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priest pulled the trigger.
    Curtis Lockhardt lay with his head against the glass, where it met the carpet. He was drowning in his own blood, his lungs filling. There was a dimming of his vision, as if night were falling fast now, and he couldn’t quite see the prancing child anymore. In her place he could make out the shape of St. Patrick’s Cathedral blurring far below him. The spires seemed to be reaching toward him, like fingers pointing.
    He saw a black trouser leg beside his face. He felt something blunt pressing against the back of his head.
    Curtis Lockhardt blinked hard, trying to make out the sprightly dancing figure, but instead he took one last look at St. Patrick’s.



1
DRISKILL
    I remember that first day quite clearly.
    I was summoned to lunch at his club by Drew Summerhays, the imperishable gray eminence of our well-upholstered world downtown at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. He possessed the clearest, most adaptable mind I’d ever encountered, and most of our luncheon discussions were both illuminating and amusing. And they always had a point. Summerhays was eighty-two that year, the age of the century, but he still ventured down to Wall Street most days. He was our living legend, a friend and adviser to every president since Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign, a backstage hero of World War II, a spy master, and always a confidant of the popes. Through his close relationship with my father I’d known him all my life.
    On occasion, even before I’d joined the firm and subsequently become a partner, I’d had his ear because he’d watched me grow up. Once, when I was about to become a Jesuit novice, he’d come to me with advice and I’d had the lack of foresight to ignore it. Oddly enough, in such contrast to his austere, flinty appearance, he was a lifelong football fan and, particularly, a fan of mine. He had advised me to play a few years of professional football once I’d graduated from Notre Dame. The Jesuits, he argued, would still be there when I retired but now was my only chance to test my ability at the next level. He had hoped that fate might deliver me to the New York Giants. It might have happened, I suppose. But I was young and I knew it all.
    I’d spent my Notre Dame years as a linebacker, caked in mud and crap and blood, all scabby and hauling around more than my share of free-floating anxiety and rage. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mayhem stuffed into a two-hundred-pound body. Sportswriter hyperbole, sure, but Red Smith had so described me. The fact was, in those days I was a dangerous man.
    Nowadays I am quite a civilized specimen in my way, kept in one psychological piece by that fragile membrane that separates us from the triumph of unreason and evil. Kept intact and relatively harmless by the practice of law, by the family, by the family’s name and tradition.
    Summerhays hadn’t understood the simple truth that I’d lost whatever enthusiasm I’d ever had for playing football. And my father wanted me to become a priest. Summerhays always thought that my father was a bit more of a Catholic than was, strictly speaking, good for him. Summerhays was a realistic Papist. My father, he told me, was something else, a true believer.
    In the end I hadn’t played pro football and I had gone off to become a Jesuit. It was the last bit of advice I’d ever taken from my father and, as I recall, the last time I ignored a suggestion from Drew Summerhays. The price for my lack of judgment was high. As it developed, the Society of Jesus seemed to be a hammer, the Church an anvil, and the smiling linebacker got caught between. Bang, bang, bang.
    It wasn’t just that I didn’t become the Jesuit my father had hoped for—young Father Ben Driskill, mighty Hugh’s boy, chucking old ladies under their chins at rummage sales, shooting baskets with the neighborhood toughs and turning them into altar boys, giving smelly old wino Mr. Leary the last rites, arranging for the teens’ hayride