“Quite,” the Cardinal Archbishop said again.
Father Doheny was beginning to look nervous, and the Cardinal Archbishop didn’t blame him. Even with the ibuprofen, even with his headache receding into memory, he was still being too stiff, and the last thing he wanted was to be too stiff to the kind of donor who wanted most desperately to be able to feel that he was in on the inner workings of his archdiocese. He gave himself a mental order to unlink—did those ever work?—and gestured to Andy to sit down. Then he sat down himself.
“Well,” he said.
Andy got himself a cup of coffee and a saucer full of cookies, stacked high. He had to be one of those people who could eat endlessly without gaining weight.
“Look,” he said, sitting down and spreading out his things on the table. “I’m glad you got in touch with me. You know? I had no idea things were in the bad state they’re in. It always sounds in the papers like you’ve got the whole thing taped.”
“We’ve got some of it taped,” Father Doheny said.
“There are different problems that need to be solved,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “One was, of course, the legal and ethical situation pertaining to the actions of the priests involved in the criminal behavior—”
“It wasn’t criminal behavior then, was it?” Andy said. “Back in what, 1960 or whenever it was. It wasn’t criminal behavior then.”
“I think it was criminal behavior,” Father Doheny said. “I think it was just handled differently at the time than we would handle it now.”
“And nobody is ever going to know if those people were telling the truth,” Andy said. “It’s easy, I think, to file a lawsuit against a big institution like the Church. It pays, too. What did the archdiocese end up paying out? Millions of dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Twenty six and a half million dollars over a period of ten years,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
Andy banged his fist on the table, triumphant. “There, then. What did I say? And they could all have been lying. They could have made it all up. And they probably did. That whole bunch of them going to that gay church and getting their names in the papers. The Episcopalians have always had it in for the Catholics. I know you’ve got to honor the deals the old Archbishop made, Your Eminence, but if you ask me, his biggest mistake was caving in on the question of guilt. He should have stood his ground. They couldn’t have proved a thing. Not after all that time.”
The Cardinal Archbishop had a sudden vision of himself, sitting in a high-ceilinged room in an office building in the Vatican, only an hour after the Holy Father had told him he was going to receive this appointment, watching two blackcassocked priests lay out for him the extent of the evidence that existed to prove that the priests accused were indeed guilty, and guilty over and over again.
His headache seemed to be coming back, fighting with the ibuprofen for pride of place in his skull. He said, “I’m afraid stonewalling on guilt would not have been possible. There was more actual evidence than you realize. Much more than was ever allowed to come out.”
“But how could there have been?” Andy demanded. “After all this time.”
“There was evidence from the time. Doctor’s reports. And—letters.”
“Letters?”
“From three of the priests involved to some of the boys,” Father Doheny said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Andy said.
The Cardinal Archbishop rubbed his temples. He did it very carefully, because part of him was convinced that if he did it the wrong way, it would make his reemerging headache worse. “The only mistake the old Archbishop made,” he said, “was in agreeing to financial arrangements the Archbishop was not equipped to handle. Those arrangements are now in place, and we cannot, for a number of reasons, change them. The result is that the archdiocese desperately needs money, and not the kind of money we generally need. To be specific, we need something on the order of a million dollars a year, over and above our usual intake.”
Andy Reilly blanched. “A million dollars a year? For how long? Can’t the Vatican put in some of that?”
“If Rome wasn’t putting in some of what we need,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “we would need twice as much. And we need it for ten years.”
“Jesus Christ,” Andy said again.
The Cardinal Archbishop felt a sudden rush of meanspirited satisfaction. Andy O’Reilly had been caught up short. This was entirely out of his league, and he was scared to death. The satisfaction receded almost immediately, to be replaced by a hot shame he was sure must have shown on his face. He hadn’t become a priest to despise his parishioners. Andy O’Reilly was out of his chair and pacing around.