“Definitely,” Hoey smiled broadly. “You’re too soft, entirely.”
“Good, Shea. Because I’m a Jew, I’m circumspect about matters religious. I’m not a bawler or a brawler like the homegrown quasi-Christians.”
Hoey warmed to his role again. “In actual fact you being a Jew, you probably never even heard of-”
“Exactly, Shea!” Minogue clapped his hands together. “Brian Kelly phoned me because I am a Jew!”
“But Opus Dei; they’re our crowd,” said Hoey in a slightly aggrieved tone. “And what’s to Opus Dei that makes a story out of them? I know that Kelly was a bit of a backslider but what would he have to tell Paul, I mean you?”
“Maybe a story about the hold that Opus Dei has on its members. The way they recruit members. Maybe Brian Kelly is soured on the organization.”
“But they’re Holy Joes. The worst they might do is dress up in women’s clothes and whip themselves.”
Minogue swivelled around in his chair. Eilis was now standing behind Hoey. Hoey followed Minogue’s eyes, craning his neck and twisting to look up at Eilis, who looked down at him with her more sceptical expression.
“Excuse me now if I’m interrupting your plans for your weekend,” she said to Hoey. She turned to Minogue. “DC Tynan would want to be talking to you.”
Minogue listened to Tynan’s brief message.
“Half-past seven? I should pick you up, so. Are you sure I need to be there?”
He thought he heard Tynan snort faintly. “Unless you’re planning to react in some untoward way to the presence of His Eminence,” said Tynan.
“Jimmy Kilmartin, I was thinking…?”
“The Archbishop asked for you by name. He knew you were in charge of the case. Tell James, by all means, but it’s you that His Eminence wants to see, as much as myself.”
Minogue wondered if Kathleen would believe him when he got around to telling her. She might regard it as a conversion. He turned back to Hoey.
“Let’s go on a bit. We were getting somewhere. I’m Paul Fine and I have Brian Kelly wanting to tell me something.”
“That’s what I was saying: when you put this against the wall, it doesn’t stand up well. Kelly had nothing to tell you that was so scandalous.”
“But I’m a Jew. Is that a disadvantage? I wouldn’t know the ins-and-outs of what Catholics do.”
“That’s it. When you push it to the limit…”
“But being a Jew I might have a distinct advantage. I’d know what goes on in Irish heads because I’m Irish, but I’d be bringing a fresh approach to the matter.”
“You wouldn’t be so cynical about religious Catholics, you mean?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t start out spiteful and wanting to go for people’s necks. Something else though, Shea-there’s another reason why Brian Kelly picked me. It’s something symbolic. Did you ever hear of a fella called Leopold Bloom?”
“I think I did, all right… Was it a film?”
Minogue shook his head.
“A symbolic thing… because you’re a Jew? Like Jesus,” Hoey whispered, looking around the squadroom to be sure that no one else could see his embarrassment.
“Fabulous, Shea. There’s that. Brian Kelly would have been alive to religious symbolism, yes. There’s another thing too, something very down-to-earth.”
It was Hoey’s turn to shake his head. “Can’t see it.”
“ I couldn’t be a member of Opus Dei, Shea,” Minogue whispered.
Hoey sat back in the chair and drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “You’re saying that Kelly was worried about his pals in Opus Dei finding out that he was none too happy about something to do with the organization? If he had pals left in it.”
“You’re Brian Kelly now, Shea. Ready?”
Hoey sat up again.
“Why are you not trying to get in touch with Mickey Fitzgerald?” Minogue asked.
Hoey answered in the tone of the hypnotized. “I don’t know.” He began laughing lightly, unable to hide his embarrassment. “Sorry. I’m not much good in the theatrical line.”
“Maybe you’re paranoid,” said Minogue contemplatively.
“Thanks very much.”
“Brian Kelly, I mean. Maybe you’re at a pitch of anxiety and you imagine people are spying on you.”
“Now you’re talking, sir. But does it help us much to find out that Brian Kelly was a nut-case?”
Minogue disliked the term. He had shied from it even before his own brush with the arbitrariness that haunted every life, that you saw if you were able to look beyond ‘father’ and ‘policeman’ and ‘Irish’. Minogue had discovered the hard way that normality was a rather ambiguous accomplishment, something which could backfire, something which involved a lot of work which you hardly knew you were doing or why, until you stopped doing it, or it stopped you.
“Point taken, Shea. We need to get his associates at work to give us a clue as to demeanour and state of mind. Definitely.”
Hoey brightened at some remembrance, just as Minogue was about to leave. “I’ll tell you one thing: whether or which Kelly was cracked, he certainly seems to have put Paul Fine in the same frame of mind. If you look at events kind of sideways, I mean.”
“How do you mean?”
“You might think this a bit odd, but nobody in RTE knew about his interest in Opus Dei, not even the McCutcheon woman, his moth. He kept it to himself. Maybe Kelly told him he had to.”
“Ummn.”
“And he went to the National Library, not to his own place. He didn’t even check what a journalist probably checks first, the newspaper clippings and programmes on tape. And if this notion is still holding together, he’s off out to Dalkey or Killiney on the Sunday to meet Kelly. Do you see…?”
Hoey perched up on the front of the chair, slowly waving and pushing at the air with his cigarette.
“Kelly in Killiney Hill?”
“He meets Fine, an arranged meeting. They have a chat and Kelly tells him something…”
“Tell me why Kelly wasn’t the one to kill Paul Fine, Shea.”
“Like he could have been unbalanced and had some queer thing about Jews? After realizing what he’d done, he might be sick of himself and want to commit…?” Hoey shook his head. “I’m stuck there, really stuck. I’d go along with the business of Kelly trusting a Jew not to treat his information sensationally and muck-rake the organization that he might still have fond memories of. But my belly tells me that the man who shot Paul Fine three times in the back of the head wasn’t Kelly. Little Patsy O’Malley will tell us that for certain when we show him a picture of Kelly. I wonder, did Kelly attend a psychiatrist or the like?”
“Good one, Shea. Suggest that to Jimmy Kilmartin, will you? I hope I can come up with names of Opus Dei people who we can grill about Brian Kelly. I’m going to meet a fella tonight who might have something to tell me.”
“Great stuff. Who is it, do you mind me asking?”
“The Archbishop of Dublin. Apparently he wants to see me.”
“The what?” said Kilmartin.
“None other. Tynan must have been in touch with his office and was able to pull a string. This particular string seems to be attached to a brick… or should I say, a pillar? I hope that it lands soft now that I’ve pulled on it. I was trying to chase down an Opus Dei membership list as well as any friends or ex-friends of Brian Kelly. That’s what I get for doing a bit of your work for you, Jimmy. I’m meeting more clergy in one day than I’ve met in years. Maybe I’ll get a letter of introduction to the Pope of Rome.”
“I’d have it on me conscience if I didn’t take it upon meself to warn His Holiness you were planning to drop in,” said Kilmartin drily. “Tynan, now. They stick together, don’t they? He’s Tynan’s age, is the Archbishop. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they’ve known one another since they were baby priests, before Tynan jumped the wall and came to us. What’s the name for baby priests anyway, before they get to be real priests? Scholars, is it?”
Minogue had often thought that calling Ireland’s one Cardinal ‘the Primate of all Ireland’ had been an intentional pun. He had seen a cartoon of a simian cardinal on a Women’s Action Movement poster near Grafton Street during the summer. The cleric, complete with crozier and pince-nez and hat, had been sitting on oppressed women.