The Bishop Goes to the University: A Bishop Blackie Ryan Novel
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The Bishop Goes to the University: A Bishop Blackie Ryan Novel
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Overview
The irrepressible Bishop Blackwood Ryan returns as his Cardinal dispatches Blackie to The University on the South Side of Chicago to investigate a baffling locked-room mystery. Someone has assassinated a Russian Orthodox monk in his office at the Divinity School-despite the fact that the door of his office was bolted shut from the inside and no killer was found within.
Who shot Brother Semyon Ivanivich Popov? There were only four professors in the building on the night of the shooting: a feminist theologian, a distinguished scripture scholar, an expert on the Talmud, and a young tenure-seeking professor whom Blackie compares to a silverback gorilla.
It turns out that the mystery of the locked room is simple compared to the international intrigue that swiftly develops around the case. Intelligence agents from diverse nations seem to be involved, as well as both the Sicilian and Russian mobs. Blackie soon finds himself the target of threats and actual bullets as he seeks to unravel the deepening mystery surrounding the murdered monk-whose murky secrets may stretch all the way to the Vatican itself!
Murder is more than academic in yet another delightful whodunit by one of America's most popular storytellers.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429912334 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Series: | Bishop Blackie Ryan , #14 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 351 KB |
About the Author
Priest, sociologist, author, and journalist, Father Andrew M. Greeley (1928-2013) was the author of over 50 bestselling novels and more than 100 works of nonfiction. His novels include the Bishop Blackie Ryan series, including The Archbishop in Andalusia; the Nuala Anne McGrail series, including Irish Tweed; the O’Malley Family Saga, including A Midwinter’s Tale; and standalones such as Home for Christmas and The Cardinal Sins.
A leading spokesperson for generations of Catholics, Father Greeley unflinchingly urged his beloved Church to become more responsive to believers’ evolving concerns. He chronicled his service to the Church in two autobiographies, Confessions of a Parish Priest and Furthermore!
Priest, sociologist, author and journalist, Father Andrew M. Greeley built an international assemblage of devout fans over a career spanning five decades. His books include the Bishop Blackie Ryan novels, including The Archbishop in Andalusia, the Nuala Anne McGrail novels, including Irish Tweed, and The Cardinal Virtues. He was the author of over 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of non-fiction, and his writing has been translated into 12 languages.
Father Greeley was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and a Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. In addition to scholarly studies and popular fiction, for many years he penned a weekly column appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers. He was also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America and Commonweal, and was interviewed regularly on national radio and television. He authored hundreds of articles on sociological topics, ranging from school desegregation to elder sex to politics and the environment.
Throughout his priesthood, Father Greeley unflinchingly urged his beloved Church to become more responsive to evolving concerns of Catholics everywhere. His clear writing style, consistent themes and celebrity stature made him a leading spokesperson for generations of Catholics. He chronicled his service to the Church in two autobiographies, Confessions of a Parish Priest and Furthermore!
In 1986, Father Greeley established a $1 million Catholic Inner-City School Fund, providing scholarships and financial support to schools in the Chicago Archdiocese with a minority student body of more than 50 percent. In 1984, he contributed a $1 million endowment to establish a chair in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago. He also funded an annual lecture series, “The Church in Society,” at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, from which he received his S.T.L. in 1954.
Father Greeley received many honors and awards, including honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arizona and Bard College. A Chicago native, he earned his M.A. in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of Chicago.
Father Greeley was a penetrating student of popular culture, deeply engaged with the world around him, and a lifelong Chicago sports fan, cheering for the Bulls, Bears and the Cubs. Born in 1928, he died in May 2013 at the age of 85.
Read an Excerpt
The Bishop Goes to the University
A Blackie Ryan Story
By Andrew M. Greeley
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2003 Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1233-4
CHAPTER 1
"One cardinal ought to be enough for Chicago, ought he not, Blackwood?"
His Eminent Lordship Sean, Cardinal Priest of the Roman Church, Cronin towered over me, like a crimson watered silk alien from another planet. Cardinals who are tall (only a few) and handsome (even fewer) and with powerful presence (yet fewer still) can create that illusion. No one of this world would walk around in cardinalatial choir robes in daylight. He might, however, be a character from a Fellini movie or someone playing Richelieu in a theater of the absurd production from North Lincoln Avenue. In any event his hooded blue eyes were wide-open, his forehead furrowed in a deep frown, and his lips pressed together in either serious thought or suppressed anger.
"Arguably," I said, glancing up from my computer, "more than enough."
I had just returned from a bootless trip to Rome. A certain dicastry of the Roman Curia had wanted to consult with me on a problem. By which they meant they wanted to tell me what they thought and could not have cared less about what I thought. They were doing me a favor by talking to me.
"Yet we seem to have another."
"How unfortunate." I sighed in West of Ireland protest.
"He's dead."
Milord Cronin opened my liquor cabinet, removed from the back of it a precious container of Bushmills Single Malt and poured himself considerably more than a splasheen in one of my recently cleaned Waterford tumblers.
"That would solve the problem, would it not?"
I turned away from my workstation. The Cardinal deposited a large stack of output on the floor and reclined on my couch. In full robes with a drink in hand (though it was only early afternoon on a radiant October day), he did look a little like the cinematic version of Armand-Jean de Plessis, duc de Richelieu — if one were to imagine that worthy to have been Irish.
"No, that creates the problem."
Aha, the harmless, indeed almost invisible little auxiliary bishop was about to be dispatched on a mystery-solving expedition.
"There are always a few kooks wandering around this city," he said, sipping cautiously from uisce beatha as the Irish were pleased to call the Creature. "This is good stuff, Blackwood," he interrupted his train of thought. "You think they will have it in heaven?"
"Minimally it and sex."
He sighed, not, however, as loudly as I can sigh.
"My own tailor makes crimson robes for them, though he doesn't want me to know about it. They're not really authentic, but parading down Thirty-first Street in what they think is full regalia gives them a kick, I guess."
"As do the several troubled folk who insist on donning papal white. It is, after all, a free city. From the point of view of those who are not of the household of the faith. We're all kooks."
On occasion I have had to persuade some such persons not to enter a ceremony at the Cathedral over which I preside at the Lord Cardinal's pleasure. They depart quietly with sad eyes when I tell them that their presence would greatly trouble Milord Cronin, which may be a touch of an exaggeration.
"This Russian fellow, however, left a full set of choir robes in his closet. They seem to be authentic ..."
"Russian fellow?"
"That's right, you've been off in Rome, haven't you? This Semyon Ivanivich Popov who was killed in a locked office of the Divinity School at The University the other night."
In Chicago there are many universities. However, only one is identified as The University, mostly because of frequent repetition of the italicized word by its denizens.
He handed me a sheaf of clippings from Chicago papers.
"Interesting name ..."
"He was Russian. They all have funny names."
"Simon, son of John, priest? Or if you wish, Simon bar Jona, Pope?"
"The cops tell me that the robes included a pallium. None of the crazies bother with that."
The pallium is a small decoration made of wool, which only archbishops can wear.
I glanced through the clippings.
"No mention of the sacred crimson in the press."
"Cops have kept it secret."
"Aha," I said, "does not his late Eminence look much like Grigori Yefimovich?"
"Who?" He looked up from his tumbler of Bushmills.
"The inestimable and legendary Rasputin."
Cardinal Popov was standing in front of the Divinity School in the flowing robes of Russian monasticism, complete with the hood that was propped up in front and added several inches to his already impressive height and his staff. With dark, flashing eyes, broad shoulders, a long gray beard, and the frown that is required in such pictures, he was a central-casting Russian monk. He must have created quite a stir at The University.
"He's dead, isn't he?"
"He was thrown into a freezing river in 1915, but there have been disputes about whether he survived and may still survive."
"This guy was teaching at the Divinity School out there, something about the Mystical Soteriology of the Old Believers. Whoever they might be ... I suppose you are informed about the subject."
"One could summarize them by saying that they were fundamentalist Orthodox who went into schism over a new translation of the Bible. They were murdered in great numbers by various czars who didn't like dissidents of any sort ...Have our mutual friends across the pond made any inquiries about Brother Semyon's death?"
Color that beard black and he would look like Rasputin. A man who lived over a hundred and forty years had the right to a white beard, did he not?
"Not a word. Finally, after a couple of days, I called them. Pretty high-level too. All I heard was what a fine scholar Brother Semyon was and what a tragedy his death was and how terrible the American crime rate was."
"They're hiding something?"
"Maybe. That's the way they would talk if they were. But then they may not know anything either ... How come he's in all those departments? Does he collect salaries from all of them?"
I glanced at the text of the articles. Semyon Popov was a visiting professor in the Divinity School, the Slavic Languages Department, the Committee on Social Thought, the Center for International Studies, and the College.
"Only prestige. The more departments which list you, the more important you are."
"So he was pretty important?"
"More likely as a Russian monk he was pretty fashionable."
"Blackwood, what the hell goes on in that part of the world?"
"The Vatican or the University?"
"I mean out where Russia and Poland come together?"
"It's kind of like the Pecos River in Texas, where there's no law west of ... Between the Vistula and the Volga there isn't much in the way of natural boundaries. So invaders have swept across those plains for a couple of thousand years — Goths, Huns, Teutons, Slavs, Wends, Magyars, Vikings, Mongols. A few of each group stayed there either on the way in or the way out. Maybe even a few Celts who headed west when the last ice age ended. The borders keep changing so at any given time, half the people are in a country they don't want to be in. There's lots of religions there too, four or five brands of Orthodoxy, a couple of Catholic Byzantine groups, and, of course, the Latin Rite Poles. It's borderland, a region of the world made to order for conspiracy and shenanigans."
As I lectured my eyes drifted briefly to the portraits of three Johns on the wall of my study, childhood heroes — the Pope, the president, and the quarterback. Now all three were dead, John Unitas being the last one to have gone home. O lente, lente currite noctis equi.
"We've had underground operations there, I presume?"
"Sure. Probably still do. Some of them as independent of Vatican control as were those Czech bishops who ordained women when the Iron Curtain was still working."
"And the various popes have appointed certain cardinals in petto — secret until they want to reveal it ... Most of them one kind of Eastern European or another ..."
"A nice touch," I admitted, "though hardly displaying the transparency that is supposed to be our hallmark these days."
He dismissed this cavil with a wave of his hand, the one with the ring, not the one holding my Bushmills.
"OK, Blackwood, let's say for the sake of the argument that Brother Semyon was in fact a Catholic bishop in the underground over there and that he did such a good job that they gave him the red hat in petto. Why would he travel around with choir robes if it were all a secret?"
"Or even possess them. One suspects that the FSB, née KGB, would find that disturbing ... It says here that his head was blown off by a shotgun!"
Milord Cronin grimaced.
"Messy, but quick."
He drained his tumbler.
"How, then, did the vigilant Chicago police identify him?"
"It was his office, and his robes. Who else would it have been?"
He searched for a place to put the Waterford and finally set it on the top of my computer output.
"They thereupon sought confirmation from fingerprints or DNA?"
"His apartment was swept clean of all traces.
There were plenty of fingerprints in his office, however. The Russians don't know who Brother Semyon is. Or was."
"If it were really him."
He rose from my couch with more alacrity than I could have managed.
"There is also the possibility," I added, "that he identified in some fashion with the Avignon crowd."
That stopped Milord dead in his tracks, just as he reached the door of my office.
"Who!"
I forebore from correcting him by saying "whom."
"It is said that there is a remnant of the Avignon papacy that still survives. Rejecting as they do the solution of the Council of Basle to the Great Western Schism, a few elderly French clerics gather together when their pope dies and elect a new pope, who promptly concedes jurisdiction to the false antipope in Rome for the good of the Church. He then appoints a few more elderly French clerics to choose his successor when that becomes necessary."
"That was five hundred years ago!"
"More like seven hundred!"
"Why would they bother?"
"You know the French ..."
He turned in the doorway and scowled.
"I don't like any of it at all, Blackwood. One pope is enough. So is one cardinal — unless they make you one as a punishment for your South Side Irish prejudices. I can't have itinerant cardinals wandering around Chicago posing as Russian monks. Or vice versa. Or French popes, or whatever. I want this mess straightened out ... See to it, Blackwood!"
Thereupon he disappeared down the corridor with much the same éclat as the Superchief when it used to leave Chicago on the rails to storied La La Land.
CHAPTER 2I pondered the problem, which, I must confess was, as Holmes would have said, not without certain interesting aspects.
My first call was to a certain person highly placed in the civil service of the American government who owed me enough favors to last a lifetime.
"I was afraid I'd hear from you, Blackie," he began. "You want to pick up another one of your markers, I assume."
"As a Chicagoan I would hardly be so crass as to begin with that."
"I don't know what happened out there at the University. If I did, I doubt that I could tell you."
"Ah," I said.
"Something pretty weird from what I can tell, but people higher up than I am are reserving it to themselves."
"So they can tell all in their memoirs as soon as they leave the administration."
"Maybe, but I think not. This is something that everyone wants to pretend never happened. So it's pretty heavy."
"Our government might have had something to do with the affair."
After his blunt beginning I thought it better not to mention names.
"I didn't say that."
"Some people are afraid that such may be the case?"
"Some people know there are rogue groups who might do anything."
That was all the hint I would get from him. It confirmed what already seemed patent. This was very heavy stuff.
I asked about the health of his wife and family. Obviously relaxing, he assured me that all was well. I promised to stay in touch, a pledge which did not seem to bring him much joy.
I then phoned the Reilly Gallery over on Oak Street, where Michael Patrick Vincent Casey, the former superintendent of the Chicago Police Department and husband of Annie Reilly, did the impressionistic paintings of Chicago that had kept him busy since his retirement. Mike was known in our clan as Mike the Cop as though there were other Mikes such as Mike the Monsignor, Mike the Politician or Mike the Barber. However, he was the only Mike in the extended family.
I chatted with the good Annie Reilly and promised her I would be over to visit and receive my appropriate ration of apple cinnamon tea and oatmeal raisin cookies. There are those, ignorant of the literature, who claim that he is Flambeau to my Father Brown. Annie argues that in fact I am Watson to his Holmes.
"Blackie! What's happening!"
"From your forced good cheer I judge you already know what's happening."
"I assumed that I would hear from you as soon as you returned from Rome."
"And ...?"
"I don't know anything about it, Blackie. Mostly because my friends out there either don't know themselves or they're afraid to talk about it."
"Ah."
"There was another murder out at the Divinity School. A Romanian guy executed in the washroom, presumably by the secret police from his country."
"The Securitate."
"They weren't able to solve that either. We don't have much experience with that kind of assassination around here. They've been told to close it down as soon as they can and get it out of the media."
"Ah."
"You know about the crimson robes?"
"Oh, yes."
"What do you make of it?"
"I don't. And you?"
"Really weird ... No one wants to involve the Catholic Church in this mess."
"Unless the events have already involved it."
"What does Sean want?"
"He wants me to see to it. What else?"
"So you'll go out there and wander around doing your invisible act and see what you can pick up."
"At the moment I can think of no other strategy."
"Let me make a few calls and get back to you."
He would call some friend of his out there and see if he would talk to me off the record.
Let us suppose, I told myself, that Brother Semyon is indeed a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, albeit in petto. Let us also suppose that he travels around with his cardinal robes available should it happen that he needs them. Let us also suppose that he is some kind of secret agent, mostly but not entirely for the Holy See, and thus has contacts with some of the various spook shops. Such as and for example the folks down at Langley. Who then would want to see him dead?
Who wouldn't?
Suppose that one or several of his employers wanted to "extract" him as they say in the trade, that is, remove him from a dangerous situation. Might they have disposed of someone else as a cover for this extraction?
Arguably.
But how would one prove that and, more important perhaps, why?
The spooks tend to bungle, an occupational hazard that arises from their inability to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Perhaps they had bungled this time, which might give us (whoever "we" might happen to be) a chance to catch them.
An outcome they would not like, as my good friend Nuala Anne would say, at all, at all.
The larger question is why one should bother. The Chicago cops, the government of our Republic, and the Holy See all agreed, perhaps independently of one another, that the whole matter should be forgotten as soon as possible. Could I not simply tell Milord Cronin that his curiosity about an invasion of another, though certainly not an alternative, cardinal was not advisable, perhaps not even prudent.
"Prudent" was not a word he was fond of. It usually had the same impact as the red cape waved at a charging bull. Yet he surely would understand my point.
Such a policy went against the grain. My grain, that is. I didn't like these gumshoe creeps mucking around in my city and my archdiocese. I would explore a little further.
So I placed a call to a certain number in Paris. I will translate the conversation into standard English from the Anglo-French patois in which it occurred.
"Ah, Blackie, what transpires?"
"I'm interested in the Avignon Papacy."
"Bon! That ended at the Council of Basle, as you well know."
"Fourteen thirty-nine. Almost six centuries ago, leaving behind only an excellent Rhône wine ..." "I quite agree."
"And a schismatic papacy."
"Which soon became marginalized and irrelevant."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Bishop Goes to the University by Andrew M. Greeley. Copyright © 2003 Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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