A Great Day for the Deadly(6)

“A message.”

“Just a minute.” The tiny woman rushed to the back, made her way along a row of severely high-tech-looking pigeonholes, and came up with a large manila envelope. It wasn’t what Gregor would have called a message, but it was from the Archdiocese of New York. The letterhead was big and bold enough to read all the way across at the counter where he was standing.

“Here,” the tiny woman said, thrusting the thing at him. “It came in about two hours ago, and right after it did we got a phone call, and you wouldn’t believe how insistent they were. It’s stamped all over with urgent, too. They must have a crisis on their hands.”

If they did, Gregor didn’t see what it would have to do with him. He didn’t know anybody at the Archdiocese of New York. He opened the envelope and peered inside. Inside there was another envelope, a padded mailer, with a note taped to its side. Gregor pulled the mailer out and read the note.

“This arrived this morning from Cardinal O’Bannion” the note said. “He has impressed on us that the matter is urgent.”

“The matter is urgent,” Gregor said out loud.

“What?” the tiny woman asked him.

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “Thank you. I’ll take care of this now.”

“I’d find a phone if I were you,” the woman said. “They really were very, very insistent.”

“I’m sure they were.” Gregor hardly blamed them. Cardinal O’Bannion was a very insistent man. From what he’d heard, Cardinal O’Connor could be a very insistent man, too. If John O’Bannion was really intent on getting in touch with Gregor Demarkian—and the effort involved to track Gregor down at the Hilton suggested he was—the clerks at the Archdiocese had probably been driven absolutely crazy since the message came in.

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.”