The Good Shepherd (53 page)

There was pain on Matthew Mahan’s face. Dennis felt it in his own body, along with anger.
Get mad, get mad. Tell him off,
he begged silently.

“Aberration?” Matthew Mahan said. “I can’t believe that you - would say such a thing. One of the great spokesmen for freedom in the Church.”

“So you have your freedom,” Derrieux said with an almost animal bark, “this is what you do with it. You and your friends in Holland.”

“I have very few friends in Holland.”

“You are prepared to lie as well as threaten?”

“That’s a very serious thing to say to me,” Matthew Mahan said.

“I say it with the evidence in hand,” Derrieux snarled, shaking the envelope in his face. “Do you take us for fools? The Dutch bishops betray the Pope one day, and you join the assault the next day. Without collusion, without any plan in advance?”

“I am prepared to swear on this cross to the truth of what I am saying,” Matthew Mahan said, picking up his pectoral cross from the small table between them.

Derrieux gave no sign that he had even heard him. “You people have succumbed to the vilest of all beliefs, the end justifies the means. You will do anything, say anything, to destroy the papacy. You want to rip down, in a night, what 2,000 years of sacrifice have created, the one voice through which God speaks to men clearly, infallibly.”

“I am not a theologian. I would not dream of debating with a thinker of your reputation.”

“But still you throw down the gauntlet,” Derrieux shouted, shaking the letter again. “You presume to lecture the Holy Father.”

“I presume to tell him what’s in my heart and head.”

“Nonsense, my friend, that is what is in your heart and head, vile nonsense. You are the captive of this young mountebank and his generation, who want to stand everyone on his head so they can proclaim the substitution of genitalia for thought.”

“I will not allow you to insult Father McLaughlin,” Matthew Mahan said in a voice that remained low but was now very tense. “He is a fellow priest, a dedicated fellow priest.”

“We have evidence that suggests other conclusions. He has a carnal relationship with an ex-nun, a woman named Helen Reed. Moreover, he connived with his brother to disrupt your diocese. When your most intimate advisers, your chancellor and your vicar-general, urged you to dismiss him, you refused.”

“Is that - is that true?” Dennis McLaughlin asked Matthew Mahan.

The Cardinal avoided his eyes. “Derrieux - my friend -” he said with a tremor in his voice, “this has nothing to do with my letter.”

“It has everything to do with it. What else could produce this monstrosity but evil, a web of evil in which you have been trapped, my friend, with your tragic American innocence.” He pointed his delicate index finger at Dennis. “I see it on his face. Hatred of the Church, of the priesthood. I see it in his eyes. The words are almost on his lips.”

Just hatred of you, Your Eminence.
With a mighty effort, Dennis did not say the words. He prayed that his face was expressionless.

“This is vicious,” Matthew Mahan said.

“Evil, the kind of evil he represents deserves no mercy,” Derrieux said.

“Please!” Matthew Mahan brought his fist down on the table. His pectoral cross bounced onto the floor. He picked it up. “Please let us discuss what is in that letter. Let us discuss what is happening to the Church. What will happen unless those warnings are taken seriously. While we sit here reviling each other, we are losing souls, Your Eminence. People are dying spiritually. Some of them sit at the gates of the Church begging while we walk past them, loaded with our spiritual riches. Priests are sitting in rectories watching their vocations dying day by day.” He pointed to Dennis McLaughlin. “This young man is a priest. Deeply, profoundly a priest. If he falls away, anyone can fall away, anyone will.”

No
,
no I am not worthy,
Dennis thought.
Forget me, forget this absurd love that has happened between us.

“Your infatuation with this heretic is truly alarming, Your Eminence. It suggests the most frightening thoughts to me. I pray to God for the sake of your soul that they are not true.”

He stood up and flipped the letter onto the table top. “The Church, which you see as crumbling, dying, is undergoing a transformation that will carry it triumphantly into a new era of greatness.”

He snatched up the copy of
Journal of a Soul.
“We are purging ourselves of the infection of this holy fool. I’m told that you are one of his disciples. Perhaps that is another explanation for this act of idiocy you have committed.”

He let the book fall back onto the table with a thud. Dennis heard in its echo the sound of nightsticks hitting bodies, of gavels falling, of guillotines.

Derrieux walked to the door and turned with a royal sweep of his cassock. “I am told by the Cardinal Secretary of State to give you the following order. Go home to your diocese and write another letter, asking the Holy Father’s forgiveness. He will try to obtain it for you. But he guarantees nothing.”

He opened the door and strode away down the hall without bothering to close it. Dennis kicked it shut and whirled to face Matthew Mahan. He was eager to explode, to ignite this man with his own anger. But what he saw strangled the hot words in his throat. Matthew Mahan sat in the wing chair like a beaten man. There were no scars or bruises on his face, but his head lolled back against the blue cushions, as if he had been battered by a hundred punches and kicks.

“He was my friend,” he said in a small, sad voice. “We used to have coffee together once or twice a week during the council. I used to introduce him as my walking graduate school.”

“He’s a son of a bitch. A power-hungry son of a bitch,” Dennis said.

The sadness in Matthew Mahan’s eyes was almost unbearable. “Did you - did you refuse to fire me?” Dennis asked. Matthew Mahan hesitated. Dennis realized he already knew the answer. Blindly he stumbled in another direction. “I mean - how would he know about what the chancellor or the vicar-general said to you?”

“One - or both - have been writing to Rome,” Matthew Mahan said wryly. “It’s probably George Petrie. I’m sure by now he thinks he can do a better job than I’m doing - and he’s probably right.”

“No!” Dennis cried. “Remember what you said - about just doing the job. You’ve been doing so much more than that. Petrie’s just too dumb - or too ambitious - to see it.”

Matthew Mahan nodded, a sad unconvinced smile on his face. For a moment, Dennis felt close to weeping; the next, he was struggling for breath. The room was charged with defeat, disaster.

“You’re not going to let him discourage you, are you, that - that clerical De Gaulle?”

Matthew Mahan forced a smile. “No. No. I said we’d stay here until the Pope saw us. We will.”

Conviction, strength, had vanished from his voice. “I’m sure the Pope hasn’t even seen your letter,” Dennis said. “Write a covering note and I’ll take it back to the Vatican tomorrow. Hand-deliver it.”

“He saw it,” Matthew Mahan said. “Why else would I be told to ask his forgiveness?”

Dennis was silent. It was his turn to pace the floor. “That man would lie about anything. He talks about evil, infection. It’s all over him like sores. The infection of power.”

“Paul saw it, Dennis, he saw it. It had the ring of truth,” Matthew Mahan sighed. “Let’s go to bed. I feel terribly tired. We can talk in the morning.”

By ten-thirty, they had both showered and were in bed. Dennis turned out the light and lay there rigid. Sleep was out of the question. Matthew Mahan was apparently doing no better. The springs of his bed creaked every time his big body moved on it. Hours passed. Dennis dozed. Half in, half out of sleep, he heard bells tolling distantly. Then a voice, equally distant, calling: “Dennis. Dennis.” It was a dream, of course. The voice was so faint it was unrecognizable. Who was it, his brother Leo? “Dennis -” The voice was half-choked now. He woke up. The harsh unmistakable sound of a throat struggling for air filled his ears. “Den -” Gurgling.

He turned on the light and cried out with anguish. Matthew Mahan was slumped against the back of his bed. The shirt of his blue pajamas was soaked with blood. There was blood everywhere. On the pillow. On the sheets. On the floor beside the bed. As he stumbled to his feet, more blood gushed from Matthew Mahan’s mouth.

“A hemorrhage,” Matthew Mahan whispered. “Bill Reed warned me -” He choked and tried to hold back a mouthful. It burst through his fingers. “Get me to the bathroom -”

“No. Lie still,” Dennis cried and snatched up the phone. A sleepy clerk answered after twenty rings. The pensione had no doctor. He was new to the city, a stranger from Bergamo. He knew nothing about doctors. All this in incredibly broken English.

“Call the police then. An ambulance.”

“
Ambulanza
?” asked the clerk.

“
Ambulanza. Ambulanza,”
Dennis shouted.
“Presto. Subito.
”

“Get me a towel, Dennis. I’m making such a mess,” Matthew Mahan said as he hung up.

He got him a towel. Within minutes, it was soaked with blood. “Oh Jesus, where is that ambulance?” Dennis cried.

A knock on the door. The room clerk stood there wide-eyed. “Where’s the ambulance?” Dennis screamed.

“
Dottore.”

The fellow turned and ran down the hall. Dennis realized that he had not called the ambulance yet. He had decided to come upstairs and see if these crazy Americans were drunk or something.

Another towel slowly turning red in Matthew Mahan’s clutching fists. Then it was over. No more blood. Over. “Thank God, Dennis prayed frantically.

“Let me get this off you,” Dennis said, unbuttoning his soaked pajama shirt with trembling fingers. He stripped it away, threw it into the bathroom. “Can you move to my bed?”

Matthew Mahan nodded and tried to say something. Dennis draped his arm around his shoulder and pivoted his feet over the edge of the bed. His flesh was incredibly cold. When he stood up his knees buckled. He was like a dead body, a dead man already. The two of them lunged forward and fell onto Dennis’s bed. For a moment, Dennis lay there crushed beneath his weight, pure terror swallowing him. He struggled free and with an enormous effort managed to straighten him out in the bed. Tenderly, tears streaming down his face, he wiped the blood from his lips and hands. As he drew the sheet up over him, swearing that the doctor had to come soon, Matthew Mahan smiled faintly and whispered, “Anoint me, Dennis.”

“What? No.”

“Anoint me, please.”

He found the silver vials in their special compartments in the briefcase. He took them in his hands and knelt beside the bed for a moment, struggling for self-control. Then he dipped his finger in the oil and made the sign of the cross on Matthew Mahan’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet, repeating the formula, “By this holy anointing and His most loving mercy, may the Lord pardon you for any sins you have committed -”

“Thank you, Dennis. I would like to go to confession and receive Communion.”

No
,
I can’t hear your confession. The guilty cannot forgive the innocent.
Of course, he denied the words, took a stole from the Cardinal’s briefcase, draped it around his neck, and knelt beside the bed “My deepest and most inveterate sin has been pride, Matthew Mahan said. “I struggled against it. But it has a thousand disguises. As soon as I thought I had expelled it from my soul it was back again with a new voice, a new demand. I’ve also struggled, usually in vain, to forgive those who hurt or attacked me. I loved the power and the privileges of my office too much. I thank God for having made me aware of this - but it was almost too late. I ask his forgiveness for those earlier years of self-indulgence.”

At first, when Dennis tried to speak the words of absolution, they froze in his throat. A wave of sobs racked his body. Then he heard a voice that did not belong to him but to his priesthood saying, “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

From a small watch-shaped silver pyx, he took a white Host. He filled a glass with water and put it on the night table beside the bed and then placed the Host on the Cardinal’s tongue He tried to swallow it and began to choke. The water saved him.

“Thank you, Dennis,” he whispered. “Now we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about.”

“Where is that ambulance?” Dennis cried.

The room clerk was back in the open door. He babbled in Italian. Dennis could not get a word until he repeated three or four times
sciopero, sciopero, sciopero
.

“What does it mean?” Dennis asked Matthew Mahan.

“Strike,” he whispered. “The ambulances are probably on strike.”

“Call the Villa Stritch, Father Goggin,” Dennis said.

He scribbled both names on the back of the title page of Pope John’s book. The clerk fled once more.

“I don’t think it matters, Dennis,” Matthew Mahan said. “That’s too much blood - even for a fat man like me - to lose.”

“No. You’re going to be all right. I know it.”

“Dennis. Don’t blame yourself. We came a long way - together. I knew the risk. I knew it all the time.”

The phone rang. It was Goggin. Dennis frantically explained what was happening. “I’ll get a taxi. I’ve never been sick here. But someone must know where a doctor -”

Dawn was turning the sky from glossy black to furtive gray. Traffic began roaring in the street below. Dennis thought of rushing to the window and screaming for help.

“Did I ever tell you what Pope John said to me, the day he consecrated me bishop?” Matthew Mahan said.

Dennis shook his head.

“He said - he said he would be the first to greet me in Heaven. Is there anything to worry about - when you have that kind of a promise?”

“The Church - the Church needs you. I need you.”

“Don’t be - too anxious about the Church, Dennis. Take your time. We have our Lord’s promise. Tell them the truth in your book - but be patient if they don’t hear you.”

“The hell with the Church! No - I don’t mean that.” He struggled to control himself. “Are you in pain?”