps there was some threat in Minogue to which people responded by speechifying. Out of the corner of his eye he knew that Tynan was sitting still, but that it was not a stillness of relaxation. Had Tynan known it would turn out like this?
“Our faith; our culture; our people; our children’s future; altruism: where will you find any of that these days, I sometimes ask myself in my most dispirited moments,” Burke continued in a low voice. “Short supply, hmm, John?” He darted the remark to Tynan.
Tynan nodded.
“So it troubles me to hear criticism of Opus Dei when I know that its membership shows these qualities. Though they may have any and all the failings which flesh is heir to, and I’ll certainly second that,” said Burke.
Minogue wanted to protest; to say he was not being snide about Opus Dei, to say that even policemen could understand context and motives. He saw it would be useless. Any explanation would have the cast of an excuse now. Qui ’s‘excuse,’s’accuse. What had probably gotten Burke’s goat was the suggestion that there was some connection between Opus Dei and Paul Fine’s body gently drifting in off the Irish Sea. But why did Burke appear to be resigned now, after starting out so tough?
“You know, I read the paper this morning and I saw something I didn’t believe. No, it wasn’t the fact that thousands of people, poor people the most of them, are without a way to travel by public transport and carry on their lives in a reasonable manner. No, it was something even more distressing. I had Father Sheehy phone up the Irish Times and confirm the sources and I’m afraid the figures seem to be true. There are ov
er 150,000 Irish people, all young men and women, working illegally in the United States.”
Daithi. Minogue watched the Archbishop’s eyes get bigger. Daithi wanting to be away from this. At least he’s resisting in the only way he knows will work. Fled the place.
“ One hundred and fifty thousand people! Nearly fifty thousand people a year are leaving our shores. We’re on the brink of a new millennium: there’s no famine any more to excuse us. Except there is a different kind of a famine or a hunger abroad on the land. A blight of a different order, a decay.”
Burke’s flowing allusions seemed to tire him completely now. His chin sank on to his chest and he stared balefully at the desktop.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?” he said suddenly to Minogue.
“I think I do, Your Eminence. I worry about our two at home,” Minogue conceded.
“Scattered,” Burke said as though spitting the word out. “Our young people are being scattered all over the world. It’s worse than the English ever did to us. It’s as bad as when we were persecuted for our faith. The ones that stay are often cynical and they turn inside themselves, they hold on to their jobs and they try to forget about things. Being cynical is a way of containing fear, isn’t it? Remember the rows we used to have in the lectures, John? I enjoyed them so much. I always remember you above the others, you were so full of fight.”
Burke’s features softened at the memory.
“Your Deputy Commissioner Tynan here had a very good understanding of the foundations of religious belief, Inspector. It takes a lot of nerve not to be a cynic. The youth that are leaving, even if they come back from America and the Continent, they’ve seen that things are not the same. Their faith is tested abroad and doubly so when they return. Few can come through the ordeals of unemployment and emigration unscathed.”
Should Minogue tell him that he’d rather see Daithi restless, and even cynical, than have him stay and become a credulous sycophant in Opus Dei? The authentic over the sincere any day, Burke: I’d pay the price.
“I suppose policemen’d know more about the drugs and the alcoholism,” said Burke. “Contrary to what the media might like to say, the Church does not turn a blind eye to child abuse or wife abuse either. They’re symptoms of the same disorder and what do we have now but further signs of crisis even in rural Ireland, when a married woman with a family of young children kills her husband rather than find another solution? Making orphans of her children, instead of using the law of the land to get help? Of course there’ll always be agitators who can go home to clean, warm homes far from County Tipperary and cheer for murder after breakfast.”
That was enough to tip Minogue’s gargoyle over the brink.
“Manslaughter, Your Eminence.”
“Pardon, Inspector?”
“Mrs. Ryan is charged with manslaughter.”
“She confessed to murdering her husband. Could there be clearer proof of murder?”
Tynan had not moved, Minogue realized.
“Not wishing to contradict you, but the charge against the woman is manslaughter, Your Eminence. That means that the Director of Public Prosecutions has looked at the evidence provided by the Gardai and has preferred that charge against her.”
“Saying that he knows better than the woman herself, is it?”
“Under duress,” said Tynan softly. “She was not her normal self, Frank. She had been abused and she felt her children were in danger. The Constitution obliges the State to look to her interests too, that’s the way that the legal opinions see it, I believe.”
Burke put on a tight, knowing smile. “Ever the modernist, John,” he said.
“I’m holding off on something here,” Burke added, after a pause. “It seems to be late in the day to be trying to explain things, I see. You’re a policeman, isn’t that the way, John?”
Minogue recognized the irony as a light charge of bitterness in Burke’s tone.
Tynan nodded. Burke turned to Minogue. “Inspector, I’ll be running the risk of offending you now when I ask you to leave myself and my old friend here alone for a few moments.”
It was not a question, nor was it an apology. Minogue stood and walked to the door. Behind him he heard a wooden drawer slide open. Closing the door, too confused to be angry at his dismissal, Minogue caught a glimpse of Burke’s hand rising from the drawer of his desk. The hand was holding an envelope.
Sheehy was waiting in the hall, a grave Sheehy.
“By all means sit down in the Visitors’ Room, er,” he said in an apologetic tone.
Minogue began to feel resentful now. He did not sit down but started pacing the room, not caring that Sheehy was looking at him through the doorway.
Minutes passed. Minogue stopped and, not wishing to look at the portraits of Burke’s predecessors, stared out of the window at the street-lights. His mind worked around the resentment, the burn in his chest. It struck him that he did not know why he had to be here if all he was to do was to attend on a lecture made up of Burke’s thoughts aloud and then be told to wait outside. But Burke had asked for him. Just to admonish him for riding rough on Heher and Drumm earlier in the day? Heher’s modesty might have prevented him from explaining to Minogue how Opus Dei was tackling the ills of the world and didn’t deserve his suspicions but it hadn’t bothered the same Heher to phone the Archbishop’s Residence and have Minogue receive some leaden advice. Calling in the elephants to trample mice like Minogue? Heher smiling, well-spoken, healthy-looking, self-effacing-‘Call me Joe’-and then phoning Burke to get the system, the self-same system he seemed to be bashfully abjuring as regards titles like ‘Father’, up to heat.
Sheehy was tapping timidly on the open door to the Visitors’ Room. Sheehy too, clean, pleasant manner, with a look of concern and reeling on his face-what made these damned priests look so well-washed, so bloody confident? Didn’t they have anything like sons and daughters to worry about?
“His Eminence would like to say good-bye. I believe the meeting is over,” said Sheehy.
Minogue followed him to Burke’s office. Burke was standing behind the desk, and Tynan was putting something in the pocket of his jacket. He stood up too. His face had changed, Minogue saw: his cheeks were flushed and his eyes seemed to be more noticeable, bigger perhaps.
“Good-night to you, Inspector. I wish you success in your work.”
“Thanks,” Minogue managed.
“After you leave here I think you may see things a little clearer, Inspector. I think Billy Fine’s choice has a lot more to it than a chance meeting in a Museum. Just remember this, if you will: even Billy Fine would agree that it is the people of small grasp, the ones who have a poverty of imagination, who snap at the heels of things too great and profound for them to understand. These people… these self-proclaimed messiahs in the media, these cynics, ungenerous minds… these do far more damage than their abilities and understanding would ever warrant by themselves. Do you know what I’m saying yet, or are we too far ahead of you here?”
“I don’t follow, Your Eminence,” said Minogue evenly.
Burke scrutinized him for a moment. “You don’t follow. I think that somehow I knew that before we met, Inspector.”
Burke turned to Tynan and thrust out his hand. “ Tentenda via, John.”
Tynan shook hands. Burke stared into Minogue’s face when he shook hands with him. As the two policemen were leaving, Burke called out. “And my regards to Roberta, John.”
Minogue thought that Tynan stiffened slightly. “Thank you,” he said.
“I want a drink,” said Tynan.
Minogue tried to hide his surprise. He started the engine, set the choke in slightly and thought what pubs he knew were in the area.
“But not before we stop at the nearest phone,” said Tynan.
Tynan sat woodenly in the passenger seat, not looking out of the side windows as Minogue drove, but apparently observing the movement of the needles in the green of the dashboard light. Minogue stopped at a pub, Slatt
ery’s. Tynan took the envelope out of his pocket and tapped it distractedly against his knee. Minogue checked his pocket for change.
“Not often you get a night like this,” Tynan murmured. “Did you enjoy the lecture?”
“Matter of fact, I didn’t,” Minogue replied, feeling the sourness rise again in his chest. “I felt I was back in school being told to stand outside the door for being naughty.”
Tynan opened the door, and the interior light shone on one side of his head. “I had a notion he’d have something to tell us about our materialist society and the moral chaos of our times. But it’s no excuse, and he knew that,” Tynan said absent-mindedly.
“You had the advantage of having him as a teacher, I understand,” said Minogue grimly.
“I certainly did. Remember me yapping away on the way here, about virtus and obedientia? Frank Burke did me the great and inadvertent favour of telling me in time that I could expect a lot less philosophical treatment of the notions were I to take Holy Orders, as I was about to. We had good arguments, he and I. He’s not a conservative but he has to answer to conservative men. Do you know what I mean?” Tynan asked.
Minogue caught the hint.
“Frank took it worse than I did when I told him I couldn’t go through with it. Didn’t talk to me for several years after I left the seminary. When he found out that Roberta and I were going to be married I thought he had mellowed a bit, but no. He asked if the usual thing would ensue, that the children would be brought up Catholic, being as Roberta was a heathen. I told him it wouldn’t ensue. Non serviam, Frank. He said that no priest in his diocese would marry us, so. I told him I had a friend in Kilkenny who had agreed to marry us, but thank you very much anyway. Needn’t have been the row as it turns out, but we weren’t to know it then… one of those things which can’t be changed. No children, you see. There were no hard feelings, I told him when I met him later. Maybe he put a curse on me for leaving the tribe, do you think?”
Tynan’s tone was a gentler irony now.
“I don’t know,” said Minogue quietly. “What the Jesuits lost, we pagans have gained. It wasn’t all for nothing, I’d say.”