Right now, life in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was mostly a struggle with money. It was—what? four o’clock in the morning? he’d been here so long, and he still lived without watches, so he couldn’t tell—and he had yet to make sense of the figures laid out in this chart. The chart had been prepared by the firm of accountants he had hired, from New York, to audit the archdiocese’s books. He couldn’t hire a firm in Philadelphia because it seemed as if every single male human being between the ages of thirty and fifty was somehow part of The Scandal, even if they were Jewish, or had only immigrated to America in the last five years. He tried to think of what it was that had gone on here on his predecessor’s watch, but it was like thinking of his mother. As far as he could tell, the old man had simply panicked. Decisions had been made that made no sense at all—to pay hush money that hadn’t hushed anyone up; to make denials to the press that could not be maintained for an entire week; to claim ignorance where no ignorance had been possible. What had begun as just another priest-molests-altar-boy five-day wonder had exploded into the nastiest priest-pedophilia scandal in the history of the Church in America—and he had been sent here to clean it up. That was why he had been made an archbishop, and why he had been made a cardinal less than a year later, and why, sometimes, there were rumors that he was destined to become a Pope. The Cardinal Archbishop wanted to be Pope the way Sylvester Stallone wanted to be a girl. The more time he spent in the active life of the Church, the more certain he was that he wanted to end his time on earth at Avery Point, in the quiet, and the simplicity, and the lack of complication.
On the far side of the room, the door to the office opened, and Father Doheny stuck his head through, worried. He was young, but the Cardinal Archbishop was always struck by how very different he was than he himself had been at the same age. Father Doheny was the picture of the secular priest. He was destined for a parish. He exuded enthusiasm. Now he came in and shut the door behind him.
“Your Eminence, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”
“What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night for you, too.”
“I saw your light on and got worried that you were awake. And working. You are awake and working.”
“Not quite. Most of the time I’m just sitting here staring at these papers and thinking how ironic it is.”
“How ironic what is?”
“Well,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “everybody outside the Church, everybody in Philadelphia, even CNN, thinks that the problem of the scandal has been solved, and that I’ve done it. As far as I can tell, I’m being forgiven my failures of personality because I came in here and cleaned up the mess left by my predecessor. Who, I may remind you, was not himself responsible for the scandal. He wasn’t archbishop here when any of the incidents actually occurred.”
“I don’t think they really think you have any failures in personality,” Father Doheny said.
The Cardinal Archbishop raised his right eyebrow into a perfectly straight, lethally sharp point. During his novitiate year at the monastery, he had been required to give up that habit for six straight months because his novice master had thought that his ability to do it was his greatest vanity. His novice master had been right.
“They think,” he said carefully, “that I’m a son of a bitch.”
Father Doheny looked pained.
“Never mind,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “They’re right. The Church needs sons of bitches sometimes. Otherwise, we’d get Her into trouble, and we wouldn’t be able to get Her out. That doesn’t change the chief difficulty in this case, however, which is that the public humiliation of the scandal may be over, but the repercussions have only begun to be felt. Have you looked over these numbers?”
“Once or twice, Your Eminence, yes.”
“And?”
Father Doheny hesitated. “We appear to be operating in the red.”
The Cardinal Archbishop smiled. It was not, he knew, a friendly thing. “We are operating in the red. We most certainly are. To be a little more precise, we are hemorrhaging money, to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars a week. Give or take the change. Twenty-five thousand dollars a week is one million, three hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“Are we really going to lose that much this year?”
“We lost that much last year. We’re living on loans, Father, and for the life of me I don’t know what we’re going to do about it. If we were somebody other than who we are, we could go back into court and ask that the restitution payment schedule be reworked so that we could actually pay it. Under the circumstances—”