The Third Revelation (23 page)

“He showed it to you?”

“He gave it to me.”

Traeger stared at her. So what kind of game had Crowe been playing when he went off to his room to get something he had already given to Heather?

Traeger said, “Is it in the company safe?”

“It's downstairs.”

He leapt to his feet and went rapidly down to Heather's oratory. There were vigil lights flickering that she must have lit earlier. And then the room was illumined as Heather entered, flipping the light switch. She went to the altar and moved the picture hanging behind it.

“A safe?”

“A tabernacle. I hope that eventually perhaps I can have the Blessed Sacrament reserved here.”

But Traeger was interested in the folder she had taken from the recess's repository. She brought it to him.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You didn't look inside?”

“It's in a language I can't read.”

Traeger undid the strings, widened the opening, and without taking papers from the file, saw that it was what Crowe had brought from Rome. What he and others had been killed for.

“It's Portuguese.”

“Portuguese?”

“Do you know anything of Fatima, Heather?”

“Of course.”

“Sister Lucia?”

Her lips parted. She put out her hand and laid it on the file. Traeger had closed it. She picked up the strings and tied them, showing more emotion than Traeger had seen since they came upon the body of Brendan Crowe.

“Why did you bring it here, Heather?”

“Too many people have access to the safe at work.”

 

 

She drove him to a mall not far from her house. The great sea of parked cars was what he was looking for. He had her pull in and then drive slowly between rows of cars.

“This is fine. Thank you, Heather.”

“God bless you.”

When had anyone said that to him without his having sneezed first? The words had meaning as she said them. He got out, stooped, smiled, shut the door, and then turned and went shopping for a car.

“Ain't love grand?”

Laura had never had such a day. And never before had she seen Nate Hannan nearly come unglued.

First, there had been the suggestion that they somehow spirit the body of Father Crowe away from Empedocles. As an initial impulsive reaction, okay, but he had to be argued out of it. Nate simply had no recent experience of situations in which he was not in complete control. Second, there had been Nate's insistence that that stranger Vincent Traeger had murdered Brendan Crowe. There was no point in spelling out for him, as Ray had, the difficulties with the explanation. It was an explanation that promised to direct the investigation away from Empedocles, and that was Nate's major concern.

Well, he seemed to have succeeded. Purcell's questioning turned to what any of them knew of Traeger and when Zelda made the extraordinary revelation—revelations, really, first, that her husband, her
first
husband she had clarified while clinging to the enigmatic Gabriel Faust, had been with the CIA and, second, that he had worked with Vincent Traeger—Purcell pursued this eagerly. Perhaps he saw a way of getting the problem off his plate. Laura made a note to herself to avoid meeting a violent death, if it affected the survivors this way.

Eventually, after hours of being questioned, the three of them were alone in Nate's office where something like calm returned.

“I can't believe this happened here,” Nate said. “Who would want to kill a priest?”

“Diocletian,” Ray suggested, then had to explain it to Nate. The gaps in the great man's knowledge still surprised Laura.

“We're going to have to tighten security around here,” Nate said.

“I'll get at it,” Laura said. As long as this could be turned into a soluble problem, Nate would relax. And of course soluble meant that Laura would take care of it.

“Where's your brother, Laura?”

“Heather took him to a rectory in town.”

“Good. Good. I wish we'd thought of that earlier.” Earlier, of course, he had opposed John's going.

“Could Brendan Crowe have been killed off the premises?” Nate asked. This was a side of Nate's single-mindedness that was less than attractive.

Finally, they broke up. They got Nate into his car—he still drove the most modest of Fords, Henry being one of his heroes—and Laura got into the passenger seat of Ray's car and heaved a sigh of relief.

“We need a drink,” he said.

“At least.”

He leaned toward her as he turned the ignition key, and they bumped foreheads.

“Let's get out of here,” she urged.

“My place or yours?”

“Mine.”

And off they went, down the road to the gate. His place, her place, when would it be theirs?

“What's that mean?”

“What?”

“What you said in Latin. It sounded familiar.”

“ ‘Just say the word.' ”

“Where's it from?”

“It's from the Mass. I thought you were Catholic.”

She moved toward him on the seat, wanting her shoulder against his. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could just be Catholics together again, no longer half ashamed of their relationship? John had seemed unsurprised when she told him that Ray had asked her to marry him.

“John could preside,” she said softly.

“If you like.”

She loved him for knowing immediately what she meant.

 

 

At her apartment, she got out the single malt scotch for Ray, who liked it neat, without ice, to sip as much as to drink. Laura made a martini for herself. The night had grown surprisingly cool, so she lit the fireplace and they sat with just a single light on. A lovely domestic scene.

“Do you want some nibbles?”

“Later.” He puckered his lips and made kissing sounds.

Nate's question earlier was the obvious one. Why would anyone want to kill a priest, specifically Brendan Crowe?

Laura remembered when they had been in Rome, when she had left Ray at the Hotel Columbus and gone to the Vatican to have lunch with John at the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lived. The man Brendan Crowe had worked for, Cardinal Maguire, had recently died, and Father Crowe was just back from his funeral in Ireland. In Saint Peter's there had been a prolonged pontifical funeral Mass for Rampolla, the secretary of state who also had recently died. When Laura suggested that Vatican City seemed injurious to one's health, John had mentioned the age of the secretary of state. But he clearly hadn't wanted to talk about it. No more had she. But now, sitting in her apartment before the fire with Ray, she remembered that exchange and what seemed to her in retrospect John's eagerness to drop the subject. She would press John on the matter tomorrow.

“You think we're making the right choice with Gabriel Faust?” Ray asked.

“He's got credentials out the gazoo.”

“As well as Zelda. I make no mention of gazoos.”

She punched his arm. “Ain't love grand?”

“She parades him around like a trophy.”

“Brendan Crowe studied his dossier, interviewed him,” Laura said. “He said Faust was the real article.”

“Well, Crowe certainly came up with the obvious solution to that list of paintings.”

Have copies made, copies so perfect they would be as good as the originals. Faust knew all about it, another plus. Nate would have the depictions of the joyful mysteries of the rosary ordered and the new foundation could get under way. It occurred to Laura that she and Ray regarded Nate's determination to add Refuge of Sinners to his accomplishments as a quirk, as if he had suddenly decided to collect antique cars or Civil War mementos.

“Thank God for Heather,” Laura said, raising her glass.

Her old classmate had always been serious, it was one of her charms, but even so, Laura had been surprised by the transformation in Heather. She reported to Ray, but Laura was her superior as well. Why then did she feel like such a kid when she talked to Heather? All the authority that had come along with her success at Empedocles, as Nate's indispensable right hand, seemed to fade away before Heather's manner. How to describe it? She was conscientious, reliable, efficient, and yet somehow otherworldly. She had become a Catholic.

“Heather, I thought you always were.”

“Sometimes I think the same.” That smile, that smile. If it were anyone else, Laura would feel condescended to, but it was because of Heather's indifference to the usual jockeying and maneuvering in any corporation that, having first doubted it—there were so many ways to maneuver—she now accepted Heather's attitude as the genuine article. And of course Heather and Nate could have intense conversations about their spiritual reading. Well, intense on Nate's part. Once he learned there was a ladder of spiritual perfection, he was intent on the uppermost rung. And Nate could talk to Heather about his plans for Refuge of Sinners. He had actually proposed that Heather run the thing.

“She turned me down,” Nate said, another new experience for him.

The foundation would be a corporation separate from Empedocles, nonprofit of course, and Laura and Ray had tried to understand its purpose. Asking Nate was risky, since it led to one of his sermons: not unctuous, more like a business plan.

“Why doesn't he just underwrite Trepanier's organization?” Ray had wondered.

“Because it wouldn't belong to Saint Ignatius.”

Well, if Nate had been predictable, he probably would be a computer repairman trying to make ends meet. They had hoped the grotto would satisfy his new interest in the faith of his fathers, but it had been just the beginning.

“I almost wish he had thought of John for the job,” Laura said.

“Would he have taken it?”

“No.”

“There you are.”

It had been Zelda's surprising remark that Traeger had been in the CIA with husband numero uno that cast the events of the day in a new light. Or a new darkness. What she and Ray knew of the CIA didn't amount to much. The agency was often in the news of late, portrayed as a check on if not a rival to the administration. Its critics pointed to the miserable record of the agency in assessing the situations in which they had involved the country. It was something to learn that not even members of Congress were privy to its operations or even knew the extent of its budget, let alone how the money was used. And they had covered themselves with shame in their estimate of Iraq, first in the Gulf War, now in the seemingly endless conflict in which our troops were engaged in the supposedly conquered country. All the talk about weapons of mass destruction had been revealed as so much blather. But it had been based on so-called intelligence. What did all that have to do with what had happened to Brendan Crowe in the guest building at Empedocles? If anything? But the mysterious disappearance of Vincent Traeger made Father Crowe's horrible death seem an event in a game that Purcell and his colleagues were unlikely to understand.

“That gets Purcell off the hook,” Ray said. “His relief at the thought is palpable.”

“Us, too.” She snuggled closer. “Let's talk about us.”

“Not in front of the children.”

Laura purred. What a lovely thought.

“And so to bed.”

They went out to dinner, as they usually did, Zelda saying she did not want to spoil their honeymoon by revealing what a lousy cook she was. Honeymoon? What had begun in Corfu had continued nonstop ever since, gaining in intensity after the ceremony in the sacristy of Santa Susanna in Rome. Father Kiernan had been remarkably incurious about Gabriel, apparently assuming that he was as committed a Catholic as Zelda surprisingly was. No, not surprisingly. He remembered her agonies of remorse between bouts in bed after their relationship had altered from expert and client to sexual partners. Calling Zelda from Corfu, more out of boredom than anything, had proved a fateful step.

“Another?” he asked when they had finished their Manhattans.

“Let's.” She hunched her shoulders and widened her eyes. But the implied naughtiness of a second preprandial drink was make-believe.

“Tell me about your husband, Zelda.”

“You're my husband.”

“I had no idea he had been with the CIA.”

“He only told me after he retired. Can you believe it?”

“What did you think he did?”

“He said he was a lobbyist. And he was. But it turned out that was more a cover than a job.”

“And he worked with Traeger?”

“Gabriel, I am trying to forget about this awful day.”

He put his hand on hers. “I thought it had been rather successful.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Of course it has been. And I am so delighted. I'll tell you a secret. I had begun to worry how I could possibly avoid boring you to death. Now you have a wonderful position. What exactly are the arrangements?”

“I thought you'd never ask.”

He handed her the memorandum and contract Laura Burke had given him before they left Empedocles. Zelda's plush lips rounded when she read the proposed salary. Gabriel realized how important to him that was. If she had feared the specter of boredom, he had not looked forward to her discovery of how modest his means were. How could he help but feel like a gigolo, particularly the way Zelda displayed him as if he represented some splendid catch? He had insisted on using his credit cards during these past weeks, dreading presenting her with the bills when they came. Now he would have an income beyond anything he had expected. Not even in his optimistic youth would he have imagined such a sinecure.