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bastard's Celtic cross tattoo.
    "Tort," he recited, "the breach of a duty imposed by law whereby some person acquires a right for action for damages." Tort, from the Latin
tortus,
past participle of
torquere,
meaning twisted, wrung or, as in the English, tortured.
    As in the cross. He stared at it hard. The symbol of a tortured people. The symbol, whether he liked it or not, of who he was. The Son of Man flogged, His skin shredded, His body left to rot through all history on a pair of beams. Dillon could not stifle his old question, the one he had been told never to ask: Are we supposed to be
consoled
that God has joined us in this?
    The door beside him banged open, and the lean stooped figure of Professor Corrigan stumbled in, burdened with a stack of books and examination papers. Inside his rumpled brown serge jacket the point of one shirt collar was bent up above his tie, like a flap. His tie was askew. The sight of Dillon had obviously startled him, and now he peered over the rims of his glasses, his eyes flaring as they had when Dillon entered the examination hall nearly two hours late.
    Dillon stood, eager to show the man the deference he seemed to
require. But Corrigan turned brusquely away and crossed to the door of the dean's inner office. He knocked, and from within came a muffled sound which the professor took as permission. He went through the door, clutching his books and papers. It closed with a bang behind him.
    Dillon sat again. He brushed the back of his hand against his nostrils, whiffing it. He smelled nothing.
    The dean's door opened. The black-robed Jesuit stood there holding it, but not for Dillon, as he first supposed. Professor Corrigan, still with his armload, brushed by the priest without a word. Three paces took him across the anteroom, his eyes rigidly avoiding Dillon. When he fumbled at the knob, Dillon sprang to his side to help him, but the professor managed the door on his own and, without a word, was gone.
    "Come in, Mr. Dillon," the dean said coldly.
    As Dillon crossed in front of him, he picked up the man's faint body odor. Away from the yards Dillon was a connoisseur of odors, and he put this one at two parts tobacco, one part the smoke of incense and one part stale perspiration pouring off an unlaundered cassock. A priest's odor, it automatically summoned Dillon's potent memory of the seminary rector. Once when Dillon was serving as an altar boy a consecrated host had fallen from the gold lip of the ciborium to the profane linoleum of the sanctuary floor, and when Sean Dillon, age eighteen, had instinctively reached for it, the rector had stomped on his hand with the heel of his stout, black, ankle-high boot.
    Dillon took up his place facing the cluttered, desk while the dean crossed behind it to sit. On the near edge of the massive mahogany desk Dillon read the Gothic letters of the nameplate: "Reverend Aloysius T. Ferrick, SJ."
    "You have a problem, Mr. Dillon, a rather large problem." It had been more than fifty years since the priest had come as a child from Ireland, but he had an accent still.
    "I understand that, Father."
    "Professor Corrigan was more than a bit incensed at your interruption. You caused a major distraction, he says."
    "With all due respect, Father, it was his reaction that did that. I was intending to slip quietly into my usual chair, which isn't far from the door. Professor Corrigan—"
    The Jesuit silenced him with an abruptly upraised hand. "That isn't the issue anyway. The commotion isn't the issue." Father Ferrick leaned
forward to pick up a thin, black volume from his desk. "Your problem, Mr. Dillon, is that regulations of Loyola Law School"—he began leafing the pages, the book of rules—"define absence from a terminal examination as ipso facto cause for failure of the course in question."
    "I was not absent, Father. I was late."
    The Jesuit raised his eyes to Dillon. "Professor Corrigan has failed you."
    Dillon had to resist an urge to look behind himself;