The buzzer on the nun’s desk rang and stopped and rang again in jerky impatient spurts. The sound started suddenly and continued violently, making Gregor jump. The nun looked at the intercom, blinked, and pushed a lever. The sound was shut off.
“He’ll be right in, Your Eminence,” she said at the box, not bothering to hear what the Cardinal Archbishop might want to say. Then she switched the intercom off and turned to Gregor. “Do you like reading Time magazine?” she asked him.
Gregor looked down at his hands. He was still carrying Time. He had Newsweek stuffed into one of the pockets of his coat. “I don’t read it very often,” he told her. “This week it had an article about the, uh—”
“About the murder in it,” Sister finished for him. “Yes, I see. My order is Primitive Observance, you know. According to our Rule, we aren’t allowed to read secular magazines.”
“Do you want to?”
“To tell the truth; I tried it, when I first came to work for the Cardinal. I had to ask permission of my Superior and go through no end of trouble, and then—well, then I found it very depressing. The only thing I found more depressing was television.” She hesitated. “I have read one or two again over the past week. Since the murder.”
“You’d have got more information eavesdropping at the Cardinal’s keyhole.”
“I don’t have to eavesdrop at the Cardinal’s keyhole,” Sister said, “the Cardinal tells me far more than I want to know already. But I am worried about him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s been very upset. He’s been—brooding about all that, from last year.”
“Do you think that’s surprising, Sister?”
“No. No, I don’t think it’s surprising. I don’t think it’s healthy, either. And then there are those Sisters. The Sisters of Divine Grace.”
“What about the Sisters of Divine Grace?”
The old nun looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t mean to be critical,” she said miserably. “I understand that things have changed since I entered the convent, and besides, an active order is different from a contemplative one. That’s what my order is, contemplative. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have left the confines of our monastery in Connecticut.”
Gregor grinned. “When I was here last year, what I heard is that the Cardinal insisted.”
“Yes, he did. The Cardinal does have a tendency to insist.” Sister moved things around on her desk, biting her lip. “I know,” she said slowly, “that it takes a very different path of formation to fit a young woman for work in an active order than it would for life in a contemplative one. In an active order, you can’t treat your postulants like hothouse flowers. You’re going to send them off to teach religion in East St. Louis. And if SDG was a really modern order—you know, one of the ones where the Sisters don’t wear habits and do wear makeup and spend their time agitating for female ordination—well, maybe I could have understood it. As things go, I can’t understand it. Mr. Demarkian, what was that girl doing, walking around by herself in the middle of the morning when—”
The buzzer went off again, insanely this time, as if the Cardinal were sitting in his office, pounding on his button with a balled fist. Even Sister jumped this time, a polite little body hop that was nothing at all like Gregor’s large-scale clumsy jerk. Sister got control of herself almost at once, and leaned over to push the lever again.
“It will only be a moment, Your Eminence,” she said. “Mr. Demarkian is just on his way in.”
She released the lever and looked up at Gregor in embarrassment. “You’d better go in,” she told him. “Maybe we can talk again on your way out. His Eminence really has been very upset lately.”
“Maybe I can calm him down,” Gregor said.
Sister shot him a look of such pure skepticism, it could only have been managed by a nun.
“On the day someone calms the Cardinal Archbishop down,” Sister said, “the Pope will fire every member of the Curia and restaff the Vatican with Lutherans. Go talk to the man before he has an attack of apoplexy and I get stuck being the one to get him to the hospital.”
[2]
Sister wasn’t the first person who had told Gregor about the Cardinal’s long continued problems with “all that happened here last year.” Gregor had heard the same from several people, including from Father Tibor, who had had lunch with O’Bannion in Philadelphia only three months before.
“The man looks as if he is in the middle of a breakdown, Krekor,” Tibor had said. “I am very worried. You have met John. You know he is not a man likely to have breakdowns.”