John Brady - Kaddish in Dublin

“She confessed to murdering her husband. Could there be clearer proof of murder?”

Tynan had not moved, Minogue realized.

“Not wishing to contradict you, but the charge against the woman is manslaughter, Your Eminence. That means that the Director of Public Prosecutions has looked at the evidence provided by the Gardai and has preferred that charge against her.”

“Saying that he knows better than the woman herself, is it?”

“Under duress,” said Tynan softly. “She was not her normal self, Frank. She had been abused and she felt her children were in danger. The Constitution obliges the State to look to her interests too, that’s the way that the legal opinions see it, I believe.”

Burke put on a tight, knowing smile. “Ever the modernist, John,” he said.

“I’m holding off on something here,” Burke added, after a pause. “It seems to be late in the day to be trying to explain things, I see. You’re a policeman, isn’t that the way, John?”

Minogue recognized the irony as a light charge of bitterness in Burke’s tone.

Tynan nodded. Burke turned to Minogue. “Inspector, I’ll be running the risk of offending you now when I ask you to leave myself and my old friend here alone for a few moments.”

It was not a question, nor was it an apology. Minogue stood and walked to the door. Behind him he heard a wooden drawer slide open. Closing the door, too confused to be angry at his dismissal, Minogue caught a glimpse of Burke’s hand rising from the drawer of his desk. The hand was holding an envelope.

Sheehy was waiting in the hall, a grave Sheehy.

“By all means sit down in the Visitors’ Room, er,” he said in an apologetic tone.

Minogue began to feel resentful now. He did not sit down but started pacing the room, not caring that Sheehy was looking at him through the doorway.

Minutes passed. Minogue stopped and, not wishing to look at the portraits of Burke’s predecessors, stared out of the window at the street-lights. His mind worked around the resentment, the burn in his chest. It struck him that he did not know why he had to be here if all he was to do was to attend on a lecture made up of Burke’s thoughts aloud and then be told to wait outside. But Burke had asked for him. Just to admonish him for riding rough on Heher and Drumm earlier in the day? Heher’s modesty might have prevented him from explaining to Minogue how Opus Dei was tackling the ills of the world and didn’t deserve his suspicions but it hadn’t bothered the same Heher to phone the Archbishop’s Residence and have Minogue receive some leaden advice. Calling in the elephants to trample mice like Minogue? Heher smiling, well-spoken, healthy-looking, self-effacing-‘Call me Joe’-and then phoning Burke to get the system, the self-same system he seemed to be bashfully abjuring as regards titles like ‘Father’, up to heat.

Sheehy was tapping timidly on the open door to the Visitors’ Room. Sheehy too, clean, pleasant manner, with a look of concern and reeling on his face-what made these damned priests look so well-washed, so bloody confident? Didn’t they have anything like sons and daughters to worry about?

“His Eminence would like to say good-bye. I believe the meeting is over,” said Sheehy.

Minogue followed him to Burke’s office. Burke was standing behind the desk, and Tynan was putting something in the pocket of his jacket. He stood up too. His face had changed, Minogue saw: his cheeks were flushed and his eyes seemed to be more noticeable, bigger perhaps.

“Good-night to you, Inspector. I wish you success in your work.”

“Thanks,” Minogue managed.

“After you leave here I think you may see things a little clearer, Inspector. I think Billy Fine’s choice has a lot more to it than a chance meeting in a Museum. Just remember this, if you will: even Billy Fine would agree that it is the people of small grasp, the ones who have a poverty of imagination, who snap at the heels of things too great and profound for them to understand. These people… these self-proclaimed messiahs in the media, these cynics, ungenerous minds… these do far more damage than their abilities and understanding would ever warrant by themselves. Do you know what I’m saying yet, or are we too far ahead of you here?”

“I don’t follow, Your Eminence,” said Minogue evenly.

Burke scrutinized him for a moment. “You don’t follow. I think that somehow I knew that before we met, Inspector.”

Burke turned to Tynan and thrust out his hand. “ Tentenda via, John.”

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.”