Precious Blood(108)

“Sin without atonement,” he was saying, “leads you to live a lie. And that’s what so many of us do. We live a lie. And we think nobody else in the world knows our secret.”

That’s what so many of us do. We live a lie. Barry felt his stomach roll over. Where had he been, during that broadcast? What had he been thinking about? He’d been so hyped up over the deal with Mark Candor, so high on the audience, he hadn’t been listening. It wasn’t until the show was over and he was back in this office that he’d begun to think about what Andy had been saying and to realize it was odd. It wasn’t until much, much later that he’d been able to run the tape and check for himself. He should have known something was going on. Andy never sat forward like that, all tense, unless he was up to something serious.

We think nobody else in the world knows our secret.

He got out of his chair and crossed the room. Gregor Demarkian had rewound the tape again and was replaying the “we live a lie” speech. He was pointing at the screen and saying something to Smith in a voice too low for Barry to make out the words. Smith was shaking his head.

Barry put his hand on the back of Gregor Demarkian’s chair and said, “Did you find what you wanted?”

Demarkian shut off the tape and turned around. “I found exactly what I wanted. I take it you found it, too. This is what you wanted to show Sister Scholastica, when you went over to the convent yesterday?”

Sister Scholastica, Barry thought. Kath. He said, “Yes. That’s right. I—I’d been watching it. Running it over and over again. And it was strange.”

“It’s still strange,” Smith said.

Barry shook his head. “I suppose it is. I wish I knew what he’d been getting at. He wouldn’t have been like that if he hadn’t had something specific on his mind. Something he didn’t want to say outright.”

“Had he done things like this before?” Demarkian asked. “Used your show, I mean, to imply things.”

“You mean to send little coded messages?” Barry smiled. “Oh, yes. He did it all the time. It was usually some parishioner of his that was getting on his nerves. He was great at figuring things out from half-hints and inconsistencies, little things nobody else paid attention to. Mistresses. Financial problems. Those kinds of things. If he found out something like that about somebody who was bothering him, he would—”

“Twit,” Gregor said.

“I suppose everybody’s told you that,” Barry said.

“Did Andy Walsh’s parishioners generally watch your program? You’ve been very consistently anti-Catholic over the years, from what I’ve heard.”

There was a metal folding chair standing against the wall, left over from a staff meeting they’d had a week ago. It should have been taken out and put away, but for some reason it hadn’t been. Barry pulled it over, opened it up, and sat down.

“Everybody watched that talk show,” he said, “even the Cardinal himself. I don’t have courtroom proof about the Cardinal, but I know it anyway. He’d sermonize about me when he thought I’d been really awful. But even if Andy’s parishioners weren’t all tuned in, or taping to tune in later, they would all have heard eventually. Andy was my most popular guest. People talked about the things he said, especially when he was being outrageous.”

“Would you call what he was doing on this program being outrageous?” Demarkian asked.

Barry shrugged. “It would depend. On who was watching it. My natural constituency wouldn’t have thought it was outrageous at all. Fundamentalists talk a lot about the Devil. They believe in him. Catholics are supposed to believe in him, too—I think Pope Paul VI wrote a whole encyclical about how the Devil was real—but your ordinary day-today American Catholic doesn’t, not really. We’ve all gotten very middle class, and the Devil so very low rent. I think Andy’s ordinary parishioners would have been shocked.”

“Shocked,” John Smith said. “After everything else that nut did?”

“Andy was a nut, Lieutenant, but he was a liberal nut. They expected him to consecrate oat bran muffins. They didn’t expect him to start ranting and raving about the forces of Hell. I’m not sure Andy actually believed in Hell.”

“What about you?” Smith said. “Do you think Andy Walsh is in Hell now?”

It was one of those questions he was constantly being asked by people who had not been born again. He couldn’t have given Smith what he wanted, which was a foaming mouth and a pair of fanatically mad eyes, so he didn’t answer it. He turned to Gregor Demarkian instead. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about this tape, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve gone over and over everything and everyone I can remember. I don’t know what Andy was getting at. I don’t have the faintest idea.”