“Hello Joseph!”
“Joey.”
“Yes, of course, how are you Joey?” Father Mercado reached down and shook Joey’s hand from the altar of the grand cathedral.
“I am doing well, and you?”
“No complaints. What brings you here today? You aren’t thinking of joining up are you?”
“Father, I need…”
“Joey, in the confessional or during the celebration, calling me Father is cool, but when it’s just you and me talking, please call me Frank. It makes me feel like I’m home.”
Joey laughed a little, “Okay, Frank. What I need is to pick your brain a little more about the Knight’s Chamber and a few other things.”
“Hold on, if you are here as a cop, then we can go back to Father Mercado.”
“How about as a concerned citizen and Catholic?”
“This sounds serious.”
“It is, my friend, and I would like you to help me on background so that I can understand things a little better.”
“Give me a minute. Let’s go down the street to a place on the corner. I don’t want to do this in here.”
“I totally understand,” Joey nodded.
The challenge of sitting in a sidewalk café on the streets of Paris with a priest is that when the inevitable French girls prance down the street without the benefit of supporting undergarments, the undulating motion instinctively attracts the eye of the male. There were many ‘bouncing Bettys’ passing by, and Joey had to focus in on the fact that he was talking to a priest and didn’t want to be obvious.
“Frank, I have to ask you if you can hold what we discuss here between us. Almost like it was confession. I don’t want to put you in a dilemma, but I need to insist on discretion before I proceed.”
“I will agree if there is no compulsion for me to answer something which I don’t feel comfortable with.”
Joey let those words sink in and tried to imagine what would trigger that but decided he’d find out soon enough. “Agreed.” Joey opened a file on his iPad and showed the Paris morgue picture of Franciscan Friar Gregory, who was found dead in a stairwell of the Sofitel in ’97.
“I assume he’s not sleeping in this picture?”
“No, he is deceased, but it’s the manner of his death that intrigues me.” Joey flipped to the next image, the front page of LeMonde, the French paper of record, chronicling the arrival of the Pope in Paris back in 1997. “Now I know you weren’t here then, but that Franciscan priest died the day before the Pope arrived.”
“Actually, I was here. Not as a priest, but the Pope was here on his ‘reach out to youth’ initiative. A few friends and I came here to participate. How did the priest die?”
“Probably murdered, and he isn’t a priest, but someone we believe was here to assassinate the Pope.”
Frank now understood the weight of Joey’s inquiry. “You know, Joey, the Pope was one of the reasons I answered the calling. He spoke to me and millions around the world. Who would want to kill him?”
“Frank, unfortunately, it is a long list.”
“Yes, I guess I am a little tunnel-visioned there, but okay, who killed the would-be killer?”
“That’s what I am trying to find out.”
“How do you think I can help you figure that out?”
Joey fingered the next image onto the screen. It was Marilou’s police-style sketch of the ring Sicard and the bishop wore. “Ever see this?”
“Looks like the Ring of Thorns.”
“Exactly. Remember when I asked you about the room under the church?”
“Wow. You said you couldn’t sleep a wink until you got inside. You weren’t kidding, were you?”
“Well, the door knockers on the doors of the Knight’s Chamber and the rings worn by the Knights of the Sepulchre are exactly the same.”
“Knights. Okay I got that part but I don’t follow what…”
“We believe the man who killed that assassin was wearing this ring. He is the same man I came here to Paris to find. I nearly had him, and then the French law pulled him away from me.”
“So a Knight of the Sepulchre saved the Pope’s life by killing his would-be assassin.”
“That’s our working theory thus far, so I ask you, do you know of this group or this man?” He brought up Sicard’s picture.
Frank took the iPad and tilted it to avoid the glare. “You know, I think I have seen this guy.”
“Remember where? When?”
Joe could see Frank thinking, “Joey, if this man saved the life of the Pope, even though I don’t agree with his method, he is a hero to me. Why would I help you incarcerate him?”
“I can see your point. But I am not interested in arresting him. He is only sought as a person of interest in a completely different affair with the most critical national security implications, which I am currently trying to stop. What happened here in Paris in ’97 is out of my jurisdiction. I have no interest in that.”
Joey’s mind immediately filled with the phrase “sin of omission,” because, although what he was saying was true, he didn’t bother to mention that his co-investigator, Director Dupré, would see it differently and surely stop at nothing to press for the prosecution of the murderer he had let slip through his fingers.
“Joey, I am a priest. I take confession and celebrate Mass. I am not an informer.”
“Frank, I can’t go into what this is all about, but this man has knowledge of threats and methods that makes him someone valuable to talk to.”
“Joey, I have seen the movies. ‘Talk to’ can mean rendition, handing him over to some god-forsaken dungeon in some dictatorship that isn’t queasy about little things like human rights.”
“Whoa, Frank, don’t hang that crap on me. I work for the science advisor to the president, not Attila the Hun. You are a priest, but you are also an American. I need you to remember that. Sicard might help us thwart an attack, an attack using scientific means, that could be worse than one hundred 9/11s.”
“Do I have your word then Joey, as a man, and as a Catholic to a priest, that if I help you, Sicard will not suddenly disappear?”
Joey didn’t know if he could guarantee that. After all, he didn’t know the depth of complicity Sicard might have had in Maguambi’s whale tale. “Frank, I cannot grant a pardon. I mean, I don’t know how clean Sicard is, but I can promise you this: if his involvement is purely academic and he hasn’t compromised any national security secrets, then yeah, he talks and then he walks, free as a bird.”
Frank took a minute. He looked across the street at the citizens and tourists going about their day. He focused on a young girl and her mother, who reminded him of his sister and his niece, back in Philly, back in the USA. Joey was in some way protecting them as well. “Okay, I have seen him at the church. He takes a special confession; he goes to only one particular priest, never to any of the rest of us..”
“The priest that takes the confession, what’s his name?”
“Monsignor. Monsignor Mancuso.”
“When can I speak to him?”
“Tomorrow.”
Joey sat back, took a sip of espresso and looked across the street at the chocolate shop with the pink awning. Maybe I should get some for Phyllis? It was the first normal thought he’d had in a long time. Now that he had connected Sicard to the Monsignor, it was only a matter of time until the rest of the pieces fell together, not only in the whale case, but possibly in the shoot-down of the chopper as well. Maybe a big, like two-pound, box of chocolates.