Police Lieutenant Frank Berardi looked long and wearily at the gaunt face of the man sitting on the other side of his desk. “Talbot,” he said finally, “why don’t you just go home and print some more pamphlets?”
John Talbot’s smouldering eyes went wide and his voice rose rhetorically. “Because the time for words is past. The time has come for action!”
Berardi said, “You don’t expect me to believe all this bilge you’ve been handing me, do you? Besides, I’m Homicide. The fellow you want is Lieutenant Kaplan of the Vice Squad, down the hall.”
“I have already talked to Lieutenant Kaplan,” replied Talbot. “He said if people were being killed, your department is involved.”
Berardi chuckled. “Good old Kaplan. He’s a shrewd cookie.”
“His kind are all shrewd.” Talbot tried, with this, to establish a just-between-us-Christians rapport with Berardi, but he met cold response.
“His kind,” Berardi repeated. “You don’t like the Kaplans of this world any more than the Berardis, do you? I guess there isn’t much you do like, is there, Talbot?”
Talbot’s lips became a thin, white-edged line. “Oh, I knew I’d have trouble with you, Lieutenant. You’re only interested in persecuting me and protecting your fellow Catholics . . .”
“Listen, I’ve arrested Catholics and testified against them and sent them to the chair . . .”
“Of course—Catholic laymen, just for appearances. But a priest! Have you ever arrested a priest?” Talbot sat back in smug triumph.
“No,” Berardi said softly. “Now that you happen to mention it, I have never arrested a priest. Or a rabbi. Or a Protestant minister. Somehow, when clergymen shoot filling station attendants or poison their mothers, they’re so damned clever at covering their tracks that I can’t pin a thing on them. They fox me, every time.”
“Make fun of me,” said Talbot, tolerantly. “Go ahead. But when the lid is finally torn off that rectory and it’s exposed for the den of vice it is, when they find the orgies going on there, and the innocent girls tortured by perverted priests until they either die horribly or consent to perform the most sickening abominations—”
“Oh, can it, will you?”
“—and it becomes known that you knew about it all the time and refused to investigate because you’re a rotten Vatican hireling yourself—”
Berardi leaned over the desk. “I’m warning you, Talbot,” he said. “We’ve received dozens of complaints about you; we’ve seen that crap you print and hand out; and you’ve been tolerated this long only because it comes under the heading of freedom of speech. Pamphlets about The Imperial Vatican Menace and The International Catholic Conspiracy are one thing—but you better watch your step . . .”
“Are you threatening me, Berardi?”
“I’m advising you. Just watch your step. Don’t cross the line and break any laws.”
Talbot stood up. “You absolutely refuse to act?”
“You catch on quick.”
“So be it. When the powers of oppression and tyranny conspire to protect each other—”
“Oh Christ.”
“—then the people must take matters into their own hands.”
Berardi was on his feet instantly. “Their own hands, eh? Let me tell you something, Buster. I’m going to be watching you. Like a hawk. Twenty-four hours a day my men will be watching you. One riot-inciting word out of your yap, one pamphlet that defames the character of any person, and it will be my pleasure and privilege to throw the book at you!” He moved closer to Talbot and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “And you know why? Because I’m prejudiced. I have this terrible prejudice about things that smell bad. And you smell bad, Talbot. You stink. You’ve got a mind like a pile of maggotty garbage, and it makes me sick. Do me a favor? Get out of here before I puke all over the floor.”
Silent with rage, Talbot left.
Berardi slumped back into his swivel chair. “Orgies at St. Michael’s,” he said to himself. “Wow.”
Talbot walked out of the police station, into the driving rain, heedless of it, the pummeling water soaking his clothes, the sky-splitting forks of lightning and the cannonades of thunder invisible and inaudible to him. When he reached the ACME PRINTERS, John Talbot, Prop., he let himself into its dingy interior with a key, peeled off his sodden outer clothing, and made for the sparse back room that was his home.
No pictures adorned the walls, no calendar even. A day-bed, a hideously decrepit armchair, a single wooden kitchen chair and a battered bare table comprised the inventory of furniture. On the table was an electric hotplate with two coils. A blue porcelain coffee pot stood on one. He started a pot of coffee. As it heated, he walked back into the print shop and dug into the drawer of a green metal filing case. There, carefully catalogued, were copies of his productions: small four-page pamphlets and larger single sheets, printed on the rainbow remnants of other people’s paper. He found one—Torquemada, Catholic Torturer—and carried it to the flat bed press he used for his smaller jobs. His fingers flew over the fonts as he set the type for a new single sheet. The words opened like poisonous tropic blossoms in his brain and went directly to the typestick; there was no need to write them down. Occasionally he glanced at the Torquemada pamphlet for reference, picking up a sentence and rephrasing it with swiftly moving fingers. Soon, the coffee was percolating in the back room. He carried the type he had set so far into the back, and as he drank his coffee, he read what he had created, his printer’s eye easily reversing the mirror image of the words in his hand:
CATHOLIC SEX RITES
IT IS WELL KNOWN to all Historians that are not in the pay of the Vatican (as too many are) that Catholic priests of another day took their vows of Celibacy lightly and had relations with women. When the women would not yield to their desires, they threatened them with the Wrath of God. When the priests also happened to be professional Torturers like the infamous Spanish Inquisitor, Torquemada—appointed Grand Inquisitor in 1487 by Pope Innocent (!) VIII—then the Rack and the Thumbscrew were convenient persuaders that changed the minds of many reluctant women. All this is solid historical fact, of course, and widely known.
What is less widely known is the shocking fact of such clerical Sex Practices today. This pamphleteer has been threatened with incarceration if he commits “Defamation of Character” or “Inciting to Riot,” so names will not be mentioned here. But have any of you ever heard and wondered at strange sounds in Catholic rectories? In the Unholy Hours, past the witching time of night, have you ever heard sounds that seem like the screams of poor girls in mortal agony? Have you ignored them? How long will your conscience let you ignore them? No specific Parish or even City will be mentioned here, under pain of “legal” action, but—
Talbot drained the coffee cup. With luck, he could print and distribute these—wet ink be damned!—within the hour. As he returned to the front of the shop, he made a mental note to reset the title: the word SEX should be larger, and—ironically—in the medieval ornateness of Cloister Text.
• • •
“Drunk,” Mrs. Barlow was saying on the phone. “No, I didn’t smell it on him, my dear—he made very sure not to breathe in my face!—but how else would you explain his actions? Unshaven! Actually! And telling me to mind my own business! Well, after all . . . And remember what we learned about his reputation at St. Francis . . . yes . . . yes indeed . . . Oh, I do. I will. I fully intend to. But you see, that’s not quite all, dear. There’s—well, I really don’t know how to put it, it’s very embarrassing . . . but there’s a woman involved. I don’t know. But obviously a low creature, given to the most hideous language . . . I can’t repeat what she said . . . well, dear, it all makes a very unsavory picture. . . .”
• • •
Father Halloran had not escaped the unseasonable sultriness of the weather by moving to Guardian Angel Orphanage. It was only a night’s drive from St. Michael’s and the same mugginess hung heavily over both places. From almost his first moment at the new post, he had been immersed in work. Things had been piling up ever since the death of the previous director, and Father Halloran was forced to wade through papers and problems that occupied every waking hour. He had little time for reflection, little time for pangs of homesickness for St. Michael’s, little time for the self-recrimination that always overwhelmed him when he thought of Susan Garth.
There were girls of her age, and of her prettiness, among his new charges. He had spent time with some. Inevitably, they had reminded him of Susan. But during the daylight hours, the stringent demands of work dispelled the waves of guilt and remorse.
In the unrestful black heat of his dreams, however, Susan was still with him, sometimes clothed, sometimes naked, sometimes silent, sometimes screaming. Most often she was silent, staring at him with the steady eyes of accusation. Once or twice he had seen her dead—her nude body wet and pallid, washed by the murdering waters upon a grassy bank.
But why, why? He had told himself, again and again, that he could not be blamed, that he could have acted in no other way. . . .
And yet the girl still came to him at night, to scream, to flaunt her body, to accuse. He had not escaped her, just as he had not escaped the sultry heat.
All this ran through Father Halloran’s mind on Sunday morning, as he put on his clothes after a night of little rest. Completely dressed except for his black jacket, he paused to blot his dewy face with a handkerchief. Then he donned the jacket, his hands mechanically and aimlessly exploring the pockets.
His fingers closed upon a small object that was to send him driving back to St. Michael’s in frantic haste.
• • •
Bruce Glencannon had lit one of his fifty-cent Panetelas for Lieutenant Frank Berardi. Now he lit one for himself, puffing seriously, his eyes focused intently on the match flame and the glow at the end of the fragrant cigar. The labor of love completed to his satisfaction, he blew out a white cloud of smoke, dropped the blackened match into the alabaster ash tray at his elbow, and settled back in his chair. “Nice of you to drop by, Frank,” he said.
“Well,” Berardi replied between puffs, “when you phoned and said something was bothering you, something that might involve my department, I figured I’d better see what it was all about.”
Glencannon nodded. “Frank, you know me. I’m a businessman. I work with facts—sales figures, costs, overhead, things like that. I weigh these matters in my mind, sort of sum them up and see how everything stands, and on the basis of my findings I make my decisions. Just common sense—no big flashes of inspiration, no jumping to conclusions, no hasty judgments. I guess you work the same way.”
“Yes, sir, I’d say so.”
“That’s right. Probably nobody would call me an imaginative fellow, or a dreamer. If somebody tried to tell me the moon is made of green cheese, I’d laugh. If somebody else came along and said the same thing, I’d still laugh. Then if some scientist, say, came up to me and said he had color photographs taken from a rocket that prove the moon is bright green, I’d begin to wonder; and if another scientist from somewhere else said he didn’t know about that but he’d analyzed the moon through one of these spectroscopes and found it had a high protein content . . . well, then I’d start to think maybe those first two nuts weren’t so nutty after all.”
Berardi nodded.
“Frank, I’m a Catholic, just like you. We go to the same church. I’m no saint—I guess you wouldn’t claim to be either—but I think I’m a pretty good Catholic. Maybe better than some. I don’t put any store in talk against the Church. I’ll walk out of the room if someone starts telling jokes about nuns and priests. Or making wiseguy comments about the Pope. I contribute to the Church every year—I won’t say how much, but believe me it’s a healthy chunk.” Glencannon treated himself to a pause and a long draw on his cigar. “All right. So if a man came in here and said my parish priest was laying women in the rectory, I’d kick that man out of the house. I wouldn’t stand for that.”
Berardi, who had felt tense during Glencannon’s preamble, now relaxed. He smiled. “Oh, I see,” he said. “John Talbot.”
“No,” Glencannon said.
“No?”
“That’s my point, Frank. The green cheese. I wouldn’t listen to a man like Talbot, much less believe him. But Talbot plus Lydia Barlow plus Mike Chandler plus some people named Dunham from an entirely different parish . . . then I begin to sit up and take notice. And so should you.”
“Take notice of what, Mr. Glencannon?”
“Facts,” said the businessman. “Wild parties in the rectory at weird hours in the morning. Screaming and laughing—female laughing—and glasses being broken and things thrown around.”
“Oh, now—”
“No, hear me out. I get that from the Chandlers. Good people, better Catholics than I am. From this other family you don’t know, the Dunhams—I get this by way of Barlow’s wife—I’ve learned that this new priest was kicked out of his old parish for drinking, for administering a sacrament while he was drunk. And that’s not all. Lydia Barlow was in the rectory today and talked to this new fellow. He looked like hell, needed a shave, told her to mind her own business, as much as threw her out. And he has a woman in there. Lydia heard her. She heard her laugh and shout filth, like some drunken whore.” Glencannon sat back. “What do you say to that, Frank?”
Berardi frowned. “I don’t know. It sounds bad. Sounds crazy. But, Mr. Glencannon, a priest—”
“Look, you and I aren’t kids. We know priests are men, flesh and blood just like anybody else. They have hankerings—and those hankerings can get out of control. Why, a priest can go insane! What then? He might do anything. And a drunk besides? Oh—and wait a minute. Have you seen this?” He reached for a magazine and handed it to Berardi. “Article in there all about ecstasy, of all things, all about how sex and religion are really the same thing. Can you beat that? And take a look at who wrote it.”
“Well,” Berardi started to say, “this doesn’t mean—”
“Nothing by itself means anything,” Glencannon cut in. “But all of them added up do mean something. All this preoccupation with ecstasy . . . the drinking . . . the lewd woman in the rectory . . . the wild laughing and screaming at night . . . How can you ignore it?”
“Look, Mr. Glencannon,” said Berardi, ashtraying his now dead cigar, “even if it’s true—if!—it’s something the Church authorities should look into. Not laymen. Certainly not the Homicide Department!”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know it’s not a matter for Homicide? How do you know some of those shrieks aren’t the shrieks of someone being murdered, tortured?”
“Mr. Glencannon, a drunken priest, even a lecherous priest, is one thing, but how does that add up to murder and torture?”
“I don’t know. But there’s such a thing as priests turned inside out, priests who officiate at altars made of a woman’s flesh, priests who recite the Our Father backward, priests who offer living sacrifices to the Devil—”
“I think you are a pretty imaginative man, Mr. Glencannon . . .”
“No I’m not! I don’t make anything up. Sure, Talbot originally put the bug in my ear with his silly pamphlets, I admit it, but I went further than that. I did a little reading. I did a little asking. It exists, that kind of filthy service. It’s existed for hundreds of years. It has a name. You want to know what they call it?”
Berardi let Glencannon tell him.
“They call it The Black Mass.”
And a chink of doubt opened in Berardi’s armor.