“Yes, Your Eminence.”
Bishop O’Grogarty and Monsignor Robert Moran, his chancellor, were ushered into the room. The first glimpse they had of Archbishop Mulcahy was of His Eminence in full vestments, including the gold-embroidered cappa magna and shepherd’s crook. He did not look, in other words, like the priest Bishop O’Grogarty had seen outside the Paris Opera rising to the challenge of a fistfight by shaking his fist back at his challenger.
“I’m John Mulcahy,” Dago Red said, putting out his hand. “How do you do?”
“It was very gracious of Your Eminence to interrupt your busy schedule to receive me,” Bishop O’Grogarty said.
“I wasn’t busy at all,” Dago Red said. “Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa wanted me to put on my vestments. I don’t wear them very often, and he wanted to be sure they were in good shape.”
A waiter, attired in the uniform of a colonel of Imperial Czarist cavalry, rolled a table holding a silver coffee service into the room.
“That was quick,” Dago Red said, somewhat surprised.
“Doña Antoinetta has assigned us two waiters, a cook, and a valet full time,” Pancho said.
“Send the valet in, then. He can help me out of this stuff,” Dago Red said. “You won’t mind, Bishop O’Grogarty?”
“Of course not, Your Eminence,” O’Grogarty said.
“Shall I pour, Your Eminence?” Pancho asked.
“Please, Pancho, and see if the bishop won’t join me in having a little brandy in his coffee.”
“His Eminence,” Pancho explained, “has had a trying day.”
“Well, what can I do for you?” Dago Red asked, as he began removing his vestments.
“I’m here for several reasons,” O’Grogarty said. “First, to welcome you, Your Eminence, to Miami.”
“Very kind of you,” Dago Red said.
“Second, I have just received a cablegram from Rome.”
“Oh?”
“I am instructed to remind you, Your Eminence, that you have been ordered to take it easy for a couple of weeks,” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “And the second part of the message is apparently in code.”
“Oh?”
“I quote,” the bishop said, reading from the cable. “ ‘And thank you for the beer you sent to the apartment.’ ”
“Oh, that’s not in code,” Dago Red said. “I sent a couple of cases of beer over.”
“Over where?” Bishop O’Grogarty asked without thinking.
“Don’t ask,” Dago Red said. “I don’t think he would want it spread around.”
“He, himself?” O’Grogarty asked.
“Between you and me, him, himself,” Dago Red said. “He’s a very good chess player, you know. . .”
“No, I didn’t,” O’Grogarty said.
“Very good,” Dago Red said. “And he drops by sometimes late in the evening for a couple of games, and when I saw that he liked the beer, I had a couple of cases sent over to his apartment.’
“He, himself, drops by to play chess and drink beer?”
“You sound surprised,” Dago Red said. “He was once a lowly priest like you and me, Bishop. He’s confessed to me more than once that he sometimes wishes he’d never been promoted. He liked being a parish priest.”
“Didn’t we all?” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “Tell me, Your Eminence, if you can—does he know about the holy relics?”
“What holy relics?”
“The holy relics of Blessed Prudence,” Bishop O’Grogarty said.
“Let me have that again,” Dago Red said.
“The holy relics of Blessed Prudence that the Reverend Mother Emeritus Margaret is going to give to Doña Antoinetta for establishing the student nurse scholarships. Doña Antoinetta is, in turn, going to give them to the diocese.”
“Uh-oh,” the archbishop said. “I was afraid that’s what you said. Pancho, see if you can get Hot Lips on the phone, will you?”
“Holy relics of Blessed Prudence?” Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa asked incredulously.
“Don’t think about it, Pancho,” Dago Red said. “Just get Hot Lips on the horn.”
“The ceremony is scheduled for half-past five,” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “In the Grand Ballroom.”
“Oh?” Dago Red said.
The archbishop had been gradually taking off his formal vestments, which had been handed to the valet. Now he was down to his trousers and shirt. The valet handed him a suit jacket and he shrugged into it.
“Your Eminence,” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so,” Dago Red said, sitting down in an armchair, lighting a cigar, and adding just a drop or two more brandy to his coffee. “Why do you ask?”
“You look familiar somehow,” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“Well, I was a priest in China, right out of the seminary,” Dago Red said. “Then I was an army chaplain. Then I went to Rome.”
“I’m probably mistaken,” Bishop O’Grogarty soid, “but I’d swear that I’ve seen you somewhere before, and not too long ago.”
“Well, there’re a lot of Irish priests around,” Dago Red said. “Probably someone that looked like me.”
A look of sudden shock crossed the face of the Bishop of Greater Miami and the Florida Keys.
“Your Eminence!” he said. “You wouldn’t have been in . .. no, forget it.”
“I beg your pardon?” Dago Red said.
“Your Eminence,” Pancho interrupted. “That lady you wish to speak to?”*
(* Monsignor Pancho de Malaga y de Villa was absolutely unable to refer to Margaret Houlihan Wachauf Wilson, R.N., Lt. Col., Retired, as “Reverend Mother.”)
“What about her?
“She went swimming, Your Eminence,” Pancho said. “With another lady whose name has recently come up.”
“She probably wanted to relax before the ceremony,” Dago Red said. He looked at his watch. “My, it’s already four-fifteen. We don’t have much time, do we?”
“No, we don’t,” Bishop O’Grogarty said. “We’ve taken too much of your time, Your Eminence, haven’t we?”
“Not at all, but we are running a little short. . . .” Dago Red said. He got out of his chair and eased the bishop and Monsignor Moran out of the room.
“We’ll see you at the ceremony,” Bishop O’Grogarty said as he left. “It’s going to be on television, you know. It isn’t every day that the diocese gets a holy relic.”
The moment the door was closed, Dago Red pointed to it. “Go get Hot Lips!” he ordered. “Get her up here!”
“Couldn’t we just send a bellboy after her?”
“Go get her!” the archbishop said firmly.
Three minutes later, Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa walked out of the hotel and toward the swimming pool. The pool was crowded. Perhaps sixty men were clustered around the side of the pool watching the activity around the diving board. Roughly an equal number of women were clustered around the poolside bar, muttering darkly among themselves.
There were two women near the diving board, a small one and a slightly larger one. Both wore bikinis. The larger of the two, who was also somewhat older, walked to the end of the high board. There was applause as she walked out, and louder applause and some cheers and whistling as she spread her arms out. The movement caused her somewhat spectacular bosom to rise even higher and strain against the thin nylon of her bathing dress.
When she bounced up and down on the board, preparatory to diving, the applause and cheers and whistling suddenly died. There was an audible whooshing noise as sixty males inhaled deeply and watched in rapt fascination.
“Shocking and outrageous!” an obviously female voice said.
“Shameless and insulting,” said another female.
The lady finished her bouncing and did a rather well-executed swan dive. She popped up out of the water a moment later, like a cork. The applause was really tumultuous this time, for the inexorable law
s of hydrostatic physics had pushed, so to speak, the upper portion of her bathing dress off that which it was intended to cover. As soon as this became apparent to the lady, she flushed, and immediately sank beneath the surface of the water. There was some flailing around as she rearranged her bathing dress under the water, and then she swam, using a smooth breast stroke, to the side of the pool.
There was a little flurry of activity at poolside as the gentlemen watching vied for the privilege of helping the diver from the pool. In their enthusiasm to do the gentlemanly thing, three gentlemen slipped and fell into the pool.
Finally the lady was pulled out, and she stood within a circle of diving fans. Then the lady saw a familiar face just outside the circle of men around her.
“Pancho!” she said. “Pancho baby! What a nice surprise!”
“Margaret,” the monsignor said, “your friend from Rome wants to see you—right now.”
“Why, of course,” she said. “I have to be getting dressed soon, anyway.”
There were groans at this announcement.
The lady turned to the diving board.
“Prudence,” she called, rather loudly. “I’ll see you in the room, dear. The archbishop sent Pancho here to get me up to his room.”
Waving gaily at the diving enthusiasts, she followed a somewhat red-faced monsignor into the hotel.
Five minutes later, Dr. Hawkeye Pierce and Dr. Trapper John McIntyre were also ushered into the presence of the Archbishop of Swengchan.
“What’s up, Dago Red?” Hawkeye asked.
“Hot Lips,” Trapper John said. “Since I am here personally, rather than professionally, I wish you’d put some clothes on.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Pancho said.
“Any time,” Trapper John said.
“You wouldn’t want to catch a cold, would you, Margaret?” the archbishop said.
“Can I have some of the brandy?” Trapper John asked. “Or are you going to drink it all yourself?”
“You can have one little snort,” Dago Red said. “You’re going to need all your faculties intact. We have a small problem.”
“I don’t see why we just can’t go to the lady and tell her there’s been a slight misunderstanding,” Hot Lips said.
“You haven’t met the lady, have you?”
“Not yet,” Hot Lips said.
“What lady?”
“Doña Antoinetta,” Dago Red said.
“El Stoneface?” Hawkeye said.
“The avenging angel?” Trapper John said.
“She is a good, kind, generous Christian lady,” Dago Red said.
“Who thinks she is about to get a holy relic, and has already promised the holy relic to the Diocese of Greater Miami and the Florida Keys.”
“Well, Pancho, you know the arrangement we have with Dago Red. He doesn’t make any cracks about the Finest Kind Fish Market and Medical Clinic, and we keep our opinions of the little idiosyncracies of the Vatican to ourselves,” Hawkeye said. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that Doña Antoinetta expects to get a holy relic,” Dago Red said.
“You said that.”
“She has somehow formed the opinion that she’s going to get a relic of the Blessed Prudence,” Dago Red said.
“Blessed who?”
“You heard him,” Pancho said. “The same Blessed Prudence who is about to be lynched by angry wives at the swimming pool for indecent exposure in the presence of their husbands.”
“What I had in mind, of course,” Hot Lips said, “was an official holy relic of my late husband, the Blessed Brother Buck.”
“You mean you were actually going to give El Stoneface, the avenging angel, one of those little statues?” Hawkeye asked. He chuckled. “Buck and the magic dragon?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Hot Lips demanded sharply.
“Nothing at all,” Trapper John said, “every devout Catholic home needs a small statue of Brother Buck, founder of the God Is Love in All Forms Christian Church, Inc., in the act of slaying a dragon. I have one. I keep it in a place of honor—right next to the Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon.”
“I’m sure,” Dago Red said, “that, under other circumstances, Doña Antoinetta might . . . look differently . . . upon the statue of Margaret’s late husband. But as it is, she expects a bona fide, Catholic-type holy relic.”
“Perhaps she’s been considering changing religions,” Hawkeye said. “Have you thought of that?”
“Now look, wise guy,” Dago Red said firmly. “Doña Antoinetta’s a good woman, and she acted in good faith.”
“So did Hot Lips,” Trapper John said. “She didn’t offer a Catholic-type holy relic, just a holy relic.”
“I will not stand idly by and see that good woman ridiculed!” Dago Red said.
“What do you plan to do about it?” Hawkeye asked.
“That’s why I sent for you two,” Dago Red said. “It’s going to take some people with unfettered imaginations to get us all out of this, and you two have the most unfettered imaginations it has been my misfortune to come across.”
“The thing is, Dago Red,” Hawkeye said, “that we’ve been using up our unfettered imaginations at a rather frantic pace.”
“How?” Dago Red asked somewhat sarcastically.
“Keeping Boris separated from Esmerelda and the baroness,” Trapper John said.
“I’d forgotten about that,” Dago Red admitted.
“And patrolling the no-man’s-land between the GILIAFCC, Inc., a cappella choir and the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band,” Hawkeye added.
“I’d forgotten about that, too,” Dago Red admitted.
“And finally,” Trapper John said, “we have really been letting our unfettered imaginations kick their fetters with regard to the matter of Doctors Waldowski and Yancey and François Mulligan.”
“What are they up to?”
“That’s what we’ve been unfetteredly imagining,” Hawkeye said. “They haven’t been seen since they climbed in that car and drove away from the airport. The possibilities are really limitless.”
“All I’m telling you two is that you’d better come up with something,” the archbishop said, glancing at his watch, “in the next sixty minutes. Or else.”
“That sounds like a threat to me,” Hawkeye said.
Chapter Nineteen
As Dr. Pierce and Dr. McIntyre walked back down the plushly carpeted halls of the Winter Palace to their rooms, the air was rent, as the phrase goes, by screams. First a high-pierced scream, just this side of being shrill enough to be a female scream, and next a somewhat more basso scream.
“If there had been only one scream,” Hawkeye said, “I would suspect that Boris nicked himself trimming his beard. But there were two screams.”
They pushed open the door to their suite. No one was in the living room, but the sound of the screams was much louder. The two walked out on the balcony.
Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov was standing by the steel railing, leaning slightly over it. He had an ankle in each hand, one wearing a white sock with a little yellow chick embroidered upon it, the other wearing an argyle plaid sock. The bodies attached to the screams were coming from them.
“Look what I’ve got!” Boris cried.
“Don’t drop it, or them,” Hawkeye said. “It’s forty stories straight down.”
“Let’s see what you caught, Boris,” Trapper John said. “What were you using for bait?”
Boris effortlessly raised the two individuals he had been swinging back and forth over the balcony’s edge.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was Senator Jaws Fisch,” Hawkeye said. “But what would a U.S. senator be doing swinging by his ankles from the balcony of my suite?”
“Thank God,” Senator Fisch said, rushing to Hawkeye, dropping to his knees, kissing Hawkeye’s hands. “You recognize me.”
“Is this sneak thief with the outsized choppers a friend of yours, Hawk
eye?” Boris asked.
“Didn’t you hear me say he was a U.S. senator? How could he possibly be a friend of mine? The question is, what is he doing in my room?”
“He said he was trying to protect the country from Cubans,” Boris said.
“What about the other one?”
“My name is Birch Beebe, sirs,” the other one said. “I’m chief of the F.B.I. in Miami.”
“That’s a likely story,” Trapper John said.
“I’ll show you my credentials,” Birch Beebe said.
He searched fruitlessly through his pockets. “I know I had credentials when I came in here,” he said. “I always carry my credentials when I’m conducting an unauthorized search.”
“I came out of the shower, Hawkeye,” Boris said, “and I caught him searching through your underwear.”
“What were you looking for in my underwear?” Hawkeye asked.
“I can’t find my credentials,” Birch Beebe said.
“You must have lost them when this big ape was holding you upside down,” Senator Fisch said. “Gentlemen, you can take my word for it as a U.S. senator that this gentleman is what he says he is.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Trapper John said.
“I wouldn’t believe a U.S. senator if he told me my name was Pierce,” Hawkeye said.
“And what is your name, sir?” Agent Beebe inquired.
“Pierce.”
“Well, Mr. Pierce,” Senator Fisch said, “I see that we’re going to have to take you into our official confidence.”
“Not a chance,” Hawkeye said.
“Your country needs you,” the senator said.
“To do what?”
“We are investigating a Cuban lady suspected of all sorts of un-American activities,” Birch Beebe said.
“Such as?”
“She evicted the Friendly Sons of Italy, for one thing,” the senator said.
“And you wouldn’t believe what a naughty mind she has,” Beebe said. “Sex-wise, I mean. You wouldn’t think it to look at her. She looks like somebody’s young grandmother.”
“If you cooperate with us, we’ll let you hear the tapes we have,” Senator Fisch said.
“What tapes?”
MASH 10 MASH goes to Miami Page 21