Office of Innocence (31 page)

“There were dozens on it,” he said, and Darragh knew he would tell anyone he met, all night, until he was taken away and his wounds dressed. “They're down there!”

Whatever this ship had been, its ruin was final. Trumble was beside him, gasping and staring at the melee of wood and steel guyrope. “Jesus,” he said. Weeping, Darragh raised his hand over those who must still be drowning in this ruin.

“
Ego te absolvo
,” he intoned, more by instinct than by coolly arrived-at intention. And as he did, he felt Fratelli's arm confidingly embracing him in brotherly shock for the unseen men seeking the mothering air in wreckage below them. Two further gashed sailors, rescuers or survivors, were hauled onto the seawall, retching and bleeding at the feet of other ratings and officers.

“Jesus,” said Trumble, “poor buggers!” Naval police began walking along the edge of the seawall, ordering men back, warning of more undersea explosions. Precisely because Fratelli, Trumble, and Darragh were dressed as civilians, and might have authority of the kind to which Fratelli made such easy pretense, a naval policeman explained, “The Japs were after the
Chicago
. They got this depot ship. Dozens of blokes. Dozens.”

Darragh wondered how the night could be expected to accommodate the scale of this, of the horror of those men whose lungs had flooded in the dark, bloody anchorage, as he and Fratelli stood there ineffectual by the cluttered surface water. More and more Australian sailors wearing the armbands which declared them to be police now proliferated, and Darragh found that even he and his companions were forced back from the calamity. Their right to be in the graving dock by the seawall was never challenged, but they found themselves further and further from it, walking backwards amongst sheds and barracks, but always pausing to look and exclaim. Fratelli handed around the remnants of the bottle, a badly needed mouthful each. Fratelli's arm played around Darragh's shoulder.

“This is the night, Frank,” he said. “Even I know God is abroad.” He earnestly kissed Darragh's cheek, and Darragh did not recoil as much as he might have expected to. “For Christ's sake, Father, you can't really expect me to do anything with the big guy here. Get rid of him, and you can take me to my medicine.” Under pressure of death barely achieved yet by the seawall, this seemed a peculiarly reasonable idea. It was, as Fratelli had said, a night when the relentlessness of destiny, the unarguable nature of punishment, seemed written on the air. “Just get rid of the big guy,” Fratelli pleaded, throwing the empty whisky bottle on the pavement, indifferent to whether it shattered or not. “He's not part of anything.” The antiaircraft and other guns were firing again all round the harbor. There were the seabed sounds of depth charges. Darragh's brain jolted with fright for the Japanese submariners. What must it be like to be encased in the silt, in the Christless dark of Sydney's profound moorage? What faith could soothe that bitter, thunderous dark?

Darragh turned to Trumble. “Ross,” he said, “I could be here till morning. I have to thank you, but everything's settled now and you ought to go. It's a long way to Homebush. Bert might need you.”

“I thought we were going back together?” said Trumble, his solemn eyes reminding Darragh of the possible dangers of Fratelli, which were greater than Trumble could know. Was Darragh sure? Darragh said that yes, everything was settled. He could see that Trumble, after all the liquor and row, was trying to remember how to make his way back to the world of taxis and electric trains.

“If that's the way you feel,” said Trumble, a little offended to be dismissed.

“Thank you,” said Darragh.

Trumble was all at once gone. Fratelli said, as thumps and thuds receded, “I'd bet the sonsofbitches in the subs are dead. And look.” He drew his hand up towards the overcast. “No paratroopers.”

There was piping aboard the great battleship
Chicago
as it slipped its moorings and was all at once veering seaward, edging out towards the vast safety beyond the Sydney Heads. Darragh watched it, since its scale demanded watching, for an indefinite time.

“Bless 'em all,” said Fratelli in a dream. “Let's go, Frank.”

He had talked like this to Kate Heggarty, with hypnotic authority, while she stayed stunned and fixed in place by her husband's capture. Darragh could well understand how she could have savored his kindness, the powers of persuasion, the glittering eyes that transcended the dull charities of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

Darragh and Fratelli fell into step, moving as one being.

“Where are we going?” Darragh nonetheless asked.

“Up the steps again. . . . A station at the corner of Darlinghurst Road. I ought to know. MPs and Aussie cops.” They passed through a gate guarded by two Australian sailors, who wanted to hear anything Darragh and Fratelli could tell them. Fratelli did the duty. A ship was sunk. The rumor was there were dozens on it. A torpedo had missed
Chicago
, come right under the Dutch submarine, exploded under the seawall, and reduced the depot ship to splinters. “Christ,” said one of the young men. “That must be
Kuttabul
. I know a bloke on that!”

“Yeah,” said Fratelli, moving on with Darragh. “That's the war.”

They mounted the stone steps back to the world they had left a few hours and some eras ago. Darragh hoped to retrieve the known world at the head of the stairs, and Fratelli seemed lighthearted, about to be rescued by grace at the plain desk of a police station. He stopped, however, on one of the stone landings, by a cement balustrade.

“Do you think you'll ever see the nigger, that Gervaise, again?”

“I hope so,” Frank confessed. “He deserves to live and to go home too, in the end.”

“Do you think he'll go home? Not if my kindred souls in the corps have their way. Penal battalions of black men! Don't kid yourself, Frank. You won't be seeing that boy again. Not ole Gervaise! How sad! A big guy like that stepping into some minefield in New Guinea. Yeah. How sad!”

“Then we don't deserve to win,” said Darragh.

Fratelli waved that concept aside. “Frank, you've ruined everything for me, you know,” he reproved Darragh. “Frank.” He wrapped his arms around Darragh with a ferocity Darragh could not have expected. “You took her fucking soul, Frank.”

In that ferocious embrace, Darragh could barely move—he writhed but Fratelli had, as Inspector Kearney had warned, abnormal power. “I'd led her to where we went, but you had her soul, Frank, fuck you!”

Fratelli's power seemed languid, but it put Darragh on his back, against harsh stone, or cement and gravel, nothing as erosive as Sydney's kindly sandstone, and Fratelli descended on him like a felled tree. Darragh was pinioned. I thought I was strong, Darragh told himself. But
this
was strength. Fratelli's massive hands were on his windpipe, and around the span of the throat. As in Kate Heggarty's case, there was knowledge and power here to crush the breath and interrupt the blood. If he, the Ordained of the Lord, a priest forever, could find himself in this choking situation, with the thunder of his blood detonating in the sky, providing the phantom paratroopers whose existence Fratelli had denied, how much more forgivable had this been in Kate Heggarty? Anyone could come to this end with such a powerful fellow! Darragh wanted only to tell the world that he had been validated in the sermon he had given that distant morning, twelve hours ago. The words of the Mass worked like solid lumps through his chest, up the column of his throat, taking on neon proportions in his brain. Wrestling with the power of this dark angel, he spread his hands, thumbs tucked in behind the two forefingers. For some reason, he thought liturgical correctness was required.
Dignum et justum est. Vere dignum et justus est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere. It is worthy and just. Truly worthy and just it is, truly proper and salutary, for us always and everywhere to give thee thanks. . . . Sanguis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aetemam. . . . The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ
, in His throat through which He deigned to share with us the prosaic air,
preserve my soul into eternal life.
Darragh struggled under the prodigious flashes of light he saw beyond the slope of Fratelli's omnipotent shoulder. When will the peace set in, he wanted to know, beneath Fratelli's crushing hands?

The jagged litanies continued to run out of him into a breathless sky, Jesus my Lord and my God, why hast thou abandoned me? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, look down on thy servant in mercy. Sweet heart of Jesus . . . tower of ivory . . . morning star . . . source of our joy, oh our joy. A dreadful thing to die with submariners, in the blossoming dark, with the merciless paratroopers descending and descending.

Now he could feel, even as his brain threatened to leave him, the hard bones of Fratelli's pelvis and the specific penis battering at his right thigh. He gagged for mercy but could feel his own penis engorged in a kind of vicious cooperation with Fratelli, who owned the night and all its mayhem, and had the power to evoke all squalor.

Amongst the multiplying parachutes of his last breath, a parachutist or minister of mercy appeared at Fratelli's shoulder. He wrestled without much effect at first, dragging at the shoulders of the succubus. Then, as the searchlights of vessels lit up the harbor again, Darragh saw Trumble the merciful creature lift a huge square of sandstone and drop it on Fratelli's head. Fratelli slid away, and Darragh was abandoned to a sudden ache for air. Trumble had lifted the successful lump of stone again and was about to let it fall from chest height on Sergeant Fratelli. Kearney preposterously arrived and prevented him. Kearney cried, “Come on, come on, boys. Enough fun. Jesus, Trumble, let it go!” Two men in suits were lifting Darragh upright, and he saw before him Kearney, framed by the lit harbor and honored by a new set of deepwater explosions. Kearney reached out and shook his hand. “What are you up to, Frank?” he asked. “You'll never be a fucking bishop now, you know.”

XXV

Darragh spent a drugged Monday in St. Vincent's Hospital, attended by whispering nuns who had much to celebrate in God's benevolence. The
Chicago
had not been sunk, the young priest had been rescued, the killer detained! Though there were rumors that the mother submarines from which the swarm of midget subs had been released had shelled the innocent streets of Bondi or Bronte, the bodies of the Japanese submariners lay as deeply dead as that of Kate Heggarty, and the nameless citizens of the city walked abroad with tales to tell of the night of their survival.

Dear old Trumble, who had refused to leave his charge, was entitled to dream of his revolution at war's end—that was Darragh's view. He who loved the idea of the Madrid Republicans who massacred priests to save the populace from their influence was praised by the press for having saved the life of a priest. On the human plane, nothing was simple. And Darragh, who was co-hero of Fratelli's capture, did not feel a sense of triumph. Fratelli held him still by the throat. He was in purgatory with a barely saved and howling Kate. Fratelli seemed to have crushed the hope from his blood.

At one time he woke to find his mother and Aunt Madge sturdily present, and realized that contact with Fratelli had given him a disease, a membrane of dimness over his eyes. He began to shed tears when they spoke to him. Shame, which had been lifted from him yesterday morning, had returned at Fratelli's hands the night before.

He woke at three o'clock on Tuesday morning, recited the office from his breviary, which someone had taken the care to bring him from St. Margaret's, and strained for the same level of gratitude as the Sisters of Charity. He was in feverish dread of the morning paper, and when the nuns did not bring him one, he went to the end of the corridor and found a
Herald
. After the passage of two nights, he was barely mentioned except as the victim of an assault. The oldest paper of the city, the most respectable, the paper of the ruling classes of Australia, had let him off lightly and with some generosity of soul.

For a time there was a hollow elation, but within half an hour it had evaporated, leaving an underlying landscape of ruin exposed. He felt a ridiculous tendency to tears when the monsignor visited him, spotting his grief in his eyes. “Frank, please don't be upset. They have the killer safe contained.” The killer could not be contained, though. He stained everything he touched; he spread darkness with his lunging penis. “This is what comes of taking things too seriously, son,” said baffled Monsignor Carolan.

“I want to go back home,” Darragh told him. “I want to work.”

The monsignor sighed. “The hospital's ringed by journalists and their cockatoos, just waiting to get a picture of you leaving. Stay awhile yet.”

Darragh continued inconsolable about Gervaise, dead sailors, and the wife of Lance Bombardier Heggarty, whose face was more intimately clear to him than that of visitors. “This is just a crack-up you're having, Frank,” the monsignor advised him on a second visit. “You'll come out of this the wiser.” He reached out and took Frank's wrist. “Be a good fellow there.” Then he laughed, trying to cheer Darragh up with ruefulness. “Quite a trick even for you to be out at the one time with a strangler and a Communist!” Darragh was indeed consoled that the improbable comedy of it had reached the monsignor. “Where do you get 'em from, Frank? You're a wonder in your way.”

Darragh did not want to look at newspapers again after that first time. It was as if he learned through the pores of his skin what others, even the nuns, knew from the newspapers of their patients. Fratelli had been questioned by the Americans and the CID. A fellow MP had by some accident, or led by a sense of something awry in the master sergeant, searched Fratelli's locker on Sunday evening before the emergency broke out, and found a journal. The idea of a journal seemed all too credible to Darragh, given Fratelli's confessional fervor, the fullness of his account, the evasions, the qualifications he put on his own guilt. All that took words. It took ink. There was not merely a journal, as the CID, summoned by the corps, found in searching his locker. There was as well a memento, a blouse. It was white, and of embroidered linen; no obviously risqué item. Fratelli would have prided himself on taking a worthy garment—no vulgar brassiere, no satin lingerie.

By the afternoon following the submarine attack, a resident of the Crescent, with the authority of the accumulated evidence against the man, had identified Fratelli, and the earnest blue suit in which he made his journeys to Mrs. Heggarty's plain door. Darragh could well imagine how Kearney would have skillfully evoked information from the honest citizens of the Crescent, including Mrs. Thalia Stevens.

Mrs. Darragh came again, and Aunt Madge, and he found himself turned to stone or at least to silence by their tolerance of him, their cheery determination. That too brought tears to his eyes, which threatened to choke him if he let them free. They sat in light, looking in at him in his pit. His mother said that, darling, she was proud of him. He was earnest, she said, that was all. Earnestness could be cured, apparently, at St. Vincent's. He had so shamed them, he wanted to confess, but the pills they began giving him on the second day bloated and dried his tongue. It lay in his mouth like a toadfish in a drying pool. Had the pills given him this tendency to be giddy and go liquid at the eyes? He asked a nun that, and she was evasive.

Vicar-General Monsignor McCarthy visited in his purple stock, and told Darragh that he was being prayed for. When he went outside, he could be heard holding half an hour's conversation with a specialist beyond the door. Darragh believed, though he could not swear to anything he heard or saw, that the specialist said, in a slightly raised voice, “But he can't go on retreat. He needs a holiday.” The vicar-general reentered the room, frowning above the purple of his stock. “There's no rush for anyone to make up their minds on what should be done yet, Frank,” he said. “Just rest for now.”

Darragh was appalled with himself for being challenged by a tendency to weep in the face of this official purple. “I want to begin saying Mass again,” he declared. “Hearing confessions. Anointing the sick.”

“In a day or so, Frank.” The vicar-general pointed to the breviary on the bedside table. “And you don't need to worry about the office. You're dispensed from that for now. You're far too ill.”

“Dispensed,” said Frank. He hated the verb acutely.

Because the pills let the days slide away beneath his feet, it was Saturday before Inspector Kearney came with another senior detective. Kearney seemed tentative, and tender in a brotherly sort of way. “Father Frank, we're not going to pursue the bugger for grievous bodily assault. It's the murder or nothing.”

“Of course it's the murder,” said Darragh, and again his eyes filled and threatened to unman him.

“The Yank authorities are right on our side. But the bastard's pleading insanity.”

Darragh felt laughter in him, as hectic as the monsignor's laughter had been earlier in the week. “He zigs and he zags,” said Darragh, as if it were an endearing trait of Fratelli.

“He certainly does. Look, when things are better for you, I have to talk to you. Don't be alarmed. Our American friends don't want this to be a circus. They'll try him by closed court-martial at Victoria Barracks. They're going to ask a New South Wales Supreme Court judge to sit with all the colonels. This won't be like a public court. No bigotry, no cross-examination. A court-martial will give you a fair go. You should be out of the chair within an hour.”

“I can't break the seal,” Darragh explained. “The archdiocese wouldn't know what to do with me then. They don't know what to do with me now. See, I feel I went down with all the sailors.”

“No. No, Frank,” said the detective in an authoritative way. “You're here, you see. You're
here
.”

Darragh frowned. Yes, he must be here, he decided, but he did not always feel as if he was.

Kearney smiled in a rough attempt at reassurance, and to signify Fratelli was a joke. “See, he says you drove him to it, because he loved her and you put her in two minds. With your spiritual advice and all! He says
you
made him mad.”

Darragh laughed outright and without apology.

“That's zigging, all right,” he told Kearney. “That's zagging.”

“Perhaps. But it's so easily disproved. I know one of the MP officers thinks Fratelli's actually courting death, but without so much as saying ‘I am guilty.' Because the madness thing, it won't wash. The judges will give you an easy time, believe me. You deserve some consideration after what he did to you.”

“Oh, he had me, all right,” Darragh assented. “He had me, the old Fratelli.”

“He had a horn on him when we took him, Father.” Darragh did not want to hear that. He was burdened with shame not least because something in him had called out the beast in Fratelli. It seemed, therefore, like malice for Kearney to say it. “He kept that awful erection of his for ten minutes after, it seemed. Built like a bloody draft horse. Remember what he did on Kate Heggarty's body.”

Darragh instantly vomited over the bedsheets. Nuns came from every region of the hospital, and correctly looked reprovingly at Inspector Kearney, who to them was just an importunate layman.

Darragh lost many days now. He believed he remembered an elderly nun telling him, “But you can't say Mass yet, Father. You'd upset the chalice. Then . . . Our Divine Lord's blood all over the place.”

That closed the matter. Yet suddenly, as if he had got immune to the sting of his pills, or as if the doctor had reduced them, he was able to go into a courtyard and sit in the sun. His grief came less frequently, more dully. Tears he shed chiefly in the secrecy of his room, since he knew by now that they seemed to throw everyone into disarray. One afternoon, he and Aunt Madge sat together at a table in this enclosed yard. He caught Aunt Madge herself watching younger nuns, novices, of an age unlikely to be permitted to nurse Darragh, spying on him for a second from this or that window.

“Women,” she told him, as if nuns in some ways participated more heavily than others in whatever frailty she was remarking on. She looked at him as if she knew that the abiding question in his mind was, How do I get from this courtyard into the effectual world? “You think you're such a sinner, don't you, Frank?”

“I don't know whether I'm a sinner or a fool. It's the same thing.” There was the thing of feeling unclean too, but he did not burden Aunt Madge with that.

“Yes, you're such a wild man, aren't you? In your own head. That's exactly what's wrong with you. I'll tell you, most of us have buckets more shame than you. The archbishop has more shame—I wouldn't mind betting that at all, I knew him when he was a curate. The monsignor—that walking ledger. It's better to be like you than like him! So I want you to cut out these tears, do you hear me? Or if you want to let them flow, do so, but forget shame. You have no shame to bear.”

He shook his head. Aunt Madge lowered her voice. “So there's this assumption around, isn't there, hinted at in the papers, that you and the girl—that you had an infatuation for her. Well, say it was the truth. So what? What does it matter? Priests have been sillier by far than that. Believe me. Women get to men, and priests are men. Therefore, women get to priests.”

He couldn't explain how much he was ashamed that his fascination for Mrs. Heggarty was public property. And he couldn't argue with Aunt Madge. She was so robust in debate, of so strong a mind. She dropped her voice further and reached for his wrist, holding it emphatically. “I'll tell you this just to wake you up. Just to make sure you know you've let no one down. Mr. Regan and I—do you believe this, your beloved, upright Mr. Regan?—we had a love affair. Twelve years ago. Yes. Lasted three months. Looked at purely from the point of view of being a lover, he was splendid. He put all his guilt and all his sense of damnation into it, did dear old Regan. Now this was all a terrible thing, Frank, on my part and his. His girls were young. His wife was loyal. But the terrible thing about the sixth commandment, Frank, is that when you're violating it, when you're wrapped up in the other person, the other person stands for the entire universe. You forget everything else. And the sinister thing is, you feel somehow that God's on your side. Or this or that god, anyhow. Venus, say! Well,
mea culpa
. I didn't go near the Regan family for eight years afterwards. I used to sneak into your place when you were young, so Mrs. Regan wouldn't see me. Sneaked out. I'm sure your mother knew all about what had happened, but she never said. Anyhow, in the end I just went to Mrs. Regan one day and pleaded for her pardon, and she'd already given it. Maybe—and this isn't an excuse—but maybe she knew that one fling would be more than enough to bind dear old Regan to her for life.”