Tynan shook hands. Burke stared into Minogue’s face when he shook hands with him. As the two policemen were leaving, Burke called out. “And my regards to Roberta, John.”
Minogue thought that Tynan stiffened slightly. “Thank you,” he said.
“I want a drink,” said Tynan.
Minogue tried to hide his surprise. He started the engine, set the choke in slightly and thought what pubs he knew were in the area.
“But not before we stop at the nearest phone,” said Tynan.
Tynan sat woodenly in the passenger seat, not looking out of the side windows as Minogue drove, but apparently observing the movement of the needles in the green of the dashboard light. Minogue stopped at a pub, Slattery’s. Tynan took the envelope out of his pocket and tapped it distractedly against his knee. Minogue checked his pocket for change.
“Not often you get a night like this,” Tynan murmured. “Did you enjoy the lecture?”
“Matter of fact, I didn’t,” Minogue replied, feeling the sourness rise again in his chest. “I felt I was back in school being told to stand outside the door for being naughty.”
Tynan opened the door, and the interior light shone on one side of his head. “I had a notion he’d have something to tell us about our materialist society and the moral chaos of our times. But it’s no excuse, and he knew that,” Tynan said absent-mindedly.
“You had the advantage of having him as a teacher, I understand,” said Minogue grimly.
“I certainly did. Remember me yapping away on the way here, about virtus and obedientia? Frank Burke did me the great and inadvertent favour of telling me in time that I could expect a lot less philosophical treatment of the notions were I to take Holy Orders, as I was about to. We had good arguments, he and I. He’s not a conservative but he has to answer to conservative men. Do you know what I mean?” Tynan asked.
Minogue caught the hint.
“Frank took it worse than I did when I told him I couldn’t go through with it. Didn’t talk to me for several years after I left the seminary. When he found out that Roberta and I were going to be married I thought he had mellowed a bit, but no. He asked if the usual thing would ensue, that the children would be brought up Catholic, being as Roberta was a heathen. I told him it wouldn’t ensue. Non serviam, Frank. He said that no priest in his diocese would marry us, so. I told him I had a friend in Kilkenny who had agreed to marry us, but thank you very much anyway. Needn’t have been the row as it turns out, but we weren’t to know it then… one of those things which can’t be changed. No children, you see. There were no hard feelings, I told him when I met him later. Maybe he put a curse on me for leaving the tribe, do you think?”
Tynan’s tone was a gentler irony now.
“I don’t know,” said Minogue quietly. “What the Jesuits lost, we pagans have gained. It wasn’t all for nothing, I’d say.”
Tynan smiled briefly.
“And it seems to be a very curious logic indeed that I have this piece of paper in my fist from Francis Burke. As if we were Nemesis each, one for the other. He assumed it would be a weapon in my hand. After you left he handed me this envelope, what you see here. Then I knew what I was there for, not just you alone. You-I think he just wanted to see what class of a creature you might be, so that if things were to go against him he’d know about the man that’d be doing it.”
“Doing what?” asked Minogue. “I have no quarrel with the man. I have me own religion to be going on with, and he has his.”
“He got the idea fairly quickly, Minogue. After you canonized Marguerite Ryan.”
“Me? All I’m saying is that it takes just a little bit of imagination to see into how terrible her life must have been. We’re the race with the big hearts and the big imagination, are we? How is it that we’re also so good at applying rules in the abstract? I have nothing to fear from Marguerite Ryan or a hundred Marguerite Ryans, so I don’t, or even from a hundred hairy members of the Women’s Action Movement. I don’t for the life of me understand what the flap is about, unless all the men of Ireland, sitting on their bar stools, are getting premonitions about what a lot of them deserve.”
“You should have said that to His Eminence,” said Tynan drily. “He handed me this envelope and asked me several things before I opened it. I thought it was a few names, colleagues of Brian Kelly; maybe even a good-sized list of Opus Dei members in the Army and the Gardai, something that’d save us a lot of headaches and delays with our own internal investigations. I wasn’t hoping for too much.”
“What did he ask you? Conditions?”
“No, they weren’t conditions. He knew, or he had decided, that there couldn’t be. Frank is by no means a confused thinker when it comes to deciding what must be done in a crisis. I think he was appealing to a man he thought he knew, a man he’d known thirty years ago: that’s why he didn’t want you there. He asked me if I could treat the information with discretion, control it in respect of the possible consequences.”
Minogue felt the light breeze coming in the open door of the car.
“I looked down the list and I told him I couldn’t do it. I think he knew that already,” added Tynan.
Minogue’s scalp registered something which had yet to reach the parts of his brain that could interpret ideas to him. Tynan stopped tapping the envelope on his knee and he held it at arm’s length. The light cast shadows where the envelope had been opened by thumb and by finger. The jagged edges of the paper looked like the serrated edge of a bread knife to Minogue. Knife. List. Names.
“He asked me to think about the repercussions, think would this be justified.”
“What repercussions?”
“He didn’t outline them, just left them hanging like the better threats that are issued. He didn’t need to, because it’s quite plain to see. He had led us up to that point, I see now, to load me up so that I’d think twice, considering all the undeniably good work that they do… some of them, anyway.”
Minogue felt an artery beginning to tick under his jaw.
“Frank thought he could hook me on a weakness. He thought, he hoped, that I could not go through with what we must go through, because it would destroy and impair the work of so many virtuous people. A small sacrifice for the greater good… I must say that I hadn’t expected that of him. I realized then how much I had fallen by the wayside over the years, so that I couldn’t imagine any institution being worth the life of one man. Of two men.”
Minogue started in the seat. His thoughts rushed out: Brian Kelly, Paul Fine.
“He knew that too, of course,” Tynan continued. “He didn’t ask directly. Here he was by some twist of fate handing me something which would harm him and the institutions he Represents. Me, the spoiled priest, the one who took up with a Protestant wife. Me, the one he couldn’t mould. I didn’t tell him that it was because the Fines are Jews. I didn’t need to. I’m Sure Frank’s all too well aware of the significance, and I think that the symbolic side of that actually frightened him. Here,” he thrust the envelope at Minogue. “I can’t be sitting around here talking as if I was writing a bloody diary. There’s work to be done and quick.”
Tynan stepped out and closed the door.
“One more thing, very important, Minogue. Listen to me, carefully. A young man who must remain nameless went to a priest whom he had known in college. This priest was home from a stay in Central America. After listening to the young man, this priest was able to persuade the man to make a confession to him. This young man is undergoing a crisis that has to do with his membership in Opus Dei. He read about the murder out in Bray, and, though he can’t finger anyone directly, he was privy to peculiar conversations in an Opus Dei house near Clonskeagh. He flew the coop. Are you following me?”
Minogue nodded.
“Right. This pal of his from years back nearly had a fit, I was told. Radical man, the new generation of missionary. Didn’t know what to do with what he had heard, so he wrote down the names he remembered and out he marched to the Archbishop’s house, preceded by a few phone calls. Fair play to Burke, he sized up the problem and worked his way around the confessional vow.”
“He gave me the distinct impression that he was going to chastise anyone connected with this,” said Minogue. “Including servants of the State.”
“He’s not wild about Opus Dei, believe it or not. But he won’t go another inch with us.”
“Meaning we’ll not know who this rebel Opus Dei fella is? Can’t interview him?”
“Just so. What we get from him is a list of persons who may be engaging in a political conspiracy. What we
