by Jane Haddam
Right now, though, Gregor was not going to go racing for the phone. He was going to sit down with Dave and Schatzy and have a nice substantial lunch, punctuated by conversation first about murderers and maniacs they had known, and then—as was inevitable during any social contact among Bureau agents above a certain age—about the late, vociferously unlamented J. Edgar. By then, Gregor thought he would have calmed himself down enough not to sound too inappropriately happy on the phone.
There was certainly nothing to be happy about in the death of Brigit Ann Reilly, but Gregor was happy nonetheless. Ever since he’d realized that the murder Schatzy was talking about had taken place on O’Bannion’s turf, he’d been a little surprised that he hadn’t heard from the Cardinal. Gregor knew how John O’Bannion’s mind worked. You found yourself an expert you could trust, and you stuck with him.
Besides, with Bennis working and everybody else away, a little murder case would come as a welcome relief.
It had to be better than hanging around New York City in miserable weather, listening to the worst kind of mentally rigid Bureau administrator blithering on about what a wonderful tool they had in this computer program they hadn’t yet learned how to run.
Two
[1]
THERE WERE PEOPLE WHO said that John Cardinal O’Bannion was a Neanderthal, a throwback to the days when Catholics were supposed to “pray, pay, and obey.” Those were the people who concentrated on his politics—1930s liberal; now labeled conservative—and his theology, which was definitely of the Absolute Moral Norms variety. There were other people who said he was a wizard. The Archdiocese of Colchester had been a mess when he had been sent in to take it over. Vocations to the priesthood had dried up. Half a dozen orders of nuns, exasperated at his predecessor’s high-handedness and his death grip on a dollar, had withdrawn from the parochial school system. The vast majority of the laity was in open rebellion, half in an attempt to be more Catholic than Rome, the other half in an attempt to be God knew what. There were rumors of Love Feasts for the Goddess being held in fields of daisies from the banks of the Seaway to Syracuse. Of course the Cardinal had to be a hard-liner on morality and the liturgy, these people said. That was the only way to bring the little people back into the fold. The little people were always so impressed with pomp and circumstance, and so respectful of authority—as long as it behaved like authority. What the little people wanted more than anything else was not to be forced to think.
To Gregor Demarkian, what John Cardinal O’Bannion was was an original, a big coarse man who had come late to his vocation, an ex-longshoreman who could still talk like a longshoreman, a kind of warrior priest. He was also a passionate Catholic. Many of his contemporaries from the seminary—and hordes of up-and-coming younger men—had replaced their belief in the historical reality of the Resurrection with a vague idea of “spiritual” and “symbolic” rising from the dead, just the way they had replaced their belief in individual sin with a furious opposition to “sinful systems.” O’Bannion was adamantly in favor of the traditional interpretations of both. “The point of Christianity,” he once told the 3,000 assembled members of the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State, “is not to make us more emotionally stable people, more psychologically aware people, more fulfilled people, more self-actualizing people. It is certainly not to promote our ‘human growth’ or to make us better adjusted and more ‘accepting’ of our natures. The point of Christianity, ladies and gentlemen, is this: that approximately two thousand years ago in Palestine a man who to all intents and purposes had been dead and buried for three days raised Himself up and appeared in His risen body to the people who had loved him and others, and that He did these things in fact, and because He did these things in fact, we are obligated to listen to what He had to say and to try to follow it, whether what He had to say is what we want to hear or not.”
Gregor could just imagine what the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State had thought of that. He didn’t have to imagine what certain other people had thought of it. Reactions to that speech had appeared in everything from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Republic. The more populist press had tended to approve of it, in a vague and uncomprehending way, because they also tended to approve of God in general and to disapprove of psychotherapists. The “intellectual” press had been furious. Gregor was neither a religious man nor a moralist. He had no strong ideas one way or the other about the existence of God or the philosophical advisability of engaging in acts of promiscuous fornication. He thought O’Bannion had simply stated the obvious, the absolute bottom-line core definition of Christianity, without which Christianity would not exist. The irrationality of the literate press’s attacks on O’Bannion had startled him.
The irrationality of the literate press’s reactions to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly had startled him, too. It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, March 1, and Gregor was standing in the anteroom to the Cardinal’s office in the Chancery in Colchester, rocking restlessly back and forth on his feet and smiling nervously every once in a while at the Benedictine nun in full habit who served as the Cardinal’s secretary. The nun was perfectly pleasant and even friendly, but Gregor wasn’t used to nuns. All that black and white and unnatural calm made him nervous. He was also very tired. He had opened the Cardinal’s envelope yesterday afternoon as soon as he’d got back up to his room from lunch. He had read through it carefully, called the Cardinal, agreed to come up to Colchester and go on to Maryville, and then gone out and bought every newspaper, newsmagazine, and tabloid with a story about the murder in it. The reading proved to be irresistible. He had expected to get at least eight hours of solid sleep before he had to go to the train station in the morning. He had gotten less than five, and those sprawled out across crumbled newsprint while still wearing a suit. He had told himself he would doze on the Amtrak trip upstate. Instead, he had reread the report in Time and skimmed through the long quasi-editorial in The Nation, looking for God only knew what. It wasn’t that any of these pieces contained essential information about the murder itself. Reading them, Gregor wasn’t sure the press had any information beyond what had been given out the day the body was found—and that wasn’t much. If he wanted details, he had the Cardinal’s report to look through. It contained just about anything he could have expected to get, considering the fact that he was attached to no official policing force anywhere in the country. If Gregor Demarkian had formed distinct impressions of the Cardinal Archbishop, the Cardinal Archbishop had formed distinct impressions of him. At least, the Cardinal Archbishop had remembered that Gregor liked his information organized, exhaustive, electic, and typed.
What was fascinating to Gregor about the press accounts of the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—especially the ones in the prestige weeklies—was their tone. From Time to the New Republic, from Newsweek to The Nation, the editorial voice seemed to be a cross between the grimly prissy schoolmarm of nineteenth-century fiction and the hell-and-brimstone preacher. Father Tibor back on Cavanaugh Street was always telling Gregor that the American press was hysterically hostile to religion, but Gregor had never listened to him. Tibor was a refugee from Soviet Armenia. He had lived with real-life persecution for so long, he was entitled to one or two conspiracy theories. Now Gregor thought he owed Tibor at least a mental apology. These stories were so bizarre, to call them anti-Catholic was to give them too much credit. The New Republic seemed to imply that there was something about “the rigid morality of traditional Catholicism” that led inevitably to violent death. Time quoted Charles Curran (briefly) and Richard MacBrien (at length) on the psychological health of women who joined religious orders that still wore close to full habit. The consensus between them seemed to be that these women were not psychologically healthy at all. Then there was Newsweek, which presented a perfectly bewildering article that seemed to imply that there was some connection between this murder and the Church’s response to AIDS. At one point, it even managed to imply that t
he Church’s traditional stand on homosexual practice had caused AIDS. What any of this had to do with the matter at hand—the brutal murder of an eighteen-year-old girl in the storeroom of a public library in Upstate New York—Gregor didn’t know, but then the writers of the articles didn’t seem to know either. They didn’t seem to know much of anything, except that they really, really, really didn’t like the Catholic Church.
The buzzer on the nun’s desk rang and stopped and rang again in jerky impatient spurts. The sound started suddenly and continued violently, making Gregor jump. The nun looked at the intercom, blinked, and pushed a lever. The sound was shut off.
“He’ll be right in, Your Eminence,” she said at the box, not bothering to hear what the Cardinal Archbishop might want to say. Then she switched the intercom off and turned to Gregor. “Do you like reading Time magazine?” she asked him.
Gregor looked down at his hands. He was still carrying Time. He had Newsweek stuffed into one of the pockets of his coat. “I don’t read it very often,” he told her. “This week it had an article about the, uh—”
“About the murder in it,” Sister finished for him. “Yes, I see. My order is Primitive Observance, you know. According to our Rule, we aren’t allowed to read secular magazines.”
“Do you want to?”
“To tell the truth; I tried it, when I first came to work for the Cardinal. I had to ask permission of my Superior and go through no end of trouble, and then—well, then I found it very depressing. The only thing I found more depressing was television.” She hesitated. “I have read one or two again over the past week. Since the murder.”
“You’d have got more information eavesdropping at the Cardinal’s keyhole.”
“I don’t have to eavesdrop at the Cardinal’s keyhole,” Sister said, “the Cardinal tells me far more than I want to know already. But I am worried about him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s been very upset. He’s been—brooding about all that, from last year.”
“Do you think that’s surprising, Sister?”
“No. No, I don’t think it’s surprising. I don’t think it’s healthy, either. And then there are those Sisters. The Sisters of Divine Grace.”
“What about the Sisters of Divine Grace?”
The old nun looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t mean to be critical,” she said miserably. “I understand that things have changed since I entered the convent, and besides, an active order is different from a contemplative one. That’s what my order is, contemplative. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have left the confines of our monastery in Connecticut.”
Gregor grinned. “When I was here last year, what I heard is that the Cardinal insisted.”
“Yes, he did. The Cardinal does have a tendency to insist.” Sister moved things around on her desk, biting her lip. “I know,” she said slowly, “that it takes a very different path of formation to fit a young woman for work in an active order than it would for life in a contemplative one. In an active order, you can’t treat your postulants like hothouse flowers. You’re going to send them off to teach religion in East St. Louis. And if SDG was a really modern order—you know, one of the ones where the Sisters don’t wear habits and do wear makeup and spend their time agitating for female ordination—well, maybe I could have understood it. As things go, I can’t understand it. Mr. Demarkian, what was that girl doing, walking around by herself in the middle of the morning when—”
The buzzer went off again, insanely this time, as if the Cardinal were sitting in his office, pounding on his button with a balled fist. Even Sister jumped this time, a polite little body hop that was nothing at all like Gregor’s large-scale clumsy jerk. Sister got control of herself almost at once, and leaned over to push the lever again.
“It will only be a moment, Your Eminence,” she said. “Mr. Demarkian is just on his way in.”
She released the lever and looked up at Gregor in embarrassment. “You’d better go in,” she told him. “Maybe we can talk again on your way out. His Eminence really has been very upset lately.”
“Maybe I can calm him down,” Gregor said.
Sister shot him a look of such pure skepticism, it could only have been managed by a nun.
“On the day someone calms the Cardinal Archbishop down,” Sister said, “the Pope will fire every member of the Curia and restaff the Vatican with Lutherans. Go talk to the man before he has an attack of apoplexy and I get stuck being the one to get him to the hospital.”
[2]
Sister wasn’t the first person who had told Gregor about the Cardinal’s long continued problems with “all that happened here last year.” Gregor had heard the same from several people, including from Father Tibor, who had had lunch with O’Bannion in Philadelphia only three months before.
“The man looks as if he is in the middle of a breakdown, Krekor,” Tibor had said. “I am very worried. You have met John. You know he is not a man likely to have breakdowns.”
Gregor did know exactly that. He found it hard even to imagine John Cardinal O’Bannion in the middle of a breakdown. That big man with his bass voice, his thick body, his air of being able to charge right into the middle of any situation and fix it, by sheer energy. How does somebody like that break down? The answer presented itself as soon as Gregor walked into the Cardinal’s office. John O’Bannion was sitting in the swivel chair behind his massive oak desk, smoking a cigar and trying to read a piece of paper through the fumes. It was a characteristic pose and should have had a characteristic effect. Instead of being impressed—and on the verge of overwhelmed—Gregor found himself feeling suddenly, desperately sorry for the man. The ruddy, broken-veined complexion of a man who enjoyed himself too completely and too often was gone, replaced by skin as dry as paper and the color of new ash. The bright blue eyes seemed to be dulled and drowning beneath a wash of yellow film. For the first time in the four or five years since Gregor had become aware of him, the Cardinal looked old.
Gregor shut the office door behind him, walked over to the chair at the side of O’Bannion’s desk and sat down. “Stop pretending to work, Your Eminence. You can’t see anything through all that smoke anyway. Tibor’s worried about you.”
“Tibor’s worried about everybody.” O’Bannion put the paper down. “Tibor’s a saint. Hello, Gregor. I hope you don’t mind my saying that I was praying never to have to see your face again.”
“Let’s just say I’m willing to take it in the spirit in which it is intended.”
“Good,” O’Bannion said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have the energy to be socially politic these days.”
“Did you ever?”
“No,” O’Bannion said, “but I did make an effort when I was living in Rome. Do you want some coffee? Sister’s not modern. She keeps telling me she’d be happy to make me some.”
“That’s all right, I drank too much coffee on the train.” Gregor shifted in his seat and tapped his fingers against the Cardinal’s desk. O’Bannion looked so ill, Gregor was having a hard time looking directly at him. “Your Eminence,” he said, after a while, “I know you don’t take well to advice, but—”
“But I should get away somewhere and get some rest?” O’Bannion raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Everybody’s always telling me I should get away and get some rest. What they really mean is that I should go see a shrink and get over feeling guilty about all that last year. I went up there, you know. Checked in. Maybe satisfied my curiosity.”
“And?” Gregor sat very still.
“And,” the Cardinal said, “our friend is catatonic. Absolutely not home. And likely to stay that way. Whether that’s a fitting punishment for murdering three people, I don’t know.”
“In this case, I think we could let it go.”
“In this case, I don’t want to let it go. Never mind, Gregor. In spite of all the fussing people are doing over me these days, my present condition is not the result of torturing myself with guilt over what happened last year. In the first place, I have jaun
dice—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in the office, Gregor. It upsets Sister. And before you go off half-cocked, the jaundice is a side effect of gallstones and I am having both the jaundice and the gallstones seen to. I’m not a complete idiot. I will admit, however, that I haven’t been getting much sleep.”
“You never did get much,” Gregor said. “Is the insomnia of the moment caused by the death of Brigit Ann Reilly?”
The Cardinal hesitated. “Partially. I have, of course, had the Reillys here quite a bit over the past week. That was necessary, under the circumstances. But it’s not so much the murder, Gregor, as it is what’s going on around the murder. You read the material I sent you?”
“Twice. The girl died from coniine poisoning, that was obvious. I was wondering if you’d had any trouble with the police, over whether you could legitimately call it murder.”
“I never have any trouble with the police,” the Cardinal said blandly, “especially when the chief is named Pete Donovan. But no, on the question of murder, suicide, or accident, there was never any doubt. The dose she took was massive. She would have to have taken it within half an hour or forty-five minutes before she died, unless we’re going to assume she stood on the lawn of the library munching decorative border leaves for Heaven only knows how long—there’s hemlock in the library border; that might not be in the report—anyway, unless we’re going to assume that, we’re going to be stuck with the fact that someone must have fed it to her. Deliberately.”
“What about accident?” Gregor asked. “Somewhere in that report you sent me there was mention of a man named Sam Harrigan—”