“Not actually.” I asked myself, Why not? And I could think of no explanation for my reluctance. I wondered, Could Davy Mogaill and Father Tim explain theirs?
“Fine thing for a priest to be having.” Ruby gave a contemptuous sniff and returned the medallion, handling it as if it were something just fallen off a leper. “Take a good close look, Hock.”
There was a design stamped on one side of the brass piece: an axe tied up with a bundle of rods, beneath which were the letters H.O.S. That much I could see without the aid of my bifocals, which I then squinted through to make out a very worn, italicized script engraved on the reverse:
When nations are empty up there at the top,
When order has weakened or faction is strong,
Time for us all to pick out a good tune,
Take to the roads and go marching along.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I’d say this priest friend of yours has a dark side to his personal moon,” Ruby said.
“Like a lot of other priests.”
“Sure, but how many of them are Fascists these days?”
“Fascist? What are you talking?”
“Let’s have that thing again,” Ruby said. I gave the medallion back to her. She showed me the side with the picture, and asked, “You have any idea what this is?”
“The design? No.”
“It’s the fasces. That’s Italian.”
“Meaning?”
“In ancient Rome, all the various magistrates liked to advertise how they were hotshots in the empire,” Ruby explained. “So whenever they went out in the streets with the common herd, they’d have packs of slaves along with them to wave the fasces. The symbol of privilege and authority back then. The peasants made way.”
I thought about that for a second, then said, “I wonder if there’s anything new under the sun. Nowadays, all the politicians run around with these entourages of camera crews, and guys wearing sunglasses and little earphones and navy blue Secret Service suits.”
“Which is supposed to mean they’re hot stuff. Same thing. A gimmick is a gimmick, down through the ages.”
“But what’s any of that got to do with Father Tim?”
Ruby sighed and looked at me like I was wearing a round haircut. “So then later on,” she said, “there was an Italian guy who looked like a pro wrestler called Benito Mussolini. He needed a logo for a political outfit he started up after World War I. So … the Fascist party, from fasces. Anyway, you might have heard that the party was popular with a lot of pious types.”
“Yeah, I heard. But Father Tim? I really don’t think …” My voice trailed off because I had no respect for my thoughts. Nor for a picture from my boyhood that suddenly played through my mind, like an unfamiliar yet unforgotten tune: Father Tim in my mother’s house, sitting with my Uncle Liam, the two men listening to Joe McCarthy on the Atwater-Kent and getting all lathered up about America going straight to Commie hell in a handbasket. I shook my head, and said, “I think he’s really harmless.”
“Well, probably. Poor old guy living up in the Bronx all alone like he does, with only somebody’s cast-off war souvenirs to keep him company, never hearing regular from his friends.” While I felt guilty, Ruby turned over the medallion. She read the script again, and said, “Maybe Il Duce, the bald-headed creep, wrote this charming verse himself. Before he went into politics he was a journalist, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind from now on when I read the newspapers.”
“Good idea.” Ruby took off her glasses. I relieved her of the brass medallion. She said, “You’re not actually going to keep that old damn thing. What for?”
“You never know.”
I drifted back in my seat then and slept the rest of the flight to Dublin. I dreamed of war: of tyrants in ridiculous hats motoring down grand boulevards lined with men and women wearing grim faces, holding tight to children wise enough to laugh; of ignorant boy armies striding through fields of mud and clay, many falling in the slop, never to rise; of smiling young soldiers in picture frames; of aristocrats telling lies to journalists, and politicians believing what they read.
And in these sorry dreams, I heard my father’s ghost voice; his words penned in a letter to my mother, written from wherever in the war he was, words I had once heard read aloud, and which I committed to fiercest memory:
“The world’s gone cockeyed and a moral truth doesn’t have a tinker’s chance against the Devil without vast armies; and God’s very own sweet army doesn’t have a chance without spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda and the very thickest plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve a man ’s civilization …”
Chapter 9
Mogaill sat in the pew near the statue of St. Jude, smoking a cigar and wondering what the world was coming to. He needed a good, thick odor of tobacco. In all his years of working homicide, he had never got used to the skanky smell of a corpse.
Thirty feet away was the late Father Timothy Kelly, surrounded by a forensics squad from the Midtown-North PDU. The dead priest was sprawled facedown on the floor outside the confessional. Red and gray fluids seeped from a dime-sized exit wound at the back of his bald head. His trousers were wet, and getting wetter as death drained his body.
An officer with a camera photographed the body from all conceivable angles. Another used a knife to scrape out a spent bullet from the back wall of the oak confessional. Tiny red blood spatters against the purple confessional curtain were calibrated for density and directional thrust. Fingerprint powder, white and sticky, was everywhere. Everybody was making notes, everybody smoked, nobody seemed particularly excited.
Up at the front of the church was Father Twohy, the unfortunate young priest who had heard Father Kelly’s last confession; who had then, for the first time in his career, administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic church. He stood by a chair next to the altar now, wiping an ashen and horrified face with a damp handkerchief. In the choir loft behind him were a dozen keening nuns, black and screechy as a flock of crows. Uniformed officers had cleared the sanctuary of the few parishioners. One of them, a frecklefaced pregnant girl, remembered seeing a bald-headed priest pull up in a taxicab just before she walked up to the church.
“He looked all out of breath or something, and I was real surprised to see him in the pews like a regular person with something really heavy on his mind.”
The precinct detectives had also interrogated Father Twohy. Not too many questions were asked; cops tend to respect the morbid privacy of suicide. And Father Twohy’s few answers revealed nothing about the dead priest’s troubled world. “I don’t know what to think! I heard this shot, I jumped off the bench in my side of the confessional, I opened the curtain and there he was—a priest, with a pistol in his mouth, falling. Then I saw it was old Father Tim. He’s retired, he lives up in Riverdale …”
Open and shut. Mogaill had been told as much on his unexpected arrival, which was about twenty minutes after Midtown-North got the call to come running over to Holy Cross. “If you want, go and talk to the little mother and to Father Twohy yourself,” one of the interrogating detectives suggested, “but I don’t think they’ve got anymore spill than they already gave us.” Mogaill said that was probably true, but he nevertheless took down names.
Lieutenant Ray Ellis, a unit commander of Mogaill’s long acquaintance, was the supervisor on the crime scene. He was short, bald, sloppy and thickset, and wore a brown cop suit and black shoes with rippled crepe soles. He also wore the impersonal expression of a department lifer; distrust of his fellow man was etched in his face like the scowl on a bulldog. It was Ellis who had further horrified Father Twohy by passing out the cigars right there in the sanctuary.
Ellis broke away from the ring of cops performing cleanup duties around the mess of Father Tim’s body. He walked over to Mogaill. “Forensics says no question the padre ate his gun, so there’s no percentage in dusting for pri
nts on this, Captain,” he said, handing a small pistol to Mogaill. “Get a load of this antique.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” The suicide weapon fit easily in the palm of Mogaill’s hand. He stared at a .25 caliber automatic with a short, blued barrel, about four inches in overall length, still warm from one shot fired out of its six-round magazine. The checkered grips were made of hard rubber, which were aged and brittle, but unworn. Mogaill looked up at Ellis, and said, “An oldie but a goody, hey?”
“It’s been more than a couple of years since I seen a beaut like that,” Ellis said. “Back in the fifties, there was lots of them little Mausers showing up, on account of guys in the service taking them off Germans to bring back home.”
“How do you figure a priest comes by one?” Mogaill asked, hefting the pistol. It weighed little more than a fat wallet.
“I guess before he was saving souls for Jesus he was maybe in the war? Maybe he stripped down a dead kraut like everybody else who wanted a swell souvenir?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so,” Mogaill said, shaking his head. “He’s too old to have been a soldier then. Besides which, he’s Irish. And in the war that we’re speaking of, true Irishmen served nobody’s army.”
“Sounds like there’s something personal behind that, Captain.” Ellis’s distrust, as well as his reliably suspicious view of humanity, extended equally to civilians and colleagues. “You know the padre, or what?”
“I know of him.”
“Friends and countrymen, like that?”
“Us harps stick together.”
“So I heard,” the lieutenant said. Mogaill gave him back the Mauser. Ellis pulled a plastic evidence bag from a pocket and put the pistol inside. “By the way, Mogaill, I’m wondering something about that.”
“Are you now?”
“I called up to where the padre lived, this old priests’ home in Riverdale. They tell me one of you harps who stick together was the last who seen him alive, before he went and took off in a plane to Dublin.”
“That’d be Detective Hockaday you’re talking about?”
Lieutenant Ellis nodded his bulldog head slowly. His eyes flattened.
“When he was a wee kid, Hockaday was a choirboy here at Holy Cross and the priest was in charge of the choir,” Mogaill explained. “There was something more, too, I think. Father Kelly’s a friend of the Hockaday family—was a friend. Looks to me like Father was having himself some terrible time of it. Maybe he wanted to talk over his troubles with an old friend.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” Ellis said, scratching an ear. “But unless you’re an old friend, too, I wonder how come you’re Johnny-on-the-spot here? As you can see plain, this ain’t homicide. So what’s your interest? And anyhow, don’t a division captain get Sundays off?”
Mogaill said nothing for a few seconds. He puffed on his cigar and glanced over toward the altar, at Father Twohy still in a state of shock and the chorus line of moaning nuns. Then he turned back to Lieutenant Ellis, and said only, “‘Tis a hell of a way to be keeping the Sabbath, hey?”
Again he circled the block in the unmarked Plymouth. And still it was there: a dark sedan idling at the corner like a panther half asleep, the green illumination of dashboard lights and the orange dot of a lit cigarette reflected in the windshield.
This time as he drove by, he memorized the license plate number, for whatever that might be worth. Nothing, probably. Then he pulled up in front of the big red-brick friary and double-parked. He stepped out of the Plymouth and started up the sloping walkway to the entrance. Halfway there, a yellow floodlight over the doorway caught him in its sweeping glow, big as life. He turned, and looked down toward the corner. The dark sedan pulled away from the curb, passed by slowly, then disappeared.
He continued up the walkway.
An old priest answered the door before he was able to land the first knock. The priest was thin and white haired, with eyes as gray and dead as the East River. He was a head taller than Mogaill and had to look down to speak to his visitor. “You’re the policeman who telephoned?” the priest asked in a reedy voice, faintly accented from an Irish youth.
“That’s me,” Mogaill said, flashing a shield. The priest examined it closely. Besides reading New York Police Department, Mogaill’s gold shield contained his name, rank, serial number and division. The priest said, reverently, “Captain D. Mogaill, central homicide, just as you told me.”
“You’d be the priest who answered the phone? Father…?”
“Father Owen Curley.”
“Yes. Might I come inside, Father?”
“I’m so sorry. Yes, of course.”
Mogaill entered a foyer dimly lit by a chandelier, several bulbs of which were missing. The papered walls were peeling. The floor groaned under a stained rug. There was a soapy, old man smell to the place. A cat trapped a cockroach along the baseboard of a wall and pawed it to death.
“Where are all the others tonight?” Mogaill asked, stepping past Father Curley into a salon off the foyer. This room was brighter, and full of cane-bottomed rockers, cracked leather club chairs, and reading lamps. There was a fireplace and a television console and a round, oak table piled neatly with unread copies of The Catholic Messenger. Father Curley answered, “Why, in the chapel. Offering invocations for the soul of our poor Brother Tim.”
“Of course.”
“Your news was a shock to us all.”
“We’d best not disturb the prayers then.”
“No.”
Mogaill returned to the foyer. He walked to a paneled staircase and stopped, resting a hand on a newel post and looking up into the darkness of the first landing. He said to Father Curley, behind him, “So you were telling me on the phone, Father Kelly was out of sorts this morning?”
“Very much so,” said Father Curley. “It’s not like him to put off his breakfast like he did. Good food was Brother Tim’s favorite of God’s many bounties.”
“You mentioned, too, that your room was next door to his?”
“That’s right. We’ve been neighbors for quite a few years.”
“You want to show me his room now?”
“Of course, yes.” Father Curley pressed the button of a switch plate on the foyer wall and lighted the stairs. He stepped ahead of Mogaill and led the way up the first flight, pausing at the landing to ask, “From what you told me, it appears poor Brother Tim took his own life. But, since you’re here from the central homicide division … well, do you honestly think this might be a case of murder?”
“It’s times like this when I honestly don’t know what to think.”
“But a man of your experience … surely you have an opinion.”
“In my opinion, people aren’t altogether human.”
“I’ll have you know, Brother Tim was a good friend and a fine priest,” Father Curley said. He added, icily, “And a good human being.”
“Even so, you leave good silk out in the rain, it shrinks.”
“Captain Mogaill, you are a Catholic, are you not?”
Mogaill thought, So that’s it. He said, “Better a good Catholic should be murdered in cold blood than commit the cardinal sin of suicide?”
The priest muttered in Latin and crossed himself. “Perhaps we should simply get this business behind us, Captain.” Father Curley continued up the next flight and Mogaill then followed him, wordlessly. They walked halfway down the second-floor corridor to Father Kelly’s door. Father Curley pushed on it, and said, “In here.”
It was a tidy room, functional and unadorned, with all the warmth and personality of an airport hotel. The colorless walls contained nothing besides a crucifix. There was a sagging twin bed covered in chenille, a bureau, a small closet, a chair and table by the window. Twelve flashing lights on a telephone answering machine were the only signs of life.
It took Mogaill less than two minutes to search through Father Timothy Kelly’s belongings, the accumulations of a man who had lived so many years; a priest who owned unthinkable memor
ies, and an old gun that had finally made them go away.
He was not surprised to find the bottle of Jameson’s hidden in a bureau drawer beneath some socks. Nor was he surprised that Father Curley feigned astonishment at such discovery. Davy Mogaill understood a man who would hide himself in drink; he understood, as well, that a charade is only good when there are friends who claim they never knew.
In his brief but thorough search, Mogaill found only one item of any possible significance. He slipped this into a pocket. Then he bade a good night to the priest with the dead gray eyes.
Davy Mogaill was not anxious to get home. He never was.
The house in Queens where he had once lived with his wife had grown cold, as cold and lifeless as the room he had just searched. When Brenda died, he wanted to sell the place and take a small apartment in Manhattan. But then, where would he put her things? So he had remained with Brenda’s belongings, all neatly stored in rooms he seldom entered, in a house with the heart and joy cut out of it. And in these years alone, Davy Mogaill rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a captain.
Before leaving the Bronx, Mogaill drove the unmarked Plymouth to a diner on Broadway at Two-hundred-fortieth Street. He expected to be followed, and he was. The dark sedan waited, just across the way. He took a booth where he could see out the window to the street and keep track of the driver’s burning cigarette.
A waitress, no more than Brenda’s age when he married her, came over to his booth. Like his Brenda, this girl had hair the color of October’s pale red leaves in the Galty mountains, and a ready smile that took a wistful Mogaill home to County Kildare. She set down a glass of water, handed him a menu, and said, “Would you like a few minutes?”
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