Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (15 page)

“Well,” said Costello with a chuckle, “that's what I meant.”

“I'm sure you did.”

Within minutes Costello had wiped his lips with his napkin and risen. In his left hand he held a briefcase, the kind you didn't see much any more, the kind where the front and the back came together on a V-frame and a flap dropped down the front and snapped into the lock.

On the flap were the letters, embossed vertically in gold:

Burke at first wanted to smile, but then he grew concerned. When he was a kid he was told that I.H.S. stood for “I have suffered,” supposedly Christ's lament on the cross. In reality I.H.S. was a Greek truncation of the first three letters of Jesus' name. “It's kind of like Christ's monogram,” Burke used to joke as he explained it to laymen. Unless Costello's real name was Isaac Henry Sullivan, there was something very wrong here.

Burke looked up to see Costello, carefully holding his cross in his other hand, bow in an old-fashioned way, then back away from the table before turning and leaving the room.

The Westie in Burke had been piqued, for he knew Costello was not what he purported to be. He picked up the phone and called an old friend from Dublin, Monsignor Vincent Bartley, now the parish priest of St. Paul's on Staten Island.

“Vince,” Burke said, “I gotta be quick.”

“Sure,” said Bartley in his soft North Side Dublin accent.

“Did you ever run into a priest back in Dublin by the name of John Costello?” Burke pronounced it the American way.

“Costello?” said Bartley, pronouncing it the Irish way.

“Costello,” said Burke, agreeing with Bartley's pronunciation.

“You mean
The Reverend Doctor
Costello,” laughed Bartley into the phone.

“The Reverend Doctor?”

“Indeed,” said Bartley. “I know your man, but not from Dublin. I knew him when I was studying in Spain.”

“What do you think?”

“I have only two words for the Reverend Dr. John Costello,” said Bartley dryly.

Burke knew of Bartley's Fenian connections and became concerned. He knew it was going to be bad news. “And those two words are?”

“
Opus Dei
.”

More trouble, Monsignor Burke thought to himself. “Who are you thinking of, Eminence, the Christian Fundamentalists?”

“The Christian Fundamentalists, exactly,” said Cardinal Sweeney. “Let's hit these abortionists hard, and let's do it now. I want you to get in touch with Reverend Cockburn.”

“Eminence,” said Burke defensively, “do you mean that hysteric who picketed the veterinary clinic?”

“That man who was cruelly assaulted right in front of that feckless clinic,” added the Cardinal.

“By a cairn terrier, I believe,” countered Burke.

The Cardinal shot him another one of his looks, made to intimidate. “I don't want to argue on this, Monsignor. This has to be done. What I'd like to do is get together with Swift and Cockburn and hold a press conference. If the Congressman is up to it, we could even have it at St. Vincent's, where no abortions are performed. Let's set it up as soon as you can do it.”

“Yes, Eminence,” said Burke quietly as he stood up to leave. The more he thought about the press conference, the more it disturbed him. Back at his office he put in a call into his cousin.

“Cyclops Reilly here,” said the voice over the phone.

“Benedict,” said Burke, “it's Johnny Pie.”

Reilly cringed. He hated being called Benedict. “Well, well, well, Monsignor,” he said, “what have I done to rate a call from a dignitary of the Church like you?”

It was hard to believe, but Benedict Reilly and Seán Pius Burke were first cousins. They grew up in the same tenement on West 49th Street across from the old Madison Square Garden. They shared the same grandmother, old Masie Scully, late of the Falls Road, Belfast.

Masie was a piece of work. The special branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made her a widow in 1920, and by 1924 she was in New York living with her two young daughters in Hell's Kitchen. During World War II the daughters had married a couple of Irish tough guys from the neighborhood. The two men, Tom Reilly and Dominick Burke, took odd jobs at the Garden, working the floor, changing the arena from boxing to hockey to rodeo to basketball. On the side, they were “boyos,”doing jobs for the mob. Everybody knew them as auxiliaries in the Westies, the Irish gangsters of Hell's Kitchen.

It always amazed Cyclops that the Mafia would hire the Westies to do their dirty work. For all the intermarriage between the two nationalities, there remained a deep schism. The Italians, by personality, were solitary figures, more comfortable at home with family, while the Irish were gregarious gladhanders.The Italians aspired to be Westchester Republicans, while the Irish knew there was a little bit of John F. Kennedy in each of them. It was an odd business arrangement.

Masie Scully didn't even have her own apartment. In each daughter's railroad flat she had a room, and she ruled the two households as if she were Pope Masie I. She went to mass twice a day. She ignored whatever Westie work her sons-in-law were involved in, and generally dictated the lives of her two families. She had even named the two children. Benedict was named after Pope Benedict XV, who had been Pope during the Troubles. Young Benedict hated the name, especially when the neighborhood kids called him “Benny” and implied that he was the only Irish Jew in the neighborhood. In fact, his nickname as a kid had been “Briscoe,” after Robert Briscoe, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin. Benedict had actually been glad when the boys down at the
Daily News
had given him the obvious nickname “Cyclops” because he hated his childhood moniker so much. Later he would explain Benedict away by saying that he was named after the Pope by his grandmother because “he gave good encyclical or something.”

Seán Pius had been named after Masie's murdered husband and Pope Pius XII, the Teuton-loving Pontiff of World War II infamy. But Seán Pius, younger than Benedict, had gotten off much easier with the neighbor kids. To them he was the popular “Johnny Pie,” the handsomest and smartest kid in the class.

They were complete opposites. Cyclops was a character right out of
Angels with Dirty Faces
, while his cousin would be more comfortable singing in a Bing Crosby-led choir. Cyclops would go to Vietnam and return to a job as a copyboy at the
Daily News
. Johnny Pie would go off to college, then to seminary and graduate school. Cyclops was street smart; Johnny Pie knew which fork to eat his salad with. It was extraordinary that they could come from such a close gene pool. But there were two things they shared: a Hell's Kitchen toughness and an extraordinary Irish willingness to resist.

“I been reading your stuff on Jackie Swift,” said the monsignor. “Very interesting.”

“Yeah,” said Cyclops Reilly, “I'm keeping a close eye on the creep. What's it to you? Or are you calling on behalf of the Cardinal? He didn't fall for Swift's Virgin shit, did he?”

“Hook, line, and sinker,” said the monsignor. “We're having a press conference at St. Vincent's tomorrow. The Cardinal is going to endorse Jackie Swift for Congress....” He paused to let it sink in, “. . . because of his Right-to-Life stance.” Reilly whistled at the end of the phone. “I know Billy Eminence will be there because it's his beat, but I thought you should know about this because of your interest in Swift. Just in case your name slipped through the cracks and you didn't get an invite.”

Cyclops Reilly's mind was racing now. “Yeah, thanks, Johnny Pie. I really appreciate this.”

The monsignor continued, “The Cardinal is also going to bring along the Reverend Chester Cockburn, who'll also endorse Swift.”

“That nut from OFF who picketed the vet's clinic?” asked Cyclops.

“Yes, that's him,” said the monsignor. “His Eminence wants to present a united front on abortion.”

“Aren't you supposed to talk him out of shit like this, Johnny?” asked Cyclops.

“Not this time,” continued the monsignor. “This comes from higher up.”

“Higher up?” said Reilly. “You don't mean The Dour Slav?”

“I don't mean anything, Benedict,” said the Monsignor, suppressing a smile at his cousin's unique sobriquet for Pope John Paul II. “You can take that any way you want. But if I were you I'd look into the background of Reverend Cockburn. You may want to ask him a few questions at the press conference.”

“Does this have anything to do with your special work for the Cardinal?” asked Reilly.

“Yes, it does, Benedict,” replied Burke. “See you there?”

“Yeah,” said Cyclops Reilly. “I'll be there.”

“Does this have anything to do with your special work for the Cardinal?” The sentence had curiously bounced back into Monsignor Burke's mind after he had hung up the phone on his cousin.

The “special work” was routing out pedophiles for the Cardinal and it had earned him his red stripe. Being a lawyer, he had been assigned to negotiate with the families of the abused. Negotiate was a euphemism. Badger, intimidate, twist, coerce was more like it. If they didn't take the money and run, he often ended up cross-examining them in court. Make the victims the predators so the archdiocese could save a little of its dirty money. It had made him sick to his stomach. Once, while talking to his cousin about a family matter on the phone, he had let it drop how much he hated his job, being the Church's persecutor of innocent victims, all children.