Gospel, page 24
“Bye-bye, Gabe,” she said, waving faintly.
And soon the bus was bound for Belfast, and she watched it sputter away in a haze of bus exhaust, getting quieter and quieter as it moved to the bend ahead. Lucy stared until she realized she was looking at the distant hills of rough scrub, combed by the gusty saline breeze, no more color in the early-evening landscape than a black-and-white photograph.
Lucy put her phone card away and decided she’d better tell O’Hanrahan of this encounter. She wasn’t sure just what to report—maybe merely that she’d seen Gabriel again. She turned and nearly ran into the man in the badly matched golfing clothes. He lifted his hat politely, giving her an intense, curious look before self-consciously reverting to his magazine.
Back at the Crown, O’Hanrahan had amassed a jovial crowd around him, Mr. McCall, the rabbi, David, Mrs. McCall nursing a half-pint, and a few other interested listeners.
“Lucille!” he cried, lifting a Guinness in her honor.
“Evening, Dr. O’Hanrahan.” She noticed that Father O’Reilly, their watchdog, was missing. “Did you find the father?”
“Gone back to the chapel,” said the professor, pointing beside his glass to a note Father O’Reilly had left them. “I was discussing with this ignorant man…” He meant Mr. McCall, who was tipsy and laughing. “… that it is the O’Somethings rather than the McSomethings that put Ireland on the map.”
“Total rubbish!” said Mr. McCall, as his wife restrained him by putting a hand on his arm.
The argument raged on with everyone in on the joke and Lucy distant from the discussion; she saw that David was also transfixed. She was tired from her bad night of sleep on Rathlin Island and wished to make it an early night. Maybe she would have a soft drink and then excuse herself.
“Lemme fetch ye a beer, love,” offered Mr. McCall.
“Just a Coke,” she insisted. “Do they have Diet Coke?”
Unheard of in these parts.
“Just a Coke then.” Lucy picked up Father O’Reilly’s note and folded it and then unfolded it, occupying her hands.
Gentlemen,
Unexpectedly I’ve had to return to the Church of the Holy Savior where many duties await me. I shall return by nightfall to discuss in full our business.
Fr. O’Reilly, S. J.
Sure is proud of that S. J., thought Lucy.
“Dr. O’Hanrahan,” she broke in, interrupting a lull in one of his stories. “There’s something we ought to talk about—”
“Get back to me later, honey,” he interpolated in his risqué tale of the moment.
“Jukebox,” announced David, motioning to Lucy.
They went to the jukebox and scanned the pitiful song selection at the Crown. Some dance-club hits from a few months back. Lots of standard Irish numbers, the Dubliners, the Fureys, a brush with contemporary music featuring Sinead O’Connor, the Pogues, U2, all the regulars on the local Irish-bar jukeboxes back home.
The Pekingese by the fireplace barked as someone stepped too close to it. The old lady pulled the dog’s leash and brought her little baby closer to soothe.
“God,” said Lucy, “that woman has been here since this morning.”
“Mrs. McCready, she lives in here, she does. She must go home from three to five because they close this place.” The dog kept yipping despite its mistress’ talking babytalk to it. “Now if I could only dress like that, me social life would improve,” David added, nodding toward the man Lucy had seen earlier in a pink sports jacket. He looked to be waiting on the restroom, peeking restlessly around the corner impatiently.
David slipped a coin into the jukebox. “Now we got to pick something.”
The titles were scrawled by hand: “The Flower of Sweet Strabane,” and “The Brown Colleen (That I Met in the County Down)” and “Black’s the Colour of Me Truelove’s Hair.”
“Ooh, that’s a stinker,” said David. “Let’s play that one. Get the old men asinging.”
Hold it, thought Lucy.
She interrupted the professor in midstory: “Dr. O’Hanrahan, could I see you a moment?”
She must have said it seriously enough that he resisted the temptation to yell at her. He left his coterie and walked to the edge of the bar beside Lucy. Lucy had Father O’Reilly’s note. “Father O’Reilly’s Irish, maybe English, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did he spell ‘Saviour’ without a u?”
O’Hanrahan read the note and a troubled look spread over his face. “Morey, get over here,” he called to the rabbi. The rabbi discreetly excused himself, joined them and examined the note as well.
“Excuse me, Jack,” said O’Hanrahan to the innkeeper, working behind the bar. “Have you seen that O’Reilly fellow at all this afternoon?”
“Aye, before lunchtime with yourselves,” he said.
“After he had you put that package in your safe?”
Jack said his wife delivered a coffee tray around 4:30 P.M. up to the man’s room. Jack summoned his wife Martha from the kitchen. She came out, a hefty, red-cheeked woman, wiping her brow on her aproncloth, hot from assembling pub meals.
“Yes,” Martha said, somewhat bothered. “He asked me to leave it outside his room. I went back in a bit and the tray was inside. I knocked him up to get me tray but there was no answer.”
All five of the party looked immediately at the series of hooks where the room keys were. O’Reilly’s key wasn’t there, so it was still with him. He was still in his room.
O’Hanrahan tensely asked, “Do you have a skeleton key?”
Jack did. His wife took over the bar and O’Hanrahan led a group toward the stairs. Lucy noticed David staring at them quizzically. “Black’s the Colour of Me Truelove’s Hair” began to play.
O’Hanrahan with Rabbi Hersch and Lucy in tow reached the top floor and knocked on room no. 3. No sound inside. With a deep breath, Jack fiddled with his skeleton key and opened the door.
Father O’Reilly was stretched out on his bed, dead asleep in his clothes of that afternoon. The rabbi went over to him and shook him. “Father? Father?” But he wouldn’t awaken.
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” asked Lucy.
“Very shallow breathing,” said the rabbi, leaning in close.
O’Hanrahan examined the coffee tray. A remnant of the afternoon coffee was still in the cup. The remaining liquid had an odd film over it that caught the light prismatically like an oil stain. “Something’s in this coffee,” he said, smelling it. “This is drugged.”
Jack: “Ah, me wife would never…”
O’Hanrahan: “No, Jack, we’re not saying it’s your coffee. It was sitting out in the hall for a while and someone could have dropped something in it.”
Lucy looked at the rabbi, who seemed to be feigning great concern for this unlikable fellow. You don’t suppose O’Hanrahan and the rabbi resorted to this …
Downstairs there was commotion. It sounded like a fight. Everyone heard Martha raising her voice to shoo someone out of the bar.
“What now?” Jack grumbled. “I’ll call an ambulance,” he then offered, as he made his way from the room, the others trailing behind.
“Jack!” his wife cried, meeting them at the bottom of the stairs. She was hysterical.
“It’s all right, dear, we’ll call a doctor—”
“No! The man on the phone,” she wailed.
Lucy looked around the pub.
It was empty.
Everyone had been ushered outside. She looked out the window to the street and saw David waving her to come out. Jack picked up the receiver.
“Aye?” he said, the next moment faltering in his composure. “Seven o’clock, you say?”
Lucy instinctively looked at the pub clock. Three minutes till seven. Quickly, the wife opened the cash register and grabbed the money—
“No time for that,” her husband snapped, slamming down the phone. “Let’s get out of here!”
“What is it?” demanded O’Hanrahan.
“A bomb threat,” he stammered.
Lucy felt the blood drain from her face. She and the rabbi and O’Hanrahan went immediately to the door. The innkeeper’s wife followed, apron pockets full of cash, but Jack, disobeying his own orders, darted back inside to the back. His wife protested but he returned to the street in no time:
“I saw it!” he cried to the throng outside. “Get back from the glass! There’s really a bomb in there!”
There were cries of panic, and everyone backed away a hundred yards.
“I think there was a man still in the loo,” said Martha, wringing her hands. “And I doon’t see him out here…”
“Not here,” said Mrs. McCall, shivering beside her husband, clasping his hand. “Not here, too, please, God. I thought we’d outrun it.”
“We’ve never had a problem here,” said an older man bitterly. “It’s all these newcomers in town—”
Mr. McCall spoke up sharply: “They’re visiting me, Connor, and I won’t have a word said against them.”
“They’re Taigs, aren’t they? Catholics!”
Word spreads fast, thought Lucy, slipping a step back from the crowd.
Two minutes until seven. Lucy listened to the grumblings and the disbelief of the townspeople. People knocked on doors and phone calls were made to neighbors of the pub to get them out on the street.
O’Hanrahan put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and drew the rabbi closer as well, saying quietly, “This isn’t sectarian violence. It has to do with the Matthias scroll. Which is, damn it, in that pub in the safe.”
“Right,” snapped the rabbi, “for goddamned safekeeping. We should have grabbed it and run, Paddy!”
One minute until seven.
“This is horrible,” said Lucy. She thought: we’ve brought this to the town. Gabriel was right. This is dangerous. Matthias, whatever he has to say, is a troublemaker and I’m going home soon as I can get back to Dublin—I’ll leave the Indiana Jones stuff to the old men. The gray stone Presbyterian church clocktower clicked into place for the hour. It began to chime.
Then, there was the explosion. A muffled one. A “pop.”
Everyone jumped anxiously at the noise but it didn’t shatter the glass in the front of the pub or make a fireball or any such thing. The crowd reaction was one of curiosity, more than outrage or horror. That little pop was like a cherry bomb on Guy Fawkes Day, someone said.
An old man with his wife mumbled, “Ah, that weren’t worth gettin’ out of me bed for, was it, May?”
Jack began to go inside, but many in the crowd cried for him not to. Maybe a bigger bomb had malfunctioned. Maybe this was a trap. A tiny boom and then we all go inside and then it really blows sky high. Call the police, Jack, they cried out. Call Special Services.
The crowd milled about, some drifting home for lack of new excitement, some because of the chill. O’Hanrahan and Rabbi Hersch removed themselves a few paces from the rest to discuss heatedly what they should do now—what they should have been doing rather than enjoying themselves and making merry. Lucy sullenly stood beside Martha.
“Oh thank God,” she breathed, noticing the man in the garish golf clothes walking up from behind the houses next to the pub. “I thought he was in the loo, but he was out here to whole time.”
Lucy followed with her eyes. The Man in the Cheap Suit fished out his car keys and got inside a white Cadillac. Lucy took a step closer. The man drove toward Belfast and Lucy quickened her step to glimpse the license plate and to see the country code of “D” on the back trunk. She immediately found O’Hanrahan and interrupted him:
“What country is D?”
The rabbi: “Deutschland, Germany.”
“What’s a German car doing in Ballymacross?” she wondered aloud, looking in the direction of the disappearing car.
“Stealing the scroll, that’s what!” said O’Hanrahan, before moving quickly through the crowd to return to the pub. Now, everyone from the town was outside and talking about this incident, the first ever for this town. The Troubles, the Troubles! Jack stood guarding the door of the Crown.
“We shouldn’t go in,” he said, “until the police arrive.”
“Jack,” said the professor, “this wasn’t sectarian, this was a robbery. They were after what was in your safe.”
“I got nothing of that kind of value,” he began.
“O’Reilly did,” O’Hanrahan reminded him. “That package he gave you.”
Jack relented. “Okay, let’s be quick about it.”
The pub’s main room was undamaged and, aside from a spray of sawdust and the acrid smell of smoke, it was unchanged. Behind the bar, glasses were broken, bottles had overturned and come off the shelves, and the safe itself was wide open and the wood encasing charred.
“Well, would you look at that,” said Jack, rubbing his head. “They left the deeds, the checkbook from the brewers—ah, they coulda had a time with that, they could … Now fancy that! They even left the money…”
The scroll was gone.
Soon the police arrived, and amid the milling, gossiping neighbors and curses of the bar staff, the amateur estimates of damage, the dark humor in the face of the robbery, two defeated figures made it up the back stairs to the rooms above.
O’Hanrahan, shaking his head, unlocked his room and went straight for the bottom desk drawer. The Bushmills Black, David and Lucy’s gift. “I take it you’d like a sip too, Mordechai?”
“Make it a big sip,” he said, wearily sitting on the side of O’Hanrahan’s bed. O’Hanrahan washed out the room’s glass by the sink, filled it and offered it to his friend. O’Hanrahan noticed himself in the mirror, and he looked unrecognizably ancient, tiredness verging on ruin.
“Almost,” said the rabbi desolately, looking at the palm of his hand and its emptiness. “When Father O’Reilly disappeared this afternoon? That was our cue that something was up. That lousy kraut must have hired that goon to steal the scroll back.”
“Slipped right through our fingers,” O’Hanrahan stated pointlessly. He downed a swig of whiskey. “We at least have our photos to work from.”
The rabbi nodded.
But this was no consolation. Even if they translated the gospel from the photos, without the original no one would necessarily believe them. It even sounded like a good hoax: yes, it’s a First-Century account of Christ and yes, it’s revolutionary, but no, we don’t have the original scroll—you’ll have to take our word for it.
O’Hanrahan thought out loud. “My guess is you’re right. The German guy caught on he’d been swindled by these Ignatian creeps and sent someone up here to steal it back. How long until he puts it on the black market?”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to sell it ever again.”
“He’s got to translate it, right? If we’re lucky, this rich collector will still need us to translate it, and will call us…”
“Forty years we chased after this. Forty years, Paddy.”
“Matthias has slipped through our hands a dozen times already, and he may elude us a dozen more times.”
Lucy cleared her throat to announce herself.
The professor tapped his whiskey bottle. “Oh, it’s you, Luce. Get a glass and pull up a chair.”
She started unsurely. “The scroll is definitely stolen?”
“Yes, Mr. Matthias is out of our hands again. Get a glass and pull up a chair.”
“No, thank you,” she said. “You know, that whiskey’s so strong and my digestion has been…” O’Hanrahan’s look of distaste for her constitution was fearsome. The rabbi had yet to acknowledge Lucy’s presence. She got brave. “Uh, Dr. O’Hanrahan?”
“Hm?” he said, from deep in his glass.
“I think I know who took it.”
O’Hanrahan reasoned she was making a dumb guess: “Let’s hear it.”
“The Franciscans.”
O’Hanrahan looked at her.
“I think the Franciscans stole it, not wanting you and the Jesuits to have it.”
The rabbi: “Any proof for this?”
“Gabriel.”
O’Hanrahan stood up. “Gabriel was here in Ballymacross? You’ve seen him?”
“Yes.”
At this the rabbi stood too. “Sit down, little girl, and start from the beginning.”
O’Hanrahan repossessed the rabbi’s glass, poured her a single, and pressed it into her hands. She was seated inexorably in O’Hanrahan’s chair, as the rabbi closed the door.
Lucy took a deep breath. “Well, ninety minutes ago I ran into Gabriel. We met when I was making my phone call at the station—you know, checking in with Chicago. Gabriel and I talked—”
Rabbi Hersch: “Did you tell him we had the scroll?”
“I think he already knew.” She tried to sound particularly female and desperate: “Well, if you guys had talked to me and let me in on one single thing you’ve been doing, I would’ve been able to make the right strategic move, so stop glaring at me.”
O’Hanrahan, sitting again, leaned forward from the corner of his bed. “And did he tell you why he stole the Matthias scroll from me in Rome?”
“Well, not in so many words, but I think I know.”
They were waiting.
“I think,” Lucy began, “he was supposed to steal the scroll and take it to the Franciscans. He botched the plan down in Italy but I think he just got what he was after right here.”
The rabbi shook his head. “That little nebbish? That boy couldn’t tie his shoe without help. How would he blow up a safe?”
Lucy swallowed hard. “I think Brother Vincenzo actually stole it. But he didn’t have to blow the safe. They came in while the pub was closed from three to five.”
O’Hanrahan stared at her incredulously. “Who is Brother Vincenzo?”
“The guy who is traveling with Gabriel. You’re right, Rabbi, sir, Gabriel couldn’t break into a safe, but Brother Vincenzo could, without using an explosive.” They continued to stare at her. “He converted to Catholicism after a life of crime in Naples, after prison. Now he’s a Friar Minor.” She added, “I ran into them both in Oxford. They just left on the six o’clock bus to Belfast.”
