“That’s right,” Gregor told him.
“Then the police are going to want to take away the wine.”
“But of course.” Gregor was puzzled. “They’re going to have to take away the wine, Your Eminence. All of it. The bottles in the anteroom, the wine in the pitcher, the wine in the chalice. Even if the poison was administered some other way, they’re going to have to run tests.”
The Cardinal was shaking his head. “They can run all the tests they want to,” he said, “on the wine in the bottles and whatever wine might be left in the pitcher. But they can’t take away the wine in the chalice, Mr. Demarkian. It’s been consecrated. It’s not wine at all. It’s the very blood of Jesus Christ.”
“But,” Gregor said.
“There are no buts, Mr. Demarkian. The wine in that chalice will not be removed from this church by any secular authority for any reason whatsoever.”
O’Bannion gathered the sides of his robe in his hands, turned to face the congregation, and started bellowing out instructions to the nuns.
[2]
It was because neither Declan Boyd nor Sister Scholastica had come back from the anteroom that Gregor decided to go into it—because of that, and because he needed to think. It was, he found, almost impossible to think in front of all these hundreds of people. The altar platform was raised just far enough above the main floor to make him feel as if he were on stage, and stages had always made him nervous. He was not a public man. If he had been, maybe he would have welcomed what he knew was coming: the frantic hyperbole of magazine journalists looking for a hook. It was always the magazine journalists who got to him. Newspaper reporters had the day-by-day and play-by-play to hang their stories on. Magazine journalists were always looking for “broad-based appeal.” What appeal could be more broadly based then the exploits of an—as first The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then People, and then Time, had called him—“Armenian-American Hercule Poirot”?
He had gotten down on his knees next to the body of Andy Walsh anyway. There were things he had to see, before the police showed up and reduced him to being a member of the audience. First, he gave himself a good look at Andy Walsh’s face. There was no blue tinge to the skin, meaning there had been neither cyanide nor massive coronary occlusion. A coronary occlusion would have had to be very massive to cause what had happened here, even if Andy Walsh had had a history of serious heart trouble. Gregor’s impression was that Walsh had been an exceptionally healthy man. He had also been young.
Gregor got up and looked at the altar. From the residue. of moisture on the inside of the chalice, he guessed Walsh had drunk about a third of what he’d poured into it. That was quite a bit, considering the chalice’s size. He calculated how much liquid nicotine it would have taken to kill a man of Andy Walsh’s size. Properly distilled and undiluted, it wouldn’t have taken much. Pure liquid nicotine was one of the most powerful poisons known to science. The amount contained in a pack of regular-strength cigarettes or a single good-size cigar could wipe out most of the congregation now sitting in St. Agnes’s Church. Even distilled by a rank amateur and heavily diluted—as this poison must have been heavily diluted, in order for the wine to go on looking like wine—the murderer could have gotten away with one part in three, or a little less. Unless—
The “unless” didn’t seem to be getting him anyplace. Even the clumsiest, most haphazard distillation of nicotine—from that theoretical pack of cigarettes, say—would have produced a poison strong enough to kill in an amount no larger than what could be contained in an ordinary sewing thimble, if that amount were ingested more or less pure. Gregor almost went back to a serious consideration of poison on the Communion wafer, since the Communion wafer Andy Walsh had eaten had been ten times the size of the ones that would have been distributed to the congregation. Unfortunately, no matter what he’d suggested to the Cardinal, it just wasn’t possible. If there had been nicotine on the Communion wafer, Andy Walsh would have been dead before he picked up the chalice.
If the nicotine had been placed directly in the chalice, then either there had to be a fair amount of it in there before Andy poured the wine—to correct for both the dilution and the fact that Andy, having announced that he was going to distribute under both species, wouldn’t drink the contents of the cup down—or it had somehow to be placed on top of the wine. Gregor couldn’t imagine Andy Walsh putting it there himself. Nobody had suggested that the priest was suicidal, and he certainly hadn’t looked suicidal on Barry Field’s talk show. Far from it. Gregor couldn’t imagine any way for anyone else to get it in there, either, in the right position. It would have been a conjurer’s trick. The poison had to have been in the wine bottles, or in the pitcher. Those were the only sensible explanations. And yet—