Precious Blood(41)

“I wonder what Andy wants with anything.” Judy looked around for her pocketbook, didn’t find it, and bit her lip. “I must have left my purse at St. Agnes’s. I’ve probably had my wallet stolen by now. Is Joe going to Mass by himself tonight?”

“Yes, he is.”

“I’ll come back then,” Judy said. “We’ve got to talk this thing out, Peg. I don’t know what Andy’s up to, but I don’t trust him. You may not care if it all comes out one way or the other, but I do.”

“I didn’t say I wanted it to come out. I said maybe we should tell the Cardinal about it.”

“What’s the difference?”

There was a great deal of difference, Peg thought, but saying so would only prolong this conversation. That, she definitely didn’t want. Having Judy in her house always made her feel washed up and frumpy, like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters having come to her poetically justified end. She thought about showing Judy to the door and decided not to. Judy knew her way. She’d been in and out of this house since the day Peg and Joe bought it.

The heels punched across the carpets. The front door opened and shut again. The house was quiet, except for the sound of Charlie arguing with his sisters about how to put the VCR into rewind. Peg headed for the television room, wondering when it was she’d stopped knowing what she thought about anything.

I should have asked her to stay with us, Peg thought. Then at least she wouldn’t have been found dead in an alley.





[2]


Going around with the Cardinal like this—in full clerical dress, in one of Dee Packer’s “unpretentious” touring cars—always made Tom Dolan feel as if he were traveling incognito. The car was a small brown Buick, the very essence of nondescript. The Cardinal was a vision out of the age of the Borgias, draped in scarlet and punctuated with gold. A studied informality had come to the American Church with Vatican II—so studied and so cunning, Tom sometimes forgot it was a ruse. O’Bannion in battle gear put the lie to that favorite liberal pipe dream, the self-destructing hierarchy. He was the Cardinal Rome wanted Her Cardinals to be, and he could have sat down on the throne of Renaissance France without looking in the least out of place.

Except, of course, for the fact that he was so obviously Irish.

Tom put his hands up to his face and rubbed. He had been at work since five o’clock this morning, and he was about ready to self-destruct himself. The car was bouncing along from pothole to pothole. The motion was making him sick. Maybe, he thought, he ought to have let the Cardinal walk, which was what the Cardinal had really wanted to do. It was only a dozen blocks from the Cathedral to St. Agnes’s. Then again, it was a dozen of the wrong blocks: right down Carver Street through a series of heavily Catholic neighborhoods, right up to the door of St. Agnes’s Church. First they’d be mobbed by the faithful. Then they’d be mobbed by the media. Right now, they were merely stuck in traffic.

O’Bannion reached under his robes, brought out a cigar that looked too cheap to be bearable, and lit up. “Did you call Andy Walsh this morning?” he asked. “Did you get in touch with him?”

“I called him just before seven, Your Eminence. I definitely got in touch with him.”

“He knows we’re coming?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“He knows how I feel about altar girls?”

“I don’t see how he could avoid it, Your Eminence.”

“I don’t see how he could avoid it, either,” O’Bannion said, “but he always does. Did I tell you I’ve asked Rome to make you an auxiliary Bishop?”

“No,” Tom said. He dropped his hands and looked at O’Bannion, surprised. “I thought you didn’t approve of all that. Loading the Chancery up with auxiliary bishops.”

“I don’t. Having one won’t exactly be loading the Chancery up.”

“That’s true,” Tom said. O’Bannion’s predecessor had had no fewer than six auxiliary Bishops on his staff. Nobody had ever been able to figure out how he’d done it. “This is very nice of you, Your Eminence. I’m grateful.”

“You shouldn’t be. You’d have been raised to the episcopate sooner or later, you know.”

“Thank you for saying so, Your Eminence. Right now, I’m very young.”

“Yes, you are. I, on the other hand, am getting old. I’ve reached the point where I’d like to cover the Church’s ass as well as my own.”

“Excuse me, Your Eminence?”

John Cardinal O’Bannion sighed. The traffic jam they were stuck in was going strong. They were halfway between the Cathedral and St. Agnes’s and they might as well have been parked. Tom looked past the Cardinal’s head at a row of small white frame houses, each with a cross overlaid with a Eucharistic symbol on its door. The crosses had been given out by the Chancery at the start of Lent to anyone in the Archdiocese who wanted them. It was the Cardinal’s way of combating “secular hedonism.” There were going to be no fuzzy yellow chicks or pink plastic Easter bunnies where the Cardinal had to see them.