He found what he was looking for beneath the vegetable crisper at the bottom of the refrigerator. He pulled the drawer out and saw a black notebook.
It was a diary with entries beginning on the day Leo Tunney emerged from the jungles of Cambodia and walked into the United States Embassy at Bangkok. It also contained carefully clipped stories from the New York Times and the Washington Post on the emergence of the priest, as well as Rita’s own notes, in a neat, schoolgirl hand.
Had they found it, the pros from the Agency? But no. She wouldn’t have left it here if they had.
He took the journal into the living room and sat down.
Her notes filled fourteen pages. All about Tunney, all about the use of religious orders for spying purposes in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s.
Devereaux smiled. Notes about Tunney, and she was now “out of town” for a few days. In Florida, no doubt.
He put the black notebook back in the refrigerator, under the crisper tray.
He went into her bedroom and looked at her belongings. There was a string of pearls — fake. And a locket of Victorian design containing a picture of an older man and woman. On the wall was a sampler in a picture frame. The sampler was quite old, he thought. It said: God So Loved The World.
Her dresser contained clothing, sweet-smelling from soap she had placed in each drawer.
An old-fashioned girl, Devereaux thought, going through her things, trying to draw a psychological frame of her in his mind. She was in Florida, he was certain; she was close to Tunney.
From the first, sitting with Hanley at the sidewalk café, he had decided that Rita Macklin was the key to the complex puzzle of Father Tunney. Why had she been so dogged in her pursuit of the case from the first? How had she known that Tunney was at the Watergate? It hadn’t been asked, hadn’t been explained.
He found photographs on the dresser.
Mother and father in drab, proud dress, dark clothing, standing in front of a frame house. The photograph was produced by a small shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Another photograph of a young man in a school football uniform. St. Martin High School.
And a photograph of Rita Macklin with the older man and woman — her parents — along with the same young man, but now wearing a sports jacket. Her brother? Yes, probably.
She had been about sixteen then, he guessed. Her body was thin; she was probably too tall for her age. And her face was extraordinary — bold and shy at once, the eyes open and unafraid, the cheekbones high and prominent, and yet some quality of softness to the features that suggested fragility.
He spent two hours in the apartment and when he emerged at last, the light had faded into a dull twilight of gray and black. He climbed along the ridge of trees to the side street, found his car and pulled back into the traffic buzzing homeward along Old Georgetown Road. The Old Man — Admiral Galloway, the wily old bureaucrat who had guided R Section for a turbulent decade — lived in a posher section along the same meandering highway.
It was time now, he thought.
He could go to Florida and find Tunney.
And wait to use Rita Macklin to make some sense of Tunney’s reappearance.
10
Leo Tunney had not touched the meat offered him; in fact, he had quietly shoved away the heavy white china plate as soon as he thought it polite to do so. The meat appeared gross to him, red and oozing with blood and juice and colored by wine sauce, the beef tinged brown at the edges, barely warm at the pink center. Tunney felt ill and ashamed but he could not explain these feelings to the other priest eating at the opposite end of the table. The table was too large; it muted conversation and permitted Leo Tunney to suffer in silence. Finally, the door to the kitchen swung open and the rectory housekeeper approached the table. She removed the plate without a word. She means well, Tunney thought to himself; they all mean well.
At last he asked her for a portion of rice and she stared at him oddly, one hand on her hip, then shrugged and returned to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she produced a bowl of flaky, dry white material that resembled rice but did not taste like it. It was as though it had been boiled over and over until all its taste had been drained. At the same time, she brought a white serving bowl of broth made from the congealed grease of the roast. Tunney tasted the broth, which was too salty, and dug the long, elegant fork into the rice. He drank glass after glass of water during the meal; he had been so thirsty, all the time, during the four days he had been in this place.
Four days he had dreamed and slept and dreamed while his thin body fought the infections inside him with fevers and sudden chills and bone-shaking tremors in the middle of the night. Once, when he awoke in the afternoon on the second day of his fevers, he was certain he was going to die. The certainty had calmed him; many times in the twenty lost years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, he had been presented with the face of death and he thought he had found a way to accept it, with an Oriental bow, with a graceful acknowledgment of inevitability. He mistook his calm certainty of death that afternoon for acceptance until he realized that it was only a frozen fear, a suppressed and barely moving panic inside him, waiting for an end to pain and memories.
He had not died.
This morning he had felt well enough to get out of his sickbed. His first steps had been uncertain, and he had felt dizzy from the effort. He had asked Father McGillicuddy for a cassock and collar. McGillicuddy had scoured the closets for a cassock that would fit his thin frame and finally found an old-fashioned black garment with buttons from collar to toe. Somehow, the cassock seemed to embarrass McGillicuddy.
“There’s changes, you know, in the Church,” McGillicuddy had said. “During the time you were gone.” But Leo Tunney, though ill and thin and disoriented by the events of the last three weeks, was not a fooclass="underline" He knew there had been changes, but the point none of them had understood — Rice, the men from the Agency, the Ambassador or the embassy staff, and now this fat, self-assured man — was that Tunney had changed as well, in different ways, and that he now needed a touchstone like this black garment to return to an idea of himself that he had lost in Asia.
Leo Tunney thought of this as he stared at the bowl of instant rice in front of him. He did not remember this dining room or the entire rectory building; it had been built as an addition to the original motherhouse of the Order in 1958, the year Leo Tunney had gone to Asia.
“Are you all right, Father?”
McGillicuddy was finished eating and he leaned solicitously over his place setting at the other end of the long table.
“Yes. I’m all right.”
“Well, first solid meal and all in the rectory. We’ll soon have you fattened up again.” McGillicuddy spoke with assurance; he was a fat man himself with a fat man’s gestures. He waved a cigar as he spoke, conducting his orchestra of words. The cigar was wrapped in brown leaf and tapered elegantly; he had not lit it yet but waved it as though he were reminding himself and his guest that he would soon be enjoying it. A similar cigar had been offered to Tunney but the frail missionary had declined.
Cyrus McGillicuddy had a face as pink and clean and cherubic as that of a freshly bathed child. His voice was a pipe organ of tones, always on the verge of a shout or of laughter. In fact, the only part of his appearance that betrayed the image of the jolly cleric was the eyes: cold, baleful, calculating, watching every reaction to his words and gestures, gauging the mood he was creating moment by moment.