True Believers (40 page)

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Authors: Jane Haddam

BOOK: True Believers
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The Cardinal Archbishop had never had any patience for the sort of cleric who thought of himself literally as a Prince of the Church: the kind of man who wore robes everywhere, or traveled with an entourage, in order to make himself as conspicuous as possible. He had the same feeling of distaste for those of his parishioners who insisted on wearing expensive Christian jewelry. Christ died on a cross of wood. It made no sense to wear a cross of eighteen-karat gold with a diamond in the middle of it, the way so many of them had been after Christmas, because Tiffany and Company had had the piece in its Christmas gift catalogue. People called him an ascetic, but it wasn't really true. An ascetic denies himself things he wants, out of a sense of duty and a will to self-discipline. The Cardinal Archbishop simply had no taste for certain kinds of luxury. If he had a failing as a pastor, he thought this was it. Most people craved luxury, and they were positively addicted to self-indulgence. He seemed to have been born without the genes for either.
Of course, at the moment, he was decking himself out with as much splendor as a Renaissance Pope, and with a good deal less money in his treasury to back himself up. Even the present-day Pope wouldn't go out on the streets of a major city looking the way the Cardinal Archbishop was looking now. Every once in a while, the Cardinal Archbishop could feel Father Doheny staring at his back, confused and concerned, as if he thought the Cardinal Archbishop might have had a psychotic break while he wasn't looking, and now they were all going to be stuck with the consequences. Even so,
Father Doheny did his job. He handed pieces of heavily embroidered cloth across the table when the Cardinal Archbishop reached out for them. He straightened things at the back where the Cardinal Archbishop couldn't see them. He kept a straight face, as bland as the face of a bad statue in the sort of church which bought its art from the same sculptors that manufactured its funeral monuments.
The Cardinal Archbishop looked into the mirror and straightened the bright red skullcap on his head. He had a traditional red Cardinal's hat, but nobody ever wore those anymore, not even in Rome, and he hadn't been able to bring himself to order it brought down from the wall of the cathedral where it hung. Even so, a scarlet cap and a scarlet cape were obvious enough, and under them he had all these … things.
“So,” he said finally. “Do you think I've finally lost my mind?”
“I was wondering what you were doing, Your Eminence, yes. This isn't, uh, standard street attire in this day and age.”
“Some of it isn't street attire at all.” The Cardinal Archbishop brushed what might have been lint and might have been a thread from the wide cummerbund that spanned his waist. “I feel like I'm about to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Do you think it was actually the case that there was a time when people were impressed with this sort of thing?”
“I think people are still impressed with this sort of thing. Some people, at any rate.”
“Yes, so do I. And that's part of the reason why I'm wearing all this. The other part is the press. Have we managed the press? Do they know I'm coming?”
“Absolutely, Your Eminence.”
“Good. We're going to get a lot of phone calls when all this is over, but I wanted to tell you now that I'm not taking any from the Conference. Not a single one. I already know what they're going to say, and I don't particularly care.”
“If you've cleared this with the Holy Father, I don't see that you have anything to worry about with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
“I keep telling you. I haven't cleared this with anybody. I've only kept them informed. Except that I haven't kept the Conference informed. I think it was easier when we really were Princes of the Church. I'd like to be an autocrat for a
day. It would be considerably more relaxing than being what I actually am. Have you kept tabs on that damned fool with the money?”
“Uh, not exactly,” Father Doheny said. “Which damned fool with the money were you referring to?”
“The one who was in here the other day. The one we wanted to put at the head of the committee. Never mind. It doesn't matter. Either he's going to quit outright, or he's going to lecture me and I'm going to tell him off, and then he's going to quit. It can't be helped. I doubt if the bankruptcy can be helped, either. I'll think about it tomorrow. Are we ready to go?”
“Of course. I'm ready if you are, Your Eminence.”
“Do we have press at the door?”
Father Doheny gave him a very odd look and went to the window to check. “Yes,” he said finally. “It seems we do. We do have press at the door.”
“Good. There ought to be even more when we get across town. I'm ready to go if you are, Father. It's about time we got this show on the road.”
The Cardinal Archbishop never used phrases like “get this show on the road.” His English was as formal and correct as a set of model sentences in a grammar book. He didn't care. He swept out of his office and into the hall with Father Doheny trailing behind. He let Sister call the elevator for him, then swept inside the elevator cab when it came. In these clothes, the only movement possible for him was sweeping. The cape could have been designed for Zorro on a night with more assignations in it than sword fights.
“Make sure the car is ready when we get down,” he told Sister, as the elevator doors closed. She scurried back to her desk, and he looked at the crucifix that had been put up in the cab next to the security mirror.
“There are people who think we should abandon the crucifix for a plain cross,” he said to Father Doheny. “They want Christ risen and triumphant, not dying in agony. But you know, Father, I think they're wrong. We preach Christ and Him crucified. That's what St. Paul said. He knew what he was talking about.”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” Father Doheny said, sounding thoroughly confused.
They had reached the first floor. The elevator doors were opening again. The Cardinal Archbishop stepped out and walked across the broad foyer to the front doors of the chancery, moving so quickly that Father Doheny had to half run to keep up. Outside, the wind was bitter and full of ice. The Cardinal Archbishop felt it as needles against the skin of his face. He got into the car and let the driver close the door on him as half a dozen reporters pushed in to ask him questions. He wasn't answering questions, at the moment. He would answer questions when he got to Baldwin Place.
“Are they following us?” he asked Father Doheny when the car pulled out into traffic.
“They seem to be.”
“With any luck, there will be more of them when we get to St. Anselm's and St. Stephen's. That was a pretty poor showing. You'd think the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia could command more press attention than that just by going to a baseball game.”
“Your Eminence, would you mind very much if I asked you what we're doing?”
“We're going to see Father Burdock.”
“Well, yes, I know that, but—”
“Something else occurred to me. Now that Father Healy is dead, he's no longer a suspect.”
“Your Eminence?”
“Never mind. We'll have to come back for Father's funeral, too, of course, when the time comes. But that will be later. Is that Baldwin Place up there?”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“Is that a television van?”
“Your Eminence, if you could just tell me—”
The car pulled up to the curb in front of St. Stephen's. To pull up in front of St. Anselm's would have required going against the traffic. There was indeed a television van—in fact, there were two of them—but what the Cardinal saw the most of were nuns. Sister Scholastica had done what he had asked of her. She had her nuns out on the street in force, in full habits and capes, so that there looked like there were a lot more of them than there actually were. Maybe there really were a lot more of them. The Cardinal Archbishop would not have put it past Sister Scholastica to bring in recruits from
other schools in other parts of the city, or even from other traditional orders. All that mattered was that the nuns looked like nuns. They had to be easily recognizable to non-Catholics who had only a quick glimpse of them on television. The driver came around the side of the car and let the Cardinal Archbishop out. He stepped into the street and looked around.
“Your Eminence?” Father Doheny asked anxiously, hurrying around from the street side. “What's going on here? This looks like the start of another riot.”
“It is. It's my personal riot Mine and Father Burdock's.”
“Your Eminence—”
“Don't worry,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “The police are already here.”
It was true, too. The police were already there. The Cardinal Archbishop could see them, lined up on either sidewalk but standing well back so that they didn't become too obvious either to the television cameras or the crowd. There was a crowd, too, just building up, coming from both the St. Anselm's side and the St. Stephen's side of the street. The Cardinal Archbishop looked down the street, but everything at the other end seemed to be quiet and dark.
“I only hope Father Burdock and his people did their part,” he said. “We're going to look pretty silly if we've gone to all this trouble and they're not at home.”
“Your Eminence—” Father Doheny said again.
The Cardinal Archbishop walked away without listening to the rest of what Father Doheny had to say, mostly because he had already said it himself to himself several times over the past few days since the riot. He walked across the street to St. Anselm's and mounted the steps. He should have brought a censer to waft incense at the crowd. He could hardly believe he'd been so stupid as to forget it. He got to the top step in front of St. Anselm's front doors and held his hands out at shoulder height.
“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sanctus
. Amen,” he said, in the loudest voice he had, which was very loud. He had a good deep bass when he wanted to use it.
In front of him, the crowd calmed down. The nuns fell into ranks and repeated the Latin to him. People began spilling out of St. Stephen's Church. Some of them sat down on the frozen sidewalk to listen.
“
Pater Noster
,” the Cardinal Archbishop started, and after that it was a piece of cake. He was old enough to have been taught all these prayers in Latin as a child. He had been trained as a priest in the days when speaking Latin was expected of everyone who took Holy Orders. The words rolled out of his throat the way thunder rolled out of a valley before a storm.
Over on the other side of the street, the doors to St. Stephen's opened one more time and Dan Burdock came out, looking far less impressive in green-and-gold vestments than he might have—but then, the Cardinal thought, even High Church Episcopalian wasn't as high church as Rome was on an off day.
Since the Pater Noster was over, the Cardinal Archbishop started in on the Ave Maria.
For a long time after the Cardinal Archbishop arrived on Baldwin Place, Dan Burdock had stayed inside his own church, his hands resting on the green-embroidered cassock he had made up his mind to wear, hesitating. He had not been surprised, and he had thought he should not be afraid. This was what his meeting with the Cardinal Archbishop had been about, and as he watched men stream out of St. Stephen's front doors into the street, he thought that he ought to be glad of it. God only knew, the men were glad of it. Aaron was nearly euphoric. Dan had been careful about security, as the Cardinal Archbishop had been careful. He had called the men he needed and told them it was urgent, but he had not told them why. Given the events of the last few days—maybe even of the last few months—they had all assumed the emergency had something to do with Roy Phipps, and they had not been wrong. What Dan had not done was call his own bishop. His bishop was a gentle, wise, intelligent man who believed more of the Christmas story than Bishop Spong, but he was essentially cautious. He would worry, as Dan had worried, about what would happen if something went wrong. Then, looking out on the street at the crowd swelling slowly and relentlessly, Dan realized that, of course, something was going to go wrong. The Cardinal Archbishop had always expected that something would
go wrong. He was not afraid of what the wrongness would bring, or what it would mean, or how he would look tomorrow morning on the front page of the
Inquirer
. That was when Dan had finished up dressing in his silly ritual clothes. They weren't even the right ritual clothes. Episcopalians didn't have pompous costumes for everyday life. He'd had to put on Mass vestments, although he was sure there was some rule telling him he couldn't. Even so, he could see the Cardinal Archbishop's point. The brighter their clothes, the more easily they would be seen on television.
Dan finished dressing and went out to the front steps of the church. Aaron was there, hopping from one foot to another, hard-pressed not to double over, he was laughing so hard.
“Why didn't you tell us?” he demanded. “We would have loved this. We would have helped you.”
You would have told the immediate universe, Dan thought. Instead of saying it, he pressed forward toward the middle of the street, where the Cardinal Archbishop had now gone to stand and wait for him. A man ran forward and thrust something into his hands and ran away again. Dan looked up to see that he was holding the gold cross mounted on a pole that they used for procession at the start of the Sunday service. He hadn't realized it was as heavy as it was. He wasn't the one who usually carried it. He held it over his head and thought that it must be visible for blocks. Somebody parked in a car at the diner this moment would be able to see only two things, the mass of people in the middle of the street and the cross. Then he thought that he should have worn something under all this embroidered linen, like a sweater. It really was February. The air was cold enough to make his bones ache.
He got to the middle of the street where the Cardinal Archbishop was, and stopped. He was, he thought, outclassed in every way. The Cardinal Archbishop was taller, and thinner, and more splendidly dressed. It didn't help that he was also the sort of person who drew people's attention, something Dan had never been. Roy Phipps was, though. He had been that way all the way back in college. Dan thought about that for a second and put it aside.
“People,” he said, leaning close to the Cardinal Archbishop's ear, “are going to think that Canterbury and Rome have reunited, under the direction of Rome.”
“Want to change your mind?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“No.”
“Want to go ahead of me?”
“I'll look like your altar boy.”
“Want to be first when we get to the spot?'
“Want to toss a coin to decide which of us will give his superiors the worst heart attack?”
“Mine are having their heart attack as we speak. We should have arranged for a band. Excuse me.”
Dan stepped back a little and let the Cardinal Archbishop go forward. The street was now so full of people, he could barely move, but they were all quiet, and all well behaved. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was throwing anything at all. He recognized a dozen or more of the men he had called over the last several hours, and those men all seemed to have brought friends with them. He recognized the men of his congregation. Chickie George was holding hands with that Mary McAllister who ran the homeless center—but then, if Chickie were straight, he'd be married to that girl by now.
The Cardinal Archbishop raised his hands high over his head and started the Angelus, blessedly in English, because it had been thirty years since Dan had had a course in Latin and the most he remembered now was a series of swear words he'd been taught by a particularly unsavory classics teacher at his prep school. Now that he thought of it, Dan was sure that that particular classics teacher had been gay.
“The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“And she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” the crowd answered—al! the crowd did, because even High Church Episcopalians knew the Angelus.
Then the crowd moved, slowly but deliberately, with the Cardinal Archbishop at its head, and in no time at all Dan found himself pushed to the front of it. Out in front, there was suddenly air to breathe, and space. The crowd was concentrated at the end of the block near the churches. There was nobody at the other end of the block or a block and a half away from that, where Roy was. Dan said the words of the Hail Mary—how he remembered them, he couldn't say—and moved forward slowly, the way he processed in on Sunday
mornings when the organ was working very slowly and the church was hushed. Along the street, lights went on in town houses and front doors opened. People came out to see what was happening. That hadn't happened when the real riot had been going on. When the real riot had been going on, the neighborhood had locked down tight, hoping to stay out of it.
Once, years ago, when Dan was still in the seminary, he had thought there might be a way out of it. He couldn't be the only gay man who had entered the ministry, or who had pledged himself to celibacy, either. In those days you never heard about Roman Catholic priests falling from the path of righteousness into the muck of sex—but then, in those days, they might have fallen less often. It had been easier to stay clean in an era when sex had been vigorously repressed in all parts of the culture, when there had barely been a hint of it on television or in the movies. It startled him sometimes to realize how shocked people had been by books like
Ulysses
, or, even funnier, things like
Valley of the Dolls
, where there was no real sex on the page at all. Now sex was everywhere. It was on the billboards he passed when he came back to St. Stephen's from a trip across town. It was on television, butt naked half the time, men and women both. It was, especially, in the books he read. There now seemed to be something like an Obligatory Sex Scene, so that no novel was really a novel without five pages of intimate description.
No, Dan thought, as he inched his way down the street and the crowd inched behind him, the Cardinal Archbishop intoning the Angelus with every step—no, he could not have been the first gay man to enter the ministry and decide to solve his problems with celibacy, and he could not be the first one to realize that celibacy was not the point Sex was not the point. Even having somebody to wake up next to in bed was not the point. He wasn't particularly horny. His loneliness came and went.
Identity
was the point, and the need not to feel that he had been born in some way defective.
Of course, according to Christianity, everybody was born defective. That was the point of original sin. Maybe, Dan thought, that settled the question of whether he was an orthodox Christian or not, in the negative. He did not believe in original sin. He did not believe that anybody should believe in original sin. It made him feel a little odd to realize that the
Cardinal Archbishop mostly likely not only believed in original sin, but celebrated it.
They were all the way down the street and at Roy Phipps's door. Dan had no idea how they'd gotten there so quickly. It had felt to him as if they were barely moving at all. He looked at the windows that flanked the door and saw that the lights in the rooms beyond them were all on. Roy was a lot of things, but he was not a coward. He would not retreat. It struck Dan suddenly that there was something wrong in this, something wrong in the way they had defined religion from the beginning, something whacked-out at the core, because he shouldn't be here now. None of them should be. Roy Phipps should not be what he was in this place and at this time, because it was a betrayal of everything else he was and had been, from the very beginning.
Dan took a deep breath and mounted the steps to Roy's front door. The crowd behind him was quiet. The Cardinal Archbishop was not intoning prayers. Dan rang the doorbell and stepped back. Then everybody began to pray the Our Father, as if it had been arranged in advance.
Years ago, at Princeton, Roy Phipps was a phenomenon. He was the sort of boy the system had been designed to celebrate, the diamond in the rough, the genius in the muck pile. He was supposed to go on to graduate school and then a career in academia or law, with an avocation in cultural alienation. Dan himself was supposed to go on to a career in academia or law, and then, and then—what?
The door opened wide, and Roy stepped out, dressed in sports jacket and tie, looking like a businessman checking to see if his newspaper had come in the morning. He looked Dan over from head to foot, then turned his attention to the Cardinal Archbishop. Dan could see the rhythmic twitching of a muscle in the side of his face, the only one that Roy had never been able to control when he was angry.
“The Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon,” Roy's voice boomed out—and it did boom. The man had a deep and carrying bass that Dan never quite got over the sound of. “The God of wrath will bring down the apostates and the adulterers and the sodomizers and on the last day He will cast you all into the pit of fire, into the pit of hell, to suffer an eternity of agony in the company of Satan and his fallen angels—”
The Cardinal Archbishop, it turned out, had an even deeper bass voice, and it carried even farther. He began to intone something in Latin, and for a few moments, Dan couldn't figure out what it was. The crowd had become very still. Dan didn't know if they understood what the Cardinal was saying or not. The Catholics might. His own men almost certainly would not, except for the one or two of them who had been to seminary or studied classics.
Then the flow of the words began to seem familiar, and one or two of the words themselves began to seem familiar, too. The wind had picked up and was coming down the street at a furious pace. Dan felt it in his ears and on his neck and wished he were off the steps and down in the crowd where the press of people would shield him from the cold. Some of the crowd had picked up the rhythm, too, and a few people were saying what seemed to be responses.
And then, somehow, Dan knew. It had been thirty years since he had heard any version of this rite, but he knew—and as soon as he did, the responses began to come quite naturally to him, too, although he had no idea how. He had never performed this rite in his life, or known anybody who had. He didn't even think Episcopalians believed in it. What he remembered, he remembered from a theology class so far in his past it might as well never have existed, and he thought he must have learned the old version, the before—Vatican IIVERSION, although it didn't seem to matter.
The Cardinal Archbishop mounted the steps in front of Roy Phipps and raised his hands above Roy's head. Dan stepped back and down. Did Roy know what this was? Of course he knew. Anybody who was looking into Roy's face at this moment knew he knew.
The Cardinal Archbishop was performing a rite of exorcism.

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