Authors: Anne Emery

Tags: #Mystery, #FIC022000

Cecilian Vespers (41 page)

“Fred, where were you at the time of the murder? We know you
weren’t really at the Atlantic School of Theology.”

“Tell me this first, Monty. Where did Jan Ford tell you she was that afternoon?”

“That’s easy. She refused point blank to say where she was. Told us she didn’t need an alibi, and we could all get lost.”

“She was with me.”

I stared at him in astonishment, and he laughed. “Yeah, I know. Fred Mills with a woman; it doesn’t compute. She came along with me for support.”

“Came along where?”

“Monty, I was seeing a shrink!”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Well, not a shrink exactly, but a psychologist. I have an anxiety disorder. A phobia. And it flared up when I arrived in Halifax.”

“Okay …”

“You’re going to laugh. In fact, I don’t know who is likely to find it funnier: the people here or the folks back home. In Kansas.”

“You’ve got me curious, Fred.” “Have you ever heard of thalassophobia?”

“Thalasso —”

“Fear of the sea! I’ve had a morbid fear of the ocean since childhood. Childhood in Kansas. About as far away from the sea as you can get. It really got out of hand when I came to Halifax, teetering on the brink of the Atlantic Ocean! St. Bernadette’s is about a sixty-second walk from the harbour. I started getting worked up as soon as I mailed my application to the schola. I even called Brennan to ask — casually, I thought — exactly where the schola was located. But I guess I wasn’t quite smooth enough, because he replied: ‘We’re on a houseboat, Freddy. And I can’t remember the last time the waves crashed over the top of us. Jazes,’ he goes, ‘gotta bail!’ So he was no help. He doesn’t take it seriously, tries to jolly me out of it.”

“And so you didn’t want him to know you were seeing a psychologist the afternoon of the murder.”

“Exactly. I should seek professional help again, to find out why I gave a false alibi in a murder investigation rather than risk ridicule from my old professor! That speaks volumes about my character. Sad, I know.”

“Oh, we all have things we want to keep private. And look at it this way: you knew you were innocent of the murder, so you figured your real destination was nobody’s business.”

“Right. The irony is that it was fear of going to Stella Maris Church — Star of the Sea Church, overlooking the water — that set me off. I even went up near it the day before, to see if I could handle it — that’s when your witness saw me at Seaview Park. Then I had to listen to Monsignor O’Flaherty’s enthusiastic promotion of the bus trip to Peggy’s Cove. How huge the surf is there, how people have been swept off the rocks by rogue waves, the whole bit. Hearing that, and knowing we were going to Stella Maris after dark, was enough to propel me into Debbie Schwartz’s office for treatment. Wonderful woman. My psychologist in Kansas looked her up and smoothed the waters for me, so to speak, before I got on the plane to come here.”

“Yes, I know Debbie. I frequently hire her to assist my clients. Well, nobody has to know.”

“Oh, hell, I’m a big boy now. I’ll own up to it, even if Brennan won’t be as sympathetic as Jan Ford. She may be guilty of atrocious music, but she was a great help to me when she noted my symptoms that Friday and offered to accompany me to Doctor Schwartz’s office.”

“Well, there you go. If we find out anything else happened that afternoon, you and Jan are off the hook.”

When it was Kurt Bleier’s turn he leaned towards me and spoke intently. “On the afternoon of the murder, I was out looking for Reinhold Schellenberg. I was concerned — justifiably so — when he suddenly cancelled his lecture. Reinhold was a priest at St. Sebastian Cathedral in Magdeburg, in the German Democratic Republic.”

“East Germany.”

“Yes. You may not believe me, but I had great respect for him and for many other churchmen. And I was not alone in that. During the war, the second war, many priests were imprisoned by the Nazi regime. They sat in prison with other enemies of the state, including members of the Communist Party and other socialists. And so it was
that my father, Max, came to know Reinhold’s uncle, who was also a priest. Johann Schellenberg. An honourable and courageous man, he took the place of another inmate in the prison and let himself be abused by the authorities, so the other man would be spared.”

I recalled the story as told to us by Greta Schliemann. Father Johann Schellenberg had confessed to an escape attempt in order to protect the guilty party. Kurt Bleier’s father had demanded his release.

“My father admired him greatly. Whether he ever told him so, I could not say. But they respected one another, and met often over a chessboard. The chessboard you saw here at the schola. Yes, you were right: it was my father’s, and I brought it here. The notes concealed in it were threats that I knew about through a contact in Reinhold Schellenberg’s abbey. I copied them out to show him. But I am getting ahead of myself.

“When I was growing up in Germany after the war, my father spoke to me often about Johann Schellenberg, whom he admired more than any other man he had ever met. Oh, he thought Johann was in error, philosophically and politically. But the Schellenberg name was revered in our home. When I joined the
Volkspolizei
, I became aware of the nephew, Reinhold. Another man who, although suffering under the delusions of religion, was a man of honour. He was in fact a principled opponent of our regime. There were many things about our regime I myself did not agree with, Montague, but I always hoped the revolution would purge itself of those errors in years to come. I still believe it would have, but we ran out of time. For now, anyway.

“In October 1971 the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, made a visit to Berlin. There was a young man, a seminarian named Lukas Vogel. He was a student and friend of Reinhold Schellenberg, and he was a dissident. We received information that Vogel was planning to disrupt the state visit. I travelled to Magdeburg to speak to Schellenberg. We had never met before. I did not speak about my father and his uncle at that time. I told him I knew of the planned protest, and I urged him to take Vogel in hand and make sure it did not happen. Schellenberg claimed he knew nothing about the demonstration, did not know where the seminarian was, and had nothing to tell the
Volkspolizei
. I warned him. If he could not guarantee the young man would drop his plans to disrupt the visit, I would have to inform the
security apparatus. He would not agree. But I heard from sources that he did in fact try to warn Vogel and his group away from the visit. Obviously, they did not heed his advice.

“Reinhold Schellenberg came to the event himself. The Stasi were on the lookout for Vogel. They found him and closed in on him, but he broke away and ran towards the stage where Brezhnev was speaking. Schellenberg emerged from the crowd and moved to block Vogel. He threw himself in front of the young man just as the Stasi drew their weapons and fired. Schellenberg was hit and went down. He was taken into custody along with Vogel and two others. Schellenberg was treated for a bullet wound in his arm. All four were interrogated. Reinhold was made of the same stuff as his uncle, Johann. I admired him, but I let him down. If I had been more efficient, the whole thing could have been prevented.

“I have told you about the threats against him in later years. He cancelled a journey to the United States because of a threat years ago. But he was not out of danger. This is the first trip he ever made to North America. When I heard of it, I arranged for my wife to sign up for the schola cantorum. She is very musical, and agreed to the plan. I had notes of the threats — copies I wrote out — in the compartment of the chessboard, and I showed them to Reinhold. For the first time, I told him of my father and his uncle in the camp. We became friendly in the days before his death. I urged him to be careful. I asked him about his movements around the city here. He shrugged off my concerns. When he suddenly cancelled his lecture that Friday afternoon, I was worried. I tried to find him. But it was my failure. Again.”

There was somebody missing from the gathering. “Where’s Brennan?” I asked Mike O’Flaherty when I finished speaking with Kurt Bleier.

Glances were exchanged, then Mike said: “He doesn’t know any of this yet.”

“What? Where is he?”

“Come with me.”

He reached for a set of keys, went outside, and crossed to the church. I followed. Mike put his fingers to his lips for quiet, then
worked some heavy-duty locks to get into the nave. Was Burke in the church, down on his knees giving thanks to God for letting him express the inexpressible in his music? Was he prostrate before the Blessed Sacrament, the way I had seen him in Rome? We tiptoed in. The church was lit by the warm glow of candlelight. Burke was sitting in one of the pews, in his Roman collar and an ancient leather jacket. His head was resting on the back of the pew, his eyes were closed, his left arm was flung out to the side. Sleeping in heavenly peace. He looked about eleven years old. Curled up next to him, holding his right hand, was my daughter Normie. She too was sound asleep, and someone had covered her with a blanket.

“Your wife thought she’d be all right here,” Mike whispered.

I looked at her for a long moment. “Yes, she will.”

We left them, and Mike locked up.

“You know, Mike, she’s investigating him to see if he’s an angel! I suspect tonight tipped the scales in his favour. What are you going to say if she asks you?”

He smiled. “‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the foremost of sinners.’ That was either Brennan’s slurred speech to the Romans or Saint Paul’s first letter to Timothy. I expect our friend will go and sin no more!”

“Do you think so?”

“I know so. He’s a new man, Monty. A new man.”

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their kind assistance: Dr. John MacPherson, Rhea McGarva, Joan Butcher, and Edna Barker. All characters and plots in the story are fictional, as are some of the locations. Other places are real. Any liberties taken in the interests of fiction, or any errors committed, are mine alone.

The following books and publications proved invaluable in the writing of
Cecilian Vespers
:

Benedict XVI.
Summorum Pontificum
. Apostolic letter issued
motu proprio data
, on the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970. July 7, 2007

Chesteron, G.K.
St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox.”
New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1956 (first published, 1933)

Day, Thomas.
Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste
. New York: Crossroad, 1990

Maritain, Jacques.
St. Thomas Aquinas
. New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1958 (first published, 1931)

Martin, Malachi.
Hostage to the Devil
. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. This is the source of the passage about the “Montini experience”, to which I refer in the last chapter.

Reese, Thomas J., SJ.
Inside the Vatican
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998

Rose, Michael S.
Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from
Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces – and How We Can Change Them Back Again
. Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 2001

Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Summa Theologiae

Second Vatican Council.
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium
, 1963

Walsh, James J.
The Thirteenth: the Greatest of Centuries
. New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1924 (first published, 1907). This is the source of the comments on the “Great Latin Hymns” in the first chapter. The quotation on the “Dies Irae” is from Prof. George Saintsbury, cited in Walsh at page 197.

Wiltgen, Rev. Ralph M., S.V.D.
The Rhine Flows Into The Tiber: The Unknown Council
. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1967

I am grateful for permission to reprint lyrics from the following:

Anne Emery
is a graduate of St. F.X. University and Dalhousie Law School. She has worked as a lawyer, legal affairs reporter, and researcher. She lives in Halifax with her husband and daughter. Her earlier novels were
Sign of the Cross
, winner of the 2007 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel,
Obit
(2007),
Barrington Street Blues
(2008),
Children in the Morning
(2010), and
Death at Christy Burke's
(2011).

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