“All right, tell me.”
“He’s laying the facts before the Director of Public Pros-ecutions and asking him for a warrant charging me with being an accessory after the fact to murder.”
“He’ll never make it stick.”
“And what if he succeeds? Would it cause you the slightest concern?”
“Probably not.”
“Good, honesty at last. There’s hope for you yet. And your cause, Fallon. Irish unity or freedom or hatred of the bloody English or whatever it was. Was it worth it? The shooting and bombings. People dead, people crippled?”
Fallon’s face was very white now, the eyes jet black, expressionless. “I enjoyed every golden moment,” he said calmly.
“And the children?” Father da Costa demanded. “Was it worth that?”
“That was an accident,” Fallon said hoarsely.
“It always is, but at least there was some semblance of reason to it, however mistaken. But Krasko was plain, cold-blooded murder.”
Fallon laughed softly, “All right, Father, you want answers. I’ll try and give you some.” He walked to the altar rail and put a foot on it, leaning an elbow on his knee, chin in hand. “There’s a poem by Ezra Pound I used to like. “Some quick to arm,” it says, and then later, “walked eye-deep in hell, believing in old men’s lies.” Well, that was my cause at the final end of things. Old men’s lies. And for that, I personally killed over thirty people assisted at the end of God knows how many more.”
“All right, so you were mistaken. In the end, violence in that sort of situation gains you nothing. I could have told you that before you started. But Krasko.” Father da Costa, shook his head. “That, I don’t understand.”
“Look, we live in different worlds,” Fallon told him. People like Meehan, – they’re renegades. So am I. I engage in a combat that’s nothing to do with you and the rest of the bloody civilians. We inhabit our own world. Krasko was a whoremaster, a pimp, a drug-pusher.”
“Whom you murdered,” Father da Costa repeated inexor-ably.
“I fought for my cause, Father,” Fallon said. “Killed for it, even when I ceased to believe it worth a single-human life. That was murder. But now? Now, I only kill pigs.”
The disgust, the self-loathing were dear in every word he spoke. Father da Costa said with genuine compassion, “The world can’t be innocent with Man in it.”
“And what in the hell is that pearl of wisdom supposed to mean?” Fallon demanded.
“Perhaps I can explain best by telling you a story,” Father da Costa, said. “I spent several years in a Chinese Communist prison camp after being captured in Korea. What they called a special indoctrination centre.”
Fallon could not help but be interested. “Brainwashing?” he said.
“That’s right. From their point of view, I was a special target, the Catholic Church’s attitude to Communism being what it is. They have an extraordinarily simple technique and yet it works so often. The original concept is Pavlovian. A question of inducing guilt or rather of magnifying the guilt that is in all of us. Shall I tell you the first thing my instructor asked me? Whether I had a servant at the mission to clean my room and make my bed. When I admitted that I had, he expressed surprise, produced a Bible and read to me that passage in which Our Lord-speaks of serving others. Yet here was I allowing one of those I had come to help to serve me. Amazing how guilty that one small point made me feel.”
“And you fell for that?”
“A man can fall for almost anything when he’s half-starved and kept in solitary confinement. And they were clever, make no mistake about that. To use the appropriate Marxian terminology, each man has his thesis and his antithesis. For a priest, his thesis is everything he believes in. Everything he and his vocation stand for.”
“And his antithesis?”
“His darker side. The side which is present in all of us. Fear, hate, violence, aggression, the desires of the flesh. This is the side they work on, inducing guilt feelings to such a degree in an attempt to force a complete breakdown. Only after that can they start their own particular brand of re-education.”