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flapping around his legs. John stood watching him for a while and then followed. The only choice he had was dinner with the priest or those rooms his father had found them where there was going to be no dinner at all.
    Besides, there was something else, something he couldn’t pin down but something that made him feel good.
    He was interested.
2
    Interested. The buzzer on his intercom was going off like a third-rate smoke alarm. His cigarette had burned to cinders in the ashtray. Here he was, forty years old, an auxiliary bishop, vicar of the bishop of Bridgeport for New Haven. It wasn’t the best he could have done. There was a vast field for ambition in the Church, a veritable Jacob’s ladder of preference and preferment. He could have been assigned to a more important diocese or even sent to Rome. Still, considering who he was and where he’d come from— what he’d come from—he hadn’t done badly. He could have been sent to South America or imprisoned in a boy’s school in the bowels of the Bronx. Either of those things could happen to him yet. He was successful and he was safe. The safety was the important part. The Church wouldn’t let you go bankrupt. The Church would always give you a home. He had to be losing his mind.
    Sometimes he thought Marie was going to make him lose his mind. He’d told her a hundred times. Buzz once and then stop. Considering the noise that thing made, if he didn’t answer he wasn’t in the building.
    He flipped the damn thing to talk and said, “Yes?”
    “Mr. Murphy’s here,” Marie said. “I know you told me to send him right in, but I thought I ought to buzz.”
    “Send him right in,” John Kelly said.
    “I will. Now that I’ve buzzed.”
    “Marie—”
    She flipped off with an angry little click. The office was silent.
    Bishop John Kelly sighed and stood up. He rarely wore full clerical dress, but he was wearing it today. He’d always considered it good policy to meet movers and shakers in the costume of a prince of the Church. He wasn’t a prince of the Church, not really, not yet, but all this time in the Jesuits had taught him the importance of image. Dan Murphy would have understood. He wasn’t really a mover and shaker either, but when he came through Bishop John Kelly’s door he looked like one.
    He also looked a little amused. He had a Kevin McCarthy kind of face, what John thought of as “upper-class Irish,” and it was pulled into a smirk.
    “Well?” he said. “Have you thought it over?”
    John Kelly sighed. He liked Dan Murphy, maybe because Murphy was a known quantity. He always knew what Murphy was going to say and do and want and think. Unlike someone like, say, Father Tom Burne.
    He pushed thoughts of Tom Burne out of his mind—Burne was a bad subject for contemplation at any time—and said, “I’ve thought it over six or seven times. Are you sure this Cometti person doesn’t have ties to the Mafia?”
    “Coletti,” Murphy said. “Victor Coletti. If Coletti had ties to the Mafia, I’d know about them. And I wouldn’t know him.”
    “I suppose that’s true.”
    “A district attorney has to be careful.”
    “You have to be careful, at any rate,” John said. He thought of asking Dan if it were true that he wanted to run for governor some day, and decided against it. Dan would deny it, and he already knew the answer. He took the letter Dan had sent him off his desk and flattened it out against his hand.
    “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Tuesday and Thursday nights at seven thirty. On WNHY. Which is a network affiliate.”
    “Right,” Dan said. “I told you it was going to be good exposure.”
    “It’s impossible exposure. Seven thirty is when the affiliates make all their money off the game shows. I asked.”
    “Victor Coletti is a good Catholic layman,” Dan said.
    “If he’s that good a Catholic layman, the Pope is a South American nun.”
    John Kelly sighed again and sat down.
    All other considerations aside,