Murder Superior(40)

“I’d spent twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Then there were the simple procedural matters,” Reverend Mother General went on. “Who to call. Who to contact. What to report and how. It isn’t 1950 anymore, you know.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, beginning to get lost. “I know.”

Reverend Mother General wasn’t Bennis Hannaford, or Sister Mary Scholastica either. She clarified the point immediately. “What we’ve got to accept,” she said, “is that with the world the way it is and the way it’s going, we’re going to find ourselves dealing with the sorts of people who make dealing with the police more and more necessary. There are a lot of lunatics out there these days, Mr. Demarkian, and a lot of bigots. Just two months ago one of our Sisters was mugged in Boston—in habit, yet. Just three weeks ago, two of our Sisters in Detroit were hospitalized from wounds received from sniper fire. We staff parochial schools in every ghetto in the country and we’re proud to do it. Most of the people we deal with would be fine, upstanding citizens of any community they happened to live in, they just don’t have much money. Unfortunately—”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“Cocaine,” Reverend Mother General said.

“Mmm,” Gregor said again.

“It’s not the people who use it you have to worry about,” Reverend Mother continued. “It’s the people who sell it. So you must see what I mean. You must see what our problem is.”

“Actually,” Gregor said, “I don’t exactly understand how I could be helpful in this sort of…”

“But of course you do,” Reverend Mother General said.

“But of course I don’t,” Gregor insisted. The only advice I could give would be to pull your Sisters out of the inner cities because they aren’t safe, and I couldn’t give you any advice at all about how to guard against the kind of thing that happened in Maryville last year because there isn’t any way to guard against it, so just what—”

“What we want you to do,” Reverend Mother General said, “is to write a handbook and give a little course. In procedures.”

“Procedures,” Gregor repeated.

“Procedures,” Reverend Mother General repeated. “When to call the police. When to call the FBI. How to preserve evidence. What constitutes evidence. How to handle the press—”

“Oh, no, now, if I knew how to handle the press I wouldn’t be the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

“Of course you would be. It was brilliant marketing strategy. And, of course, in most places we have the Chancery to help with the press, and sometimes that’s very good. Sometimes it’s not so good, however. You must know all these things, Mr. Demarkian. This is what you do.”

“But a project of the sort you’re talking about would really take a very long time—”

Reverend Mother General stood up, beaming. “That’s all settled then,” she said. “You’ll come in and speak to the Mothers Provincial a week from Tuesday. That’s aside from the general address you’ll be giving this week, of course, we wouldn’t deprive you of that.”

“But,” Gregor said.

“And don’t worry about the handbook,” Reverend Mother General told him. “We won’t need a draft of that for at least fourteen days.”





Chapter 5


1


IT HAD BEEN A very long Sunday morning, complete with breezes that blew unconsecrated Hosts out of baskets and bees onto the lip of the Communion   chalice, and by the time Father Stephen Monaghan was done, he was tired. He was especially tired because today had been one of what he thought of as his “death days.” By “death days” he did not mean days on which people had died. Father Stephen Monaghan was used to death in the way priests get used to death. He’d buried a couple of hundred people in his time. He had said Masses without number for the relief of souls from the sufferings of Purgatory. He could even contemplate his own death without too much difficulty. The span of a man’s life is three score and ten, the Bible said. Father Stephen Monaghan found this eminently sensible.

What Father Stephen Monaghan did not find eminently sensible were parishioners, particularly young and newly middle-aged parishioners, who seemed to have a highly peculiar idea of what life was about “Americans,” a titled British lady once said, “have somehow got the idea that death is optional.” The first time Father Stephen Monaghan had heard that quote, he’d thought it was ludicrous. That was twenty years ago. Now he said Mass on a college campus and in the churches of the surrounding towns when the college was not in session and the churches were short of priests. The people he preached to were either young or nuns. The people he preached to believed they were immortal. It was like talking to children. “Someday you’ll die,” he’d say, and they’d look at him with contempt so deep it might have bored a hole to the center of the earth. Death was a boogeyman fairy tale, as far as they were concerned.