he was such a weak man under it all. Nice and thoughtful as you want, but weak when it came to action in emotional circumstances. She remembered how he'd collapsed when they pulled his little drowned daughter out of the pool, not intervening himself. Then at the funeral he hadn't done anything to prevent his wife—now his ex-wife—from thinking her mom was his mistress, but just let her mom get snubbed and stared at by one and all. No way was he going to help her deal with her fright in any significant way.
"Well, lock the door well, OK?"
"It's locked." For what it was worth after a burglary.
"Check it."
"Bye, Stan."
"I'll call you in an hour."
She was feeling rather numb now herself. But she wasn't paralyzed; she could still find her way to picking up the phone and calling Father Giovanni. She assumed that a priest wasn't likely to be in front of a television or computer at 10 pm; she might even be waking him up—you didn't call university professors at this hour. But she didn't care. She informed him of Father Kevin's murder.
"Oh my, my," the priest exclaimed, adding something in Italian. "When did it happen?"
"Today. Or last night."
"My friend," he was saying.
"In a mithraeum."
"In a mithraeum." He gave the word no special emphasis.
"Um...I'm really sorry," she repeated awkwardly. She was not very good at this and she was concerned about that photo. "What exactly was Father Kevin assigned to do in Rome?"
"Research on Proto-Christianity," he said in a small sad voice.
"So Proto-Christianity can kill you?"
"As a subject…it comes close to, and sometimes spills over into, the esoteric."
What does this mean?
"Father Giovanni, I personally think that Father Kevin was killed for something he already knew about before he left. It appears that a photo of a medallion—my medallion—was pinned to his body. I think that whoever murdered him tried to kill me first."
"That is an anguishing thought." He sounded stupefied.
"Would you be willing to show me Father Kevin's office?
"Naturally."
A few minutes before 11 am the next morning, Angie arrived back in front of Father Giovanni's office door at Georgetown. She hadn't slept much and wanted to gather her thoughts before knocking. After responding to Stan's check-up call last night, she'd waited up for her mother in front of the computer, stubbornly hitting the search key for 'Kevin O'Flanagan Georgetown University' over and over and finding the same ten listings; even when she added a term—'died', 'born', 'family—hoping to enter a new virtual galaxy—she remained on this side of the unyielding barrier. Her frustration had been such that she picked at her arm scab a bit, something she knew better than to do. Her mom returned then, fortunately. Delia sat sweaty in a kitchen chair, still dressed in her gingham dance dress, while Angie told her all that had happened in the last three hours.
Her reaction was: "I know I didn't like them but maybe it's time to go back to the police." Angie was incredulous. "Those two guys in Gettysburg?"
The police indeed. And she still felt that way this morning.
At 11, she stood up. Noiselessly she thought, and yet Father Giovanni opened the door immediately, as if aware of her presence. "Please come in."
"Thank you, Professor."
He shut the door after her and made no small talk. "I am greatly horrified by Kevin's death. One hopes in his guardian spirit." With that, he gestured at a strange bronze work on a book shelf—a winged disc encircling a man's upper body. "It's Zoroastrian. Faravahar. And previous to that name, Khvarenah. A sort of Grace granted to the benefactors of the world. To good kings, but also worthy heroes. Like Kevin." He uttered his friend's name with emotion and bowed his head. A pause followed. Perhaps he was praying, she wasn't sure. When at last he raised his big magnified eyes from behind his glasses, he said, "I have been meditating on your medallion because I understand that it can only be worrying you. Your medallion seemed a mix of Mithraic symbols and secret markings to me when I saw it. Presuming that the photo in Rome is the same or similar, I suppose we should bear in mind that there are a good number of secret or semi-secret societies that have survived over the centuries. The Masons, the Templars, the Knights of Malta. Most of these have evolved from war orders to charity organizations, like the Knights of Malta. But others, like the Circumcellions, say, might—who knows?—still be active today."
Why make a conjecture like that? The doubt crossed her mind that he was toying with her. And why didn't he seem as upset by his friend's death as he said he was? Of course he was a priest. They had powerful thoughts for making themselves feel better. But could his deep faith really account for such contained grief?
"And these Circumcellions?" she pursued.
"The terrorist monks of early Christianity."
"Meaning?"
"Sorry, it's a term I use in my seminar class. Students your age are quite taken with them. You see, for the first five centuries of Christianity, Ms. Cebrelli, competing groups battled it out over all sorts of doctrinal and political issues. The Circumcellions were a suicide cult in Northern Africa. Their religious practice consisted of delivering random beatings to strangers along the road, with the purpose of goading the strangers into killing them. If that didn't work, they just threw themselves off a cliff instead. You see, they decided that martyrdom was the ultimate Christian value and so they whacked their victims around in the hopes of provoking their own martyrdom…Sound a bit familiar, doesn't it?"
She told herself she was not going to be bullied into saying something about Islamist extremists. She glanced at his room, not knowing what to take as significant, and thinking that it was time to get to the purpose of her visit.
"Does—did—Father Kevin have his office right next to yours, Professor?"
"That's right. And I promised you a look. Come, then."
In the hall, Father Tomasz walked by them, offering Angie a tight smile of recognition to an underling. The two men merely nodded at each other. She wondered if Tomasz knew about Father Kevin's death yet.
The dead priest's office was the antithesis of Father Giovanni's crammed den. It was not only bare but felt chilly and unused. On the desk there was a pencil can and a writing pad but no computer. A single Russian icon of a Madonna, gold on wood, was propped up on a shelf of the bookcase, along with a surprisingly small number of books. There was a brown plant with a tall stalk in a floor vase, which looked as if it hadn't been watered for ages. The personal touches were limited to the map of Ireland tacked up on the wall and, thrown over the desk chair, a dirty towel on which there was a drawing of Ireland and a geographical breakdown of Irish last names. Walking to the center of the room, Angie noticed a few framed photos on a small shelf by the window: in one there was a soccer team all wearing green jerseys (The Irish national?), and the others were of the same woman—a youngish looking brunette with short hair. There was Father Kevin with her in a European city that might have been St. Petersburg. Then Father Kevin with the same woman by the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Angie felt puzzled. Nothing about what she saw jived with what she'd thought would be in this room. She'd imagined a place that would convey a sense of Father Kevin to her, the man who had pleaded the cause of tribal priests fighting AIDS in Africa.
Instead, there was just this stopping place, this nearly anonymous watering hole.
Father Giovanni cleared his throat. "Finished, Ms. Cebrelli?"
"Not really," she replied bluntly. "Just how many hours a day did Father Kevin spend in this room? And was there some reason for doing his research elsewhere? I mean, was it on something dangerous?"
"This was his office to use as he wanted. No, I don't believe his research was dangerous."
"This