True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “What’s that ahead of us? It looks like somebody’s setting off fireworks on the ground.”

  “It’s St. Anselm’s and St. Stephen’s,” Jackman said.

  Gregor slid forward again. Now that he knew enough to look for the spires, he had no trouble finding them, but the scene on the ground still made no sense. He made out the Channel 6 Action News van, mostly because its ABC logo seemed to be lit by a spotlight and facing right toward him. After that, all he could get was an impression of people, hundreds of people, far more than there should have been.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “What is that, rubberneckers? Why don’t you have your people clear the area?”

  “It’s not rubberneckers. It’s a demonstration. And a counterdemonstration.”

  “A demonstration of what?”

  Jackman tapped the driver on the shoulder, and he sped up, just a little. They were three blocks away, and those blocks were clear. It was only when you got to the corners where the churches stood that you ran into a solid wall of people. Past the Channel 6 Action News van, Gregor got sight of what seemed to be a man in a white bedsheet, wearing a gold foil crown on his head and gold-painted … wings.

  “Wings,” he said cautiously.

  Jackman pulled him back and leaned forward himself. “Yeah, wings,” he said. “Wings and halos. They told me about the wings and halos. Shit.”

  “Do you want me to pull up to the side entrance so you can go around to the back and avoid the crowd?” the driver said.

  Jackman shook his head. “Let us out here. The whole point is to get ourselves on television. Let the good people of Philadelphia know that their police are on the case, right to the highest levels. Do we know if the Cardinal has arrived yet?”

  “No,” the driver said.

  The car pulled up to the curb. John Jackman got out, and Gregor followed him. They were now less than half a block away. Gregor could see other news vans, and the tight crowd of demonstrators in their white sheets and gold wings that seemed to be clogging the street between the two churches. This was not a spontaneous demonstration, at least not entirely. The demonstrators had professionally printed signs, the kind you usually had to put orders in for weeks in advance. GOD HATES SIN one of them read. Another read YOU WON’T BE GAY IN HELL. As they got closer, Gregor realized that at least some of the sound they were hearing was music. The angels were singing.

  “What’s that music?” he asked Jackman.

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jackman said. “It’s probably something Rapid Roy wrote all by himself.”

  “That’s who these people are? They’re connected to Roy Phipps?”

  “Right. They’ve got a full gospel something or the other church down the street. You know the kind of names these places have. They annoy Dan Burdock a lot.”

  “Dan Burdock is the pastor at St. Stephen’s,” Gregor said.

  They had pushed far enough into the crowd for Gregor to see that there were, indeed, counterdemonstrators. It took him a moment to place the man at their head, but then he did: Chickie George, the man he had met when he’d come to look over St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s after he’d talked with the Cardinal. Chickie George’s sign was not professionally made, and it showed. The cardboard was too thin to make for an effective sign. The letters, drawn hastily with a black felt-tip pen, wavered slightly. Their message, however, was unmistakable: Queer Nation.

  “I didn’t realize St. Stephen’s had this big a congregation,” Gregor said.

  “It doesn’t.” They had reached the line of uniformed officers standing near St. Anselm’s front walk. Jackman pulled over the first one he saw, shouted in his ear, and got something that looked like directions. He grabbed Gregor by the arm and pulled him along. “They’ve got a cordon up on the other side of the block,” he said, shouting a little to get heard over the singing. “It’s not doing any good. They’re coming through the side doors of the church and then out the front.”

  “Who are?”

  “Half the gay men in the city,” Jackman said.

  Now that they were right in the middle of the demonstration, Gregor could feel how wrong it was, and not only wrong but ugly. Everything in this place was anger. Even the nuns standing on St. Anselm’s front steps looked angry. Roy Phipps’s people exuded a will to violence so clear and so malevolent, Gregor could taste it. Chickie George was not significantly calmer, and some of the men around him were murderous.

  Gregor tugged at Jackman’s sleeve. “You’d better get these people away from each other,” he said urgently. “They’re going to explode.”

  Jackman whirled around. “We can’t,” he said desperately. “Don’t you get it? We can’t touch anybody until they start something serious. We just settled a huge lawsuit over gaybashing. And you know what happens if we touch Roy. Roy knows how to use the courts. We can’t do a damn thing.”

  It was then that the angels started chanting. “Burn in hell,” they said, and then, louder, “Burn in hell. Scott Roger Boardman is burning in hell.”

  Out in the middle of the crowd, Chickie George reached down and grabbed the nearest angel by the crotch. The angel whirled around and hit Chickie in the side of the head with his YOU WON’T BE GAY IN HELL sign. Chickie dropped his own sign and doubled over. Blood was spurting out of his ear. Two more angels dropped their signs. One of them kicked Chickie in the rear. The other aimed a ham-fisted punch to his midsection, and Chickie went down.

  “Here we go,” Jackman said.

  Somewhere in the lines of police, a whistle went off. The uniformed cops began moving in. It almost didn’t matter. It was almost too late. By now everybody was kicking and screaming and gouging, the angels and the gay men both. A very young woman and a nun in habit came racing off the steps of St. Anselm’s and into the crowd. A man in a clerical collar and black clothes came racing off the steps of St. Stephen’s. They all converged on Chickie George at once, only to be met by one of the angels, a big one, shoving them out of the way with his arms and kicking out at Chickie with his boots. They were big boots with weather spikes in the soles of them. When they hit Chickie’s clothes they tore them and the flesh underneath them. There was blood everywhere.

  Jackman grabbed two uniformed patrolmen and pushed them in Chickie’s direction. He followed them. The young woman from St. Anselm’s had got hold of the angel’s sign and was using it to hit the angel over and over again in the side of the head. The angel didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t bleeding. Other people were. Two or three of the angels were down. So where several of the gay men. You couldn’t move in the street without stepping into blood.

  Jackman got to Chickie George with Gregor right behind him. He got hold of the angel and dragged him off, throwing him into the arms of two waiting patrolmen who wrestled him to the ground. The sheet tore and flapped. The angel was wearing the uniform of some gas station somewhere. Gregor leaned over and saw that Chickie was conscious and breathing. He was not in tears.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” the young woman said. She was in tears.

  “Wait for the ambulance,” Gregor told her, having to shout over what now seemed to be a full-scale riot. “He’s been hit in the head. You shouldn’t move him.”

  “I’ll kill that man,” the young nun said. “I don’t care what the Ten Commandments say. I’ll kill that man.”

  Chickie George rolled over slightly and smiled. “You go, Sister.” His voice sounded like a radio speaker more than halfway to dead.

  The man in the clerical collar looked up. “There’s the stretcher. Okay, Chickie, you’re going to the hospital.”

  Jackman came back to them. “Listen,” he shouted, “we’re going to give the ambulance guys time to get this guy out of here, then we’re going to teargas. You’ve all got to get out of the street. Get back inside. Do it now.”

  “I want to go with Chickie,” the young woman said. One of the ambulance guys grabbed her by the wrist and motioned her to follow him. John
Jackman herded the rest of them toward St. Stephen’s through the only break in the crowd any of them could see.

  “Oh, no,” the young nun said. “I’ve got to get back to the other side.”

  Jackman kept pushing her along. There was no time. She could get back across the street sometime later. Down the block somewhere, there was the sound of glass breaking. Gregor had a sinking conviction that he knew what it was.

  “That’s going to be Roy Phipps’s church, isn’t it?” he asked Jackman.

  “Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” Jackman said.

  There was another break in the crowd—caused, Gregor saw, by two patrolmen who were clearing their path—and they all pushed through St. Stephen’s front gates and up to the church’s front steps. The street was full of people, and they were all crazy. Men like the ones who attended Roy Phipps’s church forgot that gay men were at least as much men as they were gay. Some of them might be small and delicate, but most of them were tall, broad, strong and, on top of that, they worked out. There was no way to tell who was getting the better of this fight. The cops were pulling up a van with a loudspeaker on it. Some of the people lying in the street were recognizable as angels, but some of the angels must have lost their costumes. Some of the gay men were making an effort to strip them off.

  “Now hear this,” the loudspeaker said. “Vacate this area immediately. I repeat. Vacate this area immediately.”

  “Let’s go,” Jackman said, pushing them all those last few feet to St. Stephen’s front door.

  Gregor turned back at the last moment, and that was how he happened to see it, the image that would forever afterward define this riot in the history of Philadelphia.

  There was a gay man with a feather boa wrapped around his neck, pummeling an angel with his sign, over and over again about the head and shoulders. Another angel, already on the ground, reached up and touched the boa at its lower tip. A second later, the boa exploded in flames, and the gay man was on the ground, his shirt on fire, his pants on fire, his skin turning black in the unnatural light.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jackman said.

  Then he pushed Gregor all the way back into St. Stephen’s foyer and ran out to the aid of the man on fire.

  2

  It took nearly two hours to clear the street. There were too many people injured on the ground to use the tear gas after all. That left nothing but phalanxes of uniformed cops to clear the area, and nobody wanted to leave. For the first half hour, Gregor sat in St. Stephen’s foyer and watched the action. Every once in a while, Dan Burdock—the man in clerical black—would come out to bring in one of the gay men that Jackman had convinced to leave the fray. Most of them were bruised. Many of them were bleeding. Of course, the angels were doing no better.

  Most of them were bruised and bleeding, too, and, unlike their gay opponents, most of them didn’t have sense enough not to fight with the police. Police vans came and went. Gregor found himself surprised that there were that many pairs of handcuffs in the entire city of Philadelphia. The young nun who had been with the young woman at Chickie George’s side came out and tugged him by the sleeve.

  “Mary called from the hospital. I mean she called across the street, and they called me.”

  “And?”

  “Chickie’s going to be all right. He’s got four broken ribs, but it isn’t anything serious. He doesn’t even have a concussion.”

  “What about the man who was set on fire?”

  The young nun looked away. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if she knows about it.”

  Well, Gregor thought. She probably didn’t know about it. It happened after she’d left. Out on the street, all sorts of things seemed to be happening, but none of them made any sense. Some of the angels had never moved from their original positions. They were kneeling on the sidewalk by St. Stephen’s front gate, frozen solid.

  Jackman came in one more time, with one more gay man, and Gregor grabbed him. “Look,” he said. “I can cross the street and do what I came to do. What’s the point of keeping me in here?”

  “How about making sure that none of my officers hits you over the head by accident?”

  “So walk with me.”

  Jackman looked outside. It was no calmer now than it had been a few minutes before, but Gregor didn’t think he had expected it to be. What it really looked like was the night scene in an early Fellini movie. It was full dark, and there were all kinds of lights everywhere: the streetlights, the lights from the churches and the other buildings on the street, the lights the police had put up to “illuminate the area.” In all this artificial light, the battlers looked more animated than real, like the characters in one of those New Age video games where verisimilitude mattered more than plot. Even their bleeding looked fake.

  “All right,” Jackman said.

  Gregor felt him grab him by the arm and tug. He went willingly. He wanted to be out of this foyer, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think he could cross this street at this moment without getting hurt, unless he had some kind of protection. Coming out into the air, he was surprised, again, at just how cold it was. For a while, in the middle of the riot, he hadn’t noticed the cold, only his own fear and the feeling that it would be easy for it to turn to panic. Jackman dragged him across the street to St. Anselm’s front walk. They both said hello to the uniformed patrolman standing there, his entire purpose to keep people out of St. Anselm’s unless they belonged there and could prove it. Up on the steps that led to the front doors, it was quieter. Jackman stopped for a moment and looked back over the scene.

  “What a mess,” he said. “Do you know this is going to be a disaster?”

  “It is a disaster,” Gregor said.

  “For the department. Because you know what’s going to happen. No matter what we do, no matter what happens out here, it’s all going to be our fault. Everything. We didn’t get here fast enough. We got here too fast. We didn’t move in fast enough. We moved in at all. We were unnecessarily rough with … pick your favorite party.”

  “I don’t think it could have been helped,” Gregor said.

  Jackman shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Reason and logic don’t matter. Fairness and truth don’t matter. When the dust clears from this thing, we’re going to be up on the carpet in front of one of those special commissions, and it will be a damned miracle if I don’t lose my job.”

  Gregor would have said something comforting, except that he couldn’t think of anything. It was entirely possible that what Jackman had said was true, and for some reason it was enormously depressing, even more depressing than the scene on the street. He scanned the crowd one more time and found Roy Phipps, standing on the sidelines, dressed in an ordinary business suit and not moving.

  “He doesn’t seem to be taking part in this riot,” Gregor said.

  “He’s a very smart man,” Jackman said sourly. “Thirty demonstrations and six riot situations since he got to Philadelphia, and we haven’t been able to arrest him once. The body is supposed to be in some kind of office annex behind the church. We can go through and out the back.”

  They went through and out the back, moving as quietly as they could, because in spite of what was going on outside, there was a priest at the altar celebrating Mass. Maybe, Gregor thought, it was because of what was going on outside. He wondered where the worshipers had come from. Some of them were nuns, and that was easy enough to understand, but some were ordinary lay people. Gregor couldn’t imagine they’d come through that crowd outside with all the fighting going on, but some of them must have, or else seen the mess in the street and come in by the side. Most of the lay people seemed to be workingmen and women still in working clothes: mechanic’s uniforms, nurse’s uniforms, waitress’s uniforms.

  “Daily communicants,” Jackman said shortly, and Gregor had to remind himself that Jackman’s full name was John Henry Newman Jackman and that he’d been brought up Catholic and educated at Catholic schools. “You’d be surprised how many there still are,�
� he said. “Daily communicants, I mean. People who go to Mass every day and receive Communion every day. You’d think all that would have gone out with Vatican II.”

  They went out the side door near the statue of Mary and into the courtyard. That was lit up, too, but the lights were concentrated on one small place on the first floor of a long, low annex. Behind them, out in the street, a sudden surge of sound rose up and broke and then died abruptly. Jackman ignored it.

  “I can’t know what it was,” he told Gregor. “I don’t even want to speculate. There’s the Cardinal Archbishop.”

  The long low building—me annex, Gregor supposed—was cordoned off, with a uniformed patrolman at the door and a bustle of tech men in white smocks milling around inside. Just outside it, though, there were two low benches, side by side. The Cardinal Archbishop was standing next to one of those, leaning over to talk to Sister Scholastica, who was sitting.

  “The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, Roy Phipps, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, all in one night,” Jackman said. “I ought to be canonized.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” Gregor told him.

  Sister Scholastica caught sight of them and stood up, her veil whipping out behind her as soon as it was free of the bench. “Oh, Gregor, I’m so glad you’re here. I really am. You have no idea—”

  “Mr. Demarkian seems to be working with the police,” the Cardinal Archbishop said stiffly. “Possibly it would be wise if you refrained from making statements until you have an attorney present.”

  “Oh, Your Eminence, don’t be silly. Hello, Mr. Jackman.”

  “Mr. Jackman is the deputy commissioner of police,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

  “I found the body,” Scholastica told Gregor. “Sister Harriet Garrity’s body. She wasn’t, you know, a Sister like me, from my order. She was the parish coordinator. She didn’t wear a habit or anything like that. She didn’t live in a convent.”