Prince of Peace (58 page)

With a high-pitched whine, a large army truck, the familiar olive canvas, backed up the street toward them. More soldiers?

Michael looked around quickly, hoping to see reporters, cameramen, American or European witnesses. None. The citizens who had been following had been stopped by a line of police a block away.

Suu Van Pham began reciting, in Latin, the Sixtieth Psalm. "Hear, O Lord, my cry..." The others joined in. At least if they had to be arrested, Michael thought, it would be by Americans.

"From the earth's end I call to you as my heart grows faint. You will set me high upon a rock; you will give me rest, for you are my refuge, a tower of strength against the enemy."

Even before the truck stopped, the flap was thrown back and Vietnamese Rangers began jumping out. They were carrying heavy wooden riot sticks. Immediately, though no priest resisted, they began to club them. Within seconds each priest had been bloodied, then roughly picked up and hurled into the truck.

All but Michael. A pair of American MPs had snatched the crucifix from him. Taking him by each arm, they dragged him into the headquarters building.

Within ten minutes the demonstration was over. The truck was gone. The dropped breviaries and candles, the crucifix and Pham's sign had been swept away. The bystanders, including reporters, half a block away had seen nothing, owing to the wall of burly American soldiers. The entire demonstration might have been a fantasy, a mirage. And the bystanders were dispersed then anyway when the skies opened finally, with a great clap of thunder, for the rain.

 

Michael was kept in a bare room, alone, for more than two hours. It was furnished with a plain wooden table and two chairs. He tried to pray but couldn't. The sound of the lock turning in his door startled him. He straightened in the chair and put his hands palm downward on the table and he watched as the door opened.

"Jack!" Michael stood. Relief surged through him, an absurd happiness. It was Jack Howe, in his white suit, his slick black hair carefully parted above his haggard face. Howe looked gaunt as ever, and stern, but the tension in which Michael had held himself so rigidly went at once. When Howe offered him his hand Michael took it in both of his and shook it gratefully.

"Are you all right, Father?"

"Yes, but you've got to get me out of here. They've arrested my fellow priests. I've got to get to them."

"Sit down, Father." Howe withdrew his hand.

"But, Jack—"

"Sit down," he ordered.

Michael stiffened. He watched in silence while Howe took a pipe from his pocket and lit it. Had he ever seen Howe smoke a pipe before? As he puffed it alive he said, "That was a stupid thing to do, Father."

"Where are my fellow priests, Jack?"

"The Viets have been taken to the Center for Political Reindoctrination at Bien Hoa."

"That's a prison! That's where V.C. terrorists are taken."

"You people didn't expect rooms at the Caravelle Hotel, did you?"

"What law did we break?" Michael stared at him; had he ever seen this Howe before?

"I thought you had more savvy than this, Father. They used you." Howe looked at Michael mournfully.

"Everybody uses me, Jack, even you." Michael was trying to stretch his mind around what, at last, it knew. "You told me once you hated the CIA. Now that I recall, perhaps you didn't explicitly deny working for it, however."

"I wish I could have told you, Father," Howe said simply.

"And now they've sent you in here because you're famous for getting me to eat out of your hand."

"Father, I asked to be the one to see you."

"Why?"

He shook his head and shrugged. "Because I know why you did it."

"I did it, Jack, because of things you taught me."

Howe stared at his pipe.

"You stayed with it too long, Jack."

Howe's eyes widened. "Maybe so. But now it's moving too fast to jump off."

"I'm off." Michael stood up. He recognized Howe's situation, that familiar despair, but it came as a surprise to find he had no sympathy for him. "Take me to Bien Hoa."

Howe stared at him.

"I mean it. If the Vietnamese priests are there, then I want to be with them."

Howe relit his pipe. It was a gesture into which he could channel his insecurity, and when the pipe was lit all traces of it were gone. He said officiously, "Father Maguire, you are being taken to Tan Son Nhut, being put on an airplane and sent home. Your visa has been revoked."

"I'm not going, Jack. Not even for you, buddy. You'll have to go back and tell your bosses that you couldn't work your magic with me this time."

"Oh, really? What are you going to do?"

Michael answered with a resolve he did not know he had. "I'm going to return to the Presidential Palace and I am going to retrace the steps that we took today, and I am going to stand outside this building until curfew. I will observe curfew because I have no intention of breaking the law. But I will repeat the procession tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and every day until my fellow priests have been freed."

"That won't be necessary, Father. Your fellow priests will be freed as soon as your plane leaves the ground. The government has no interest in making heroes of them."

"I don't believe you, Jack. I don't believe the government here. You're all fucking liars. You free the priests. Then talk to me about leaving."

Howe studied the bowl of his pipe for a moment, then turned abruptly and left the room.

More than an hour later another man came, this one in khaki. On his collar were the silver eagles of a full colonel.

He offered Michael his hand. "Father Maguire, I'm Father Paul Fitzmaurice."

Only then did Michael see the silver cross on his breast pocket. This was the Theater Chief of Chaplains.

"I have a message for you." He put a piece of paper on the table and sat.

"Already?" Michael smiled. He understood suddenly that they'd have been on the wire to New York. As he picked up the teletype sheet, he said, "Good old Tim O'Shea."

The chaplain shook his head. "Not Bishop O'Shea, Father. It's from the cardinal."

Michael's stomach constricted. Why hadn't he expected this? Had he been living in never-never land? He sat, stunned.

When he saw that the communication was in Latin, he did not breathe. The first thing his eyes fixed on were the parenthetical citations by number of canon law. He was being formally ordered back to New York under solemn obedience.

Michael looked across the table at Fitzmaurice. "It must be the middle of the night in New York! They woke Spellman for this?"

The chaplain nodded. "They want you out. Every American in Vietnam is furious at you." Especially including me, his attitude suggested.

Michael looked at the paper in his hands. "I don't think the cardinal is too pleased either."

"They're threatening to force CRS out of Asia altogether because of you."

"Good Lord."

"What did you expect?"

Michael looked sharply at the chaplain. "To be able to stand peacefully in front of an American building, to express an opinion."

"This isn't the States, Father. You're damn lucky they're not charging you with treason."

"What?"

"'Aid and comfort to the enemy,' Father. You've heard of it?"

"Don't accuse me of treason, Colonel." Michael's anger swelled. Fitzmaurice shrugged, backing off. "Look, you give every priest over here a bad name. You're the first American citizen to join these kooks. How do you think that looks? An American priest demonstrating against his own superiors!"

"Westmoreland and Taylor are not my superiors."

"Over here they are. This is war, Father. I don't think you understand that."

"That's one thing I do understand, Colonel. I know war when I see it, and I know when the rules of war are being violated. I've been in the countryside; have you? I've seen this war from the villages; have you? You should get your chaplains out of the officers' clubs and into the free fire zones, then tell me this is war. This isn't war, Colonel. It is mass murder. It is genocide."

The chaplain said mournfully, like a hurt mother—a common form among certain clergy—"I take your refusal to call me 'Father' as an insult, as you no doubt intend it."

"Not so. I simply find it impossible to think of you as a priest."

"You've got a nerve."

"A nerve is right! A raw nerve, involving some brother priests of ours who had the shit kicked out of them with American GIs looking on, and who are now in Bien Hoa, a torture-prison. And you know it. I'm not leaving here until they're free."

"The Viets can take care of themselves, Father. They knew well enough what they were getting into, even if you didn't." The chaplain nodded at the teletype sheet. "You don't have any choice in that matter now. That's God's Will you're holding in your hands."

Michael dropped the paper on the table. "I want you to tell whoever sent you in here I'm not leaving Vietnam until those priests are free."

"That's a solemn command you have there, Father, from your Ordinary himself. You recognize the canonical formula surely."

"Yes, I do."

"And you recall the consequences if you disobey."

"I believe the progression runs from suspension to interdiction to excommunication, doesn't it? But it's a little more complicated than my saying yes or no to a solemn order. Since they've chosen to play this canonically, Colonel, instead of, say, pastorally or even fraternally, they'll have to follow the form to its conclusion. That means they have to issue the order three times before the penalty is incurred, which gives me a little time, doesn't it?"

"And they told me you young priests didn't know your canon law."

"Some of us know it well enough to hide in it."

"But what about CRS? It won't have the benefit of canonical due process. The army can just shut it down. Do you want that on your conscience?"

Michael shook his head. "They can't do it. The Catholic Relief Service! It's the largest private foreign aid agency in America. It operates in seventy countries. It gets clothes and food to ten million people. There are three hundred CRS workers in Southeast Asia. And the board of directors has some of the most powerful men in America on it. What MACV has if they shut down CRS is bad publicity. Everybody from Uncle Walter to the
New York Times
to, maybe, the head of Caritas International comes to me to find out what happened. And do you know what? I'll tell them. And that, Colonel, is what they'll obviously do anything to avoid."

"You're pretty cocky, aren't you?"

"Not at all. I'd vastly prefer that none of this was happening. I wish I was the third curate in an upstate parish."

"You may get that wish before you're finished."

Father Fitzmaurice stood.

"And you tell them I demand to know by what authority I'm being prevented from leaving this building."

Fitzmaurice shook his head, genuinely bewildered. "This isn't the States, Father. Do you want them to turn you over to the Vietnamese?"

"That's exactly what I want."

"They can't and you know it."

"Then get our brother priests out of Bien Hoa."

***

Minutes after the chaplain left, Jack Howe returned. "All right, here's the deal. You're free to go. But you get the woman away from this building."

"What woman?"

"The German nurse. She's been standing outside all afternoon. Tomorrow the priests will be released. They'll be brought to the rectory of the cathedral where you can greet them. Then an army driver will take you to Tan Son Nhut, and you'll board a plane for the States. And you will never come back to Vietnam."

"You make it sound like I'm a criminal, Jack. Is that what you think after all these years? After all you've seen here? That I'm the criminal?"

Howe did not drop his eyes. Clearly he had decided that this priest wasn't going to make him feel guilty. He had his battens in place now.

"All right, Jack," Michael said, "I agree."

Howe nodded briskly and left the room.

Inge Holz was waiting beyond the sandbag barrier. The rain had stopped and the late afternoon sky was clear and bright. When Michael came out, she rushed forward and embraced him. She began to question him in a rush, but he put his finger to his lips and led her away from the headquarters building. In the middle of the next block he unbuttoned his cassock and took it off. He laughed. "I should have left this there. I borrowed it from the air force." He draped it over one arm, and put the other arm around her shoulder. "I think they let me out because they sensed you wouldn't go away."

"I wasn't certain you are still there, but where else can I go?" Her calm had never broken, but he saw how alarmed she'd been.

He told her that Pham and the others would be released the next day, and that he'd agreed to leave Vietnam.

"And you believe them?" she asked.

"I'm not going until I see them."

"But when you go they can do anything."

"They can do anything now, Inge. My being around guarantees nothing."

"But how can you leave? Without you they are there forever. Pham won't stop now. He'll need you again."

"No. He needs his own people. That's all. If I have work to do, it's with mine. Pham doesn't need me. Maybe he doesn't need you either." Michael hadn't planned to say that. What business was it of his?

"What do you say?" She held herself against what he'd said, as if it was the first blow of many.

"He's a priest, Inge. You know what I mean."

She slipped out of his arm and ran ahead. She dodged through traffic to cross the street away from him.

By the time he caught up with her, she was sobbing.

"I'm sorry," he said, as he took her arm.

She continued to walk at a clip, but she didn't shake him off. Neither spoke. They walked as far as Lam Son Square where battered Citroëns and Pugeots competed with the motorbikes and pedicabs in the evening rush hour.

In front of the big hotel, the Continental Palace, that catered to Americans and Europeans he suggested they go in for a drink. She didn't resist. Her spirit was drained. She was exhausted, he realized, and far too vulnerable to deal with what he'd said.