Cecilian Vespers

by Anne Emery

  I remembered Rhonda then and turned to look at her. She stood without moving, her eyes fixed on Gino Savo.

  “I rented a car here at the airport, purchased a map, and found my way to a hotel across the harbour in … Dartmouth? Is that what it’s called? Yes. I went into the Anchor bar and found the little anchor stick and added it to the heart-and-arrow cards. I made calls to the schola and learned something of the schedule. The feast day of Saint Cecilia would set the investigators’ minds in the wrong direction, giving me time to escape, so I planned my attack for that day.

  “I telephoned Schellenberg in his room at the rectory to lure him to the church. I did not identify myself, but I got the impression he may have recognized my voice. I told him I required his assistance for a personal crisis and I suggested we say Mass together at the old church where we would not be disturbed. I drove to Stella Maris Church in the rental car. I went into the church. I put on gloves and a raincoat even though it was a bright sunny day. Father Schellenberg greeted me with his arms open wide. I raised my axe and killed him. I put the anchor and the arrows on his body. Then I cleaned myself at a basin at the back of the church, cleaned the floor, cleaned the weapon, put it in the duffle bag, and drove away. I drove out to the ocean and sat with the car heater on until all my clothing was dry where I had washed away the blood. I returned to my hotel. Only then, with all the actions completed, could I contemplate the evil of my deed. I was sick in body and in soul. That night I flew back to Paris, discarded the murder weapon, then went on to Ars.”

  I asked Savo: “Why on earth did you come back here after you had escaped detection?”

  “The papal nuncio to this country, Arturo Del Vecchio, called me in Ars the day following the murder. I had not yet arrived there, of course, but I received his message when I got back. I returned his call with fear in my heart. He demanded that I come here, that I investigate and make sure nothing would rebound on the Holy See. I was near panic. I would have to revisit the scene of my crime, monitor the situation like a normal bureaucrat, protect the church and protect myself. And of course I was exhausted from travel and was barely able to think. But then Brother Robin was arrested. I was able to convince Del Vecchio there was no need for me to come. A few weeks later, he was not satisfied of the Englishman’s guilt, and demanded yet again that I travel here and handle the crisis for him.”

  “Brother Robin —”

  “I composed in my mind the message I intended to send from the Vatican, asserting his innocence. Now all I can hope for is the opportunity to thank him for his sacrifice. Whether he knew it was for me, I do not yet know. But I am undeserving of his kindness, the more so as I did nothing to relieve him of the burden he took on. I regret with all my heart what I have done.”

  It was a matter for the police after that. I called them from the departure lounge, and waited with the two priests in silence until they arrived in force. Father Savo put up no resistance when they arrested him for the murder of Reinhold Schellenberg, and took him into custody.

  Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre and I went through some hoops to get the two illegally parked cars back — my car and Brennan Burke’s. We stood for a few minutes outside the airport before driving into the city.

  “Enrico, you must have been stunned to hear of Father Savo’s guilt.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How come you didn’t want us to know you test-drove a car on the day of the murder?”

  “Having a car, it would not look good for me. Easy to get to the church, easy to get away. Though I must say it was not a car to pass unnoticed anywhere! A car for speed but not a car for secrecy and stealth.”

  “What was it?”

  “An Aston Martin V8 Vantage. It was called Britain’s first supercar when it was produced in 1977. Very powerful. It was a 1987 model they had.”

  “Where did you take it?”

  “Out on the highway.”

  “All you had to do was tell us where you really went in the car and we could have verified it.”

  “I could not get her to verify it.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman I was with.”

  “Why couldn’t you get her to stick up for you?”

  “I could not find her again.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was a prostitute, working on one of your streets. Agricola Street? I took her for a ride.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you do not. I did not have relations with her. I cruised by, she was on the corner, she admired the car. I asked her if she wanted to go for a very fast ride on the highway. She said yes. And we went. We particularly enjoyed the curving roads that run beside the ocean. The only laws I broke that day, Monty, were the speed limits!”

  “Weren’t you worried that you were a suspect in the murder?”

  Shoulders, hands, lips, and eyebrows rose in an elaborate shrug.

  “Sono innocente!”

  It was late but I headed straight for St. Bernadette’s. Nobody would be sleeping on a night like this. I had telephoned Moody Walker after the police came for Savo; Moody said he would report to Monsignor O’Flaherty in person. When I got to the rectory, Mike was in the kitchen with Mrs. Kelly and some of the schola people, including Fred Mills, William and Babs Logan, and Kurt Bleier. Teacups, whiskey glasses, and beer steins were raised and lowered as they discussed the murder and its denouement. I recounted the scene at the airport. Just as I wrapped up my story, we heard a car outside, then a knock at the back door. It was Robin Gadkin-Falkes, dropped off by his lawyer, Saul Green.

  One by one, our previous suspects took me aside and had their say. It was almost like confession.

  “Robin, you’re a free man.”

  “Montague. Yes, I am. Would you like to know where I really was the day of the murder? One of the drawbacks of confessing up front is that nobody asks for your alibi, and I would have adored giving mine.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “I was rehearsing with the local Gilbert and Sullivan society. We were going to put on a performance of The Mikado just around the time the schola course was to wind up. I so wished someone would ask, so I could say I was playing Pooh-Bah at the time!”

  “That I would love to have seen.” We were quiet for a few moments, then, more seriously, I asked him: “Robin, how far were you prepared to go with this?”

  “I would like to think I had the stuff that would have seen me through to the end. But you and I both know I didn’t have it in me. I confessed, I un-confessed, I was guilty, I was not guilty. I was, and am, a bloody fool.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “I knew Gino Savo had lost his daughter, and then his wife. I know what grief can do to a person. My heart went out to him.”

  “When did you learn of Savo’s loss? Did you know him before?”

  “This is ironic indeed: I met him during the Second Vatican Council! I doubt he would remember. I was there in the role of Vatican II correspondent for the English Catholic, covering the final session in 1965. I saw Gino Savo. He was a seminarian, and was attending a few of the sessions of the Council. He had no official role there; I assume he was listening in for reasons of curiosity. Anyway, I introduced myself to the group of seminarians and tried to interview them. I didn’t get much out of them, as I recall. I was not a very imposing presence as a foreign correspondent, young and unsure as I was. But at one point I overheard Gino telling another man about the death of his wife and daughter a few years earlier. And of the miraculous cure of his mother, which he attributed to the intercession of Saint Philomena. As you might imagine, given my own bereavement, I was all ears. I did not hear Gino mention Schellenberg, or even Pope John, by name, but it was clear that he was angry with the powers-that-were, and that this had something to do with the loss of his family.

  “My natural sympathy with the bereaved is multiplied sevenfold when it comes to Gino. I heard something about him years ago that made me love and admire the man. I once attended a retreat on the subject of redemption
. One of the speakers was a man, Franchi, who had in the past been caught stealing money from the Vatican, where he worked as a low-level functionary. He claimed he had stolen the money to support a crippled child. Turns out his son had been killed in a car wreck at the age of two. Franchi had been driving, and it was his negligence that caused the accident. Anyway, it was Gino Savo who found the man stealing; it was Gino to whom Franchi poured out the sob story about the disabled son; it was Gino who heard the real story later on. And forgave him. Kept him on staff. What Gino did for the least of his brethren, so the least of his brethren — I, Robin Gadkin-Falkes — tried to do in turn for Gino Savo.”

  “How did you know for sure that it was Savo who killed Schellenberg?”

  “Reinhold Schellenberg and I chatted a couple of times after we met here, fellow Benedictines and all that. I didn’t light into him about his actions during the Second Vatican Council — that was much easier to do on paper than in person! He was a very pleasant chap, actually. I happened to see him just after he received the phone call that led to the cancellation of his lecture and of course led him to his death. He was puzzled and he asked me if I knew who Gino Savo was. I said yes. He said he thought he recognized Savo’s voice on the telephone, even though the caller did not give his name. Father Schellenberg cautioned me not to say anything because Savo, or whoever, was in the depths of a personal crisis and obviously wanted the matter kept confidential. Schellenberg still had his lecture notes in his hand, for the talk he was supposed to give. I asked to read them, and he gave them to me. These were the notes I burned — incompletely! — when I decided to make myself look guilty.

  “As soon as I saw Schellenberg’s body at vespers I thought of the death of Saint Philomena. This was confirmed when I caught sight of the anchor stick and the valentine arrows. I had researched Philomena way back when I first heard of Gino’s plight; I had considered writing an article, but my editor wasn’t interested. I knew it was Gino.”

  “When did he slip you the Philomena chaplet with the note?”

  Robin looked at me with some amusement. “My dear Montague. It was I who wrote the note, and affixed it to the Philomena chaplet. I went out the day after the murder and found a chaplet among some other bargain items in a shop.”

  Hearing this, I remembered I had not shown Robin’s photo to the shop owner; there was no need to, I thought. Just one of the many things I had missed.

  Robin continued his story: “I helped myself to a couple of sheets of Father Sferrazza-Melchiorre’s writing paper and wrote the note saying let me grieve with you. It was meant for Gino. I was careful to avoid leaving my fingerprints on it. I had not yet hatched the plan to pose as the guilty man, you see. Then Gino slipped away, escaped to Europe, before I could find him. So I kept the chaplet. It was nowhere in sight when the police received an anonymous call from a phone booth — so very Boys’ Own Adventure — and came for me. I must have put on a fairly convincing Canadian accent. Anyway, I realized later that the housekeeper had taken some of my clothes to be laundered. The chaplet was in the pocket of a pair of my trousers.”

  So that was why Mrs. Kelly had been so mysterious; she had inadvertently removed evidence, then replaced it after the fact.

  “Robin, if you acted out of sympathy with Savo’s grief, why the big long rant about the changes to the Mass after Vatican II?”

  “Why not? I meant every word of it. It was my one and only chance to make a speech from the dock, denouncing the wreckage caused by the Second Vatican Council!”

  Next I spoke to William and Babs Logan.

  “So you really were shopping the day of the murder, Bill.”

  “Shopping?” Babs queried. “No, we weren’t shopping.”

  “Never mind, Babs. They know we didn’t ice Schellenberg, so who cares what we were doing?”

  “But we did pretty darn well that day, Bill. Do you ever go to flea markets, Monty?”

  “Uh, well —”

  “Of course he doesn’t. He’s a lawyer. The man can afford to buy retail.”

  “I may not hit the flea markets, but we sometimes go to a chain of second-hand clothing stores called Frenchy’s where you can get —”

  “Save it, Montague. He’s just trying to spare our feelings, Babs, because we’re so pathetic. We scoured the flea markets the weekend we arrived here, and went around to the second-hand shops to sell what we could. The home sales racket isn’t paying the bills for us. We needed a bit of extra cash. Yeah, I know. Losers. If I’d stayed on as a priest, I’d at least have room and board!”

  “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “You’re not a bad guy, Monty. And I’m glad you know I’m not a killer. I still have all the other problems in my life to deal with, but at least I’m not going to fry for murder.”

  “We don’t fry people in this country, Bill.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind if anybody really cheeses me off before I leave town!”

  “Fred, where were you at the time of the murder? We know you weren’t really at the Atlantic School of Theology.”

  “Tell me this first, Monty. Where did Jan Ford tell you she was that afternoon?”

  “That’s easy. She refused point blank to say where she was. Told us she didn’t need an alibi, and we could all get lost.”

  “She was with me.”

  I stared at him in astonishment, and he laughed. “Yeah, I know. Fred Mills with a woman; it doesn’t compute. She came along with me for support.”

  “Came along where?”

  “Monty, I was seeing a shrink!”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Well, not a shrink exactly, but a psychologist. I have an anxiety disorder. A phobia. And it flared up when I arrived in Halifax.”

  “Okay …”

  “You’re going to laugh. In fact, I don’t know who is likely to find it funnier: the people here or the folks back home. In Kansas.”

  “You’ve got me curious, Fred.” “Have you ever heard of thalassophobia?”

  “Thalasso —”

  “Fear of the sea! I’ve had a morbid fear of the ocean since childhood. Childhood in Kansas. About as far away from the sea as you can get. It really got out of hand when I came to Halifax, teetering on the brink of the Atlantic Ocean! St. Bernadette’s is about a sixty-second walk from the harbour. I started getting worked up as soon as I mailed my application to the schola. I even called Brennan to ask — casually, I thought — exactly where the schola was located. But I guess I wasn’t quite smooth enough, because he replied: ‘We’re on a houseboat, Freddy. And I can’t remember the last time the waves crashed over the top of us. Jazes,’ he goes, ‘gotta bail!’ So he was no help. He doesn’t take it seriously, tries to jolly me out of it.”

  “And so you didn’t want him to know you were seeing a psychologist the afternoon of the murder.”

  “Exactly. I should seek professional help again, to find out why I gave a false alibi in a murder investigation rather than risk ridicule from my old professor! That speaks volumes about my character. Sad, I know.”

  “Oh, we all have things we want to keep private. And look at it this way: you knew you were innocent of the murder, so you figured your real destination was nobody’s business.”

  “Right. The irony is that it was fear of going to Stella Maris Church — Star of the Sea Church, overlooking the water — that set me off. I even went up near it the day before, to see if I could handle it — that’s when your witness saw me at Seaview Park. Then I had to listen to Monsignor O’Flaherty’s enthusiastic promotion of the bus trip to Peggy’s Cove. How huge the surf is there, how people have been swept off the rocks by rogue waves, the whole bit. Hearing that, and knowing we were going to Stella Maris after dark, was enough to propel me into Debbie Schwartz’s office for treatment. Wonderful woman. My psychologist in Kansas looked her up and smoothed the waters for me, so to speak, before I got on the plane to come here.”

  “Yes, I know Debbie. I frequently hire her to assist my clients. We
ll, nobody has to know.”

  “Oh, hell, I’m a big boy now. I’ll own up to it, even if Brennan won’t be as sympathetic as Jan Ford. She may be guilty of atrocious music, but she was a great help to me when she noted my symptoms that Friday and offered to accompany me to Doctor Schwartz’s office.”

  “Well, there you go. If we find out anything else happened that afternoon, you and Jan are off the hook.”

  When it was Kurt Bleier’s turn he leaned towards me and spoke intently. “On the afternoon of the murder, I was out looking for Reinhold Schellenberg. I was concerned — justifiably so — when he suddenly cancelled his lecture. Reinhold was a priest at St. Sebastian Cathedral in Magdeburg, in the German Democratic Republic.”

  “East Germany.”

  “Yes. You may not believe me, but I had great respect for him and for many other churchmen. And I was not alone in that. During the war, the second war, many priests were imprisoned by the Nazi regime. They sat in prison with other enemies of the state, including members of the Communist Party and other socialists. And so it was that my father, Max, came to know Reinhold’s uncle, who was also a priest. Johann Schellenberg. An honourable and courageous man, he took the place of another inmate in the prison and let himself be abused by the authorities, so the other man would be spared.”

  I recalled the story as told to us by Greta Schliemann. Father Johann Schellenberg had confessed to an escape attempt in order to protect the guilty party. Kurt Bleier’s father had demanded his release.

  “My father admired him greatly. Whether he ever told him so, I could not say. But they respected one another, and met often over a chessboard. The chessboard you saw here at the schola. Yes, you were right: it was my father’s, and I brought it here. The notes concealed in it were threats that I knew about through a contact in Reinhold Schellenberg’s abbey. I copied them out to show him. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  “When I was growing up in Germany after the war, my father spoke to me often about Johann Schellenberg, whom he admired more than any other man he had ever met. Oh, he thought Johann was in error, philosophically and politically. But the Schellenberg name was revered in our home. When I joined the Volkspolizei, I became aware of the nephew, Reinhold. Another man who, although suffering under the delusions of religion, was a man of honour. He was in fact a principled opponent of our regime. There were many things about our regime I myself did not agree with, Montague, but I always hoped the revolution would purge itself of those errors in years to come. I still believe it would have, but we ran out of time. For now, anyway.