Cecilian Vespers (21 page)

“Yes, Father?”

“Is there something wrong with the water here today? It was cold when I took my shower, and I had to go back under the bedclothes to recover.”

That’s not all he’s recovering from
, I said to myself. He saw us then. “Normie! Are you here to see me?”

“Kinda. And Daddy wants to see you too. To, uh, invite you to breakfast.”

“Father,” Mrs. Kelly began, “about the water. There are workmen in the basement, so maybe they turned off the water heater. I don’t know …” Her voice trailed off.

“Ah. Now Normie, why don’t you give me about five minutes to get dressed.”

“And wear something warm. Bring your gloves,” commanded Normie, motherly instincts finely honed already. “There’s a chance of flurries, and wind gusts up to forty kilometres an hour!”

“Right. And wasn’t I supposed to be finding something for you?”

“Holy cards. No particular reason. I just like them.”

“That’s it. I know exactly where to find them. I’ll bring them down. Breakfast, Montague?”

“Yes. You look a bit peckish.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Twenty minutes later we were sitting in Jimmy’s Homestead having breakfast. Normie had guzzled her milkshake; her pancakes sat untouched on the plate. The holy cards, about four by two inches in size, with white borders, were spread out in front of her. She eyed Burke surreptitiously as she studied the images. One, with a pale pink background, showed the figure of a woman in a voluminous cream-coloured robe, cinched at the waist; there were white feathered wings on her back; she had long brown hair and she gazed lovingly at a boy and girl playing at her feet. Another card depicted an androgynous figure with long, wavy blond hair and translucent green-white wings suspended in a blue sky with fluffy clouds around him or her. I did not see anything that resembled the black-haired, black-eyed, unshaven, unambiguously masculine figure across the table from me. He lit up a smoke; was his hand a bit shaky?

“A little too much of the water of life last night, Brennan?”

“Daddy, you’re bad. You’re saying Father Burke was drinking too much booze! You know that’s not true.”

“Of course not, sweetheart.”

“But,” she said, examining Burke, “you do look a little, well, like a tough guy today, Father.”

“Don’t you be worrying now, Normie, I’ll be all tidied up by the
time of the noon Mass.” He turned to me. “Speaking, though, of priests gone bad, I came upon another interesting fact about Enrico’s favourite saint, Andrew Avellino. I told you that, in addition to being a priest, he was a lawyer.”

“Right.”

“But he gave up the law after he committed perjury in court.”

“Didn’t any of these saints just sit around being holy? Have we got any perjurers in our own case yet?”

“The closest thing to perjury is Brother Robin’s probably false confession to the police.”

“You say ‘probably.’”

“I haven’t written him off entirely, Monty. There’s something there, I don’t know what.”

“Something symbolized by the prayer beads and the note.”

“The note with Enrico’s prints on it. Enrico, devotee of the Sicilian priest, lawyer, and perjurer Andrew Avellino.”

“I can’t figure any of it out on an empty stomach.”

We turned our attention to the bacon and eggs and pancakes and toast and juice and coffee in front of us. We listened in as Jimmy at the counter quizzed one of the other regulars, a judge I used to work with when he was a legal aid lawyer, about the judge’s recent trip to Italy. He gave captivating descriptions of the meals he ate, the wine he drank, the music he heard, the people he met; he ended by describing how he tracked down a reclusive uncle in the Trentino region and found out why the man had been out of touch with his family for thirty years. “If I’d stayed on my butt here in Halifax, I never would have known. Now?
Mistero risolto
!” Mystery solved.

That’s all it took. Burke looked at me and I looked at him. Here it was, after months of late-night, boozy, inconclusive plans. The schola was on break, and things were winding down at my office. I smiled. Our long-desired road trip was on. We were going to Rome.

“How long a trip are we talking about?” I asked.

He gave a Sferrazza-Melchiorrian shrug.
“Chissà?”

“What trip?” Normie broke in. “Nobody talked about a trip!” I patted her hand and directed her attention to her pancakes. “Is it Rome? Can I come? Please, Daddy?”

“Not this time, Normie. But we’ll go another time.”

“Aw! Father Burke, remember when you had that T-shirt on that said ‘Angelicum,’ named after that guy you called the Angelic Doctor —”

“Right. My college was the Angelicum, named for Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

“And you said …”

“I promised to get one for you, didn’t I, Normie?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’ll bring one back for you. Count on it.”

“Okay!”

“What’s your work schedule like at this time of year,
Signor
Collins?”

“It’s manageable. I could hand a few things over to other lawyers. This trip won’t be all Vatican City, will it?”

“I imagine we could dip into a bottle of Chianti and admire a finely turned ankle in the more secular parts of the city.”

Yeah, I thought, it might be fun to be a couple of assholes over there.

I pictured the two of us in Italian silk suits and sunglasses, following a cluster of Roman beauties in high-heeled, soft leather Italian shoes.

I smiled at the image.

“I’ll let you know later today if I can swing it. I have a friend who’s a travel agent; maybe she can get us a last-minute special. Though we’re pushing it, trying to get a flight right after Christmas!”

It wasn’t much of a deal, but my agent came through with a red-eye flight to Frankfurt and a connecting flight to Rome. We would have one night in Frankfurt on the way back, and that gave me an idea. I called Moody Walker and asked him to get in touch with the police officer he knew in Hamburg. I wondered if there was anyone he could hook us up with on our night in Germany, someone who could shed some light on the enigmatic Colonel Bleier. Moody said he would work on it.

The downside was that Burke and I had to endure some pointed remarks from Professor MacNeil. “Let me see if I have this right. The police have arrested a suspect, they’re satisfied with the evidence as far
as we know, the suspect has confessed, he has hired Saul Green, one of the top criminal lawyers in the province, who has contrived for reasons of his own to extend the accused’s stay in a psychiatric hospital, which makes me think Saul knows the guy is nutty enough to have committed the murder and Saul will likely get him off for reasons of insanity. Yet you guys are claiming that it wasn’t Robin, it was somebody else. Who? Uh, we don’t know. But we can find out if we — if we what? — take off together on a road trip to Italy! Yeah! That’s where the answers are. Coincidentally, that’s also where the best food and the most plentiful wine and the most beautiful women and art and opera and all the other worldly pleasures are. Well, you may be fooling everybody else, boys, but you’re not fooling me.”

Apart from that, I enjoyed the Christmas season. We walked to midnight Mass from the house on Dresden Row. Tom, Normie, their mother and her baby, some cousins and me. Snow was falling, church bells were ringing, and St. Bernadette’s Church glowed with warm coloured light in the white stillness of the night. I joined the choir when I arrived; my family sat in the nave. Brennan sang the high Mass, and the music was magnificent. We all went back to Maura’s afterwards to eat, drink, open gifts, and sleep. I pretended we were still a family; I just didn’t look too closely at our numbers.

Part Three

Chapter 8

These that survive let Rome reward with love.
— William Shakespeare,
The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

We arrived in Rome the afternoon of Friday, December 27. Burke and I had two rooms reserved at the Hotel Alimandi, just outside the Vatican walls. It was a four-storey hotel with a roof terrace over the entrance, where one could sit and soak up the Roman sun when it wasn’t December. We were both greeted by the manager as
“signori”; Don
Burke, dressed in civilian clothes, did not correct him. No sooner had I unpacked and flopped down on the bed than Burke was in my room, urging me out the door.

“Appointment at the Vatican. Mustn’t keep the good sister waiting.” Twenty minutes later we were standing in the monumental Basilica of St. Peter, specifically at Peter’s foot, where we had been instructed to wait for Brennan’s friend, an Irish nun. The right foot of St. Peter’s statue was worn down by centuries of kisses from devoted pilgrims.

“Ah. Here she is now,” Brennan announced. Sister Kitty Curran appeared to be in her early fifties, short, plump, with a fresh open face and reddish curls going grey. Brennan greeted her with an extended hug and kiss.

“Not here, Brennan,
acushla
. People will talk.” She hailed from Dublin and had brought the accent with her. She stepped back and appraised him. “A bit of grey there now but no less striking a figure for that.” She peered up at him. “There’s something about your left eye; it turns down a bit at the outer corner. I have to say it gives you a sort of moody Irish look. What happened?”

The mark of Cain, I thought. My mark on him. Would it never go away?

“Oh, there was an incident, Kitty. During one of my many lost weekends. It’s best forgotten.”

“Is it now. And who’s this fine fellow you have with you?”

“Monty Collins, Sister Kitty Curran.”

“One of ours, would he be?”

“Montague Michael Collins — otherwise an astute student of history — exists in a state of woeful ignorance about his Irish heritage, Sister. And there’s the blood of an Englishman mixed in there too.”

“That would explain his failings, then.”

“What do you do here, Sister?”

“Call me Kitty. I work for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. In the Palazzo San Callisto over in Trastevere. We promote justice, peace, and human rights throughout the world according to the principles of the Gospel. Simple. I expect our work will be completed by week’s end and we can all go home.”

“Good for you. Give me a call when you’ve wrapped it up, and we’ll go out for a pint.”

“Why wait? We could be out lifting one now.”

“Sounds like a plan. Where should we go?”

“The Irish Monk.” My questioning look earned an oblique reply: “It’s livelier than the name suggests.”

Twenty minutes later we were seated in Il Monaco Irlandese with pints of Guinness before us. The menus were done up like illuminated manuscripts.

“I’m travelling to your side of the Atlantic soon, Brennan, for a conference on social justice.”

“Where?”

“Montreal.”

“When?”

“January 10 to 15.”

“Have you booked your flight yet?”

“No. I just got the word I’m going.”

“Good. Monty, do you know your travel agent’s number? Do you have her card with you?”

“I do.” I pulled my wallet from my pocket and drew out the agent’s card. Brennan took it and wrote the details on a Paddy Whiskey coaster and handed it to Kitty. “Get her to book you through Halifax on the way back. Spend a few days with us.”

“Oh, I don’t know now …”

“Roma locuta est, causa finita est.”

“Rome has spoken, the case is closed. You’re the voice of Rome now, are you, Brennan?”

“When was I not? I’ll be expecting you in Halifax. Free room and board.”

“Typical of this fellow,” she said to me. “His way or no way.” “You’ve known him for a while, I take it, Kitty. You knew him when he was a starving student here in Rome?”

“Oh, I don’t know if I’d describe him as starving. He kept lofty company, Brennan did. I’m sure he’s told you all about it.”

“There are great gaps in the history he’s been willing to divulge to me, Kitty. If he spent his time anywhere but the Greg, the Angelicum, and the tomb of Saint Peter, I haven’t heard about it.”

“Ah, well, maybe he’s right and it’s my memory that’s been playing fantastic tricks on me all these years. Himself in black tie at La Scala in Milan, in the private viewing box of the great diva Graziella Rossi, himself being screeched at by that same rossie — pun not intended but convenient nonetheless — when he offended her ladyship in ways never made public. Wasn’t Cardinal Testa present in the Rossi apartments when that incident took place, Brennan, or have I been a victim of unfounded rumours?”

“Don’t exercise yourself, Kitty. If I stumbled into the wrong quarters on occasion here in Rome, put it down to a young novice who didn’t know his way around and was soon enough back on his knees before the altar of God where he belonged. How have you been, my darlin’?”

“Can’t complain. As you know I had a rough innings in El Salvador
a while back but that makes me all the more keen to get the justice and human rights file signed, stamped, and off the desk.”

She spoke lightly, but Brennan didn’t smile. He took her hand and held it. “Stay in Rome, Kitty. You’ve done your time out there. Nobody could ask more of you.”

“You had some rough days yourself, Brennan, that stint you did in Brazil.”

“My parishioners had the rough days; I didn’t.”

“Your parishioners being street children targeted for death by security agencies in the pay of —” She looked over at me. “This isn’t what you came to Rome for, is it Monty? Shop talk. Sorry.”

“That is what we came for, actually, Kitty. Shop talk of a different kind.”

She took a long sip of her Guinness and said: “The death of Reinhold Schellenberg made great roaring headlines over here, as you can imagine.”

“I was rather hoping the Roman grapevine had it solved by now. What’s the talk?”

“Endless speculation, no resolution. None of it deterred in the least by the fact that there has been an arrest. Word is the fellow they arrested is just a patsy. So the rumours swirl unabated. It could have been this faction, or that faction. Liberals, traditionalists, the Germans, the Vatican, the Masons, it goes on and on. Nobody knows. You were there; I was hoping you could tell me.”