“But you wrote Mrs. Fitzroy a half-dozen times in the past six months about Tomas, about what happened to him—”
“I’m getting old, Miss Macklin; the past is more comfortable to me than the thought of the present. Even a priest is terrified of eternity when he stands close enough to touch it, as it were. Are ye Catholic?”
“I am,” she said.
“Ah, American Catholics aren’t all the same, not at all. I’ve met them in my time, I can tell ye.” His voice trailed off. “Where was I? Ah. Ye can learn all ye need to know about Tomas Crohan from yer own people—”
“You mean the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“I do indeed. Didn’t I say that to Mrs. Fitzroy?”
“I went to the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act to find the files on Tomas Crohan and they wouldn’t show them to me. Files that are forty years old—”
The old voice laughed on the line. “And why d’ye suppose that might be?”
“Because the CIA is hiding something.”
“Bright girl, ye are.”
“If you’d let me talk to you.”
“There’s nothing to be talking about.”
“You said in your last letter an Englishman in Dublin had been after you to tell him about Tomas Crohan.”
“I said that, did I?”
“I’ve got a copy of the letter.”
“So Mrs. Fitzroy has told ye everything then?”
“An Englishman named Parker. He sounds like a spy.”
“Does he now, girl? And ye no doubt have had wide experience of spies?”
“I know spies,” she said.
“And ye are a brave journalist after this story to make it a sensation in yer newspaper or on the telly.”
“I want to know what happened to Tomas Crohan and I have to start somewhere. I want to start with you.” Her voice rose slightly; her cheeks flushed; her green eyes grew deeper in color as her anger rose. “I’m going to find out what happened to him whether you tell me or not. If this is a wild goose chase, then I’ll go to square one and start over but I’m going to find out, you just bet on that.”
There was a long silence so that Rita thought Father Cunningham might have severed the connection.
“God rest his soul,” the old man said at last.
“You think he’s dead.”
“I’m nearly certain of it. During the war… It was so long ago and yet to me it was yesterday. That’s the problem of age, Miss Macklin, when the long ago is closer than what ye did an hour before breakfast.”
She waited. She felt the door opening. She pushed now slowly, with softer words, for fear of cracking the door.
“What happened during the war?”
“Terrible things, Miss Macklin. Terrible and dreadful acts and not just on the field of battle. Tomas Crohan was not loved by the English, I can tell ye; but I tell ye true few would weep at his wake in the old De Valera government either. A firebrand, he was, a bloody atheist, but that was to be accounted for by his age… we all pass through a period of not believing. Ah, but a patriot true and not a public-house singer, either; if he had been old enough at the rising in ’sixteen, he would have led them into the bloody post office himself, he would,” the priest said with some pride, recalling the Easter rebellion against British rule in Ireland. “Mark me, he was no fool, but he was blinded by his own ambition and impatience. The Devil might have feared dealing with him for fear of losing Hell; shrewd, he was, and ruthless, too, and the Americans were no different. They couldn’t leave us alone all during the war, never saw the sense of Ireland stayin’ neutral. Never saw the English had used us too long to fight their bloody wars for them; sure, hadn’t we bled enough in our red coats for the British? Aye. But Tomas was a boyo.… I never knew how he had dealt with everyone until now.…”
“You were in the De Valera government—”
“Before I took the cloth,” the priest said. He sighed. “I knew them all. I knew Crohan. I knew Catherine Guilhoolie. All of them gone now. I knew too much—”
“You were in the Intelligence branch—”
“I might have been.”
“Mrs. Fitzroy is certain you were.”
“And what would a women be after knowing about it?”
“All these years, she’s certain that Tomas Crohan was still alive and now you write her these letters, hinting about what you know.… We need leverage, Father, to use on the American government, to find out what happened to Crohan, to clear it up.”
“And what leverage would ye be after using with the Reds then?”
“You think he is a prisoner in the Soviet Union?”
“I didn’t say a word,” the old man said. “Where are ye after staying in Dublin?”
“The Buswell Hotel—”
“Ah, good enough, good enough. I have in mind an outing for meself. I’m after thinking of a nice luncheon at the Shelbourne. D’ye know the Shelbourne?”
“No, I don’t know this city—”
“Durty Dublin,” the priest said. “Well, it’s a grand place just a block from your rooms, across from the Green, Stephen’s Green, y’see. I’ll be taking a table there I think about noon. And I’ll be looking for a lass with red hair and green eyes to be taking tea with me or something a bit stronger—”
“Then you were going to see me?”
“I’m an old man and I must be humored,” the voice said. “Ye can’t be too certain who yer talkin’ to these days. This Parker fellow. I know he’s a damned English spy, I can smell him. At noon, then.”
And they broke the connection but Rita stood for a moment with the green receiver in her hand. She had pried open the door but the other side of the door was still dark and it was up to the old man to make a light. There was so much she didn’t know; the story had unfolded like an endless series of dark rooms, each with enough light to lead on to another dark room.
She replaced the receiver and picked up her overnight bag and started across the terminal toward the taxi line. It was just nine A.M.
Three years before, Rita Macklin had broken a story linking the secret journal of a missionary priest long thought dead in Asian jungles with the buildup of a Soviet missile ring in Asia aimed at China. The sensational story had prompted several job offers from newspapers and television.
Rita Macklin had fallen in love with an American Intelligence agent named Devereaux and during the days of indecision that followed the completion of the assignment on the missile story, she had tried to make him understand that she loved him. In the end, he had turned her away; Rita still thought that he had returned her feeling for him but there was a cold, black reservoir of bitterness in him that smothered all emotions, all feelings except the will to survive.
She had taken a job with the magazine at last for the mundane reason that it paid well. She had buried herself in work because that was the sort of reporter she had always been; naturally, following the story of the old priest named Tunney who had revealed the secret missile bases in Asia, she had been inundated for months with tips on stories involving other missing old men, on conspiracies involving the Church and the Communists, on stories about secret journals. They were no good and she knew it; journalists are always forced to fight through such “tips” and “off-the-record scoops”; in time, the stories faded and dried up and Rita Macklin went on to do other investigative pieces for the magazine, far removed from the world of espionage and international plots.
Until an elderly woman named Catherine Fitzroy of Chicago was escorted into her cubicle at the magazine one afternoon by Mac. Mac was the managing editor/news of the magazine, a gentle and laconic soul who was a sharp contrast to Kaiser, the man who had first brought Rita to Washington to work for his small, grubby news service. Mac was a graduate of Yale, which everyone knew but which Mac never talked about; he had an accent that might have been Maine and might have been southern Virginia; he had become Rita’s rabbi in the intricate political organization of the magazine for no other reason than he thought she was the best reporter he had ever known.