Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (47 page)

There was a prolonged silence, and Brendan began to wonder if the cardinal had heard him. But then the kneeling figure said, “Other people still call you that.”

“No.”

“You've become famous.”

“Have I?”

“I've seen it in the newspapers. They call you ‘the priest,' or sometimes just ‘priest.'”

“It's not the same thing, eminence.”

“No,” the old man replied, and then shuddered slightly, as if he had suddenly experienced a chill. “And I'd prefer you not to address me as ‘eminence.' It's been some time since I felt eminent. I appreciate your courtesy, but it isn't necessary.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Brendan, are you … carrying a gun?”

It seemed a decidedly odd question in this stone house of worship, and Brendan stared at the old man's back for a few moments. But the kneeling figure remained inscrutable, old bones and flesh draped in black. Finally he replied, “No.”

“I thought you might be. The stories …”

“Sometimes I carry a gun, but not often. In my business, a gun doesn't do much good. I've yet to meet the superstition, ignorance, obsession, or hatred that I could kill with a bullet.”

Now the cardinal raised his head, unclasped his bony hands, straightened his back. He put both hands on the rail in front of him and struggled to rise. Brendan got to his feet and started forward to assist the other man, stopped when the cardinal vigorously shook his head in protest. Brendan resumed his seat, waited. Finally the cardinal managed to stand. He turned, walked unsteadily to the pew across from Brendan, eased himself down. Brendan gazed into the eyes of the man sitting across the marooncarpeted aisle and was shocked by the stark gauntness of the features, the parchment-colored flesh that seemed almost translucent, the dark rings around the eyes. Henry Cardinal Farrell looked, Brendan thought, like a piece of fruit that had shriveled, or been cored.

The old man's lips drew back in a kind of bemused smile, and emotions Brendan could not decipher moved like moon shadows in the watery gray eyes. “Danger, the world, and good works seem to have served you well, priest. You look very well.”

“You do not.”

“I shall die … shortly.”

“I'm sorry.”

The frail Prince of the Church made a dismissive gesture with a trembling hand, and once again he smiled. “God really does work in mysterious ways, doesn't He?”

“I've heard it said, father.”

“I suppose it could be said that in a certain way I created you.”

“How so, father?”

“I created this ‘priest' that you've become, this man of such fame—or notoriety, as some would have it—who is now a private investigator, of all things, specializing in religious and spiritual matters, a fierce defender of children and their rights. Before, you were just a … priest. I have heard it argued again and again that you are a far more effective avatar for Christ in your state of disgrace than you ever were before your … career change. The implications of this for the church are a subject of some heated debate among certain theologians. My name is almost never mentioned. I actually believe my role in it all has been forgotten.”

Brendan said nothing. He felt oddly distanced, separated from this old enemy and the institution he represented by an unbreachable wall of betrayal, loss, pain, and death.

“You were never a good priest, Brendan,” the cardinal continued in a voice that seemed to be growing stronger with a passion born of either anger or regret. “You were always a rebel, never at ease with the church. You were always questioning things you had no right to question.”

“I questioned things you didn't want me to question, eminence, but I always obeyed you, didn't I?” Brendan paused as he felt waves of his old resentment and anger rise in him, waiting for them to recede. When they were gone, he continued, “I went into retreat to do penance when you ordered me to, and I came out to do your errand when you ordered me to. It was not the church that made me ill at ease.”

The cardinal stiffened. “Errand?”

“That's what I said.”

“It was God's business.”

“It was your business.”

“The reason you were sent to retreat in the first place was to teach you that it wasn't your place to make such judgments.”

Brendan suppressed a sigh. “Why did you ask me to come here, father?”

The old man looked away from Brendan, toward the altar and beyond at the huge, painted wood figure of Christ nailed to a cross. “I've told you I shall die shortly. I have my secular affairs in order, and now I am trying to do the same for my soul.”

“What is it you want from me, father?” Brendan asked in a neutral tone.

“I want you to hear my confession.”

Brendan could not believe he had heard the other man correctly; if he had, it could only mean that his being asked to come here was the sad joke of a dying old man, or that the mind of that dying old man was deteriorating. Brendan said nothing.

“You would refuse the request of a man who is so close to death?”

“I don't understand the request.”

“I don't ask you to understand it, only to grant it.”

“I'm not exactly qualified to hear your confession, am I? Why should you wish to participate in a heretical act? Some of your more conservative colleagues might say you've committed heresy merely by making the request—that's assuming you're serious.”

The old man opened his mouth and made a strange, rasping sound. It took Brendan a few moments to realize that the other man was laughing. “Since when have you concerned yourself with what the church did or did not consider heresy? I don't think you much cared even before they defrocked you.”

“What concerns me is my business, father,” Brendan replied evenly. “Forgive me for saying that you've played games with me before, and I can't help but wonder if this isn't just part of some other game.”

The cardinal abruptly looked away; when he looked back at Brendan, his pale, watery eyes seemed unnaturally bright. “This is not a game, Brendan,” he said forcefully.

“Your sins have nothing to do with me.”

“You know that isn't so.” He paused, leaned forward in the pew, added: “Some sins have a way of coming back to punish you in this life. Listen to me.”

“I won't hear your confession.”

The cardinal sighed, leaned back in the pew. “Why do you accuse me of having played games with you? You were asked to perform an exorcism. As a result of your miscalculations, the mother of the young girl in question committed a mortal sin by killing herself. Church authorities determined that the suicide of this woman was a direct result of your malfeasance—your lack of proper preparation and perhaps even your lack of faith and purpose; the sin, it was decided, was yours, not hers, and the punishment was your excommunication. That judgment may have been harsh, but it was influenced by your past attitudes and writings and your reputation and actions as a dissident priest. You were consistently involved with organizations, social and political causes that the Holy See deemed inappropriate. You were warned more than once. Those are the facts. Do you dispute them?”

“I do not. Those are the facts. But the truth lies someplace else.”

“Oh? Just what is the truth?”

“You sent me out to perform a rite for which you knew I wasn't prepared and in which you suspected I didn't believe.”

“You don't believe in demonic possession?”

“I believe in obsession founded on greed, lust, hatred, or a dozen other human evils. But it's hard enough to get people to take responsibility for their actions without providing them with the potential excuse that the devil made them do it.”

“It's not like you to be flippant or disrespectful of ideas other people take very seriously, Brendan.”

“I'm telling you the truth you claimed to want to hear. If you think I'm being flippant, you still don't understand me and you can never understand what happened. Lisa Vanderklaven wasn't possessed by demons; her erratic behavior was, under the circumstances, rational and healthy. She had a very good reason for defying her father and continually running away from home, namely that she was being persistently and brutally abused by the same man who had made her mother his mistress and who was her father's close business associate. When Lisa told her father about the abuse, he refused to believe her. Henry Vanderklaven preferred to believe that his daughter was possessed by demons, for to accept that she was being molested by Werner Pale would have interfered with his business interests and cast considerable doubt on his ability to judge character. Lisa Vanderklaven needed protection, not exorcism.”

“In my initial interview with Lisa, she broke down; she couldn't believe that her father could actually believe she was possessed. That was when she told me that Pale had not only been molesting her, but had been involved in a sexual relationship with her mother for some time; Pale had bragged about it to her. At the time, I didn't feel I had any choice but to talk with Olga Vanderklaven, not only to try to confirm Lisa's story but to offer the mother my help, if she wanted it.
That
was my mistake. Faced with the fact that Lisa and I knew about her lover, and that the lover was molesting her daughter, she committed suicide.”

“If anybody in that family could have been described as possessed, it was Lisa's father, and he'd created his own hell out of a deadly combination of greed and self-righteousness. Vanderklaven's greed was what led him to employ a man like Werner Pale in the first place. Vanderklaven was an arms dealer, as you well know. What you might not have known was that Werner Pale was a murderous soldier of fortune whom Vanderklaven employed to train
provocateurs
. Those
provocateurs
were kept busy whipping up brush wars in various parts of the world in order to keep up the volume of sales of the arms Vanderklaven manufactured. He saw nothing wrong with what he did; he was an impossibly self-righteous man who could not see the evil around him that he'd created. He was a zealous Catholic with powerful friends in Rome, a church benefactor who gave millions to various church causes. He was so assured of his reservations in heaven that he could destroy his family and be blissfully unaware of the cause—the evil he had brought home with him, the man he considered a friend as well as a business associate. When Lisa told him that his friend was raping her, Vanderklaven demanded that she see a psychiatrist; when she ran away, he sent Werner Pale to find her and bring her back. When she ran away again, he went to his golf buddy—you, eminence—and asked you to arrange for an exorcism to free his daughter from her demons. Demonic possession was the only explanation he could think of for her behavior.”

“I believe, eminence, that when you heard the story, you knew it would not withstand the scrutiny and investigation Rome requires before declaring officially that someone is demonically possessed, and that it was highly unlikely you would be able to get a trained exorcist to intervene in the affairs of this very troubled family. But you were afraid to offend Henry Vanderklaven by telling him the truth; you were afraid he might tighten his purse strings to the detriment of the church's interest, perhaps even afraid he might complain to his friends in the Vatican about your lack of sensitivity. And so you looked around for another solution to the problem he'd handed you, and I was it. You would send this young priest you were trying to break to go through the motions of performing an exorcism; once again you would force me to submit to your will while at the same time making Vanderklaven happy. I failed, father, yes, and because of my failure as a human being to fully perceive and deal with Olga Vanderklaven's torment, she committed suicide as a direct result of my inquiries. Well, Rome was not about to declare that the soul of the wife of this important lay pillar of the church would burn in hell; in their view, and perhaps yours, it was preferable to consign
my
soul to burn in hell, and I was subsequently excommunicated. I didn't disagree with their action then, and I don't now. I was responsible for the woman's death, because I should have ignored your machinations, scrapped the whole idea of an exorcism, and referred the case to social workers. Olga Vanderklaven died because of my failure as a priest, eminence, but she also died because you sent someone you knew to be spiritually unequipped for the task of performing a rite that wasn't even called for to meddle in an incredibly raw emotional situation.
That
, eminence, is the truth.”

Brendan waited, anticipating defense or denial. Instead, the cardinal simply said, “You are right, priest. That is the truth.”

“If you understand that, it seems to me that you have confessed all you need to.”

The old man slowly turned to face Brendan, and his pale eyes went wide. “Understand this, Brendan,” he said in a trembling voice. “Satan himself was there. It was Satan himself you were battling against.”

Brendan studied the other man's face, saw real fear there—as well as something else he could not read. “I assume you're speaking metaphorically, father.” He paused, frowned when the cardinal responded by shaking his head. “Werner Pale?”

Now the cardinal nodded. Brendan ran his hands back through his black shoulder-length hair, looked down at the floor as he resisted the impulse to say something flippant or sarcastic that he knew he would regret. Finally he looked up, said, “No, father. Pale was a murderous psychotic and a totally useless human being, not Satan. Believing that is just your way of avoiding taking personal responsibility for what happened. That's what Henry Vanderklaven did, and it's what killed his wife.”

The cardinal's eyes went even wider, and his hands began to shake along with his voice. “But what if I'm right, Brendan? What if it was Satan?”

“What you believe is none of my business, eminence,” Brendan replied evenly. “Believe what makes you at peace, but don't then ask me to help resolve the conflicts that remain.”