Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

'I don't drink caffeine this late at night."

"There's a bar three blocks down."

''You do check things out, but I don't want a drink.'*

"The Burger King then. It's a more wholesome arena for a couple of ex-priests than a bar, anyway."

The fast-food joint was also more brightly lit than a bar.

Matt almost cringed under the interrogation-level lighting, but he stood in line with Bucek like a good prisoner, collected his tray, and ordered the usual burger and fries.

Bucek had a chicken sandwich, which he liberally sprinkled with pepper and smothered in mustard.

They sat at the sleek table and seats, designed to slide people in and slide people out in endless rotation.

Around them customers chatted and chewed, clattered and came and went. Want privacy?

Go slow where everybody's in a hurry.

"You look good. Matt." Bucek had immediately adopted Matt's preferred civilian form of Matthias, as if glad to inter one more reminder of their former relationship. He slowly masticated his chicken sandwich, his forehead corrugated, not with worry, but by his upward glance and perhaps by curiosity.

''It seems ... sacrilegious to call you Frank."

"Do it. We spent all those hours dissecting theology, vocation, holiness, ethics ... I guess I never knew you very well, did I?"

"Nor I you." Matt dragged a limp French fry through a puddle of ketchup he had squeezed out of several small plastic pouches, like coagulated blood. "When did you leave? Are you . . .

married?"

Frank's mouth twisted as if he had just bitten down on a chicken bone. "Oh, shortly after you left seminary. I'm a veteran ex.' Yup, married. Eight years now."

"Is she--"

"Catholic? Yes. A high school music teacher. Widow. Three teenaged sons." Bucek laughed, as Matt had seldom seen him do in seminary, loudly and at himself. "I'm still a spiritual director, Matthias--Matt. I guess."

"You have no children of your own?"

"No." He spoke abruptly, subject closed.

Can't? Matt wondered. Or won't? None of his business, no >more than the ins and outs of his own life--and soul--were Frank Bucek's business anymore. They both had graduated.

"And you?" Frank sucked on the straw spearing his plastic- topped paper cup of Diet 7-Up.

"I left within the year. The phone counseling job is the first thing I qualified for. I've been at it for six months. I like it. It's not so different from confession, especially the way it was done in the old days, in darkened booths with veiled shutters. I hope I'm doing some good. What kind of job did you end up doing? We're puzzlers for employment agencies, we ex-priests, you know.

Over-educated and under-experienced."

"I managed something," Frank said gruffly. "But tell me what you wanted to talk to me about."

"It's . . . ah--" Matt shoved his brown plastic food tray aside, leaned his elbows on the slick, Formica tabletop. "Private. It's none of my business, really, except my conscience is kicking up.

It's about Father Rafael Hernandez."

"Good man. Pretty good priest."

"Glad to hear it. Unfortunately, I had to hear something else about him, from a compromised source, but still. . . the charge of child molestation has been made."

"Publicly?"

"No. That's my problem. Father Hernandez obviously knows about it. And the man who made it does. And I do.''

"That's all?"

Matt nodded glumly.

"Surely the man's bringing charges, if he's a victim."

"That's just it. He's not a victim. He's a blackmailer, an embittered blackmailer who hates the church and anyone who's a part of it. He killed his elderly great-aunt to get her estate, crucified a convent cat, made obscene phone calls to an ancient, and luckily stone-deaf nun--"

Frank Bucek winced at this litany of evil-doing. "But he won't press the molestation issue against Father Hernandez?"

"No. He's in jail, awaiting the outcome of a sanity hearing. He seemed rather viciously sane to me when I saw him, hoping to wring the truth out of him."

"Bitter people don't tell the truth. Matt, not even to themselves... They have too much to lose."

The wisdom of that struck Matt like a breath of fresh menthol. He leaned closer, lowered his voice even more.

"That's just it. This man won't admit that these charges were part of his harassment tactics against his aunt's parish. I saw him in jail, and ... I tell you, Frank ... it was like interviewing the Devil. I can't claim the church is perfect, or that any one of us in its service is without sin, but such anger and enmity, such scalding . . . despise. I know the man's half-mad. I know he's violent, and vicious. I just don't know if he's a liar in this case. And he taunted me with that uncertainty. He wants me to squirm."

"You've told no one of this charge against Father Rafe?"

"No. I've been . . . oh, blast it. Frank, I've been 'investigating.' I concocted this story that the parish wants to honor Father Hernandez with a 'This Is Your Life' tribute and I've been calling good, earnest Catholic ladies at diocesan offices wherever Father Rafe has been assigned, trying to find his associates and grill them without their knowing."

Matt suddenly realized that Frank was grinning at him over the remains of his chicken sandwich.

"I've lied, Frank. White lies, for a good cause, but I feel like a skunk. It's too easy. I had no idea I was so believable."

"It's all that good boy training. The veneer remains even when the foundation has cracked.

Welcome to the real world. Matt."

"You're not shocked?"

"Who am I to be shocked?" Frank inquired gently. "Matt, I never had a seminarian under my direction who was so sincere, so scrupulous, so promising and so damned self-deceiving. I always sensed that you would make a terrific priest, and that you had no business being one."

''You always knew? Then why didn't you tell me? Why let me work and muddle and sweat my way through . . . ?"

''You can't tell someone what to do. Not even God can do that. You have to let them find out for themselves; otherwise, they're never free. And ... J didn't know it, but my own vocation was built on sand. It will take other men, Matt, to follow in the shoes of the fisherman now. A new generation."

"Maybe other women," Matt added, remembering the dedicated minority with no rational hope of ordination, taking theology at the seminary for themselves alone even in his day. They must number more now, and they would be demanding more equity--even Holy Orders, despite the Pope's recent, hope-smashing decree.

Frank's hands lifted from the table, then slapped down.

"Listen, Matt, put your overactive Catholic conscience at rest. It so happens you've come to the person who can help you out of your moral quandary. Call it a last spiritual direction from a man whose own spiritual direction has taken a radical change of course. First, I can swear--

swear on any saint's name you care to mention:--that Father Rafael Hernandez showed no signs of pederasty when I was his assistant pastor at Holy Rosary twenty-five years ago.

"And," he added, as Matt stirred restlessly, "I am also in a position to prove it. I can have him quietly checked out, his entire roster of parishes. If there's any taint clinging to Rafe, I'll find it.

You see, I have an obligation, too. I knew him years before you did; I shared parish work with him. Now I have a pressing need to know, and I'm in a position to find out."

"Why? How?" Matt felt a hosanna of relief rising in him, even as he didn't quite dare believe in such easy deliverance.

Frank smiled. "Fear not. I'm in the FBI now, buddy."

Then he winked.

Father Frank Bucek, Father Furtive, ex-Father Frank, winked.

Chapter 25

Midnight Louie Eats Crow with Caviar