“Father. Please, Father—”
Leo Tunney saw that his hands had begun to tremble again. “On the fourth day, when they called for me and talked to me, I lied to them. I am a patriot, you understand? Or was? But they were patriots as well.” The trembling was much worse. “When I lied to them, they did what they did.”
“Father—”
“Is this what you want to know, Father Foley? It is all the truth. As you wanted it.” No, the tremors had spread, he could not control his body anymore, he was bending again, the fire was in his back, his legs were numb, beyond pain, the tiger cages and the filth and the cries of pain.…
“Father.” Foley’s voice was sharp, alarmed. “Father! Are you all right?”
Tunney glanced up and looked around wildly. But the walls were receding, the cages were opened.
“Yes. I’m all right. I’m all right.”
“Father, I don’t wish to cause you pain—”
Tunney began to smile. “No. No, you do not cause me pain. I have only memories of pain.”
“Matters of state intrude, sent me here. I would like to return as soon as possible to Rome, to leave you—”
“Yes. I understand—”
“—great shifts in the political world—”
“—and my poor little secrets…”
The two men realized they were talking past each other and that the words were carrying meanings unknown to the other. Again, they waited in silence for the other to speak.
It was Tunney, the voice softer than it had been; the trembling of his hands had diminished. “I asked Father McGillicuddy for a journal book.” Weariness crept into the pale face. “I began my journal last night. After I spoke to you. I realize I will not have any peace at all.…” He stared at the younger man. “In a little while, you must wait for me, it will all be there, in that book, and then you can leave me alone with my pains. It will be everything you want.”
“Is that why you came back?”
“What? To tell you? To put it down for you?” A smile of infinite pity spread across his face. “No, Father; matters of state do not concern me anymore. Or of Church. I only have God left to satisfy, if there is God, if He can be satisfied.”
“Why did you come back then?”
“Because—” He paused. “Secrets, perhaps.” The smile was not for Foley, it was turned in toward Tunney’s own thoughts. “Perhaps God would not let me rest until I returned. I don’t want anything from Him except an end to the pain. I am in pain all the time.”
“We can call the doctor again, perhaps—”
Tunney laughed then. “Not that pain. That is merely suffering. My pain is new every moment, as though it has never happened before to any person, as though God devised it for me alone of all the men who have ever lived.”
“Father Tunney.” But Foley paused. What was he going to say, what could he command? Do not be mad? Do not feel pain?
Cardinal Ludovico had told him everything: “Tunney may have a secret.” And told him nothing at all. Why would Cardinal Ludovico be so worried by this one old man?
What had been held back, even from him?
13
The tiki bar behind the hotel on the beach side was designed like a grass hut, open on all sides, with a dozen stools set in place around it. Few sat at the bar, though; most of the customers were at little iron tables scattered over the immense concrete patio that led to the swimming pool. No one was in the pool and the clear, green water shimmered undisturbed. Waitresses teetered between the bar and the tables, serving drinks, their high heels clattering on the bare cement. Besides Devereaux, only two others — both men — sat at the bar itself.
The blood-red sun was still forty minutes above the horizon. The sky over the Gulf was streaked with clouds against the expanse of blue, layer upon layer of blue colors that gave the sky depth. The afternoon had been warm, languorous, and it seemed that the sun had been holding the same place in the sky for hours. At one iron table, an old man, glistening with a deep tan on his oiled body, reached across his lounge chair to pick up a blue robe and offer it to a pale, nervous young woman who seemed embarrassed by her white swimming suit. She accepted the robe and shrugged it on and the old man laughed then at her modesty.
Devereaux watched them from the shadows of the thatched roof over the bar.
He had been waiting for an hour.
Three swizzle sticks were lined up precisely next to his current drink. Yesterday, he had waited as well, until darkness closed the bar and he knew she would not come.
Six days before, he had followed Rita Macklin and Leo Tunney to Clearwater. For six days, he had waited and watched and studied the problem, prying at the mousehole of a solution like a cat with infinite patience.
Hanley in Washington would not have understood. Hanley would have expected action; Hanley would have expected Devereaux to be bored by waiting. Hanley did not understand the agent in the field because he had never been in the field and because Devereaux had taken part in so many covert operations in the past that required violent action, Hanley thought he knew his man.
He would never understand. Devereaux was the same man watching and waiting that he was when he planned and executed an operation. Devereaux weighed each movement and ploy against the consequences of failure or success. His only touchstone in the field was survival. In everything he did, he moved for his own survival because he had decided at some point that only a fool throws away his life for any cause.
The game was always patience, waiting, setting a trap in a deep wood and baiting a lair and waiting and waiting, collecting a jumble of impressions, sorting them slowly in the computer of the brain, storing them finally in the compartments of memory.
The steel band began to play again after a short break. The black musicians were on a small stage on the other side of the patio; the stage was under a grass roof, nearly a replica of the bar where Devereaux sat. They started their music without an introduction. In a moment, the music changed the mood of the dying afternoon as the steady, erotic beat and the strange echoes from the drums hinted at dark moments past and yet to come. It was the last set of the day and it was always different from those that went before, wilder and faster; the people sitting at the wrought-iron furniture seemed removed from the music, as though the players were playing for themselves alone, on an empty stretch of Jamaican beach in the back country, instead of surrounded by tourist motels off the Florida mainland.
Devereaux closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the music move into him. He was perfectly still.
He had observed Rita Macklin at all times of her day. He had watched her jog along the beach in the mornings and one morning had observed the gray car that seemed to follow her. She had gone to the motherhouse of Tunney’s Order four times in the past three days. He might have intercepted her casually at any of a dozen places — after he decided he would have to use her — but he had finally chosen this place, at this time, listening to this strange music.