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things.”
    “And what do you pine for, Father?”
    “Just what you would expect, of course,” he said, the irony deliberate and thick now in his voice. “Wine, women, and song.”
    He put his hand in the pocket of his cassock and pulled out a rosary. He stared down at it, watching his own fingers rub the ebony beads. “I might as well tell you then, since you'll learn of it soon enough. Father Pat and I had quite a noisy disagreement yesterday afternoon.”
    “How noisy?”
    Again that strange smile. “Holy water doesn't flow in our veins, you know. There was some shouting. Some name calling. A rectory is like a family and all families have their spats.”
    “In my family, when there was a spat, somebody usually got the crap beat out of him.”
    The priest's hand closed hard around the rosary's crucifix and his head snapped up. “Was Father Pat beaten?”
    “What was your disagreement about?”
    A few seconds of silence ticked by before he answered. “As a preacher, Father Pat had a style that was…unorthodox. It's hard to describe if you haven't heard it. It was joyful, exuberant, and loud. Really loud. It wasn't exactly like a holy roller prayer meeting, but it was close.”
    “So what if he had 'em shouting hallelujahs, as long as he was packing them in? And filling up the collection basket.”
    “Yeah, well, there was that. He probably got twice as many worshippers at his Masses as the rest of us did put together. But lately some of the stuff he was saying in his homilies was flat-out contrary to the teachings of the Catholic faith, and so I forbade him to preach. I told him he could celebrate the Mass for the sisters in the convent, but no longer for the laity. And no more preaching. I told him a priest calls people to holiness and challenges them to a better life, but he does not make the Church about himself. Father Pat took offense and we ended up hollering at each other like a couple of guys at a boxing match.”
    “Do you think someone hated this style of his enough to kill him for it?”
    The pastor blew out a hard breath, as if he'd just been punched. “Oh, God. I would have said until this moment that everybody loved Father Pat. And he was especially beloved in the eyes of our Lord, I do truly believe. Beloved and chosen.” He turned his head and his gaze lifted to the bronze crucifix above the altar, and Rourke thought he saw a painful light like a burning match in his eyes. Or it could have simply been sunlight from the window glancing off his thick glasses.
    “When I was a kid,” Father Ghilotti said, “I had a favorite uncle who was also my
parrain.
He stood up for me at my baptism. He gave me expensive toys on my birthday and took me places, just the two of us together, like to West Park and the zoo. On the day of my confirmation, when I was twelve, my family had a big celebration and as my godfather he was there, of course. After the party was over, he left in a car with a couple of my old man's goons and he was never seen or heard from again.”
    He stopped, closing his eyes, and he might have been praying, or he might only have been remembering. “I saw them looking at each other,” he went on, and his voice had taken on a street flatness. “My
parrain
and my daddy, before he got in the car. He knew what they were going to do to him and he knew why. They were brothers, but it was business.”
    He looked down and saw that he still had the rosary in his fist and he thrust it back into his pocket. “Nobody's safe,” he said. “Not even a beloved priest.”
    “Did you kill him?”
    The face he showed Rourke was both tough and open. “No, I didn't kill him. When I took my vows, I stopped being my daddy's son.”
    Rourke looked back out the window, where his brother still sat on the stone bench, curled in upon himself as if waiting for a reckoning that was sure to come, and sure to hurt.
    It isn't true, Rourke thought. We are always and forever our father's sons.
    The old priest,