“I know, I know. Holy Thursday is a busy day. It still looks to me as if you’re being asked to do much more than any one person could.”
“It usually isn’t more than any one person could.” Dolan tried a smile again. “And I didn’t mind. The Church saved me. It took me out of poverty, away from a father who drank and beat me up.” This time, it worked. “Yesterday was a very unusual day, Mr. Demarkian, even for a Holy Thursday. There were—extras—to be attended to.”
“I suppose there would be.”
“Aside from the run of the mill annoyances after an—incident—of that land. Do you know what I did between five and six yesterday afternoon? I got the Bishop of Buffalo to loan the Cardinal two of his priests.”
“To take Father Walsh’s place at Masses?”
“To stand next to that chalice of consecrated wine in St. Agnes’s Church. We wouldn’t let the police examine it and the police wouldn’t let us move it anywhere. It’s still there, covered, of course, with a police escort and an ecclesiastical one. Cop on one side, priest on the other. The only thing is, there seem to be an infinite number of cops to take turns watching, and practically no priests. What we’re going to do when these two drop dead of exhaustion, I don’t know.”
They had been walking the length of the foyer all during this conversation. Now they had come to the intersection with the hall. Tom Dolan stopped just under the dim light and pointed across the shadows to the foyer’s far side, where there was a door.
“That’s the rectory through there, in case you want to get oriented. Rectory in the north wing, Chancery offices in the south, foyer and chapel in the middle. Although what we need a chapel for with the Cathedral right next door, I’ve never been able to figure out.”
Dolan turned around again, marched down the hall, and stopped under the next dim light. It burned above a patch of marble right in front of a set of elevator doors. Dolan jabbed the call button and the doors opened immediately.
“Come on in,” he said. “The Cardinal’s been at work since five or six. Unlike me, he doesn’t need any sleep.”
“Unlike you, he probably gets it.”
“Mmm.”
“Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” Gregor asked curiously, stepping into the elevator.
“If you’re going to make like Sherlock Holmes,” Dolan said, “I’m not going to be much help. I wasn’t concentrating on Andy Walsh yesterday, you know. I was concentrating on the Cardinal.”
For at least some of the time, he had been concentrating on helping set up for Mass. Gregor had seen him. The fact that he had seen him, however, made questions about all that unnecessary—at least for the moment—and they weren’t what Gregor wanted to ask.
“What I want to know,” he told Dolan, “is, what’s ‘Primitive Observance.’”
This time, Tom Dolan managed not only a smile, but a full-throated laugh. He almost sounded awake. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Well. The Benedictines of the Primitive Observance are an order of nuns. They’ve got an abbey out in Connecticut somewhere and Papal permission to live the Benedictine Rule as established in, I don’t know twelve-something, I think. Full habits. Six layers of underwear. Medieval penance practices. Prayers in Latin. The whole bit. The Cardinal’s private secretary—also known as Sister, also known as the nun who unlocks the Chancery in the morning—is a Benedictine of the Primitive Observance.”
“But shouldn’t she be cloistered?”
“The Benedictines were never as cloistered as, say, the Carmelites or the Poor Clares. But yes, she should be, except that she’s got Papal permission to be here, because the Cardinal wants her here. Cardinals, especially cardinals popular with their Pope, do tend to get what they want.”
“Your Cardinal gives the impression—”
“Of being the kind of man who always got what he wanted? He was. With Sister, however, we have a couple of problems.”
“Such as?”
“She’s here, but she’s supposed to follow her rule as much as possible. So, she keeps silence from ten o’clock every night until after breakfast in the morning, and she lives in a convent halfway across town that’s practically as primitive as she is and doesn’t allow Sisters to answer the phone. Then there’s the Tridium. We’re in the Tridium now. At three o’clock this afternoon, Sister will make the Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral with a few hundred other people. Then she’ll make a confession. Then she’ll shut up, completely. From then until the end of the Easter Vigil Mass, meaning one o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday, she won’t say a word for anything less drastic than the Second Coming.”