by G. C. Harmon
Behind him, he found Father Richard at the bar, wielding an ice pick.
“Put it down and step away from the bar,” Steve ordered. Richard realized what was happening, and he stepped out, leaving the icepick behind.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Gilotti demanded. “What are you doing?”
“I know all about “Special Emissaries from the Vatican.” Collar or no collar, you’re here to do whatever dirty work the Pope wants. Including killing someone.”
Steve’s eyes darted between the two as he stepped back to give himself a bit of distance. He kept his hand on the pistol holstered under his left arm but did not draw. Glancing between them, it dawned on him that the shocked looks on their faces might be genuine. “Step over here with your partner.”
With his eyes locked on the tense cop, Richard slowly sidled over to Gilotti. Steve edged over to the bar. He noted some drops of water…and then an ice bucket on a counter behind and below the bar. A large chunk of ice cubes had frozen together inside. Steve was feeling more and more embarrassed by the moment.
“I’m sorry, father,” Richard whispered, “there were several cubes stuck together—”
Gilotti waved him to silence. “You think we want you dead?”
Steve had visibly calmed down. “If you want to keep more scandal from piling onto your church, killing a cop will not accomplish that.”
“Young man, I’m trying to help you.”
Steve glanced at the priest as he reached into a briefcase on the desk next to him and pulled out a file folder.
“What’s this?” Steve asked.
“This is the file on Father Fitzhugh. Bishop Tobin has been in conference calls with certain Cardinals in the Vatican as well as those over him here in California. He asked for and received permission to provide this to the Police department. He faxed it to Vatican City for their review, and they emailed it to me to give to you.”
Steve had removed his hand from his gun, but still regarded the priest with suspicious eyes. “And it’s been scrubbed clean of any pertinent information?”
“I assure you, nothing has been removed from the file.”
Steve hesitated, conveying his doubt of the validity of what Gilotti was offering him.
Gilotti stepped forward and dropped the file on the bed. “If you take the time look through the file, the information will take you in a whole new direction. For instance, Father Fitzhugh came to this country from Ireland. And he came from a time of…trouble…in his old country.”
Steve had a sudden realization. “You’re talking about the Northern Ireland conflict? What the Irish refer to as “The Troubles?”
Gilotti nodded. “According to what I read, Father Fitzhugh escaped that conflict to join the seminary. His condition for being accepted for sanctuary as well as instruction was to write a full statement of his involvement in the conflict. It makes for very compelling reading.”
Steve stepped forward and picked up the file. It was close to an inch thick, and he thumbed through it. He found the statement and glanced over the first couple pages. The statement appeared to be lengthy, several pages making a packet large enough that a simple staple was insufficient to hold it together. It was clamped together.
Steve’s mind raced with the new information, and he slowly paged through the packet, glancing over the narrative but not really taking anything in yet. He looked up at Gilotti. “How long do I have access to this?”
“You are free to take the file, Sergeant, though I trust it will remain confidential.”
Steve nodded. “I will see that it is never publicly released, and eventually returned to the church.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I have nothing further to offer you, and if you don’t mind, I am feeling jetlagged.”
“One more quick question,” Steve said. “Was the information he provided ever given over to British authorities?”
“I really don’t know. What would that mean?”
“It gives credence to revenge being a motive for the attack,” Steve explained. “Either someone is after him for turning them in, or it could be another revenge trip that we have not discovered yet.”
Gilotti betrayed nothing by his expression.
“Thank you for the information,” Steve said, edging toward the door. Before opening it, he turned back and said, “Oh, and I’m sorry about the whole…” he waved his hand, as no one needed reminding of what had just happened. He received a simple nod, and he ducked out the door. Gilotti and Richard looked at each other, and the Frenchman noted the satisfied look in his companion’s eyes. They would not have to deal with accusations of priest abuse anymore.
Steve rode the elevator down and walked out to the garage, too deep in thought to really process where he was going. His mind was overwhelmed with the new information. A connection to Ireland’s violent history opened up many possibilities to this case. The flipside of this was something sinister on the part of the Catholic Church. The question occurred to him, by providing this new information, were the priests from the Vatican actually trying to mislead him?
When he got to his car and started the engine, he suddenly stopped for a second. Aloud, he asked himself, “Holy crap, did I almost pull my gun on a priest?”
Driving back to Hall of Justice, Steve went over in his mind what he knew about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Admittedly, it wasn’t much.
Since the 1960s, and truthfully for a long time before that, conflict had arisen between Catholic areas of Northern Ireland that wanted to separate from the UK and Protestant loyalists that wanted to keep Ireland united and under British rule. There was a political organization known as Sinn Fein trying to diplomatically deal with the problems between the Catholics, the Protestants and British. But when this proved to be too ineffective, they formed their own paramilitary resistance group, the IRA, or Irish Republican Army. A wave of bombings and assassinations attributed to the IRA occurred across Ireland between the late 1960s and the late 1990s. The British Army was sent in, and they occupied much of the land. This served more to anger the separatists and made the Army a convenient target for the IRA and multiple splinter factions. The conflict eventually resulted in a divided Ireland, with much of the country becoming the independent “Republic of Ireland” and a territory still staying loyal to the United Kingdom known simply as “Northern Ireland.”
There’s a thirty year history, Steve realized, as well as smaller incidents still happening to prolong tensions in the area. What incident during that entire period had led to this priest suddenly now being on the run?
Steve parked his SUV in the garage beneath the Hall of Justice and hurried to the elevator, the file folder held under his arm. He chafed at the delay as he rode the elevator up, but then fished out his phone and fired off a text to Captain Stanson, asking him to meet at the Special Forces office. As he hurried along the hallways, he came across the Captain approaching the door to the office. Steve led him quickly inside. All eyes turned his way as Blazer entered with the Captain.
“I just got a major new lead,” Steve announced. Addressing the Captain, he said, “I just met with two priests who come to us from the Vatican. They authorized the release to us of Father Fitzhugh’s personnel file. In fact they handed it to me directly.” To the rest of the team, he said, “I’m still going over it, but what they disclosed to me is that Fitzhugh may have ties to the Irish Republican Army.”
The team exchanged glances of surprise. Stanson leaned forward, now keenly interested.
“Cap, how much do you know about ‘the Troubles’?”
“I know some. Irish Catholics were being discriminated against by a Protestant British government. They started protesting, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Irish Police, tried to suppress it. Violence met with violence and led to thirty years of conflict.”
Steve had noticed that Dave and A.J. were showing keen interest. “Sir, who were the key players in this conflict?” A.J. asked.
“It gets kind of c
onfusing,” Stanson explained. “The territory in question is generally known as Ulster. From what I understand, the Catholics in the north wanted to break away from the UK and formed the Irish Republican Army in response to the violence against them. The Ulster loyalists, who were protestant, were the ones that wanted Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. But they were also doing most of the oppressing. Britain ended up sending in the Army, which only served to escalate things. The Army tried separating the two factions, but they just made a target of themselves. From there, both sides starting getting factions splitting off, which further confused things. But with the riots, bombings and other murders, the whole conflict resulted in over three thousand killed.”
In the back of the room, Brian whistled at that number.
“With this new knowledge,” Steve went on, “It opens up a whole new range of possibilities as to what happened at that cathedral last night. I did ask if it was possible that Fitzhugh fingered someone in the conflict and put a target on his head. They didn’t know. We need to find out. Something in this priest’s past in Ireland has him on the run. I’m going to look through this file and see what I can come up with. In the meantime, I want you guys to do some independent research and familiarize yourselves with the Irish Troubles.”
“What about that card we found in Fitzhugh’s quarters?” Scot asked. “That was for an Irish pub here in town. Seems like that just became a more critical lead.”
“Yes. Toward end of shift, a couple of us are going to head there and ask around.”
Everyone rolled their chairs back to their desks and began working their computers. Stanson edged toward the door, asking that Steve keep him posted. Once he was gone, Blazer fired off a quick text to his Dad, asking how his trip down memory lane was going. In moments, the elder Blazer replied, “Grand. But I am looking forward to spending some time with me boy tonight.”
Steve replied, letting him know he would nail down a time when they should meet at his apartment. He finally settled down to read through the Fitzhugh file. The statement was obviously written by a much younger man, but the narrative was fairly detailed, and Steve felt himself catapulted back in time nearly forty years to a cold and distant land…
The Statement of Ryan Fitzhugh
January 26, The year of our Lord 1984
In order for me to leave behind a life of violence, renounce the sins of my past, and hopefully show my sincerity as I enter the priesthood, the elders of the church have asked me to write this statement and chronicle my experiences in Ireland, during what had come to be known as “The Troubles.”
I grew up in a small town called Newry, some thirty-five miles from Belfast. I suppose the town could be considered a suburb, but I’ve always felt like Newry was cut off from the big city. Newry is located in two different counties. The town itself was bisected by the Clanrye River, which also serves as a county line between Counties Armagh and Down. Our city council actually is built straddling the river, as it serves both counties.
I grew up hating the British. My father complained daily about being unable to find work in Newry or the surrounding areas in Ulster. My Da liked his whiskey. As I reached high school, he talked more openly about his sympathy for the Irish Republican Army. My mother is of Scottish descent herself, and a long sufferin’ woman was she. She once sent me to the local pub to beg my Da to come home. I found my Da speaking with several individuals that I later found were part of an IRA cell that had begun operations in our small town.
I also found support for the IRA among some of my schoolmates. Try as they might, most parents can’t keep that whole thing from their kids. Most of us grew up with their stories of relatives being harassed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Ulster Police.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to explain the Troubles. If such a thing can be done. Even growing up in the middle of it, I could not keep some factions correct. For generations, we Irish Catholics have been, or at least felt, oppressed. When it came to housing, other groups within the class system of the United Kingdom so frequently took precedent over good Catholic families that simply need a roof over their heads. Jobs were scarce as well, so frequently going to Protestants instead of good hard-workin’ Catholics. We Catholics finally began to stand up for ourselves, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary stepped up their oppression, becoming more violent towards us. The Irish Republican Army was formed to resist this. But over the years, factions within both sides of the conflict broke off, becoming more and more extreme, until it blurred the reasons for the fight. And then the British got involved, coming in to try and keep the peace, only to have it explode in their faces. In my town of Newry, the RUCs were the object of our hatred, though the British Army came in later, as I will explain.
My best friend was a young man named Cullen Riordan, who was actually my cousin on my father’s side. Cullen and I were the same age, and we hung out together much of our young lives. He had a little brother who would often bother us about coming along on our adventures, but as we got older and into high school, Cullen started finding ways to exclude him from our activities.
My da drank himself to death before I graduated high school. At the time, I was able to connect his death to the stress of the harassment against him for being Catholic. It was easy to blame the RUC and the British for that loss.
My high school graduation, what should have been a joyful occasion was subdued. Violence in the community kept a damper on much of the festivities. With my father gone, I didn’t feel much like celebrating anyway.
I recall many instances of violence, much of it the Royal Ulster Constabulary harassing residents of the town. I learned later that they were hearing rumors of an IRA cell lurking under the surface of the town, and they were looking for any who were involved. One of these instances escalated to where the RUC officers beat a man to death in the street. I was leaving a church service with my mum when Cullen ran up and breathlessly told us of the incident. I ran off with him. Mum called after me, begging me not to go, but to my shame, I went. There was a growing demonstration near the city hall protesting the man’s murder, and we joined them. The crowd was being held back by Police, but the masses were growing in numbers, and it was only a matter of time before the RUCs were overrun. Sure enough, the protest soon turned into a riot. People began to throw whatever they could at the RUCs, mostly rocks and bottles, and I found myself joining in the rock throwing.
I must have impressed someone. Two days later, Cullen and I were summoned to a gathering at the local bar. We were brought into a back room where a small group was gathered. Everyone was drinking ale, and though I was only eighteen years old, I was encouraged to join in. Soon, one of the older men was giving a ranting speech about their inability to find work and the harassment of the Constabulary, simply because of their faith. He went on and on about the ways our kind were discriminated against. Looking back, I feel like I was being indoctrinated into the IRA. But I was only too willing to believe what I was told. After all, my da had lived it.
The next afternoon, the protests against the RUCs for the murdered man continued. However, while Cullen and I were gathered with hundreds of others at the town center near the RUC headquarters, we witnessed something frightful. Army trucks began rolling into the area. It appeared the riots yesterday had gone beyond what the RUCs could handle, and they had called in reinforcements. The trucks lined up along the nearby river, six in all. Orders were shouted, and the soldiers jumped from the open backed trucks and went into formation. Moments later, they were marched toward the Police station, where they hurriedly went into a human barricade two lines deep between the protestors at the building. This was not the SAS Special Forces that was later sent in to deal with IRA cells. This was but a lesser Infantry battalion. In fact, some of the lower enlisted men seemed to be mere kids themselves. The soldiers carried their L1Al rifles, the variation on the FN FAL. Not being an expert on weapons, I put this information in merely because that is what I was told that they carried by my
IRA cell, and they showed me how to recognize them.
The crowds began shouting at the soldiers, but they stood fast. Cullen grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowds, dragging me to the front, until we were at the barricades, practically face to face with the soldiers. All around us, people were shouting at them, spitting in their faces. The situation threatened to explode again into violence any second.
The shouts, the taunts…they froze in my throat as I looked at one young soldier before me. The soldier was really just a boy, no older than me. He was not tall and strong, just a waif of a boy whose uniform draped over an almost frail build. But what drove me to silence was the look of fear in the boy’s eyes. He stood there stoically, willing himself to not back down from the threat, even as his body threatened to shake and give away his fear. I felt like I was staring at myself in a mirror. This was what I was supposed to hate?
My mum had begun going to church more after my father died, and of course dragged me with her. The parish priest at Newry Cathedral seemed to take a liking to me, and I guess I was a curious lad. With my father now gone, I found myself curious about the ways of God and where a soul goes after death. I had many conversations with Father Flanagan about theology and church doctrine. But along the way, I picked up on an interesting fact. Despite being a man of God, Father Flanagan was an IRA sympathizer. I struggled in my mind trying to reconcile the man of God who held the political views of a group that wanted its independence and used violence to fight for it.
I had a meeting with Father Flanagan where I specifically described the incident at the riot, seeing the young British soldier standing fast in the face of such anger. Flanagan did not respond right away, and I shifted my focus to that of the young man who was killed by the Constabulary. I gave voice to the question millions of people who struggle to believe in God have asked, the question others use to justify non-belief. If God is ever present and all powerful—and loves his children—why does he allow bad things like that to happen?