He waited, nearly motionless.
It was what he wanted, after all; trust me.
There was something like pity in her eyes, he saw, and then realized it was not pity at all. It was something else, more heartbreaking. He did not want to look at her but he would not break the chain of the moment.
“I know I’m going to get the journal,” she said.
He felt tension grab him.
“I talked to Tunney yesterday. In the church, when he was there alone.”
Good, he thought. She was really very good. “How did you do it?” He made his voice calm.
“I never left the church,” Rita said. She paused for effect. “Foley has been dead for two days. They had Mass yesterday morning. Father McGillicuddy said Mass. Afterward, he locked the public doors of the chapel. I had brought along some sandwiches and a thermos, I didn’t know how long it would take.”
“You broke in,” he said.
“No. I never left.” She smiled. “I went inside the confessional during Mass. I waited is all. Tunney is a priest, I figured sometime he would come to the chapel from the rectory and pray. Alone.”
“That’s very good, Rita,” he said, and realized it was and that it had not occurred to him at all.
“Yes. And it worked, which is better.” She let go of his hand and took her cup of coffee and sipped it. The waitress came and removed the breakfast dishes. “Father Tunney came in the middle of the afternoon, I must have been in that box for six hours. About two o’clock, I think. It was a little tricky, I didn’t want to scare him, he’s such an old-looking man. I’m afraid he was startled though, he stared at me as though I were a ghost. And then I saw he remembered me. From Watergate, from the times I’ve tried to get to him.”
“And he talked to you.”
“Yes. I haven’t done anything with it yet, I want to wait for the right moment. I know Kaiser would kill me if he thought I was sitting on a story. The two of us talked in the chapel, in the middle of the day. What do you think of that?”
He didn’t speak.
“He said that everything he saw would be in the journal. Everything. He kept talking about it and then he started talking about Father Foley. Do you know what he told me about Foley? It fits in with everything you said—”
That Foley was a spy, Devereaux thought. But he waited for her without speaking.
“He was a spy for the Vatican, that’s what Tunney told me. He said he had become so tired. He said death was after him, that death followed and killed those around him.” She stared at Devereaux. “He said he wanted an end to everything and that when the journal was finished, he would give it to me. He said the world would know what he knew and then it would be over.”
There, Devereaux thought. It would be easy. She trusted him and she would make it easy for him.
She was looking down again, at her hand on his, at the cups of coffee sitting on the white Formica tabletop. “I started to tell you once. About my brother. Tommy. It all had to do with why I had to find Tunney, find out what he knew.”
Devereaux remembered photographs in her bedroom. Family pictures in frames on a dresser. A fresh-faced young man in a high school sweater.
“Tommy went to Asia, you see,” she began, her voice becoming distracted as though too many thoughts were intervening. “To Laos finally and Father Tunney must have known him, you see.… I knew that from the first, there weren’t so many of them in Laos then, because of the civil war.…”
He waited for the fragments of sentences to come together in her mind.
“Do you remember several years ago after Watergate? All the investigations going on, about how the CIA routinely used some missionaries in parts of the world as spies? Do you remember that?”
Her voice broke off suddenly and Devereaux was surprised by tears in her eyes. He had not expected tears.
Devereaux reacted silently.
He turned over the bill on the table and took out money and counted it and left it. Without a word, they left the bright morning restaurant together. He held her arm gently, and steered her down the little street of shops filling with people. At the news shop, the vendor was already hanging out copies of that day’s New York Times and Chicago Tribune and Toronto Star for the tourists.
After all the rain, it would be a nice day, clear and bright without a trace of pollution in the sky.
They walked to the beach and down to the hard-packed sand at the edge of the water. She took off her shoes and carried them and walked barefoot on the sand and in the water. Morning joggers chugged relentlessly down the beach while elderly gray-haired lovers in leisure suits strolled arm in arm. Devereaux and Rita Macklin were apart, waiting in the silence of the morning for what she had to tell him.
“Tommy was a priest,” she began quietly, staring at her feet as she traced her toes in the wet sand.
“A missionary,” she continued. Her voice had become very quiet and private. Had she ever told Kaiser such secrets? he wondered.
“You should have seen him. Good-looking, really a handsome kid.”
Devereaux saw again the boy in the photograph on Rita’s dresser.
“Even if I wasn’t his little sister and in love with him, everyone said he was handsome. And more than that. Kind in the way some people are kind without being soft or mushy or stupid about it. Like my father was. Sometime, when we meet again—”
She looked up at him as though he might have gone away. “Sometime I’ll show you the family album, all the pictures I’ve kept. Dad’s dead now. And Tommy…”
She looked out at the wide Gulf before them.
Devereaux gazed up the beach at the sand where they walked. The wet sand was full of thousands of shells washed up during the night, sparkling now in the sunlight. The water lapped meekly at the shoreline.
“Dad was such a patriot. I told you that. He was second secretary in China in the forties, with Stilwell and that bunch, he worked for the State Department and when McCarthy started witch-hunting about pinkos and commies in the State Department — you remember, they were saying that the pinkos and leftists lost China to the communists — he was sort of forced to resign. I mean, he wasn’t a big fish to them but he had been a member of one of the front organizations in college in the thirties, maybe.…” She stopped, suddenly, stubbornly. “Oh, damn them all.”
Devereaux took her arm and led her along the beach and after a while she began to speak again.
“I’m telling you all this because I have to. Maybe I would have told Kaiser. I don’t know. I didn’t dwell on it all those years, I’m not crazy. But it all came back to me when Father Tunney returned, when he came out of Thailand. Had he been a spy for the CIA and why had they hidden him? I kept thinking about Tommy and my dad. My dad was so faithful to the country, you know. And they kicked him in the teeth and he still loved it so, he was a patriot. I keep saying that and the word has all these awful connotations but that isn’t what he was. I mean, he wasn’t a right-wing nut or anything. He was so gentle.
“And Tommy was like him. And religious. He became a priest. And you know what Dad told him, when he was going over to Asia? Don’t betray it, he told him. Don’t betray the priesthood, he told him. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Not for a long time. And then I realized he meant spying. He knew about spies, about how the government used people like Tommy.”
She stopped, turned to him, her face was hard yet she was crying. “I asked him, I asked Father Tunney, did he know Tommy? You see, I had to know someone who knew him. I had to find someone to tell me that Tommy wasn’t a spy.”
“Why did it matter?”
“It mattered,” she said. “Don’t you see that?”