“Just don’t call him in for another conference. Every time you do that, he gives another homily on the Bad Old Men of the Church.”
“I won’t call him in for another conference. My blood pressure’s too high already.”
“I’ll get to work on St. Stanislaw’s, Your Eminence. Do you know when you’re going to go down to give ashes?”
“What? Oh. Noon, I think. Sister has my schedule.”
“I’ll ask her, then.”
“Tell her to get Tibor Kasparian on the phone for me again,” O’Bannion said. “There has to be something I can do. I can’t sit by and watch that lunatic turn every school-child at St. Agnes’s into a practicing pantheist.”
“Of course not, Your Eminence.”
O’Bannion had stopped his pacing at the window overlooking the courtyard. Tom Dolan took a last look at him—a back-street Irishman playing Sir Thomas More, making up his mind about the timing of his own beheading—and slipped out of the office into the hall.
Seconds later, he was walking into the reception room, thinking about St. Stanislaw’s catechisms and getting ready to say hello to Sister Marietta. Sister Marietta was the Cardinal’s ordinary secretary. She was a very traditional Benedictine, with a veil that fell below her waist and a robe that brushed the floor, and she made him nervous as hell. All old nuns did. They reminded him of his childhood.
He said the minimum necessary—“Here I am again, Sister. I’m going back to my office now”—and picked up speed. He could always get the Cardinal’s schedule from someone else. Dozens of people in the Chancery had to know it. Then, when he was halfway to the safety of the door, Sister Marietta rapped her knuckles against her desk.
Tom Dolan stopped, and turned, and tried not to sound resigned when he said, “Yes?”
Sister Marietta was a study in impassivity. “I’m sorry to hold you up, Father, but I took a telephone call for you while you were in with the Cardinal. Your secretary wasn’t at her desk.”
His secretary was taking the day off, but he wasn’t going to tell Sister Marietta that. His secretary was a nun. In Sister Marietta’s world, nuns didn’t have days off. “Was it anything important?” he said.
“I don’t know. It was a woman who called, not a name I’d ever heard of. But, of course, I don’t hear of them unless they come to see the Cardinal, and not everybody does.”
“No,” Tom said, “it just seems like everybody.”
“The Cardinal is a very busy man, I know. Cardinals always are.” She rummaged through a small stack of papers on her desk and came up with a pink message slip. “This is it. There isn’t much to it, I’m afraid. I couldn’t get her to leave a number. She said she didn’t have one.”
“That’s unusual.” Tom came back across the floor and took the slip. Sister’s handwriting had been formed by the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart. It was as rounded and precise as the script on an IBM daisy wheel. Tom looked down at it and read: Cheryl Cass called, 8:30. Couldn’t leave number. Will call back.
“I tried to tell the woman it was Ash Wednesday,” Sister was saying, “and on Ash Wednesday you have a lot of extra work to do, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. I don’t know if she’d ever heard of Ash Wednesday.”
Take a breath take a breath take a breath, Tom thought, take a breath and calm down. He crushed the slip in his fist and dropped it on Sister’s desk.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Joke?”
“You’re sure you didn’t recognize the voice on the phone? It wasn’t Sister Scholastica from St. Agnes’s?”
“Of course it wasn’t. Father—”
“It wasn’t Father Walsh?”
“It was a woman’s voice,” Sister said primly. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Father Dolan, but I’m not here to play jokes on you. I’m not even here to take your messages.”
“No,” Tom said. “Of course you’re not.” He tossed the balled-up message slip into Sister’s wastebasket. Then he turned his back on her and strode out the door.
Andy Walsh must have put somebody up to this. He must have. The one thing Cheryl Cass would never do was show up here.
[4]
“I don’t know,” Reverend Mother General was saying as she dusted snow off the crown of her veil, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a homily like that before.”
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the Mass for St. Agnes school had just been dismissed from St. Agnes’s Church. Sister Mary Scholastica—once Kathleen Burke—was standing at the top of the church steps next to her Reverend Mother General, watching children file through the church door. The children were dressed neatly in green uniforms and filed with precision. The lines they made could have been formed by old Sister Bonaventure, the one who’d had a spine like a ruler. Really, Scholastica thought, she had nothing to be nervous about. Granted, Reverend Mother General didn’t make flying visits to parish parochial schools. Granted, Andy Walsh’s homily had been one of his patented monologues on Nicaragua and the preferential option for self-actualization. Still, Scholastica thought, I run a good house and a good school. Anybody with eyes in their head can see it.