The Death of an Irish Sinner (5 page)

A CAR WAS
blocking the drive in the street outside the gate. With arms folded, a tall, thin man was leaning against the fender, his eyeglasses glinting in the beams of McGarr’s headlamps.

As the gates closed with a solid clump, McGarr waited for the man to move, and when he didn’t, McGarr flashed the car’s brights and rolled a few feet forward.

Only then did the man step forward.

Gangly, mid-forties, he had a sprightly gait, more like a kind of lope, that McGarr believed he had seen before. But where?

Rolling down the window, McGarr reached for the butt of the Walther, which was again tucked under his belt. He had made mistakes enough for one night. “Help you?”

“Know me?” the man demanded, bending so his face was in the window.

McGarr said nothing, the face—like his odd gait—being only vaguely familiar.

“You don’t know me?”

Still, McGarr waited.

“And there I was hoping you’d be the consummate Sherlock—never forget a face and all that rot. You’re Peter McGarr. I’m Dery Parmalee, publisher of
Ath Cliath
. Doubtless you remember me. We’ve met several times.” His large right hand now accompanied his face in the open window.

Yet McGarr continued to regard the man. Named after the Irish language phrase for Dublin,
Ath Cliath
was a weekly tabloid newspaper that was distributed free of charge on streetcorners and dropped off at shops citywide.

But unlike so many erstwhile publications of the sort,
Ath Cliath
had flourished, if page numbers were any measure of success. The weekly tabloid was now the size of a thin book, and Noreen herself had taken to advertising her painting gallery in the rag.

“Why?” McGarr had only recently asked her, since the expense was nearly as great as advertising in one of the national dailies. Also, the quality of the stories was more than a little suspect. They were based mainly on scandal, innuendo, and gossip. Many began with the lead “Sources have revealed to
Ath Cliath
…” And Parmalee himself was often in the news fighting some slander charge in court.

“Ach, it’s ‘the word behind the hand,’” Noreen had replied, “what everybody in this town can’t get enough
of, and you know it. The inside scoop, what the other papers are afraid to print.

“Also, they cover all the films, plays, and concerts better than anybody, and the reporting about museums and galleries is the best I’ve ever read in Ireland. People pick it up to know what’s going on. Add in a few gossipy exposés”—she had shrugged—“and it’s a winner. Tell you true, I can’t afford
not
to advertise in
Ath Cliath
.”

McGarr now remembered that the cover exposés were nearly all written by Parmalee himself.

Who now withdrew the hand and straightened up. “To business then? I know what happened inside, what’s going on, and why you’re here.” Parmalee waited for McGarr’s reaction.

Seconds went by.

“I think there’s several things you should know.”

Removing his hand from the butt of the Walther, McGarr slipped the Rover into neutral.

“Mary-Jo Stanton? She was a numerary—an acolyte—of Opus Dei. In fact, this”—the hand gestured at the bronze gate—“is no mere private dwelling. It’s an Opus Dei compound, their unofficial headquarters here in Ireland, with Fred Duggan in command.”

“Father Fred?”

Parmalee nodded.

McGarr tried to remember what exactly Opus Dei was. In Latin, the phrase meant “the work (or works) of God,” he knew from the years he had been forced to study that ancient language. Could it be a Catholic religious order? He seemed to think he had heard or read the name before. “Opus Dei?” he asked.

“John Paul the Second’s reactionary shock troops,”
Parmalee said. “They fashion themselves as modern-day Crusaders, and they’re zealots of the worst sort. They’ll say and do anything to promote what they think is God’s work. How did their thaumaturgic founder, José Maria Escrivá, put it? ‘Our life is a warfare of love, and in love and war all is fair.’”

José Maria Escrivá was the name engraved on the brass plate of the painting that had been cut out and stolen from Mary-Jo Stanton’s rifled study. But
thaumaturgic
? What exactly did that mean?

“
Pillería
is what Escrivá called the campaigns that Opus Dei has carried on around the world in the name of God’s work. Dirty tricks, such as massive bank frauds with the money going into Opus Dei coffers, assassinations of political figures like Salvador Allende in Chile, and perhaps even Pope John Paul.”

“The Pope?”

Parmalee nodded.

“But isn’t he alive?” McGarr asked.

The man closed his eyes dismissively. “The first John Paul. The John Paul who initiated all the liberal reforms in the Church, who championed Liberation Theology and birth control. They—the conservatives and Opus Dei—they thought of him as a mistake, an anomaly, and they got rid of him in thirty-three days.”

Again McGarr waited, wondering if Parmalee were a bit off. Or perhaps he had something to tell him more germane to Mary-Jo Stanton’s murder. Parmalee had a tic in his left eye; behind the octagon lenses of his eyeglasses it kept straying and darting back.

“They poisoned John Paul and claimed he’d suffered a heart attack, even though he’d just had a physi
cal conducted by his doctor of over twenty years. It included an electrocardiogram. The man declared of John Paul ‘
Non sta bene, ma benone
.’”

“Not just well, but very well,” the phrase meant. Before joining the Garda, McGarr had spent over a decade on the Continent, working for Criminal Justice in Marseilles and later for Interpol. “When was that?”

“John Paul died in September of 1978.”

McGarr seemed to remember hearing or reading about some controversy regarding that Pope’s death. But he also knew that the Vatican and the other institutions of the Roman Catholic Church had more than a few detractors. Claims of conspiracy and murder were floated whenever Popes died and were succeeded.

“Wasn’t there something about no autopsy?”

Parmalee’s eye snapped to the side and remained there. “Not just no autopsy. No forensic tests of any kind, no official death certificate. The body was embalmed almost immediately.

“Only a few weeks earlier, the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Leningrad, who was only forty-nine years old, also died of a massive heart attack, while waiting in a papal antechamber before meeting with John Paul about a possible softening of the Church’s attitude toward Moscow. Opus Dei didn’t want that either.”

McGarr shrugged. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because just as Opus Dei murdered Allende and John Paul when those two got in their way, they also murdered Mary-Jo this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“To keep her from committing the ultimate betrayal by sending the manuscript of her biography of Escrivá, the Opus Dei founder, to her publisher in London.”

McGarr sighed. It was getting late, and he would have a busy day on the morrow, handling the investigation and fending off the press. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

The slight smile had reappeared on Parmalee’s face. “Because the manuscript contains the revelation that José Maria Escrivá de Balaguer may have been—and probably was—Mary-Jo’s father.”

“Her spiritual father?”

The man shook his head, the smile now almost gleeful. “Her fleshly father.”

“You have proof of this?”

“No, of course not. Only a DNA match could prove that conclusively, and I’m sure Opus Dei would fight that with every resource at their command. But I was hoping you found a copy of the manuscript tonight, or it’s still up in the study of her quarters on the third floor.”

McGarr thought of the intruder who had cut Escrivá’s portrait from the frame. There was too much…background—about Mary-Jo Stanton, the house and estate, and the Church—that he didn’t understand. And how did this Parmalee know that she had been murdered in the afternoon, when McGarr had contacted his office only an hour or so ago. “Buy you a drink?”

“At this time of night?”

“Move your car and get in.”

“But might I get towed?”

“Perhaps this might help. Fix it in a window.” McGarr handed Parmalee one of his cards.

AT ILNACULLIN, MCGARR
turned the car down the avenue of beeches that lined the drive.

“Nice place—yours?” Parmalee asked, as they passed the house and parked in the stable yard.

McGarr only shook his head. “So, Dery—may I call you Dery?—how do you know all of this?”

“Mary-Jo was a close personal friend of mine. A decade ago we worked on a hagiography of Aquinas together.”

McGarr added
hagiography
to his mix of verbal ignorance. Aquinas he knew of vaguely, having had to read excerpts of his writings while in school. “How did you come by your knowledge of the Church?”

There was a pause as Parmalee seemed to be phrasing a reply; they were out of the car now, walking to
ward the house. “I guess you could say that I’m a failed priest.”

“What order?”

“Jesuit.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Woman. Women.”

“Anybody in particular?”

“After Mary-Jo, not really.”

McGarr regarded the man, who could only be in his mid-forties. A decade earlier, Mary-Jo Stanton would have been in her early sixties. “How do you know Mary-Jo was murdered?”

“I intercepted your telephone message to your headquarters in Dublin.”

“How?”

“A snooping device I have in the car.”

“And you were where?”

“Just down the road in the village. I’ve been working on an exposé of Opus Dei’s activities in Ireland, and I overheard your call to your headquarters. Felicitously.”

“Which is illegal.”

Parmalee hunched one shoulder and smiled. “Not nearly as illegal as what I’ve discovered about Opus Dei’s ‘warfare of
love
,’ as they call it.”

The others in the house had long since gone to bed, and after reviving the fire in the den, McGarr poured Parmalee a drink, then excused himself. “I’ll be back in a jiff. Make yourself at home.”

Well out of earshot in the kitchen, McGarr used the phone on the wall to ring up his headquarters. “There’s a car outside the gates of the murder scene in Dunlavin with my calling card in the window. Im
pound and go over it bumper to bumper. I’ve been told it contains eavesdropping equipment. Copy any tapes or disks.

“I also want you to find out everything you can about a Roman Catholic order called Opus Dei—who they are and how important they might be in this country. I want that done by the morning.”

“Where are you, Chief?”

“Home,” McGarr blurted out, before adding, “In Dunlavin.”

Asking the desk sergeant to switch on the tape recorder, he then recounted the details of what he had encountered at Barbastro. Typed up, it would save him the bother of writing a report in the morning and his staff would be a step ahead.

Back in the den, he found Dery Parmalee standing by the gun racks where McGarr’s father-in-law kept his sporting weapons. Several times All-Ireland field champion, Fitzhugh Frenche owned a splendid collection of birding guns and had trained both of his children to be crack shots.

“Gorgeous guns,” Parmalee said. “Any of them yours?”

McGarr shook his head.

“Handguns being more in your line of work, I trust. Don’t I remember reading that your wife, Noreen, is some sort of champion?”

McGarr waited. It wasn’t a question. The man was again letting him know that he was more than simply well informed, he was powerfully well informed with data that could be used in any way he chose—to ennoble or descry.

“All-Ireland skeet champ, isn’t it? In her age group, that is.”

McGarr poured himself a whiskey and took the seat on the other side of the hearth from where Parmalee had placed his own drink. “Tell me about Opus Dei. From the beginning.”

“The very beginning?”

McGarr nodded. “I know very little about the Church.”

“You’re not a practicing Catholic, then?” Parmalee took his seat.

McGarr shook his head. In recent years he’d been inside churches and synagogues only for weddings and funerals. “And you?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“You don’t go to church?”

Parmalee shook his head.

“What about your former order, the Jesuits—have anything to do with them?”

“Individuals—my friends, a mentor or two—yes. The hierarchy, no. I’ve put all that behind me.”

“But you’re still interested in the affairs of the Church. Like this José Maria Escrivá.”

“
Fixated
, I think, would be the better word.” Parmalee’s eye strayed toward the fire. “I’m interested in how faith plays out in the institution of the Church. The form it takes, how and why it becomes warped, and”—he sighed—“the grotesqueries that result.”

“Like Opus Dei?”

“Particularly Opus Dei, which is the most pernicious and retrograde institution that has yet been created within the modern Church.”

“Founded by José Maria Escrivá,” McGarr prompted. “Who was?”

“A poor Spanish priest, born around the turn of the last century. He had a vision of how Church doctrine had misinterpreted a key passage in the book of Genesis. Or so they claim.”

“They?”

“Opus Dei, the order that was created by him. They claim God spoke directly to Escrivá about the passage and other matters.”

“Which key passage?”

“The fifteenth verse of the second chapter. It says,

‘And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.’ After meditating on the text when he was only twenty-six years old, Escrivá decided that Aquinas’s interpretation seven centuries earlier had been wrong.”

McGarr canted his head, wishing to hear more.

“In the thirteenth century, Aquinas had formed Church doctrine in regard to the passage. He held that work—physical labor and toil of every sort—had become a part of man’s life only
after
Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and banishment from the Garden. Therefore, work, like death, was part of the price man had to pay for having sinned and been cast out of Eden.

“That interpretation was the official Church interpretation of Genesis from the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century right up to 1879, when Leo the Thirteenth restated Aquinas’s position.

“Escrivá, on the other hand, reexamined the passage and held that work had been an essential activity in the Garden
before
man’s fall from grace. Therefore, work
was part of God’s plan for man, work was a necessary part of the human condition, and—essentially—man could not be complete as God originally intended him without work’s being an integral part of his life.

“Taking the interpretation a step further, Escrivá reasoned that one way a person could honor and worship God was to work as well as he or she was able, not merely as a cleric but in all the occupations, whatever a person’s abilities, be it street sweeper or brain surgeon. Hence, the name—Opus Dei, ‘God’s Work.’”

McGarr noted how animated Parmalee had become; two bright patches had appeared on his cheeks.

“Unlike Aquinas’s medieval take on Genesis, which contended that work was punishment, Escrivá’s interpretation was perfectly attuned to modern industrial and commercial society. Not everybody—in fact, few—can become a priest or a nun, given the present strictures of holy vows. With families, bills, debts, and so forth, most people must work and work hard.

“But didn’t the
Bible
say that work had been an integral part of the state of grace that obtained in the Garden
before
man’s fall? Escrivá reasoned. Therefore, humankind could honor and worship God through their labor by working as diligently as possible, preferably within the context of a new holy order that welcomed and respected lay vocations. Opus Dei members do not need to become priests or nuns. In fact, at present only two percent are.”

“Out of how many?”

“Worldwide? Around eighty thousand.”

McGarr’s head went back; it was a large number.
One of his brothers was a Jesuit, and he knew that order totaled only thirty thousand or so.

“Since the mid-seventies, at least, Opus Dei has controlled the Vatican bank and the Curia.”

Which elected Popes. That much McGarr knew. “And how many Opus Dei members are there here in Ireland?”

“It’s hard to tell, since Opus Dei would never divulge the actual number, but easily two to three thousand, all working for God among us. Not wearing clerical collars or habits. You’d never know who they were.” Parmalee’s slight smile had returned. “Shall I continue?”

“Please.” If, in fact, Mary-Jo Stanton’s Barbastro was an Opus Dei facility and not merely her residence, McGarr should know something about the order.

“Beginning immediately after his 1928 revelation, Escrivá proved to be not only an insightful thinker but also a consummate organizer and Machiavellian strategist. He may have written that
all
work was equal in the eyes of God, but he well understood that some types of work garnered more money and power than others, especially the work produced by graduates of universities, which is where he focused his recruitment efforts.

“Such that when the Fascist Francisco Franco rose to power in 1936, Escrivá’s Opus Dei was perfectly positioned to assist Franco in rooting out suspected socialists from the universities and installing academics with fascist leanings.

“Opus Dei’s tireless lay workers were so successful
in eradicating the remnants of socialism in Spanish universities that, in 1947, Escrivá approached Pope Pius the Twelfth, who himself had fascist leanings. Escrivá was able to convince him to legitimize Opus Dei as an ‘apostolate of penetration,’ as he called it, to fight the spread of Marxist Communism.”

Far from mere fascist leanings, Pope Pius XII had been the Pope who acquiesced to the Holocaust.
“Apostolate?”
It was yet another word McGarr was unsure of.

“Officially, I guess it’s a group of lay brethren organized to promote some mission of the Church.”

“Which is what Escrivá had established in Spain.”

“Exactly. But by legitimizing Opus Dei, that Pope created the Church’s first ‘secular institute’ and allowed Opus Dei to function on a world stage. Some lay members are required to take the sacred priestly vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

“Essentially, they’re priests without collars and practice their chosen occupations or professions while living in Opus Dei residences, like Barbastro. Nearly all of what they earn goes into Opus Dei coffers.

“Other members, not as fully committed, live with their families, wives, and husbands, while focusing their life on God’s work through Opus Dei.

“And still others simply worship with and help the order succeed in the world, knowing that every little boost they give Opus Dei is a way of promoting godliness in the world. Or at least their interpretation of godliness, which is the bottom line.

“Because”—Parmalee moved up in the chair,
plainly exercised now—“
because
, like other zealots and true believers, they’re convinced that God is with them every moment no matter what they do, which allows them to do just about anything. No,
anything
—topple governments, murder Popes or, as here, anybody else who poses a threat to ‘God’s Work.’

“Beginning in 1949 with Pope Pius the Twelfth’s imprimatur of legitimacy, Escrivá succeeded in creating the most heinous religious army since…well, since Cromwell, to put things in an Irish context.

“But as I said, a covert religious army, open warfare being passé and not their style. Rule 191 states, ‘Numerary and supernumerary members must always observe a prudent silence regarding the names of other members, and never reveal to anyone the fact that they belong to Opus Dei…unless expressly authorized to do so by their local director.’”

“Numerary, supernumerary?”
McGarr questioned.

“The two highest levels of lay commitment. Also there are
cooperators
—people who contribute to God’s cause either materially or through their offices. People like Eamon de Valera and Charlie Haughey here in this country, François Mitterrand in France, the Kennedys and William Casey, the onetime CIA chief, in the States.”

McGarr glanced at his watch. Without proof, Parmalee’s charges—if that’s what they were—were scurrilous in the extreme and journalism at its worst.

“I know, I know.” Parmalee raised his palms. “It’s getting late, and all this is rather much to take in at first blush. But I think you’ll find you’ll need to know
more, as your investigation proceeds. And I’ll be at your service, of course.”

Really, now. That Parmalee believed he knew how the investigation would proceed rather interested McGarr. “What was Mary-Jo Stanton’s status within Opus Dei?”

“As I mentioned earlier, she was a numerary, the highest category for a woman.
But
”—Parmalee raised a finger, his brows arching, his eyes still bright—“she was in many ways a disobedient and self-willed numerary who wrote the truth as she, not they, saw it. And it was in this last project—writing the biography of Escrivá, her father—that she transgressed the boundaries of Opus Dei. They could not allow that.”

“They?”
McGarr asked.

“The priests who control Opus Dei. They’re only two percent of the membership, but they control and direct all.”

“Father Fred being one of them.”

Parmalee nodded. “On permanent—how shall I phrase this?—guard duty at Barbastro. His assignment was to keep Mary-Jo happy, since she was so important to Opus Dei in two ways.” Parmalee raised two fingers. “First, as a steady source of significant money. Everything, trust me––the house, the money, the collections and archives—will be left to the order, if the lot doesn’t already belong to them.

“And second—to make sure she didn’t go public in any way about her family history, given her direct fleshly connection to Escrivá.”

“Who has been beatified?”

Parmalee’s eye darted to the side; he nodded his head. “The first step to sainthood.”

It was a major charge—that a man who had been vetted for sainthood could possibly have fathered a child. “You have proof of this?”

Parmalee shook his head. “As I said—in the house, perhaps. Unless, of course, they got to it before you and your staff arrived.”