Precious Blood(71)

“I know that.” The smoke from the cigar was getting in the Cardinal’s eyes. He put it back in the ashtray again. “Have you talked to the police? I have talked to them, of course, but I can’t get anything out of them. That Smith person doesn’t like me a bit.”

“Even if he did, he probably couldn’t have told you anything yet,” Gregor said. “Even with a rush job on the tests, they wouldn’t have all the answers until this morning some time. And that assumes their lab is very well run.”

“And you don’t think it is? I don’t blame you. They’re a mess, that department. They always have been.”

“I keep forgetting you’ve been in Colchester longer than you’ve been an Archbishop.”

“Been and gone and been again,” the Cardinal said. “I was a parish priest in this Archdiocese when I started out, over at Holy Rosary on the north side. Then I was chaplain for the Cathedral High schools during the reign of my predecessor’s predecessor. Then I was an Auxiliary Bishop in Boston for a while.”

“That seems strange, sending you all the way to Boston.”

“Everything the Vatican does is strange, Mr. Demarkian. Even this Vatican, and I like this Pope. But you talk to these people from Rome, you begin to wonder if they’re all on drugs. They’re certainly not dealing with reality.”

“I thought they were your reality.”

“My theological persuasion, not my reality. I am a conservative. They are conservatives. Especially the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger, who are the two who really count. But reality, Mr. Demarkian, means knowing how people live in the everyday world. On that, the whole Curia might as well have arrived yesterday on a UFO.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said.

The Cardinal smiled at him. “Are you just softening me up for something, or does this have to do with Andy’s murder? Because Andy wasn’t a conservative.”

“From what I hear, Father Andy Walsh wasn’t much of a Catholic. I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I’m just trying to get some things straight in my mind. You say you’re a conservative—”

“A theological conservative,” the Cardinal corrected. “I was a charter member of the Democratic party—no, I’m not really that old, you know what I mean—anyway, I was an FDR man at least and a Democrat until all this abortion business came up. I’m still a big supporter of labor union  s.”

“Yes.” Gregor remembered what the Cardinal had done about the Democratic party and “all this abortion business.” He’d gone down to city hall and changed his party affiliation to Republican in front of half a dozen newspaper reporters. It had made the CBS Evening News two nights later. “What I want to know about is things closer to home. Define a ‘theological conservative.’”

“I know exactly how to define it. A theological conservative is someone who thinks priests ought to be celibate even though there’s nothing in the Bible or the Tradition that says they have to be.”

“There isn’t?”

“Not in the least. Catholic priests married for hundreds of years before the Vatican thought to require them to remain single, although Bishops did tend to be taken from the ranks of unmarried men. Until a few years ago, priests in the Eastern Rite churches—churches in Orthodox countries that chose to remain loyal to Rome after the Greek Schism—were still allowed to marry. It’s only this Pope who’d decided to bring them into conformity with the rest of the church.”

Good Lord, Gregor thought. The Greek Schism. No wonder the Cardinal got along with Father Tibor Kasparian. This wasn’t what Gregor had in mind at all.

“Let’s try to get a little closer to home,” he said.

The Cardinal was amused. “Closer to home,” he told Gregor, “a theological conservative is a clerical son of a bitch.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I punish infractions when I can and I punish them to the limit.”

“What about Father Andy Walsh?”

“Father Walsh always made it a point to stay just inside the safety line. Where I could catch him, that is.”

“Oat bran muffins were inside the safety line?”

“I’m afraid consecrating oat bran muffins is liturgical silliness, but not mortal sin. All you need to make a Host is bread made from ‘the finest wheat,’ to quote the New Code of Canon Law. Oat bran muffins are mostly wheat, and these were probably of the finest. Andy ordered them from Le Cher at fifteen dollars a pound.”

Gregor frowned. This wasn’t getting him where he wanted to go, not anywhere near. And he couldn’t think what would. It was frustrating to have the Cardinal in such a cooperative mood and not know the questions to ask him.