I I
“One gets weary of caviar.”
Zelda clung to Gabriel Faust after Heather came running in with the news that something had happened to Father Crowe, something terrible. Laura calmed Heather down, got the story, and then she and her brother the priest and Hannan took off, the billionaire flanked by his staff. Gabriel Faust watched them go. Zelda was trembling in his arms. Heather, having brought the news, stood in the atrium of the building where she had found them, turning slowly around as if in search of true north. Gabriel moved toward her, with Zelda still in his arms. They might have been dancing.
Heather stopped turning and stared at them, still in a state of shock.
“What happened? Did he fall? What?”
“Oh, the blood, the blood,” Heather keened.
Zelda cried out empathetically in his arms. Gabriel patted her back, wondering what he had gotten into.
The negotiations had gone smoothly, the salary was the fulfillment of one of his mad dreams, they had a deal, Laura would write it up, and now this. Gabriel had the depressing thought that this was going to end like the rest of his high hopes over the past years. Excluding Zelda, of course. She was an unequivocal treasure. In several senses. He dropped his hand and patted her bottom. Heather watched impassively. She turned and walked out of the building.
“The poor girl,” Zelda shuddered.
“I think I shocked her, sweetheart.”
“How?”
He repeated the pat.
“What would I do without you?” she breathed.
As he held her, he saw Traeger come up through the shrubbery. He talked with Heather, urgently. After a moment, she handed him something, and a moment later he had run off to a car in the parking lot and driven away. Gabriel said nothing to Zelda about this odd little scene, nor to Heather when she drifted back inside.
That was the little lull before the storm. Hannan was back, hurrying through doors as they slid open. Soon there was a huddle between him and Laura and Sinclair. Hannan wanted the body removed and the whole thing treated as if it had never happened.
Laura said, “Nate, that’s crazy. With all due respect. This is murder.”
“That’s my point,” Hannan cried. “What will this do to Empedocles?”
“Nothing,” Ray Sinclair said. “Nothing bad,” he added.
It took Hannan some minutes before he was persuaded that this was a problem he could not wish away.
“Nate, he’s a priest,” Sinclair said patiently. “He was working for you.”
Hannan thought about that. “God rest his soul,” he said absently.
“John gave him absolution,” Laura said.
Hannan nodded. He looked at Sinclair. “It could be the work of a competitor.”
“Nate, you have no competitors.”
It sounded like base flattery, but Faust acknowledged that it was the simple truth. Of course he had learned all he could about Hannan and Empedocles before driving over here with Zelda. He was overwhelmed. The only doubt left was whether Zelda was as buddy-buddy with Hannan as she claimed.
“I wouldn’t say buddy-buddy,” she said. “Buddy,” she added, and smiled, a nice smile, and patted his thigh. “I see him at Mass.”
One of the things that Gabriel had learned cuddling with Zelda in one bed or another during what she called their honeymoon was that her remorse over their sporadic affair—what had it been, twice?—had turned her into a church mouse. She had a confessor, a priest named Trepanier, and she had gone to Mass almost every day, doing penance for the fun they had had. But now they were married, and it was like the answer to her prayers. Now it was all right and she found licit sex far more exhilarating than the other kind, among other things because there was no aftermath of remorse. They were only doing what they had promised God they would do when they married in the sacristy of Santa Susanna.
The police were called, inevitably, despite Hannan’s initial impulse, along with an ambulance, and then came the people from the crime lab. Meanwhile, they were kept in the conference room by the cop in charge, Purcell, who looked miscast for this murder and awed by talking with Hannan, the legendary tycoon. He explained, deferentially, that he wanted them on call. Gabriel assured Zelda they had no information for the police. All this occurred shortly after the two of them arrived, and whatever had happened had happened in another building where they had never been. He assured Zelda they would be allowed to go soon.
Meanwhile he tried not to feel a certain relief that Brendan Crowe was no longer among the living. He had nothing against the man, of course, how could he, but there had been an edge of skepticism in Crowe’s voice when he went over Gabriel’s credentials with him.
“How could remaining in the academic world have restricted you?” he had asked.
“Have you ever taught?”
Crowe didn’t answer. He noticed that Faust’s last NEA had been to study Delacroix.
“That was more or less a lark. One gets weary of caviar, I suppose.”
He had to explain that, for God’s sake. Renaissance art was the caviar, of course.
“And you returned to it?”
“It’s been my life.”
“No books?” Faust felt he was being interviewed for a teaching job.
“It has been suggested that I collect my articles.”
“Good suggestion,” Crowe said, surprisingly. He smiled. “Do forgive the grilling. I was subjected to the same thing.”
“Will you be staying?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, I must get back to Rome.”
“Rome.” Gabriel sighed. “What do you do there?”
Thank God he hadn’t known that Crowe was acting prefect of the Vatican Library, putting him in charge of books, museums, archives.
“You’re just here to grill candidates?”
Crowe did know how to laugh, though he seemed out of practice.
That was the first thing. Gabriel had wondered if he would be working with this humorless priest who went over his dossier as if he were a mendicant. He had thought it necessary to tell Crowe that he had come at his wife’s insistence.
“You’re not interested in the job?” Crowe asked.
“Yes, I am. Of course. Mr. Hannan makes it all sound quite exciting.”
“He is a sanguine man.” And Crowe himself was phlegmatic. Those old divisions of character retained their uses. And what was Gabriel Faust?
The director designate of something to be called, improbably, Refuge of Sinners.
“I’ll fit right in,” Gabriel had said when he heard the name of the new foundation. Only Ray Sinclair laughed.
They had shaken hands all around and then all hell had broken loose. Heather burst in like a messenger in Shakespeare. There was no more Brendan Crowe to make Gabriel uneasy, but he had the awful thought that the deal would not go through now. Had he allowed his doubt to surface? Laura Burke came up to him.
“I’ll write up the agreement. You can sign it before they let you go.”
Ten minutes later, she was back with the contract. They made a little ceremony of his signing it, in the conference room, Laura and Zelda and Gabriel.
“What a beautiful hand,” Laura said.
“Calligraphy is my passion.”
“Oh?” Zelda said coyly.
Purcell, when he questioned them, recognized Zelda’s name. “Zelda Lewis, until recently,” she had said when asked to identify herself. “Now Zelda Faust.” It all went smoothly, as he had predicted.
“Was he murdered?” Zelda asked.
“The investigation has just begun,” Purcell said. “I don’t see any reason to keep the two of you here any longer.”
Laura Burke went with them to the car, apologetic. “This dreadful thing will be occupying us for some time,” she said. “Why don’t I call you and we can decide when you will begin.”
“What happened to Traeger?” Gabriel asked.
“That’s what the police want to know.”
Gabriel sa
id nothing further, nor did he when, on the drive home, Zelda mentioned that Traeger had been a colleague of her late husband’s. In the CIA.
“But I already told you that.”
“And that he liked your Delacroix.”
III
“Where is Vincent Traeger?”
Father John Burke had difficulty not gagging when he stood over the body of his friend, sprawled on the bed, blood everywhere, and began to give him absolution. Ego te absolvo, he began, and then his mind went blank. He could not remember the rest of the formula of absolution. Like an idiot, he then said, blubbered rather, Salva nos, domine, vigilantes, et custodi nos dormientes, ut vigelemus cum Christo et requiescamus in pace. The prayer from Compline came readily to his lips even if he had forgotten the formula of absolution. And then the formula came, and he recited it almost lightheartedly, he was so relieved. Afterward, he tormented himself with the thought that his delay might have been the difference between Brendan Crowe alive and Brendan Crowe dead.
The others had held back while he performed his priestly task, but now they surged forward. Laura took Brendan’s hand, lifted, sought a pulse. She let it drop. Her finger went to his throat. John looked at his sister. Their eyes met. She shook her head. Then she turned.
“Ray, call the guard shack. Tell them to prevent anyone from leaving. I’ll call the police.”
“No!” Hannan had cried. “No police.”
And so that debate had begun. Ignatius Hannan seemed to want to wish away what had happened to Brendan, his motives incredibly self-regarding. A murder on the grounds of the Empedocles complex posed a business problem, a problem in public relations. Laura took her boss’s arm and led him away. John was sure the electronics whiz would lose that argument.
He had been impressed by the calmness and practicality of his sister’s reaction. Had it occurred to anyone else that whoever had done this dreadful thing must even then be in full flight? But when the call came back from the gate, the guard said that he had noticed no stranger leaving before Laura’s call.
“Where is Vincent Traeger?”
The question was raised more than once during the next half hour after John had covered Brendan’s body with a sheet and they had withdrawn to the administration building.
“Who exactly is Vincent Traeger?” Nate Hannan finally asked.
John had one answer. Traeger had been in Rome investigating some troubles within the Vatican. He had discussed them with Brendan.
“What kind of troubles?”
“Does it matter?”
“He is a CIA agent,” Zelda said. “At least he was.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Hannan asked.
“My husband, my first husband, was with the CIA. He and Traeger were colleagues. And friends.”
Gabriel Faust had gone outside for a smoke while this conversation was going on, and John went out to join him. They stood in silence, looking out at the carefully barbered lawns, the clipped shrubbery, the trees. A memory of having a cigarette with Brendan in the basement bar of the Domus came to John and he could not suppress a sob. He looked helplessly at Faust, tears in his eyes.
“He was a good friend,” he explained. “I think my best friend.”
“I don’t think he suffered,” Faust said. “I’m sorry. That’s a stupid remark.”
A moment of silence.
“He knew a lot about Renaissance art,” Gabriel said.
“He knew a lot about everything.”
Does the intellect retain after death the knowledge it has laboriously acquired over a lifetime? It was the kind of question Brendan liked to discuss. The whole mystery of death struck John as it had not when his father died, or when, visiting his mother, he had realized she did not have long to go. Brendan had been at the height of his powers. The great likelihood was that he would become permanent prefect of the Vatican Library. Suddenly, such things seemed of no importance, trivial. It was an unsettling thought that things he had always known and could recite by rote now took on a significance they had never had before. We have here no lasting city. How easy to say, even as one went on living as if there would always be tomorrow. How could he not connect Brendan’s violent death with the account he had given of the death of the secretary of state and of Cardinal Maguire? At first John had reacted in disbelief—you never knew when Brendan’s unusual sense of humor would come into play. But it became immediately clear that he meant what he said literally. Of course, Brendan had considered him naive, credulous, still awestruck by the fact that he worked in the Vatican. Well, all those things were true. He laid no claim to sophistication, if that meant reacting to several bloody murders with aplomb. And if he hadn’t been credulous, wouldn’t he have gone on doubting what Brendan was telling him? He prayed to God that he would never become blasé about the privilege of working in such close proximity with the Holy Father.
“Is Vincent Traeger a good friend, too?” Gabriel Faust asked.
“I hardly know him.”
“Crowe’s friend?”
“Let’s just say an acquaintance.”
When it became clear that Traeger was nowhere to be found, the significance of his absence became the focus. Purcell, the police detective, wondered why Traeger would have shown up at Empedocles. if he were the comparative stranger Father Burke described.
“You met him in Rome?” Purcell asked, as if he were inquiring about the farside of the moon.
“Brendan—Father Crowe—introduced me to him.”
“As?”
John was in a quandary. He knew that Traeger had something to do with the investigation of the murders in the Vatican, murders that were not publicly known to be such. It certainly wasn’t his role to speak of those assassinations, particularly since any knowledge he had of them had come through Brendan. And now Zelda Faust said Traeger was a former CIA agent. Had he been sent to eliminate Brendan? Dear God, was the world really as brutal as all that?
“You should talk with Mrs. Faust,” he said to Purcell.
“I’ll talk with everyone.”
Later Laura took him aside. “Of course the police have taken the body to the morgue.”
John nodded. He had watched the vehicle carrying the mortal remains of his friend go off down the road to the gate.
“What’s to be done when they release the body?” Laura asked.
John could see that his sister considered the decision his. Back to Rome? Most of Brendan’s life had been spent there. But what is more insignificant than a mere priest in the vast clerical culture of the Vatican, even one who had been the right-hand man of the prefect of the Vatican Library, a post Brendan himself had been filling on an interim basis?
“Ireland,” he said.
“Of course. You’ll contact the family?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
He would contact Brendan’s bishop in County Clare. But how in the name of God was he to describe to him what had happened to one of his priests, and one he had scarcely known?
One thing was certain, he himself could not remain in the building where Brendan had been so savagely killed.
IV
“He gave me instruction.”
Heather answered as best she could the questions Detective Purcell asked her about the scene she and Traeger had come upon when they got to Brendan Crowe’s suite in the Empedocles guest residence. All she had to do was shut her eyes to find that it was imprinted indelibly on her memory. She spoke as if describing the image rather than the reality.
“Why did you go to the guest building?” Purcell asked. His pencil was poised over a little notebook, ready to go into action when answers were given to his questions.
“To show Mr. Traeger the way.”
“He asked to go there?”
“Father Crowe had gone there, saying he would be back soon, and the delay bothered Traeger.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
Heather did not like this. She could see that he was puttin
g an interpretation on her words, perhaps the true one. Traeger had been concerned by Father Crowe’s absence, indicating perhaps that he suspected he was in danger. The fact that Traeger was not there to be asked these questions irked Purcell.
“You arrived together?”
“At the guest building? Yes.”
“And he entered the suite first?” Purcell went on.
“Yes.”
“How long was he alone there?”
“I was at his side.”
“You went into the suite, too?”
From the doorway, she had seen the open door of the bedroom beyond the sitting room, the body on the bed, blood. It had drawn her like a magnet.
“What did you do?”
Heather looked at him. She did not want to provide occasion for derision. She said softly, “I blessed him.”
Of course Purcell thought she was still in a state of shock, but the shock had lifted soon after she had brought the awful news back to the others and they had run off to the guest building. The Fausts stayed where they were, whispering to one another, and Heather had gone outside. If Purcell had asked when she last saw Traeger, she would have told him of giving the man the keys to her car. But he didn’t ask. He assumed that she had last seen Traeger in the suite in the guest building.
She did not regret helping Traeger get away. She liked him, she scarcely knew why. And she understood the desire to flee the awful scene in the guest suite.
John Burke announced that he wanted to move to a rectory in town, a decision that displeased Mr. Hannan.
“You’re perfectly safe here, Father.”
“That isn’t it.”
Laura explained the young priest’s reluctance to stay in the building where his friend had been so brutally killed. Laura made the arrangements, of course, after consultation with Heather Adams. Was there anything she couldn’t do?
“Could you drive John there, Heather?”
“My car is gone.”
“What?”
“It’s not in the parking lot, Laura.”
“For heaven’s sake, you should have mentioned that before.”
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