“What time is it on?” asked Maura. He gave her a quizzical look.
“The Mass,” she said.
“It’s
on
at nine a.m.”
“Could be worse.”
I heard Burke asking Maura about her job, and she told him about the various Charter of Rights cases she had launched on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. Some challenges — and some challengers
— had more merit than others, as she freely acknowledged. She was also big enough to admit that she had recently been named in a discrimination suit herself, after she refused to hire a certain applicant as a research assistant. Her defence consisted of one sentence: “She can’t spell.” Maura told him about the poverty law course she taught at Dalhousie Law School. Burke obviously liked what he heard, because he favoured her with a most charming quotation: “The wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament. And those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.”
“Sweet of you to say so,” Maura responded with surprised pleasure.
“Once a sweet-talking guy, always a sweet-talking guy. And not above stealing a line from the prophets, in or out of context. That’s Daniel, by the way, chapter 12, verse 3. I’ll write it out for you. If anyone challenges your efforts, you can point to a higher authority.”
Just then, Normie barrelled into the room and made for the piano. I saw Burke snatch her up by the back of her overalls. A fellow lawyer started to regale me with a long story before charging after a tray of profiteroles. Then it was Maura at my side.
“Did you see that?” she demanded.
“What?”
“Normie and Brennan?”
“No.”
“She careened past us and he caught her by the overalls. I growled at her for running around blind without her glasses. Anyway, Brennan picked her up. She looked at his face, then started staring at the front of his shirt. Where his heart would be. Or
is,
I should say. Then she pressed her hand over it, drew her hand back and looked at the palm, pressed it and looked again. As if expecting to find something there. They exchanged a long look and he said to her, speaking quietly and sounding very Celtic: ‘Oh, you can see just fine, can’t you, you little Druid?’ She just nodded, never taking her eyes off him. What do you make of that?”
I shook my head. Whatever it was, I did not want to get into it at the party. “Right now, she should be in bed. I’ll take her.”
I got Normie settled in a spare room, poured myself a large glass of whiskey, and returned to the conservatory to find my brother Stephen at the piano. The guests joined in, and old tunes were sung
badly with great enthusiasm. It was not until the good father picked up a beer bottle for a microphone and began belting out “Mack the Knife” that I realized he was hammered. Burke had a magnificent voice and, in full party mode, was not above milking the song for all it was worth. A drunken but effective rendition. I looked around and found everybody spellbound. Even Sylvia Stratton was gaping in a most undignified manner, delicate fingers toying with a strand of lustrous pearls at her neck. My wife seemed to have been frozen in place, a glass halfway to her lips.
It went on from there. Every once in a while Burke would look around and say: “What the hell time is it? I have to say Mass.” Then he’d go back to singing, dancing, or drinking. Till around five in the morning. It looked to me, although I was not a very astute judge by then, as if he gave up the whiskey at that time and switched to water. He eased off the vocal pyrotechnics, and his cigarette consumption seemed to tail off as well.
Then, somehow, I found myself sitting in the Strattons’ Range Rover with half a dozen other people, including my wife and brother. It was a tight fit. Brennan, now silent, sat in the front, his head resting on the window. Rowan pulled up at St. Bernadette’s Church and parked the car.
“Domine, non sum dignus, “
Burke muttered, “and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that.”
“What’d he say?” came a boozy voice from the back of the vehicle.
“Lord, I am not worthy,” my wife explained.
It was three minutes to nine when our raggle-taggle group shuffled up the aisle. The church was about one-third full. I had not gone to Mass just for the sake of going to Mass in years. Burke sprinted up a side aisle, still in his suit and leather jacket; his tie had long since disappeared. He was surprisingly agile given the amount of whiskey that must still have been coursing through his veins. Before disappearing into the sacristy, he jerked his head towards the empty second row. That’s where we were to sit. We stumbled into place. When Father Burke appeared on the altar two minutes later, his hair was wet and his face had a pinky, scrubbed look.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.
The priest, in Lenten vestments matching the amethyst in the church’s stained-glass windows, made the sign of the cross over the old, the young,
the hung-over and the still-drunk, and began saying Mass in the ancient tongue. He recited the
Confiteor
and those who knew it joined in the public confession, with its abject admission of sinful-ness:
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
For the first time in hours, I thought of the murder charge. I made a conscious effort to dispel any suspicion still lingering in my mind about Father Burke’s culpability. He spoke in a clear voice and sang parts of the liturgy in an unaffected baritone, which was only occasionally rough around the edges. The Latin responses came back to me from my days as an altar boy, thirty-odd years before.
Although I thought the sermon might be a good time to close my eyes and drift off, I soon found myself listening to a lawyerly dissertation on the meaning of the triune God. He must have been working his way through the
Credo
over the past few weeks.
“Later in the
Credo
we find:
Genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri.
The meaning of these words was hammered out in the midst of an unholy row in the fourth century. From Judaism we inherited the doctrine of the one God. But in the third century, theologians were already wrestling with the unity of God and His threefold manifestation in creation, redemption, and reconciliation. The Council of Nicea was called together by the Emperor Constantine in the year 325, and from it we have the Nicene Creed, which we still recite today. The council established the meaning of the words:
genitum, non factum,
begotten, not made. The Son is not a ‘creature.’ Rather, He is generated out of the
substance
of the Father...” Burke lost me somewhere during an ancient debate over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father
and
the Son, or
through
the Son. This was likely not everyone’s cup of tea, but if I hadn’t been so exhausted, I would have enjoyed the interpretive gymnastics that are so dear to the legal mind. I had never realized how much of this went on in the higher realms of theology. When I was a boy, they told you what it meant and that was that. I wondered how the priest was able to think so clearly; my brain was barely functioning.
I had a brief lucid moment at the consecration. Father Burke spread his hands and held them over the bread and wine. The ritual proceeded until he held the bread in his hands, bowed, and spoke the words
“Hoc est enim Corpus meum.”
We were centuries away from the
raunchiness of the Strattons’ party; each gesture was done with reverence and grace.
I was not aware of anything again until I felt a sharp pain in the toes of my right foot. I jerked awake to find that Father Burke had stamped on my foot, hard, and was standing above me with the Body of Christ in his hands. The priest smelled faintly of whiskey, smoke, and minty toothpaste. He looked at me benignly as he said
“Corpus Christi’,’
and I responded “Amen,” and took the Host. All the Catholics, however lapsed, snapped into line and took Communion. Was it the long reach of the ancient faith, or the magnetism of its enigmatic priest?
Bless me father — have I sinned. You know what I’m talking about.
For too long I’ve held it in. Now it’s time to let the truth out.
Your silhouette behind this screen. I know what you hide in there.
I know where your soul has been. Darkness hiding in a prayer.
— Lennie Gallant, “
I6
Angels”
I
I was no longer dealing with Brennan as a client, but I had taken up his invitation to join him and his cronies on their Wednesday poker nights. First, though, there was a bit of business to take care of; he asked me to come by early and bring my bill. He wanted to pay my fees without delay.
“Now there’s an offer I don’t get every day, Brennan. You’re the kind of client I’d like to keep on the hook, so let me know if anything else comes up.” I would have occasion to look back on those words with a shudder, much the way Duncan would have reconsidered his remark about the pleasant seat he found waiting for him at the Macbeth residence in Inverness, had he lived to reflect upon it. But for now, I was content to accept payment and move on.
“Wait a minute, Brennan,” I said when he handed me the cheque. “Kind of you to round it up, but it’s supposed to be written out to me, or to Stratton Sommers. I have to deposit it in the law firm account.” He had made it out to Montague Collins and Maura MacNeil.
“What I have written, I have written.” He flipped his pen in the air, caught it, smiled, and turned away.
This was Burke’s opening salvo in a campaign to get the Collins-MacNeil family back together. But that was not on the table tonight.
I was not an expert card player by any means, but neither was Father O’Flaherty, who beamed with every good hand he received and lost his money every poker night. There were three more men in the regular group, and a couple of others who showed up on occasion. The regulars were a heart surgeon, Dr. Russell Shaw, a contractor named Rick Judd, and a rough-hewn priest, Gerald Brady, from one of the parishes outside the city. The amount of liquor consumed varied from week to week, Judd and Shaw being scotch drinkers, Brennan and O’Flaherty having one or two shots of whiskey, and the rest of us having a couple of beers. There was usually a pall of cigarette smoke, but I noticed Brennan limited himself to one or two cigarettes a night. “The voice, you know,” he said, grasping his throat, when he turned down a proffered smoke.
These were enjoyable evenings, even when Brennan and a couple of the others directed most of their attention to their poker hands. Which was the idea, of course, but I had never been able to get very intense about cards. Even the dedicated card sharps contributed to the general conversation, however, and I heard quite contrasting accounts of Brennan’s and Gerry Brady’s visits to Head Office. Brennan had spent four years in Rome, in the 1970s, studying at the Angelicum and the Pontifical Gregorian University, where he earned degrees in some arcane field of theology. He felt right at home in the eternal city, learned to speak Italian fluently, and lived the good life by the sound of things. Brady’s experiences were different, and he kept us in stitches recounting his frequent gaffes in language, etiquette, and mores.
The three priests expressed concern about a spree of vandalism at Catholic churches in and around the city, including St. Bernadette’s. The perpetrator broke candles and sprayed the usual foul words on the property.
“Wasn’t there a break-in?” I asked.
“Mrs. Kelly was nervous.” “Mrs. Kelly is nervous if she hears me strike a match,” Brennan replied.
“Our vandal is nothing but a bush-league Satanist,” Father Brady declared.
“Satanic stuff, is it?” I asked.
“It’s not the real thing,” Brady replied. “St. Luke was painted over with ‘St. Lucifer.’ The number 666 was sprayed on the forehead of St. Joseph. Then there’s ‘you-know-what the bishop and all his minions’ — spelled
minyans.
Not the work of a true Satanic cult, by any means. What did he do here at St. Bernie’s?”
“We’re the House of Evil and Priests of the Devil,” Burke replied. “That just about describes us, eh, Mike?”
But Father O’Flaherty looked more apprehensive than amused.
Nobody had been around when the vandal had struck some months before. And there were no incidents during my evenings round the card table — until late in April.
The six of us were sitting there, playing the hands that had been dealt us, Brennan and Dr. Shaw puffing clouds of smoke from the enormous Cuban cigars they had clamped between their teeth. The doctor had a “Heart Health” T-shirt on; Brennan’s said “Roma” and something in Italian that I couldn’t read; Brady and Judd wore sport shirts; Father O’Flaherty was ready for bed in an emerald green dressing gown and slippers. Shortly after we sat down, the phone rang. O’Flaherty, who was closest, leapt up to get it. Brennan whispered: “I let it slip that I’m expecting a call from my sister in Dublin tonight. She works over in London, university prof, teaches Irish history to the Brits. The nosy gaffer wants to chat her up.” But it was a wrong number. O’Flaherty returned to the fold.
Brady and Shaw were trying to interest the rest of us in a fishing trip to a camp in the interior of the province. “Sounds like great crack, a weekend away like that,” O’Flaherty agreed. “What do you say, Brennan?”
Burke just snorted and continued to puff on his cigar.
But O’Flaherty was keen. “We’d get up at sunrise to fish, we’d play cards out on the deck in the evenings, enjoy the silence. Idyllic, I’d say.”
Brennan removed the stogie from his mouth and regarded O’Flaherty as if he’d gone simple. “How would you be concentrating on your cards when you’ve got one hand on the go constantly, swatting flies away from yourself? And fish. They’ve people to bring fish
to you now, Michael. You don’t have to go out at the crack of dawn to catch them yourself. Fishmongers, supermarket operators, cordon bleu chefs, Mike. These people are there to be used, when you’ve a longing for something from the salt seas.”
“Fresh water fishing we’re talking about here, Brennan,” Brady explained. “We’re not going to charter a trawler.”
“Sorry. My mother never told me where fish come from. You boys go ahead and commune with the wood ticks. Now, are we going to play cards or are you going to treat me to a serenade for banjo —” he looked at O’Flaherty “— and harp?”