The Third Revelation (24 page)

“I wish I could understand exactly what it is that Ignatius expects you to do.”

“He's not too clear on that himself. Fatima is at the heart of it.”

Zelda nodded. She knew about Fatima. So did Gabriel, now. He had made a little research project of it when he first got an inkling of what the aim of the new foundation would be.

“But you'll work there in the Empedocles complex?”

“For the nonce, my love. Hannan intends to house the foundation in a new complex.”

Attractive, that. Gabriel had appreciated the effortless efficiency of Laura Burke, but the prospect of being under her surveillance was less than exhilarating. Or of Ray Sinclair's for that matter.

Zelda said, “I'm sure those two would be married if Ignatius ever gave them time for it.”

“And what of Hannan himself in that regard?”

Zelda inhaled, then adopted her little-girl expression. “I think he had his eye on me. You see what you saved me from.”

She could have no idea what she had saved him from.

“He said I could call on Heather as I set things up, Zelda. ‘We see eye to eye on these matters.' I am quoting.”

“Isn't she a lovely girl?”

Gabriel remembered seeing the lovely girl standing outside the administration building, taking keys from her purse and handing them to Traeger.

“Where does she live?” he asked.

“God knows. She's a recluse, according to Laura.”

But Heather's handing her keys to Traeger in order that, as it transpired, he could make his getaway suggested that the two knew one another. If Traeger had been, perhaps still was, CIA, perhaps Heather was as well. Gabriel had spent much of his life in intrigue, but he found such speculation dizzying.

They had their dinner, with a bottle of Barolo, then afterward drove to Zelda's. Her place was fifty miles from Empedocles.

She said, “I suppose we should relocate. To be nearer to your new job.”

“I won't mind commuting.”

“I would hate to leave this place. The memories . . .”

Did she mean her husband? Apparently not. The reference was to their making love here, in the bad old days.

“Well,” Gabriel said. “You know how Pepys ended entries in his diary.”

“How?”

“And so to bed.”

 

 

He drove to Empedocles the following day and talked again with Laura and with Ray Sinclair about the financing of Refuge of Sinners. Gabriel tried to look blasé as Sinclair gave him the figures. There would be a hundred-million-dollar endowment supporting the new foundation. Gabriel had found his salary breathtaking, but this was affluence indeed. Again, he was urged to sit down with Heather for a long talk.

“I can't imagine why,” she said. Ash brown hair framed her face, her eyes were like Spanish olives, and her lips seemed to involve more folds and indentations than necessary, like those of Michelangelo's David, but they all enhanced her beauty.

“Is Father Trepanier to be regarded as a competitor or what?” Gabriel asked Heather.

Zelda had told him of the enthusiastic priest whose ministry she supported. Trepanier was practically in the neighborhood, but his operation, Fatima Now!, was largely electronic, a cable channel on which he broadcast twenty-four hours a day, not to mention the worldwide reach of shortwave stations.

“If Mr. Hannan has any criticism of Father Trepanier, it is the tone of his criticism of the Church.”

Heather explained. More Fatima. At the heart of Trepanier's efforts was the demand that the Church fulfill the request that the Blessed Mother had made that Russia be dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

“Russia?”

In 1917, when the apparitions had taken place at Fatima, mention of Russia—and not the Soviet Union—as the great menace to peace seemed odd, not that the three children would have seen it as such. Had they even known what or where Russia was? Of course, Sister Lucia's latter communication, written under obedience, recalling events at a later date, when she had become a nun, the other two children dead, was the product of a woman whose natural gifts had profited from the education she had subsequently received. There were also accounts of subsequent apparitions when the Blessed Virgin appeared to her alone, but they were not part of the document that had been meant for the pope and that had contained what Sister Lucia called secrets, among them what had come to be called the third secret of Fatima.

“Mr. Hannan has been swayed by those who feel the revelation of that third secret in two thousand was incomplete,” Heather told him.

“What does he think was left out?”

“I wonder.” Her eyes drifted away, then came back to him. “Isn't it strange how people become fascinated with secrets?”

Heather went on. “There are some who think that in two thousand the Church kept back Our Lady's dismay at Vatican II.”

“Is Hannan among them?”

“To a degree. He has his own theory.”

“And what is that?”

“That Our Lady warned of the loss of Christendom to Islam.”

“Any beeping messages?”

Father Krucek was a wry but delightful host.

“If you have any friends who need rooms, I can put them up, too.”

John Burke forbore saying that his best friend was dead. The pastor of Saint Cyril's had doubtless buried too many friends and family and parishioners to regard death as any great surprise. Of course, John had told him what had happened to Brendan.

“I'll say a Mass for him.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Krucek was a monsignor but did not use the title nor indeed wear the red piping he was entitled to on his cassock. He wore his white hair in a crew cut, was seventy-five and thus of retirement age, but he soldiered on as pastor. Once he had had two assistants—“When we still called them that”—but attrition in the ranks of the clergy had long since deprived him of such help. The rectory was large, with accommodations for three priests and a visitor, but now there were only Krucek and Mrs. Krapcinski, the housekeeper and cook whom he called affectionately Mrs. Krap. “My coeval,” he added. “She's been here forever. She's worse than a wife.”

It was Mrs. Krapcinski's taped voice that was heard on the parish phone, rattling off the hours of Sunday Masses and when confessions were heard, adding that any necessary messages could be recorded after the beep.

“Any beeping messages?” was the pastor's frequently asked question. He asked it now when they came into the dining room, which was redolent with the odor of ethnic fare.

“You'll be the first to know, Father.”

They sat and Krucek said the grace in Latin, making no comment when John joined in. The pastor's arthritic hand traced the sign of the cross over their empty plates, and then opened his napkin with a flourish. Mrs. Krapcinski had stood with bowed head during the prayer, then disappeared through the swinging door to her kitchen, to emerge a moment later with a steaming tureen of soup. She filled their bowls, the pastor's first, then John's. It was a delicious chowder, more solid than liquid in state.

The pastor had said his Mass at five, the afternoon Mass a grudging concession to changing times.

“I never concelebrate,” he said when John asked if the pastor minded if he said his own Mass. Nor was Communion given under both species at Saint Cyril's. It was not simply that the common cup dared the Lord to prevent the spread of disease. Father Krucek knew the arguments of Reformation times and considered offering the consecrated wine as well as bread to the faithful a betrayal. There were no Eucharistic ministers at Saint Cyril's. The pastor was delighted—if that was not too exuberant a word—to find that John was not a flaming liberal. His brows had lifted and that was all when John mentioned that his assignment was Rome.

“Rome,” he said now. “Still a student?”

“I work for Bishop Sanchez Sorrondo in the Office of Pontifical Academies.”

“You hear that, Mrs. Krap? He works in the Vatican.”

Mrs. Krap was deaf as a post—Krucek's description—but she didn't seem to miss much.

“When I can't hear I'll let you know.”

The arrangement was that John would say his Mass in the morning. “We won't make an announcement. People will begin to expect it.”

“I will only be with you a few days, Father.”

The chowder was followed by pork chops, mashed potatoes, and corn. The bread was delicious, baked by the housekeeper, as was the apple pie that followed. John praised the food, but Mrs. Krap was as phlegmatic as the pastor. She made a little mock curtsy and went through the swinging doors. In his study, Krucek opened a liquor cabinet and asked John what his poison was.

“Whatever you're having, Father.”

“Then you'll go to bed sober. I never drink.”

“Maybe a little brandy?”

Krucek poured out a generous glass and handed it to John. “I do smoke, however.”

“Good.” John got out his cigarettes. Krucek unwrapped a cigar and moistened it carefully before lighting it.

“I studied in Louvain myself,” Krucek said, the words emerging like smoke rings.

“Did you?”

“Philosophy. I taught in the seminary for years. This is my reward. Captain of the
Titanic
.”

“There seemed a good turnout for a weekday Mass.”

“The walking wounded. How many young people did you see?”

Somewhat to his surprise, John had noticed Heather among them. Of course she had driven him here from Empedocles, leaving him at the rectory, commending his host, and then, as John had thought, driving off. He mentioned her to Krucek.

“A convert. Extraordinary woman. Most converts come into the Church for the sake of a marriage, and that's a good thing of course, although some of them would become Mormons or Hottentots if that were required. Heather is the other kind.”

“How so?”

“What do you know of Edith Stein?”

“Is Heather a philosopher?”

“Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam,”
Krucek said, adding “Colossians. No, her degree is in business.”

John explained how he knew her. At the mention of Ignatius Hannan, Krucek closed his eyes and blew a series of perfect smoke rings. “He's the third kind.”

Under prodding, he elaborated. A convert like Heather was a tonic, someone who put a priest on his mettle. He looked at John, “She wants to be a saint. Not that she would put it so baldly. The questions she asked when she came for instruction . . .” His voice trailed off. “When a person like that comes to you, you realize how we've come to take it all for granted. All this hoopla for the last quarter of a century and more, changing this, changing that, until people don't know up from down. Who can blame them for thinking we've jettisoned the whole thing. And then someone like Heather comes and it's as if she is just brushing aside all the nonsense and wants the thing itself. Converts will save the Church, Father. You can quote me.”

“And Ignatius Hannan?”

“A Barnum and Bailey Catholic.”

John laughed. “My sister is his administrative assistant.”

“You understand I don't know the man. I'm not judging him. But he came by once with Heather and wanted to write a check for any amount I named.” Krucek grinned. “I said, ‘Make it out for a dollar.' And he did.” He pulled open his desk drawer and brought out a check. “I kept it as a souvenir.”

When the conversation got back to Brendan, John told the pastor that it had apparently been a break-in. That was, if not the whole truth, true. Brendan had gone to his room and apparently surprised the thief.

“What was he after?”

John shrugged. That was what made the thing so pointless. How could anything there have been possibly worth having? The thief might just as well have come snooping through John's suite. Perhaps just the reputation of Empedocles and Ignatius Hannan's known wealth would make a thief think the place was chock-full of gold. But to kill? The Empedocles complex lost a good deal of its taut efficiency after the discovery of the body. It was odd that it was the women who kept their heads. Laura, of course, but Heather, too. On the drive to the rectory Heather told him that she had made the sign of the cross over the body.

“That was all right, wasn't it, Father?”

“Why wouldn't it be? That was exactly the thing to do.” He himself, he was afraid, had come too late to be of any good to Brendan's soul.

“And I said a Hail Mary. Now and at the hour of our death.

Life is learning how to die.”

And now John remembered that she said she'd been told that when she took instruction.

Krucek said, “I was misquoting Plato, as you know.”

“I didn't know.”

“Philosophizing is learning how to die. Sounds morbid, but try to find a philosopher who isn't fixated on death.”