True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  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, b
ut 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.

  3

  In the back of the crowd, so far back that she found it difficult to hear exactly what the Cardinal Archbishop was saying, Mary McAllister was holding on to Chickie George’s arm. Chickie was so excited, he looked feverish, feverish and triumphant, as if he were liable to explode at any moment. It didn’t help that he was not well, or that he was solving his problems—Mary was sure—by taking double the prescribed amount of his pain medications. It didn’t help that it was so cold out here and he was wearing nothing but a cashmere sweater over a thin cotton shirt over good wool pants. Why was it impossible to get Chickie to take care of himself? Why was it impossible to get him to wear a coat?

  “Listen,” she said, tugging desperately at his arm. “Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—”

  “Who would have believed it?” Chickie demanded—and it wasn’t in that high-queen voice of his, either. Mary bit her lip. “The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia. The old son of a bitch. On our side.”

  “Oh, no,” Mary said. “I mean, I don’t think—”

  “I don’t either,” Chickie said shortly. “I know the old fart will be back on television tomorrow talking about how gay sex is objectively evil or whatever it is he says. That’s not what I mean. Listen to him. Listen to him. Old Roy is going to bust a gut.”

  “Please listen,” Mary said, trying to brush hair out of her face faster than the wind was brushing it in. Roy Phipps had tried to go back into his house, but the door was blocked behind him. Two of the men from St. Stephen’s had come up and got in his way. Chickie never used phrases like “bust a gut.”

  “Listen,” she said again. “There’s something I have to tell you. I should have told you before. I’m—I mean, you know, at the end of the school year—I’m going to go into the convent. Into the Sisters of Divine Grace convent. In New York. I mean, I talked to Sister Scholastica, and she said—”

  “I know,” Chickie said.

  “What?” Mary said.

  “I know,” Chickie said again. “I’ve known for a year. Haven’t you known?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was obvious to everybody who cares about you. Which just goes to show that that idiot boyfriend of yours didn’t give a damn about anything but getting in your pants, which I sincerely hope you haven’t allowed him to do, because he isn’t worth it and—”

  “Chickie.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “No,” Chickie said. “I don’t mind. If you invite me, I’ll come up for that ceremony they have where they put the veil on your head. You know. I won’t even, ah, be too obvious about, ah, things.”

  “Be as obvious as you like. Just be yourself.”

  “Right,” Chickie said.

  Mary looked up at the town house again. The Cardinal Archbishop was still intoning in Latin. The words seemed to go on and on, and the crowd seemed to know how to answer—but Mary didn’t. She didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on, or why Chickie was so ecstatic. She wrapped her arms around her body and shivered.

  “What’s he doing up there?” she asked. “Is there something in particular that’s supposed to happen?”

  Chickie looked at her with wide eyes, momentarily shocked.

  And then he burst out laughing.

  FIVE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian was in the offices of Brady, Marquis and Holden when news of the exorcism came, sitting in a large and expensively outfitted conference room with both Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani, a junior partner, and Delmark Marquis himself. The news was brought by a secretary who was running when she came, but Gregor was only momentarily surprised about that. Surely there were radios in these offices, and even small television sets, that belonged to the support staff and that were kept running, surreptitiously, throughout the day. Even more likely, everybody, senior as well as junior, management as well as staff, had computers that were plugged into the Internet for e-mail purposes. One way or the other, the news was out. Delmark Marquis demanded that the conference room’s own television be taken out of the carved mahogany cupboard where it was hidden when it wasn’t needed and turned on to the station that promised the most extensive coverage. How he knew which station this would be was anybody’s guess. Gregor sat back and watched the set and the room together. He was neither surprised nor particularly upset. He had gotten past his simple personal distaste for the Cardinal Archbishop. Now he thought that the man was—complicated—to say the least, and where he wasn’t complicated he might be unusual. But watching him on the screen, making the sign of the cross over Roy Phipps’s balding head, Gregor still didn’t much like him.

  Delmark Marquis was a small, round, neat man in the kind of suit that would have looked better on somebody who was tall and thin. It was so expensive, though, that it didn’t look ugly even on him. He raced back and forth in front of the television set, clapping his hands together in front of his face like a kindergarten teacher calling her class to order.

  “This is extraordinary,” he kept saying. “Extraordinary. What does this man think he’s doing? What can he possibly imagine is the advantage of this sort of behavior? I know it’s the fashion these days to deplore the inadequacies of the old archbishop, but at least that man had a sense of decorum. A sense of dignity. He would never have gone in for—something like this.”

  Lou Emiliani had gone out as soon as he had heard about what was happening on Baldwin Place. Now he came back in, looking relieved. “I called the precinct,” he said. “There’s no problem. No fights. No vandalism. They’re all just out there praying.’

  “Which means, of course, we won’t be able to say anything about it.” Delmark Marquis made a face. “You can’t complain about a Cardinal Archbishop wanting to pray, now can you? Not even if it’s right out loud and right in public. That man has been nothing but a problem since he came to the city of Philadelphia. Nothing. What the Vatican was thinking is beyond my comprehension.”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said politely, “we could go back to these records for a moment. I’d like to get some sense of what happened here, and how much money was involved—”

  “I thought I told you.” Delmark Marquis stiffened. “We can’t possibly know the answers to those questions until we’ve done a thorough investigation. And it’s going to take weeks. You can’t expect us to simply jump in and make speculations about a client’s affairs without—”

  “The client has given his permission,” Gregor said.

  Delmark Marquis made another face. “Ah, yes. Right off the cuff. Just like that. The man has gone off his head. He thinks it’s Christmas morning, and this is Jerusalem. I detest dealing with religious people. I really do. They have no sense. They’re always abandoning prudence for purity, and all purity ever gets them is trouble.”

  “There they go,” Garry Mansfield said. “They’re marching back down the street. Look, there’s Roy Phipps. He looks like he ate a lemon.”

  “Quite,” Delmark Marquis said.

  Gregor looked down at the papers on the table in front of him. They were only his notes, not official documents, but they contained as much information as he needed for his purposes, if he could only get Marquis to answer questions instead of having fit
s. It was going to take weeks to get hold of the official documents, even with the Cardinal Archbishop authorizing their release, but Gregor thought he could manage to get enough of what he needed for his purposes, if only he could keep Delmark Marquis on topic.

  “Mr. Marquis,” he said. “Try to concentrate. We have four people dead, that we know of—”

  “That you know of? What in the name of God do you think you’re dealing with? This is beginning to sound like a slasher movie.”

  “We have four people dead that we know of,” Gregor repeated. “The one solid motive we have in any of this is the payments being made by the archdiocese to this office, so that this office may disburse those payments to the litigants in the civil suit in which several priests of this archdiocese were accused of sexually molesting several young boys in the 1960s—”

  “I know what the case was about, Mr. Demarkian.” Delmark Marquis sniffed. “I’ve been at this firm for thirty years. I was one of the founding partners.”

  “I just wanted to make sure we were clear.”

  “Of course we’re clear. We’ve been clear since you got here. I am trying to be cooperative, Mr. Demarkian, but as far as I’m concerned you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ian Holden may be a thief—I suppose it’s hard not to think of him as anything else, under the circumstances—but if the same person killed all four of those people, then Ian Holden isn’t a murderer, and that takes care of that.”

  “That’s assuming you’re right,” Garry Mansfield put in quickly. “You don’t know that he was in court the entire day Harriet Garrity died. He could have said he was but—”