“What is going on?” Not for the first time in his eighteen years in the Section, Devereaux felt a sudden sense of isolation from the corridors of power. He felt alone, without maps or benchmarks.
“I don’t know,” Hanley said. “If we had been called off in any other way…”
“It was as though the Adviser wanted the thing done without raising any inquiries in the Administration.”
“And over at State. The Secretary at State is all over the place, he wants to run every pie.”
“A mixed metaphor.”
“But true.”
“What should I do, Hanley?”
The bottom-line question. Devereaux would not dangle alone.
“Yes. I wish I had managed to reach you in time today,” Hanley said finally. “I suppose you’re spoiling to get some sun.”
So Hanley was game for a little while, to leave Devereaux in place on the mission while Hanley probed subtly back and forth across the lines of the bureaucracy, trying to track down the reason for calling off the assignment of Leo Tunney.
“This is delicate,” Hanley cautioned again.
Devereaux did not answer.
“And Foley’s death,” Hanley said. “Did you find the information useful?”
“Yes.”
“Is your plan working?”
“Yes.”
“Is this going to turn out to be worthwhile?”
“I can’t judge,” Devereaux said. “Except it has been good enough to get the Agency to break their charter and operate on American territory again. And to get the Soviets to send an agent here. And the Vatican.”
“Yes. It might be worthwhile.”
“It might be more than a little bureaucratic game.”
“The survival of the Section,” Hanley said. His loyalty to the Section was without parallel.
Devereaux thought of Rita then, of her touch, of her warmth and the openness of her body to him; thought of her words as she trusted him.
“To hell with the Section,” Devereaux said quietly.
22
Cyrus McGillicuddy had seen death in his time, of course. In Morocco, in those years before the sedentary life of the motherhouse claimed him, he had been in the thick of it, as he never failed to tell anyone who would listen.
But that had been, in a sense, a time of abstract deaths. Even though he was able to muster charity in his heart for the suffering, it was an impersonal sort of empathy, an empathy of his faith and his own expectations of his feelings: He did not actually suffer a sense of loss when children in the desert died of starvation or when the civil war in neighboring Algeria spread to his outpost and innocents were casually slaughtered. He wept, true, and he said his prayers for their souls, but they were not of him. Still, the deaths had been real enough — death by starvation, death by mutilation (an obscure religious ritual was involved), and simple murder, murder by bloodlust. All that he had seen.
Yet Foley’s death on the causeway had affected him more than all the deaths all those years in Morocco.
Not only the sight of the body, bloated, white, and wet on its wooden slab in the morgue. It was not only that or the fact that he had broken bread with Foley, given him the shelter of his own house… no. Something more.
McGillicuddy felt guilt. Guilt for the opportunity he saw in Foley’s death. He had seen it from the first moment he was called to the morgue to identify the priest, and it saddened him. He was fifty-nine years old and he did not want to believe that in all the struggle of his religious life, he had managed to save up so little charity in his heart.
But the opportunity was there.
As he had told Foley — God rest his soul — Rome did not pay the electric bill for the Order. It had been his most heated moment in their argument when Foley forbade Father Tunney to say Mass in public. McGillicuddy saw the opportunity that Leo Tunney presented the Order in terms of both new fame — spreading the word of our good works, he had said — and ready cash. The ready cash had become an increasing problem over the years: Small donations were down because fewer and fewer found their way to Sunday Mass anymore, to be moved there by appeals for charity from the pulpit; large donations from wealthy benefactors were also greatly reduced as the benefactors found newer causes to invest their wealth in. As he had once told a fellow sympathizer, the Order just wasn’t sexy anymore.
And now Foley was dead.
And Rome was silent.
What should he do? After all, he was superior of the Order. It fell on his shoulders to weigh all the elements of the situation and come up with a correct solution. Yes, that was it; it fell to him.
On Friday morning, three days after the death of Martin Foley, Leo Tunney offered Mass for the repose of the soul of the dead man. In public. In the chapel that once again opened its doors to a large crowd.
Poor Tunney, Cyrus thought. He seemed dazed by it all, confused by the crowds, by Foley’s death (and was he even aware that Foley was dead and not merely gone?) and by the world he lived in now.
Tunney wore the black vestments of the traditional Requiem Mass. He sang the bare ritual, rich with mournful chants:
Dies irae, dies ila…
Day of Judgment, day of wrath.
Lu Ann Carter was there, dressed with far more care than on the previous Sunday. She sat straight and prim in a pew up front and followed the ritual with wide, suspicious eyes. The fame of her cure had been widely heralded but it had caused no last-minute conversion to the Catholic faith. As she had said on one of the innumerable talk programs, “God made me a Baptist but I allow He works in mysterious ways.” McGillicuddy had said dryly, after hearing her, that she was being extremely generous.
There was no laying on of hands and no sermon yet the cures continued: A woman who said she had suffered from diabetes for twenty years pronounced herself cured. A man who had had a painful goiter the morning before said the swelling shrank to nothing within minutes of entering the church. The fact that these claims were as shadowy and uncertifiable as Lu Ann Carter’s claim was beside the point.
And so it began again, with an enormous, groaning crowd at the Saturday morning Mass, filling pews and aisles, streaming into the streets around the motherhouse complex. Again, the police were called and reporters from a half-dozen Florida newspapers were on hand to record the event.
This was for the good of the Church and the Order, Cyrus argued with himself when a devil of a suggestion in his conscience pointed out that he was avoiding the clear rules of the liturgy performed at Vatican Council.
Ends do not justify means; the conscience pricked.
But these are good means as well. The Mass.
The Tridentine Mass is forbidden.
But it is still the Mass, Cyrus argued with himself, finally overcoming.
At three P.M. on Saturday, Cyrus opened the doors of the church for the weekly confessions. Father Tunney, who had spent all morning and afternoon on his journal — he had continued to fill page after page in it at a redoubled pace since Foley’s death — entered the church from the side door. He wore a purple stole, another symbolic vestment of the Church, signifying his role as intermediary between God and man in the act of penance. He had volunteered to hear confessions and now opened the door of the central confession box and sat down.
The penitents stood in long lines, waiting for him.
Do you see, Cyrus told his devil, how many come on a normal Saturday? A few old women. But here are dozens and dozens, come to reconcile themselves with our Lord.
Conscience did not answer.
In the darkness of the closed confessional box, Tunney sat, listening to the small sins of those who sought absolution. He listened in silence, his eyes closed, the sins recited in humble little litanies, sins of the innocent and the aged, sins of the truly guilty; he listened to them and they seemed to seep into him; he listened, blessed them, he murmured words of comfort and forgiveness.