McGillicuddy had watched from a window. Foley had fumed at him but there was nothing he could do.
“Touch me, touch me,” some of the Monday morning crowd had cried. And Tunney had raised his hands and made the Sign of the Cross over them.
All day they had come but Foley kept Tunney inside after the morning incident. Television camera crews came and a man who said he was from the New York Times and three reporters from People magazine and a correspondent from the National Enquirer. All were turned away, including the surprised man from the Times who kept explaining to McGillicuddy that he was from New York and could not be treated this way.
But the woman who claimed a miracle — this Lu Ann Carter was available for interviews. She said she was from near Homosassa Springs, Florida. She said she had suffered from scoliosis, curvature of the spine, for ten years, a gradual and wasting disease. Twenty-nine, she said she was. Her cousin, who owned a small chicken farm, screened the reporters who wanted to talk to her. He accepted money from some of them.
Lu Ann Carter was not articulate, which seemed to make her more sincere.
But was it a miracle?
She was straightened, she said.
Would she become a Catholic?
No, but God put holy men in all religions.
Her face was produced on Monday on a thousand Associated Press photo transmission machines in a thousand newspaper offices. On Monday night, the story of her miracle at the hands of the “prodigal priest” (as NBC called him) was an item on the network news programs. It was an item of hope: Yes, there was a war in the Middle East, and yes, the nation still was sinking into a torpor of economic disaster, and yes, the talks with the Soviets in Denmark were not going well, and yes, there were still horror stories coming from the starving people in Thailand housed in the refugee camps along the Cambodian border. But this single story of a “miracle” was good news and it lightened the heavy load of bad news that day.
Was it a hoax? Why was a priest working for the CIA? The media played it out in public.
Foley stood now at the window and watched the rain as he had watched it as a child in Liverpool. Endless rainy days making the River Mersey gray and heavy…
He felt so trapped, by Tunney, by this “incident,” by his assignment to get information from a mad old priest, information he was not even sure existed. He felt at the center of events he was not a part of.
On Monday night, he had confronted Tunney in the kitchen of the rectory. “Do you think you’re a bloody saint, is that it? A miracle worker?”
Tunney had only stared wordlessly at Martin Foley.
“We need that journal and yet you make a mockery—”
“No.”
The voice had been firm and quiet.
“No? What is ‘no’?”
“I am not a saint. Or a miracle worker. I am not even a good man.”
“Don’t lay that rhetoric on me again. This is false humility, this—”
Tunney slowly nodded.
“Yes, of course. You’re right, Father Foley.”
He bowed his head. In the next room, Mrs. Jones was listening at the door. Later she told her neighbor, Mrs. Custis, that she had known all along there was something “special” about Father Tunney, that he was one of God’s special people. She had known it from the first.
“Yes,” Leo Tunney had said. “I am willful. That is why I went outside this morning when you forbade me to say Mass. All those people had come.” Suddenly, his eyes opened very wide, seeing things far from the room in which he stood. “In the village, you see… When the people — when we — when we had nothing at all, when hope was gone along with the food, when the dead were piled around us and we had become too weak even to bury them…” Again, he paused, fell into a brief reverie. When he spoke again, his voice was altered, agitated. “I gave them nothing then. I had nothing for them. Nothing at all. All the gifts, all the powers I thought I had… And this morning, in the rain, when they came to the chapel and I could not even give them the Mass, I saw all their suffering, as it had been before in the villages. I could bless them now, I felt, inside me, that I could give them prayers to say and they would believe me. As they had not believed me in the villages. I gave them words, Father. I had to give them words, it was my second chance—”
Suddenly, the old priest sobbed, his eyes filled with tears. He rose from the chair quickly and went to his knees in front of the younger man. “Father, forgive me. Forgive my arrogance and pride.”
So Foley had been shamed to silence. Tunney had returned to his journal and worked on it late into the night. The crowds surged around the complex of buildings that were the motherhouse of the Order.
Foley saw that they were still there this morning in the rainswept streets.
Miracles.
Foley dressed in the gray light of Tuesday morning, then opened the door of his room and went down the hall to Tunney’s chamber.
The door was tightly closed.
He knocked once, hesitatingly.
There was no answer.
It was just after six in the morning. Foley went down the carpeted hallway and opened the inner door of the chapel. The old man was there.
Tunney stood at the altar, his hands at his sides, staring at the sanctuary.
Quietly, Foley closed the door and returned down the main hall to the side corridor that led to the little bedrooms.
He pushed open the door to Tunney’s room and closed it.
Carefully, quickly, in the manner of a man skilled in intelligence work, he began to go through the drawers in the chest at the side of the room. He examined each article in the room, opening and closing, returning each to the exact place he had taken it from. There would be no trace of his presence.
Where was the journal?
Shaving kit.
A shirt of flowered design that McGillicuddy had pressed on the old man.
A new breviary of daily prayers.
A rosary. The rosary that someone had given him in the rain on Monday morning.
For a moment, Foley paused and frowned: The old man went to chapel to pray without the tools of prayer. Without a book or a rosary.
The old man stood at the altar and prayed, not on his knees.
Or was he praying at all?
Minutes passed. Sweat broke out across Foley’s broad forehead. His blue eyes darted back and forth as he examined all the drawers and then the night table and then the desk.
Nothing at all.
He looked between the mattress and spring, then opened the closet. But it was empty.
The journal was not in the room.
It was hidden.
Against whom?
Not for the first time, Martin Foley felt lost, felt himself grasping at loose sand on a cliffside, sliding slowly down the shallow cliff, down to the ledge of an unspeakable chasm.
He stood in the middle of the room and looked around and could see no hiding place. Quietly, he left the room, closing the door carefully.
In the dim hall, there was a massive bureau of Spanish oak, a crucifix upon it, and a small silver plate of the sort once used for calling cards. On the wall above the bureau was a very bad reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper in an expensive frame.
Hidden against Martin Foley, hidden against the Church.