The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “And Ignatius Hannan?”

  “A Barnum and Bailey Catholic.”

  John laughed. “My sister is his administrative assistant.”

  “You understand I don’t know the man. I’m not judging him. But he came by once with Heather and wanted to write a check for any amount I named.” Krucek grinned. “I said, ‘Make it out for a dollar.’ And he did.” He pulled open his desk drawer and brought out a check. “I kept it as a souvenir.”

  When the conversation got back to Brendan, John told the pastor that it had apparently been a break-in. That was, if not the whole truth, true. Brendan had gone to his room and apparently surprised the thief.

  “What was he after?”

  John shrugged. That was what made the thing so pointless. How could anything there have been possibly worth having? The thief might just as well have come snooping through John’s suite. Perhaps just the reputation of Empedocles and Ignatius Hannan’s known wealth would make a thief think the place was chock-full of gold. But to kill? The Empedocles complex lost a good deal of its taut efficiency after the discovery of the body. It was odd that it was the women who kept their heads. Laura, of course, but Heather, too. On the drive to the rectory Heather told him that she had made the sign of the cross over the body.

  “That was all right, wasn’t it, Father?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? That was exactly the thing to do.” He himself, he was afraid, had come too late to be of any good to Brendan’s soul.

  “And I said a Hail Mary. Now and at the hour of our death.

  Life is learning how to die.”

  And now John remembered that she said she’d been told that when she took instruction.

  Krucek said, “I was misquoting Plato, as you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Philosophizing is learning how to die. Sounds morbid, but try to find a philosopher who isn’t fixated on death.”

  There was a miniature television set in the study. Krucek turned it on for the eight o’clock news. The account of what had happened at Empedocles was so enigmatic it said nothing. The emphasis was on the recovery of the stolen car in which the assailant had fled the grounds. A rental car. There was footage of the replica of the grotto of Lourdes on the grounds of Empedocles. Krucek sighed.

  “That’s the biggest obstacle for most converts, devotion to Mary.”

  “Was that true of Heather?”

  Krucek shook his head. “She saw the point of it without any difficulty. I just hope Hannan’s enthusiasm doesn’t affect her. It has to be made clear that devotion to the Mother of God is integral to the economy of salvation. Enthusiasts seem sometimes to forget who Mary is the mother of. She wouldn’t like that.”

  “I notice that your parishioners say the rosary before your Mass begins.”

  “It’s an old custom here. That’s probably why we’re still in business. Do young priests say the rosary every day, Father?”

  John did not want to speak on behalf young priests. He said he himself did.

  “Good. One thing I’m willing to bet. These characters who are costing the Church millions? They drifted away from prayer, lost their devotion to Mary. How in God’s name could they go on functioning as priests, doing what they were doing?”

  It was one of the great mysteries of the day, all the more poignant when delinquent priests were contrasted with a solid pastor like Krucek.

  V

  “I am fully occupied here, Ignatius.”

  The information came to Father Jean-Jacques Trepanier from various sources, a bit here, a bit there, and then began to assume a pattern that gave him pause. Something very strange had occurred down the road at the Empedocles complex.

  First, there was a break-in, already a bit of a surprise if one credited the stories about the security of the place. Then, a death that became a murder. The victim was a priest! An Irish priest from Rome. Jay went into his office, sat in the chair behind the desk, and turned slowly as if in search of his bearings.

  The news that had been coming out of Rome over the past several weeks was equally disturbing. Oh, not in the usual sense, but because of the sudden demise of the secretary of state—an old foe of Jay’s who had tried to get him suspended—and also Cardinal Maguire at the Vatican Library. Of course, the Vatican was full of old men, and old men die, and yet there was the persistent suggestion from Jay’s principal source that these deaths had not been accidental. His attention was drawn to the young priest Buffoni in the outer office of the secretary of state who had also died that day.

  “I hadn’t heard that. Died how?”

  “He was said to be a diabetic,” Harris said.

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “Diabetes is not a fatal disease. And then there’s the basilica guard.”

  Jay had to be wary of his Roman informants, one of whom, Harris, was connected with the Confraternity of Pius IX and seemed not to know of the enmity that had sprung up between Jay and Bishop Catena. Or did know and was trying to send him off on a wild goose chase. An odd phrase, that. Didn’t one chase tame geese? More likely when you stop to think of it, since you had them confined in the farmyard. But back to the news from Rome.

  The latest was that those deaths had not been accidental and that something was missing from the archives.

  “Something?” Careful, careful.

  Harris did not care to guess, but of course when one thought . . . The speaker stopped himself. Listening, Jay became more wary still. He was more than willing to expose himself to criticism, even obloquy, in the cause of Our Blessed Lady. The abuse that had been heaped on his head by those who did not want to hear what Mary demanded of them Jay considered a badge of honor. But he was on sure ground when underscoring in season and out the unequivocal demand of the Blessed Virgin that Russia be dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Why should so simple a thing be considered a problem?

  Of course he caught the drift of what he was being told by Harris, in part because it was he who was being told. The supposed theft from the Vatican Library had something to do with Fatima. One didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to jump from that to the third secret. But Jay wasn’t going to make that jump on the basis of the information he presently had. Besides, he had as much as ceded the third secret to others.

  Not that he considered it unimportant. God forbid. Any message from Our Lady was more than important. But arguments about the third secret became technical, seemed to require scholarship, paleography, not to mention a grasp of Portuguese. All that could bewilder the simple faithful. But who could not understand what Our Lady meant when she asked the pope and all the bishops to dedicate Russia to Her Immaculate Heart?

  Putting together what had happened down at Empedocles against that Roman background produced puzzling but fascinating results. Thank God for Zelda Lewis.

  She had called all aflutter to tell him that she had remarried.

  Jay was a little miffed. “Who presided?”

  “Oh, it was in Rome. Father Trepanier, I am as surprised as anyone. Imagine, at my age . . .”

  He was not good at guessing the ages of women, particularly those like Zelda who could afford to expend large sums to offset the ravages of time. Of course he congratulated her. Of course he would be happy to bless the newlyweds. Zelda had always been generous, but it wasn’t a matter of quid pro quo. There was no trace of simony at Fatima Now! Maybe a little rivalry, of a healthy kind. The kind there had been between the apostles. The Confraternity of Pius IX was a distant competitor, if in fact even deserving of the name competitor. Catena had no sense at all of the power and possibility of modern communications. The man still relied on a newsletter! And now Ignatius Hannan had resolved to set up a Marian foundation of some kind. The billionaire seemed unclear just what kind. But he was determined to do something to manifest the return of his faith and his obviously sincere devotion to Mary. He had asked Jay to bless the replica of the grotto at Lourdes when it was completed, and of course he had complied. When, later,
Hannan told him of his new great idea and actually advanced the notion that Jay might drop what he was doing and become its director, tact had been required to tell the man no.

  “I am fully occupied here, Ignatius.”

  “We could combine the two operations!”

  Jay had looked at Hannan as Jonah had looked at the whale. He would be swallowed up in anything Hannan launched. He was not proud of the resentment he felt at the suggestion, because it was pride, vainglory, as if he were the object of his efforts and not the spread of the message of Fatima. How odd that one’s imperfections often prompted the right decision. Imagine if he had succumbed to Hannan’s blandishments. He would now be implicated in whatever had gone on at Empedocles.

  Yesterday, Zelda and her new husband had stopped by for a blessing on their marriage. Jay had taken them to the chapel, donned alb and stole, lit the candles on the altar, and had them kneel on prie-dieux before him. He was responding to Zelda’s descriptions of their breezy nuptials in the sacristy of Santa Susanna. In the old ritual he used he found a perhaps appropriate prayer, one to be said over wives expecting or wanting to expect children. It was in Latin, of course, so there was no need to explain the prayer. Gabriel Faust knew Latin.

  “That smile on Zelda’s face is not the smile of Sarah, Father.”

  “I believe Sarah laughed.”

  “Well, she was older than Zelda. In our case, a smile will do.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Zelda demanded.

  “Boy talk,” Faust said, and Jay hadn’t liked that at all. For that matter, he didn’t much care for Gabriel Faust. But that was before the three of them sat down and had a good talk. Faust, it emerged, was to be the director of Refuge of Sinners.

  “Mr. Hannan sees it as complementary to your efforts, Father.”

  “We must all work together,” Zelda cried.

  “What on earth happened at Empedocles the other day?” Jay asked.

  It turned out that the two of them had been there, Faust to be interviewed for his new position. The mention of two visiting priests came as news to Jay.

  “I wonder if I know them.”

  “They’re both from Rome. One is Laura Burke’s brother. He works in the Vatican, you know.”

  “So did the one who was killed,” Faust said.

  “Killed?”

  Zelda told him all about it, emphasizing her reaction to what had happened. Father Trepanier could not imagine what it was like, to be right there when a man was killed, and a priest at that.

  “Brendan Crowe,” Faust said and pieces of the puzzle flew into a pattern.

  Crowe had been the assistant to Cardinal Maguire, and had been appointed acting prefect of the Vatican Library when the cardinal died. His visitors did not see the parallel between the murder at Empedocles and what had happened to Crowe’s former superior.

  “I wonder what the thief was after,” Jay said ruminatively.

  They had no idea. But there was more.

  The man who was being sought by the police, Vincent Traeger, had been a colleague of Zelda’s first husband in the CIA.

  “What on earth was he doing there?”

  But he was answering the question in his own mind. His informant with connections to the Confraternity of Pius IX had been certain the events in Rome had been somehow connected with the third secret of Fatima. Of course everything was connected to the third secret in the minds of people like Catena. At the moment that did not seem as far-fetched as it usually did. He developed this thought, attributing it to others with inflamed imaginations, not endorsing it himself. Faust was fascinated.

  “Tell me about the third secret.”

  Jay did, putting the matter as succinctly as he could, and feeling as he did and as he had before that the matter was too recondite for easy consumption.

  “Cardinal Ratzinger professed to make the whole thing public, in the year two thousand, when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

  “Professed?”

  “There are those who think that the heart of the secret was withheld.” He sought to distance himself from such critics, but within he found himself struck by the way near and far events seemed to converge on the secret.

  “Why?”

  Jay affected a tolerant laugh. “They are certain Our Lady condemned Vatican II.”

  Faust was more interested in all this than was Zelda. She was looking surreptitiously at her watch. “Gabriel, we have to get on to Empedocles.”

  They rose and Jay went with them to their car. After he handed Zelda in, Gabriel Faust said, “We have to talk more of this, Father.”

  “Anytime, anytime.”

  VI

  “They think I did it.”

  Traeger was letting his beard grow, and he felt a bit like Saddam Hussein when he emerged from his hole in the ground. He was staying in a Red Roof Inn off the interstate that connected Empedocles with Father Trepanier’s operation. The pursuit for him continued with the current supposition that he had headed for Canada. It is best for the pursuer to double back on the pursued, to keep him close. Of course, he now had two pursuers, whoever had killed Crowe and the police, local and state. Hence this motel. He had been briefed on Trepanier by Rodriguez when he put through a call to him in Rome. News of Traeger’s plight in New Hampshire had not yet got through to Vatican security.

  “You’ve lost another man, Carlos.”

  He told him about Crowe. No need to spell out for Rodriguez the connection between Crowe’s death and Cardinal Maguire’s. Carlos wanted all the details, and Traeger gave them, saving the pièce de résistance for last.

  “They think I did it.”

  How pleasant long-distance laughter from the land of sun and wine can be when one is holed up in a cheap motel, the object of a police search and trying to avoid an assassin.

  “I left without saying good-bye. They can hardly be blamed for suspecting me.”

  “Why did you leave?” Rodriguez reasonably asked.

  “I went in pursuit of the assailant. He drove off in the car I had rented. I got hold of another and followed him.”

  “And?”

  “We haven’t found one another yet.”

  Rodriguez said, “Of course you’ll have help over there.”

  Carlos meant his associates in the CIA. Traeger had no desire to have the search for Crowe’s murderer become a major project of the agency. Dortmund was not answering his phone down on Chesapeake Bay. After talking with Rodriguez, Traeger called Bea to see if Dortmund had tried to reach him there.

  “No. Would you like me to put you through to him?”

  “Good idea.”

  He sat listening to the phone ring unanswered for maybe a dozen times.

  “He doesn’t seem to be there,” Bea said.

  “You’re right. He’s not that hard of hearing.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  His problem was that he didn’t know who if anyone Dortmund had informed of his mission to the Vatican. If he knew Dortmund, he would have wanted to keep it under his own hat. His criticisms of what had happened to the agency of late were not just theoretical. He told Bea he would be in touch.

  “Do you have the number of my cell phone?” he asked her.

  “You said I needn’t have it.”

  “That’s probably best. À bientôt.”

  “Hasta la vista.”

  Bea was not unequivocally proud of her Franco-American background.

  Traeger lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling, which was as blank as his mind. He was trying to imagine what he would do if he were in Anatoly’s place. Presuming that it was Anatoly who had followed him after he left Empedocles. Too bad they couldn’t all just sit down, Anatoly, Dortmund, and himself, to discuss what had gone wrong with the outfits they once had worked for. That was a conversation he had had with Dortmund the last time they were together.

  It had been so simple then: the other side the bad guys, your side the good guys. Two super
powers duking it out for global hegemony. Would Anatoly think his side had lost? We are all capitalists now. The Berlin Wall had come down and the USSR had fallen to pieces, literally, with the constituent republics gaining the autonomy that had been merely fictional when all they had been was another vote in the UN for Moscow to cast. All the ethnic differences that had been suppressed now had free expression. We laughed when the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan. Now they were fighting Muslims in their old territory.

  But who wasn’t? In the old days, no one had worried about Muslims. All we had to do was buy oil and let Iran and Iraq shoot the hell out of one another. Palestine kept flaring up, but that seemed local, between them and Israel, and Israel was our ally. The indecisive Gulf War and now the prolonged presence in Iraq, following on 9/11, had changed everything.

  “Some planners we had,” Dortmund said. “They should have seen it coming.”

  No need to go into what the agency had done in the Middle East that had contributed to the present situation.

  “Once we had the Cold War, nice and neat, you nuke me and I’ll nuke you.” Dortmund almost sounded wistful.

  “MAD.”

  “Mutual Assured Destruction. Mad in the other sense, too, except that it made sense. It worked.” This had been an article in their creed.

  “Until our buildup bankrupted the Soviet Union.”

  “And now we’ve got guerrilla warfare,” Dortmund lamented. “At home and abroad.”