‘This time I reunited darkness and light. Next time, I will bring together earth and water.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’ll understand, in time.’
The voice was full of a calm, inexorable menace. Terrified that he would disappear at any moment, Father McKean asked him a last desperate question.
‘Why have you come to me? Why me?’
‘Because you need me more than anyone else. I know that.’
There followed a silence that, coming from a man who claimed to be the master of eternity, seemed infinite. Then he uttered his final words. His farewell to a world that was doomed.
‘Ego sum Alpha et Omega.’
The man stood up and left, almost noiselessly, a rustle of green beyond the grille, a glimpse of a face in the semi-darkness. Father McKean sat there alone, breathing with difficulty but devoid of fear, because what he was feeling was so big and so nameless it left no room for anything else.
He left the confessional white faced, and when Paul came to find him he was startled by his pained look.
‘What’s the matter, Michael, aren’t you feeling well?’
He didn’t see any point in lying. In any case, after what had happened he really didn’t have the strength to celebrate the noon mass. Mass was a moment of joy and togetherness, and the thoughts he had inside him could only contaminate it.
‘No. To tell the truth, I don’t feel well at all.’
‘Okay. Go home. I’ll take the service.’
‘Thanks, Paul.’
Paul had had some visitors from outside the parish, and he found him a ride back to Joy. A man Father McKean didn’t know introduced himself as Willy Del Carmine and pointed to a large car. He could barely remember the colour. For the whole of the brief journey he was silent, looking out the window, emerging from his thoughts only to give directions to the driver. He didn’t even recognize the road he had travelled along a thousand times.
When he was in the forecourt, hearing the noise of the car as it drove away, he realized he had not even thanked or said goodbye to the man who had been so kind as to give him a ride.
John had been in the garden when he saw the car pull up, and now he joined Father McKean. He was a man of uncommon sensitivity and a keen ability to read people’s moods.
Father McKean knew he would realize something was wrong. He had already sensed it in the tone of his voice when he had phoned from Saint Benedict to say he was on his way back. As if to confirm the opinion he had of him, John approached him now as if afraid he was being intrusive.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine, John. Thank you.’
His colleague did not insist, confirming another of his qualities, discretion. They knew each other too well by now. He knew John was confident that, when the time was right, his friend Michael McKean would open up to him. He wasn’t to know how different things were this time.
The problem was insoluble.
And it was the source of an anguish he had never felt before. In the past he had talked with other priests who had been told about crimes in the confessional. Now he understood their turmoil, their sense, as human beings, that they were in conflict with their roles as ministers of the church they had chosen to serve.
The seal of the confessional was inviolable. That was why it was forbidden to betray anyone who unburdened himself there.
Such a violation was not permitted even where the confessor’s life or other people’s lives had been threatened. The priest who violated the secrecy of the confessional would be automatically subject to the excommunication known as latae sententiae, which could be lifted only by the Pope. And that was something the Holy Father had rarely done over the course of the centuries.
If the sin confessed was a criminal act, the confessor could suggest or demand of the penitent, as an indispensable condition for absolution, that he hand himself in to the authorities. That was all he could do, though: he certainly couldn’t inform the police himself, not even indirectly.
There were cases where part of the confession could be revealed to others, but always with the permission of the person involved and always without revealing his identity. This was valid for some sins that could not be forgiven without the authorization of the Bishop or the Pope. All this, however, supposed one crucial thing. The request for absolution was dependent on repentance, or the desire to free the soul from an unbearable weight. In this particular case, Father McKean was dealing with neither.
A man had declared war on society.
Destroying buildings, claiming victims, sowing grief and despair. With all the determination of the God who, in his madness, he claimed to be, the God who had destroyed cities and wiped out armies in the days when the law was still based on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
After that tentative conversation in the forecourt with John, he headed for the kitchen to avoid having to explain himself further. As far as he could, he put on his best mask and went in the house to have lunch with the kids, who were pleased to have him with them for their little Sunday feast.
Not everyone was fooled. Mrs Carraro for one. And in the hubbub of laughter and comments and jokes around the table, a couple of the kids realized something was up. Katy Grande, a seventeen-year-old girl with a funny freckled nose, and Hugo Sael, a boy who was particularly sensitive to the world around him, looked at him every now and again with a questioning air, as if wondering where the Father McKean they knew was hiding.
In the afternoon, while most of them were in the garden enjoying the sunshine, Vivien and Sundance joined them. If Sundance was unhappy at the turn of events that had forced the authorities to postpone the concert, she didn’t show it. She was quite calm, and seemed happy to be back at Joy.
She and her young aunt appeared much more united than the day before when Vivien had come to fetch her. All the embarrassment there had been between them seemed to have vanished. It looked as if their uneasy relationship had taken a completely new direction.
This impression was confirmed when Vivien, in words that were close to euphoric, told Father McKean what had happened with her niece, and about their new-found, hard-won intimacy and togetherness.
Now, in the light of a new day, he realized how unresponsive he had been to that enthusiasm. He hadn’t been able to stop himself asking the detective about the tragedy on 10th Street and its consequences and implications, trying almost obsessively to find out if the police had a lead, an angle, any idea about who might have committed that atrocity. He had barely been able to suppress the temptation to take her aside and tell her what had happened, what he knew.
Now he realized that he’d had all the answers he was going to get, given that this was still an ongoing situation and that whatever information Vivien might have, as a police officer, was strictly confidential.