Glass Houses(8)

“Yes, there are murders here,” Gregor said. “And a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, did try to mention something called Intelligent Design in science classrooms; but virtually all of them were voted out of office at the next election, so that even if the court case hadn’t gone against them they would still have failed in their attempts to change the curriculum. It’s just not as simple as you seem to want to make it out to be.”

“There are places in the United States where they wouldn’t be voted out of office, aren’t there?”

“Yes, I would suppose there are. There are 291 million people in the United States. My guess is that we’ve got some of everything.”

“And religion,” Phillipa said. “There’s a lot of religion. Most Americans are Fundamentalists of one kind or another, aren’t they?”

“Have you met many Fundamentalists?” Gregor asked.

“Well, no, of course not,” Phillipa said. “I mean, you said it yourself. I haven’t been to the more typical places in America, only to the coasts where things are different. I’m talking about the real America now—the Heartland.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘Fundamentalist’?” Tibor asked.

Phillipa Lydgate blinked. “Oh,” she said, “you know. They believe in God. I mean they believe He actually exists.”

Tibor was now beyond upset. Gregor had no idea if Phillipa Lydgate had seen his clerical collar and meant to be offensive, or seen it and thought there was nothing about it to indicate that Tibor might “actually” believe in God. It didn’t really matter because Tibor was going to pop whatever the reason was.

Gregor was desperately thinking of a way to stop him—stopping Tibor when he finally lost control was not easy. In fact, up to now, Gregor had found it impossible—when Donna Moradanyan was suddenly standing by their table, waving her cell phone in the air.

“It’s Russ,” she said, thrusting the phone at Gregor. “He wants to talk to you. He says it’s an emergency.”





TWO


1


Gregor Demarkian liked emergencies. At least he liked emergencies of a certain kind: real emergencies—like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina—were not only godawful but inevitably demoralizing. Not only did they cause real damage, but they left you with the certainty that you were helpless in the face of the real forces of the world. This was why, although he was not himself religious, and couldn’t usually make himself believe in God, he was not dismissive of religious people. The great religions were not fairy tales. They might or might not be true in their particulars, and all of them couldn’t be true at once, but they did provide both coherent narratives that explained the underlying logic of the world and coherent codes of action for living in it. And they mattered, to peoples and to civilizations. They changed the direction of history, even when people weren’t using them as an excuse to fight each other to the death in wars. They changed the direction of individual lives. Not believing didn’t end the wars, and it didn’t end injustice or poverty or superstition either. He was getting to the point where he didn’t much like people who did not believe, or at least the ones who made a great show of their not believing.

Of course, he would never have thought of any of that if it hadn’t been for Bennis and Tibor. Bennis had taught him about narratives because that was what Bennis did. She wrote fantasy novels that he had a hard time understanding, although he liked to read them because she wrote the way she talked. Reading one of Bennis’s novels meant hearing Bennis’s voice in your head. Tibor had taught him about religion and religions. Before Tibor, he had never met a member of the clergy who could talk in more than platitudes. Now he seemed to meet them all the time. Between the two of them, they had taught him about emergencies, about the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t. It made him think of himself when he had first been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, only three years out of graduate school, sitting in a car at the end of a cul-de-sac on kidnapping detail. In the days when Gregor had first joined the FBI, all new agents were required to have law degrees or accounting degrees. Then when they were trained and hired, they were put on . . . kidnaping detail.

It was a matter of knowing whether something was about to go seriously and irretrievably wrong or not. It was the irretrievably that mattered. If some-body was dead, you couldn’t bring him back to life. If a building blew up, you could put it back together from the rubble. This was not that kind of an emergency. This was somebody panicking, and in a situation that would give many more opportunities of getting itself straightened out.