He thought of Phuong for a moment and the face faded and he thought of the child.
Tears welled in his blue eyes.
In the front pew, a woman began to weep and her neighbors stared at her. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Tunney began again. “It is so difficult to say the simplest things. I wanted to speak to you of the absolute mercy of God but I cannot do it. I am not worthy to speak to you of it. I must tell you that: I am not worthy—”
For the third time, he paused. He stared out at them in the pews and was overwhelmed by a feeling of fear and intense pity for them. None of them understood, really, but they wanted to understand. They came and knelt and prayed and asked for just a moment of peace. Let me understand.
“Pray for me,” he said finally. He raised his hand over them. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
For a moment, he stood and looked at the congregation and then turned back to the altar. He began the prayers of the Mass again.
At that moment, Tunney heard the voice. It came muddy and unyielding from behind him. He stopped and turned.
The crippled woman had pushed herself up in the pew, leaning forward on the back of the bench in front of her, her legs propped against the kneeler. She had spoken but the words were unintelligible. Everyone suddenly turned to look at her.
McGillicuddy felt sick: A crazy woman enmeshed in her own strange life of pain and prayers, she was going to make a scene and Foley would use it as an excuse to stop Tunney. No more Latin Masses, no more caving in to Tunney. No more people in the chapel—
“Father!” The voice, turgid and opaque, calling from the swamplands. “Fer God’s sake. Help me, Father!”
A man in the next pew thought the plea was a commonplace call for help, that the crippled woman had become stuck somehow. He half rose to assist her but she did not look at him. Her black eyes stared at the priest in his robes at the altar. Her eyes began to flow with tears.
Leo Tunney turned slowly and stared at her.
“Father!” The voice was half shriek of pain, half prayer. She sobbed once.
Tunney put down the chalice he was holding and came down the steps to the communion railing. The woman propped her body with one hand and held the other outstretched in the universal gesture of pleading.
“Bless me! Bless me, you holy man!”
Tunney paused, frozen by the voice, by the shaking sight of the pleading woman. Tears fell down her pale cheeks.
“Bless me!”
“I cannot. I can do nothing—”
She cried again and said words no one could understand, words that growled up inside her and seemed detached from her.
Slowly, as though in a trance, Tunney raised his hand and began to make the Sign of the Cross.
Suddenly, the crippled woman fell to her knees and then sideways to the floor, violently, as though struck by a car. Her canes clattered around her falling body, there was a loud report as she banged against the pew, like a rifle shot on a foggy morning.
Tunney stood transfixed and then bent forward to help her.
She cried out again, again making a sound that was like a word but without any meaning.
The woman in the first pew who had wept during the sermon now cried again.
“My God, my God!” a man screamed, rising suddenly in his pew in the middle of the church.
Excitement rippled across the congregation and a kind of frenzy filled the close, hot chapel.
The crippled woman stirred at Tunney’s touch and pushed her canes away from her. She cried, “Holy, holy!” and then reached for the side of the pew and pushed her body up against her matchstick legs encased hideously in dense stockings.
Slowly, inch by inch, she rose.
And stood.
And straightened her body, aligning her shoulders and arms with her spine. She was weeping like a child now and made no other sound.
Tunney, who still held her, stood amazed. His eyes were wide and frightened.
“Blessed be God!” the crippled woman shouted and she threw her arms out, stumbling away from the pew, standing alone in the aisle, turning and turning, showing herself to the people in the pews. “Blessed be God!”
She repeated the words again and there was an explosion of sound like water bursting through a dam. Shouts and prayers mingled in a single frenzied cry that boomed through the church. The woman screamed and held her arms up to the ceiling. And then she shouted the word that changed the plans of all who had come to uncover the secrets of Leo Tunney:
“Miracle!”
15
“Me,” Rita said on the telephone.
“What is it?”
“I have something for you.”
“You don’t work here anymore.”
“You have the heart of a turnip.”
“No. Soul. I have the soul of a turnip.”
“Tunney said Mass today.”
“Quite a usual thing among Catholic priests. And it was Sunday as well.”
“Kaiser, are you going to listen to me?”
“It’s your dime.”
“I can call someone else.”
“Yes.”
“Kaiser, at Mass this morning. He’s saying the old Mass and—”
“I didn’t know there were fashions in religious celebrations.”
“Kaiser.”
He waited, wreathed by smoke; a cigarette burned in one ham fist, another smoldered in an ashtray. Outside the window of his office, a huge orange anticrime street lamp smothered the darkness.
“Kaiser. A woman was cured. He touched a woman this morning in church, she had a deformed spine. She straightened. Just like that. In front of a hundred people in the church. The local radio station is going crazy, a reporter is down from the Miami Herald—”
“I don’t believe in miracles.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
Another pause. “Yes, Rita, I suppose it is. The phenomenon is the story here. UPI already has quite a long takeout on it. Why did you take so long to call?”
“Kaiser. You bastard, you knew about it.”
He chuckled. “Rita. Your refreshing naïveté is the quality that helps you be a good investigative reporter. Believe everything, everyone, at least once. I am charmed, again, by your innocence.”
“Cut the shit, Kaiser.”
“As you say. Little Rita.”
“I tried to reach you at home.”
“I was in New York yesterday. My granddaughter was baptized.”
Another pause. “I didn’t know you had a kid.”
“Yes. A son. It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it, and now a second grandchild.” His voice carried a momentary sense of awe, as though the incongruity between his appearance and parenthood had never occurred to him before.
“I didn’t call about that. I have a story. I was there. What are we going to do about it?”
“You left me, not the other way around.”
“I told you there was a story here.”
“You didn’t predict a miracle. Your word—‘miracle.’ I never saw one before. Was it inspiring? Did it make you believe in Jesus Christ?”
“Tunney seemed as confused as anyone else.”
“Yes. Our poor dear sainted prodigal.”
“I have a story.”
“Yes. And I have a news service. What a fortunate coincidence.”
“I’m staying here, Kaiser. I talked to this old priest, McGillicuddy. Tunney’s keeping a journal—”
“What?”
“A journal. The Vatican has sent a man here, a priest and—”
“What did you say?”
“The Vatican—”
“A journal? He’s keeping a journal? Leo Tunney?” The harsh, tobacco-choked voice had changed in the last moment. Now it was tense, wary.