"Tragic," I said, pretending not to look up from the Dell 300mx computer on which I was constructing the master schedule for the next month in the Cathe-dral parish.  "And Bishop Quill was on the L train!!"   He threw himself into a chair which I had just cleared so as to pile more computer output on it.  "Indeed!" I said looking up with considerable in-terest. "With any good fortune we will find neither the L train nor Bishop Quill."   Out of respect for his status among the missing, I did not refer to our lost bishop by his time-honored nickname, imposed by his unimaginative seminary classmates - "Idiot."

"You South Side Irish are innocent of charity . . ." he replied. "You have any tea around?"

Normally he would have appeared at night in my study and commandeered a large portion of my pre-cious Jameson's Twelve Year Special Reserve or Bush-mill's Green Label before he assigned me another clean up task. Auxiliary Bishops play a role in the Catholic Church not unlike that of the admirable Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction: they sweep up messes. However, it was morning, a sunny early autumn morning to be precise. Banned from coffee by his foster sister Nora Cronin, he was reduced to pleading for tea to fill his oral needs.  Before I could wave at my ever present teapot, he spotted it, stretched his tall, lean frame to the table on which it rested (surrounded by the galleys of my most recent book There is No Millennium) and poured himself a large mug of Irish Breakfast tea.

"Great!" he exclaimed with a sigh of pleasure. The pleasures of being a Cardinal these days are, alas, few and simple.  I waited to hear the story of the disappearance of the L train and its distinguished passenger. He contin-ued to sip his tea, a tall, handsome man just turned sev-enty, with carefully groomed white hair, the face of an Irish poet, the political skills of a veteran ward commit-teeman, and the hooded, glowing eyes of a revolutionary gunman.

"So what was Idiot doing on an L train?" I asked, realizing that I was missing one of the lines in our routinized scenario.  "Your brother auxiliary bishop," he said with radiant irony as he played with the massive ruby ring on his right hand, "was mingling with the poor on the way home from his weekly day of ministry in the barrio. Preparation doubtless for the day when he succeeds me." 

Milord Cronin laughed bitterly.  "He will never be able to learn Spanish which does not cause laughter among those who know the language."   "That, Blackwood, is irrelevant to the present story . . . His limousine driver was to pick him up at the Kimball Avenue terminal of the Ravenswood Line and drive him back to his parish in Forest Hills."

"Brown Line," I said in the interests of accuracy.

"What?" He exploded, a nervous panther looking for something to spring upon.

"The Ravenswood Line is now known as the Brown Line."

"The Ravenswood Line is the Ravenswood Line, Blackwood," He insisted with the sense of shared infallibility that only a Cardinal can muster and that rarely these days.  "Arguably."

"So the train never arrived," he extended his tea mug in my direction and, docile priest that I am, I re-filled it. No milk. The valiant Nora had forbidden milk as part of her virtuous campaign to keep the Cardinal alive. "And Bishop Quill never arrived either."

"Remarkable."

"The chauffeur became concerned and called the CTA which, as one might expect, assured him that the train had arrived at Kimball and Lawrence on time . . . That's a Korean neighborhood now, isn't it Black-wood."

"An everything neighborhood - Koreans, Palestinians, Pakistani, some Japanese, and a few recalcitrant and elderly Orthodox Jews who will not leave the vast apartment buildings they built so long ago."

"Safe?"

"Much safer than many others I could mention, some of them not distant from this very room."

"Who would want to abduct Gus Quill?"

"I could provide a list of hundreds of names, with yours and mine on the top."

"Precisely . . . Anyway, the chauffeur then called the Chicago Police Department and apparently reached your good friend John Culhane who called me about midnight. They have determined the L in fact never ar-rived at the terminal. Rather it has disappeared into thin air and, Commander Culhane assured me an hour ago, so has the Most Reverend Augustus O'Sullivan Quill."  I almost said, "Deo Gratias." Instead I took a firm stand for right reason and common sense.  "L trains do not disappear," I insisted. "Neither, alas, do auxiliary bishops, though sometimes they are treated as if they do not in fact exist . . ."

Milord Cronin waved away my self-pity.