Precious Blood(43)

Tom turned away from the Cardinal and looked, through the partition and the windshield, at the intersection. They were indeed going to move. He checked his watch.

“We may still get there in reasonably good time, Your Eminence. Barring further delay, it should be about ten of.”

O’Bannion gave him a long, slow look, through the haze of smoke coming out of his cigar. “Every time I go to St. Agnes’s,” he said, “I feel like I’m attending my own funeral.”





[3]


Sister Scholastica had given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed until after the ten o’clock Mass. By quarter to ten, those instructions had been violated twice—once by Benedict Marie, who had come to tell her the goat had gotten loose in the vestibule and eaten a stack of leaflets for the Sacred Heart Driving League and earlier by Father Declan Boyd, who had come to tell her what Andy Walsh had said on Barry Field’s talk show. Or what Dec thought he’d said. To Scholastica, the report had sounded garbled and confused. In some ways, it had made a lot of sense. In others, it hadn’t made any sense at all. Dec had eaten up a great hunk of her morning giving it to her, as he always did whenever he came to talk to her about anything. Whether the matter was momentous or trivial, Dec liked to turn it into an epic. Epics being complicated things, he’d had no attention to spare for her reactions—which was a very good thing. She had been behaving very oddly. The part of his report that had made sense to her was not good news. In fact, it had been a shock. She’d had no idea of how to cope with it, so she hadn’t. From what she remembered, she’d been monosyllabic and cold and short-tempered, three things she was usually careful not to be with parish priests. If Dec had noticed it, maybe he’d put it down to all the trouble she was having with the organizational details of the ten o’clock Mass.

Now she leaned against the window of her office that looked out on Ellery Street and watched the vans from WLTL and WRSX and WCCN that had parked outside the church. Whatever Andy had told his friends at the local news programs, it must have been ripe. They wouldn’t have turned out in full battle gear for anything less than a carnival. In a few moments, her students would be filing down Ellery Street, passing right in front of those airhead vultures. It was an idea she didn’t like very much. Unfortunately, she liked the idea of using the courtyard route to the church’s back door even less. After Benedict Marie had told her about the pamphlets, Scholastica had had the goat moved there.

What in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did Andy Walsh want with that goat? What could he want with it? What could he have wanted with all that trash he’d talked on television this morning? Sister Scholastica had never thought of Andy Walsh as a dangerous man—he was too ridiculous—but now it occurred to her that he might be one. He didn’t think.

There was a knock on her office door. Scholastica turned, said “come in” in a faintly inquisitive way, and waited while the school secretary, little Linda Healy, came in. The little that was monotonously appended to Linda Healy’s name was strictly a literal adjective. The cultural connotations of the word—like cuteness and youth and immaturity—did not apply. Linda Healy was four foot ten and weighed eighty pounds. She was also well into middle age, hatchet-faced, and bad tempered on principle. If she hadn’t worked for the school since the day after she graduated from Cathedral Girls’ High, Scholastica would have fired her.

Linda closed the office door, came into the middle of the room, and stopped. In her hand, she held a blue visitor’s slip. On her face, she had fixed an expression that could only have been appropriate if she’d just found a leech attached to the underside of her thigh. Scholastica wondered what the problem was this time. Or, most likely, who.

Scholastica pointed at the blue slip and said, “I take it there’s someone to see me. Now.”

Linda Healy pursed her lips. “I know you asked not to be disturbed, Sister. And I told him this was a bad time. But he insisted.”

“Is it Father Walsh?”

“Of course not.” Linda seemed to hesitate. As much as she wanted to be insulting, she didn’t want to get caught at it. She didn’t want to come right out and say it wouldn’t be Father Walsh, because Father Walsh was busy at the church. Finally, she forced herself to cross the room and hand the visitor’s slip to Sister. “He was really very rude,” she said. “Of course, I don’t know what else I should have expected, considering, but I would have thought even apostates observed the norms of common courtesy. I suppose I must have been wrong. That’s my problem, you know, Sister. I have much too optimistic a view of human nature.”