Cecilian Vespers

by Anne Emery

  We thanked him, and he went on his way. We had one more person to see. This was a woman suggested to Moody Walker by the policeman in Hamburg. I had called her, and we had arranged to link up at the Albatros where she, too, had decided to stay the night.

  Frau Professorin Doktor Greta Schliemann met us at the door of her room leaning heavily on a cane. She appeared to be in her late seventies. The woman was dressed in what looked like old army pants topped by a blouse in a mod geometric pattern of tan and pink, which might have come from a shop in Carnaby Street in the 1960s. She bade us enter and make ourselves at home on the bed, while she sat in an armchair by the open window. Her room, like ours, had bright yellow walls and a blue carpet with a pattern of tiny yellow flowers. If Normie could see it, she would demand yet another renovation of her bedroom.

  “You are interested to hear about Max Bleier and Father Johann Schellenberg. We were all interned in the same camp outside Berlin in the 1940s.” Greta Schliemann picked up her cane and said: “This is not the result of old age but of Nazi brutality. I have been using this cane since I was released from the camp in 1945 at the age of twenty-two.” That put her under seventy, considerably younger than she looked. “What would you like to know?”

  Brennan said: “Reinhold Schellenberg has been murdered, as you know. We’d like to find out whether there was any connection between Father Johann Schellenberg, who was his uncle, and Max Bleier, in the camp.”

  “I was intrigued to hear that Max’s son, Kurt, was in Canada at the time of the murder. What was he doing there?”

  “I have set up a schola cantorum, a college of sorts for the study of traditional Catholic music.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Hardly the setting in which I would expect to see Max Bleier. But of course I do not know the son.”

  “It’s hardly the setting in which we would have expected to see Kurt. He does have a reason to be there, an ostensible reason at least. His wife is a Polish Catholic and a musician.”

  “Well, well. One never knows. I can tell you only about the father and the uncle. Bleier was imprisoned, as was I, because he was a Communist, Schellenberg because he was a Catholic priest. They became acquainted with one another in the camp.” Greta reached down to her left, rummaged in a large quilted bag, and brought forth a small tattered leather book. She flipped to the page she wanted and held it open on her lap. “My diary for my time in the camp. Comrade Bleier and Father Schellenberg passed time playing chess together. Many of the inmates did, of course, but those two played often, and I don’t know whether they ever concluded a game.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “They were distracted by other matters that interested them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Debate, argument.”

  “They were antagonistic to one another?”

  “They were German! They had a dispute going every time they came together at the chessboard. Arguments over politics, religion, philosophy. Johann Schellenberg was a big man, broad-faced, with thick fair hair. He was turning greyer by the day, of course, in there. Max had short brown hair; he was small and wiry. He was in constant pain from a beating he had received from the guards. But he tried to hide it, tried not to let on that they had hurt him. I can still see the two of them sitting out in the yard, in the shadow of the watchtower, their chess pieces forgotten between them. I was a student of philosophy before I was imprisoned; I was fascinated by their conversations and tried to remember them, so I could think them over. There were two doctors who were in the camp; I used to follow their talks as well. Anyway, Max and Johann … of course I had to reconstruct it later in the barracks, so I may not have it word for word.” She consulted her diary.

  “Here is Bleier, followed by Schellenberg:

  Your church lulls the people into accepting their oppression here on earth, by promising a fantasy life in the hereafter.

  That is a cliché. You can do better than that, Herr Bleier.

  It is not a cliché, Comrade Schellenberg; it is the sine qua non of your religion.

  Hardly. Jesus exhorts us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned. This life is an important part of God’s plan; otherwise, we would not be here.

  Jesus also said the poor will always be with us. Marx assures us they will not. They will throw off their chains and take their rightful place as owners of the means —

  We have had a quarter of a century of the revolution in Soviet Russia —

  History takes time. No thinking man could expect otherwise, Comrade Schellenberg.

  “He was right, you know,” Greta said, giving us a direct look with her watery light grey eyes. “We need only look at our own era. Bad times for the left, a period of adjustment, of going backwards. But socialism will rise again. It is inevitable. Except in America, where political consciousness is not highly developed. How we used to laugh during the time of the ‘red scare’ in the United States! How we wished they really had something to fear! But no, what they have there is a huge underclass pacified by television. Goggling at the garish display of wealth and frivolous gadgets, which they believe they will some day acquire. They will not. They are fools.”

  “So Father Schellenberg and Max Bleier argued about religion, Communism …” I prompted.

  “Yes, and then they would get on to Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Freud. It spiralled up to a level where the rest of us could not follow. It always reached the point where one of them would throw up his hands in exasperation and leave the board. Someone else would quickly fill in the seat, hoping for a match. But it wasn’t the same. When one of them was absent, the other was out of sorts.

  “Then came the escape attempt. A half dozen of the prisoners formulated a plan to dig a short tunnel under the farthest aspect of the perimeter wall. There was a crude but effective scheme to remove small bits of earth and weeds on quick passes by the corner of the wall, and take the dirt away in the prisoners’ pockets. They had a clump or a berm or something they put back over it to hide the hole. One of them had to volunteer to forgo the chance to escape, to stay behind and cover up the tunnel, so it could be used again for a later group. Five of them made it out; the sixth stayed behind as planned, and covered up. The camp authorities were outraged. They proceeded to hunt down that sixth person. They did this by going into each of the barracks, taking one of the inmates at random, and beating him so that he would either confess or identify the conspirator. This happened twice. Then Johann Schellenberg stepped forward and confessed. He was beaten in front of the others, then taken away. Nobody knew where he was. But everybody knew he had nothing to do with the escape. That was the work of an older man, a Communist Party organizer from the north. There was great turmoil among the population after this.

  “Max Bleier went through the camp calling out: ‘Father Schellenberg! Where are you? Answer me!’ And to the guards: ‘Where have you taken Father Schellenberg? Are you torturing a priest? What kind of men are you?’ He was told to shut up or he would get the same treatment. One of the guards roughed him up. He sat out in the yard, at the chessboard, half-heartedly playing with other inmates. This went on for several days. Every time a guard passed, he would look up: ‘Where is Father Schellenberg? Let us see him.’ Then, one day, there came Schellenberg, limping out of a shuttered building at the back of the yard. Gaunt, bruised, but alive. The expression on Bleier’s face! Relief, joy, horror. All quickly masked. Bleier was not an emotional man. ‘Where have you been, Comrade? I’ve been waiting.’ Johann sat down, slowly, painfully, and they started up again.”

  Greta looked out the window, lost in her memories, and we were all silent for a few minutes. Then I asked: “What happened after that?”

  She shrugged. “I was moved to a different camp in January of ’45 and we were liberated in May. I don’t know what became of anyone at the first camp.”

  “So you don’t know whether Johann Schellenberg and Max Bleier kept in touch?”

  “
No. I never saw either of them again.”

  Chapter 10

  There’s a blaze of light in every word.

  It doesn’t matter which you heard:

  The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

  — Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”

  Brennan and I rose early the next morning and boarded our flight to Halifax. It was Monday, January 6. Both of us were clean but bleary-eyed and unshaven; we looked as if we’d been on our road trip for a lot longer than eleven days. Slow lines at the airport had done nothing to make us more chipper.

  An hour out of Frankfurt I brought up the murder case. “The chessboard at the schola, did that come from the choir school or the rectory, or from somewhere else?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t remember seeing it before?”

  “I don’t, but maybe I just never noticed.”

  “Be sure to ask Mike O’Flaherty. If you guys didn’t put it there, who did? If Bleier brought it with him, does that mean he knew Schellenberg was coming? Or, if Schellenberg brought it —”

  “We don’t know, Monty. We’ll see what we can find out. Now shut your gob and let me sleep.”

  But he couldn’t sleep, and neither could I. We passed the time eating bad food, watching a bad movie, and having one too many drinks for the long overseas flight. Predictably we were jet-lagged, half in the bag, and feeling like hell when we finally landed on terra firma.

  “I can’t face the rectory like this,” Brennan said when we fell into the back seat of a cab. “Michael will want to hear every detail of the trip, and I haven’t the strength.”

  “We’ll pick up something to eat and take it to my place. You can unwind there for the afternoon.”

  “Proper thing.”

  We got the taxi driver to stop at a grocery store and wait while I did some hurried shopping. It was chilly with the smell of snow in the air when we got to my place, so I lit a fire. I broiled a couple of steaks, baked some potatoes, and we had a mid-afternoon meal, which felt like a middle-of-the-night meal to us. Burke called Monsignor O’Flaherty to tell him we were back, poured himself a glass of Irish, drained it, then passed out in my armchair with the empty glass still in his hand. I called the kids and told them I’d see them tomorrow; I had a couple of things for them, and another item would be arriving later. I scribbled a note to myself about getting the Angelicum photo developed and transferred to a T-shirt for Normie.

  I was just drifting off in my bed when the phone rang. It was Father Sferrazza-Melchiorre, telling me he had a couple of friends visiting from out of town. They were looking for something to do, and he knew Brennan was with me. Sure, bring them over. I gave him directions, then hauled myself out of bed and got ready for just what I didn’t need: company.

  A few minutes later I answered the doorbell and found Enrico standing on the step, fully caped, with two men who would be recognized even in a satellite reconnaissance photo as Americans. They each beamed a set of blindingly white teeth at me, and held out their hands for a shake. One had blow-dried blond hair and looked like the proto-typical television preacher. The other was tanned and craggy and could have found steady work as an actor playing a cowboy or a farm-hand. They were dressed in Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suits. The cowboy introduced himself as Earl Slocum and the preacher as Eldon Pye.

  “Brother Eldon and I are just in from Lutes Mountain,” Slocum told me. “Up across the state line.” State laan.

  They had crossed quite a few state lines, in my estimation, if they were this far north; Slocum’s drawl placed him in the deep south of the U.S.A. But he explained that Lutes Mountain was just outside Moncton, New Brunswick, and then I was able to place it, up across the provincial line.

  “Big revival meetin’ up there, put on by the Atlantic Baptist College, and they invited Brother Eldon to do some preachin’ and some healin’. We’re flyin’ out tomorra mornin’, and we wanted to make time to see Father Hank on our way through.”

  Father Hank — Don Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre — spoke up. “Mr. Slocum and Mr. Pye are from Mississippi, Montague. Their church is close to mine. Close geographically. They knew I was coming to Canada, and I gave them my address. Their flight to the U.S. leaves from Halifax, so they are my guests today.”

  “Come in, come in. Are you ready to go back to school tomorrow, Enrico?”

  “Yes. In fact, I returned just after New Year’s. I spent Christmas with my parishioners in Mule Run, but I wanted to come back to Halifax. I like the snow.”

  “You’re lucky this year. We don’t always have snow for the holidays.”

  “Yes, it is beautiful. I hope to ski.”

  “Right. We have Martock and Wentworth. It’s not the Italian Alps though, Enrico.”

  “It is not Mule Run, Mississippi.”

  “I hear you. Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen.”

  “I see my friend Brennan is here. Allow me to introduce …” Enrico began, then faltered when he saw his friend passed out in the living room, with a whiskey glass ready to fall from his hand. “Brennan is obviously exhausted. We shall wait for him to join us.”

  The two Americans stared at the tousled, unshaven man in the chair, looked at their watches, and exchanged glances with one another.

  “Find a seat there, gentlemen. Can I get you anything? A beer? Guinness? Whiskey? Wine? Shine?”

  Glances again. “Uh, no, Montague, thank you very much.”

  “Milk? Mountain Dew?”

  “Mountain Dew would be real nice, thank you.”

  I got them ginger ale, and settled them in the living room. We all pretended there was nobody else in the room. Or that’s what I thought we were doing. “This man,” Slocum began, cocking a finger at Pye, “this man saved my life. I said toyou he was up there in New Brunswick preachin’ and healin’, and that’s exactly what I meant. He healed me, he can heal you, and —” Slocum looked with pity at Brennan and broke into song “— ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.’ He can heal that poor wretched man settin’ in that chair.”

  “Think so?” I asked.

  “I was lost, Montague. And Brother Eldon found me and brought me to the Lord. I have not touched a drop of liquor since I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. Brother Eldon?”

  “Thank you for that kind testimony, Earl.” Pye’s accent was not as down-home as Slocum’s, but it was from the same latitude. “Let me ask you something if I may, Montague.”

  “Sure.”

  “Has this man been bedevilled by alcohol for a long time?”

  “He is not drunk, but sleepeth,” I replied.

  "You’re a loyal friend, and Jesus admires that. And I’m sure you are a great comfort to your friend in his darkness. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

  The least of Jesus’s brethren took that moment to moan in his sleep and mutter something in a language I did not understand; his glass fell from his hand, rolled across the rug, and stopped at the feet of Eldon Pye, who picked up the theme again. “I won’t ask you, Montague, whether this man has been saved. He may have been baptized in the Lord as a child, I have no way of knowing. But to be born again —”

  “Oh, you misunderstand, Eldon. Brennan is in fact a —” Enrico began, but I gave him a wink, and he fell silent.

  “So what did you preach about up in New Brunswick, Eldon?” I asked. “Booze?”

  “Many of those who came to me for healing came for that reason, Montague. Liquor flows freely in our society —”

  “Hasn’t it always?”

  “—and I am only one man. I laid my hands on t
he heads of as many as I could, of those afflicted with whiskey and cigarettes and wild, wild women, to quote a song my daddy used to sing. My faith tells me those people who came to me have been healed. But, no, the subject of my sermons at that meeting was science.”

  “Oh, you’re a scientist?”

  "I am a scientist of Scripture, if you will. I am a creation scientist. And I am on a lecture tour, Montague, to warn Christian families of the evil of teaching Darwin’s theory — theory, not fact — of evolution to our children. A close reading of the Bible tells us the earth is six thousand years old. God is never wrong, the Bible is the word of God, the Bible is never wrong.”

  “The Bible —” a groggy Irish voice had joined us “— is about ‘the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven.’ And not about ‘the motion and orbit of the stars, their size and relative positions, and the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon.’” The Americans turned to gape at Burke, who spoke without moving or opening his eyes: “‘Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.’ Saint Augustine, Literal Commentary on Genesis. Written in 415, Anno Domini.”

  “Brennan, you’re awake!”

  "I’m in the middle of a feckin’ nightmare here, Monty.” He sat slumped over the arm of his chair, left hand massaging his temples. “Did I have a drink?”

  “We have company, Brennan.”

  “Did I hear some class of horseshit about Darwin being wrong, and the earth being six thousand years old? The big bang happened thirteen point seven billion years ago. Plenty of time for us all to get over it.” He opened his eyes, fastened them on our visitors, then shut them again. He fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette, then squinted as he tried to light it with shaking hands. “Ah!” he sighed, when the nicotine hit his lungs.