There was a knock on the door. The Cardinal Archbishop called out, and the door opened to let Father Doheny in.
“It’s Rome,” Father Doheny said. “It’s Ratzinger himself. Not even a secretary.”
“Well,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “at least they’re still answering my phone calls. How does His Eminence sound?”
“He sounds the way he always sounds. Like God left something out of his voice. Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not obliged to, you know. Bishops act on their own all the time. They always have. And take the consequences later.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to take the consequences later. No, never mind, Father. I’m only very tired. And yes, I’m sure I want to do this. I suppose I want to give them a chance to forbid me. Just to see if they would do it.”
“They won’t do it. They can’t do it. You know that.”
“Yes, I do know that. All right, Father, why don’t you transfer the call in here, and I’ll talk with His Eminence the Director of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I think it had more of a ring to it when we were calling it the Holy and Roman Inqusition.”
“People kept getting it confused with the Spanish Inquisition. They thought we burned heretics at the stake in caverns in the Vatican. Or something.”
The Cardinal Archbishop thought it was more likely to be “something,” but he took Father Doheny’s point. People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half. Father Doheny left the room and closed the door behind him. The Cardinal Archbishop got up and went around to his desk. It was odd the way things worked out. He had been a defender of the faith all his life. He believed in a Catholic Church united to Rome, and speaking in one voice with Rome. He was an almost infamous purveyor of all things religiously conservative: the ban on birth control; the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman; the idea that abortion was always and everywhere murder. He could be counted on to approve the Tridentine Mass in any parish that wanted one. He could be found at the head of any pro-life rally put together by a Catholic organization in the city of Philadelphia. And yet, here he was—and no matter how hard and long he thought about it, he really couldn’t see how he could be anywhere else.
The phone on his desk beeped mildly. You couldn’t say it rang. The Cardinal Archbishop stared at it for a moment, and while he did it beeped again. When he tried to imagine Ratzinger, what he saw was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man with an emotional temperature far too low. He was aware that that was exactly how most people imagined him. The phone beeped a third time, and the Cardinal Archbishop leaned forward to pick it up.
Cardinal Ratzinger spoke English, but the Cardinal Archbishop didn’t want to conduct this conversation in English. For one thing, he didn’t want to be overheard. For another, he didn’t want to be misunderstood.
“Guten abend, mein Herr,” he said, and then he heard Ratzinger’s voice, cool and deep, begin to stream out in its native German.
At the last moment, he began to wonder if he should have told Ratzinger’s secretary that his mind was made up beyond the possibility of changing, but then he decided that it would have been beside the point.
SIX
1
Gregor Demarkian had never wanted to be a private detective. Even being a consultant had, at the beginning, seemed like more of a commitment than he would be able to handle. These days, he didn’t know what to call himself. He still wasn’t set up the way a business should be, even though what he did was certainly a kind of business. Bennis had tried to show him how to use Quicken to keep books and prepare bills to be sent when his work was finished. He had listened politely to everything she had had to say and then gone back to playing Free Cell as soon as she was out of the room. Even Tibor was better at this sort of thing than he was. Bennis had shown him how to keep books for the church, and he had followed directions and kept them. Gregor hated to admit it, but he would rather not be paid at all than go through the complicated procedure of sending bills and keeping records for tax purposes. He reminded himself, often, that he had more than enough money for his needs and no desires that could be called particularly expensive. He would have liked to have bought a coffee machine, but the fact that he hadn’t had nothing to do with what one cost. It was more a matter of not being able to understand the choices, and being afraid that if he bought the wrong one, he’d be condemned to drinking cappuccino forever.
Today it was the day before Valentine’s Day, and he had a list of things to do. At the top of it was buying a card and a big, gaudy box of chocolates for Bennis. Bennis liked boxes with ribbons and bows on them, as ridiculously ostentatious as possible. Bennis was out. If he got going fairly soon, he ought to be able to do some shopping without her knowing about it and without Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani jumping down his throat, hot on the heels of a new theory. Bennis was always nudging him to get a cell phone, but Gregor knew better. A cell phone meant he would never be left in peace.