Precious Blood(72)

He was shifting in his seat, trying to think of what tack to take next, when the Cardinal suddenly sat forward and stared at his chest.

“Good God,” the Cardinal said. “What happened to your tie?”





FIVE


[1]


GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS IN a bad mood when he left the Cardinal’s office, frustrated and annoyed with himself, and the fact that he had to buy a tie on his way to Colchester Homicide didn’t help. Two ties. The tie he had around his neck, shredded and tattered, had belonged to George Telemakian. It had undoubtedly been bought at great expense at J. Press or Brooks Brothers by George’s grandson Martin. It would cost at least seventy-five dollars to replace. Gregor found himself wishing he were the kind of man who wore sweaters, or the kind who would look good in them. Instead, he was a tall, broad man who had been athletic only when forced to be—such as in the army—and was paying the price in middle age. He would have looked more gracious in the Cardinal’s robes than in a piece of stretchy wool that had been knitted to fit his form.

He was annoyed because his conversation with the Cardinal had gone around in circles, but in the right circles, so that the answer always seemed to be waiting on the perimeter but never coming in. The Cardinal, he thought, was a man of too many of the wrong land of contradictions. In the day-to-day operation of his Archdiocese, he was intensely practical. Gregor had been made aware of that during the long, convoluted conversation that had followed the Cardinal’s astonishment at the state of Gregor’s tie. The Cardinal knew to the atom every ounce of sacramental wine, every catechism, every rosary, every altar cloth, every hymnal in official Church hands in the vast area he managed. He had had these things inventoried when he first ascended to the See and had their purchase and storage and distribution centralized since. It had been to the Chancery’s private warehouse that Judy Eagan had had to go to pick up the wine that had been used at the Holy Thursday Mass. The Cardinal kept coming back to this fact, irked out of all proportion, as if the missed delivery of two cases of wine was more shocking than the spectacular murder of Father Andy Walsh. “You just can’t let something like this pass unnoticed,” he said, again and again and again and again. “This Archdiocese is a geographical monster. If you don’t have organization, you have chaos.”

Chaos, Gregor had concluded, was the proper description of the Cardinal’s mind—or that part of it that concerned nonarchdiocesan matters. O’Bannion’s personal style was so down-to-earth, his approach so pragmatically direct, it took Gregor a while to realize that the man was completely innocent of any idea of how the world outside the Church was run. Like the Rome he scorned, he, too, was unrealistic. O’Bannion didn’t even have the grace to take his notions of a police investigation from bad television or worse novels. Gregor wasn’t sure O’Bannion had ever read the one or watched the other. It was possible he’d spent his boyhood reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was constantly implying that he expected Gregor to do something dramatic, like whip out a magnifying glass and pace around the room staring at floorboards.

This bizarre view of what was going to happen in the wake of Andy Walsh’s death was made worse by the Cardinal’s anxiety about a process he knew everything about: the development of a first-rate media scandal. The Cardinal had dealt with enough of those in his day to be able to plot the course of the disaster the way a geneticist plots the hereditary progress of a mutant gene. Last night, it had been the local television news: not as bad as it could have been because “Father Tom committed a little holy sabotage.” (Gregor got the impression that Tom Dolan had managed to muck up the camera lenses with hair gel or Vaseline, in full view of both congregation and television crews but without being noticed. Gregor considered it a coup equal to anything that bad old Boss had ever dreamed up for the Bureau.) This morning, there had been the ever-tasteful Colchester Tribune, with a picture of Andy Walsh lying stretched out behind the altar and a headline in thirty-two point that said DEATH MASS. Neither the Tribune nor the local stations, however, were what the Cardinal was worried about. Tom Dolan had already fielded half a dozen calls from the major networks. They’d come in the night before, at nearly midnight, when Dolan and the Cardinal were struggling through the changes that had to be made in the city’s Mass schedules now that St. Anges’s Church would not be available for use. There had even been a suggestion—which, according to the Cardinal, had made Tom Dolan nearly hysterical—that Dan Rather wanted to come up to Colchester in person.