Murder Superior(36)

Mostly, Gregor Demarkian thought of churches as cultural institutions, like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. He didn’t know enough about faith to comment on it one way or another, but he could see the way Holy Trinity operated on Cavanaugh Street, the way it made it easy for everybody around it to organize their lives, and he understood the need for something like that. He didn’t know if Catholics felt the same way about the Catholic Church. He expected it was a bit more complicated, since ex-Catholics were often so obsessional about what had made them leave. He had noticed, however, that comparing the Catholic Church with the Boy Scouts was ludicrous. The Pentagon, that you could compare it with. Or the State Services Apparatus of the Soviet union   before the fall. Malachi Martin’s International Conspiracy of Everything would be good, too. Gregor meant no disrespect for the Catholic Church. On an organizational level, he thought it was a marvel. It was just that he didn’t understand how a bureaucracy that big managed to stay in operation for as long as this one had without strangling itself.

One of the ways it had done that was by making sure its coordinate parts were as supremely efficient as the central government was reputed to be confused. Gregor Demarkian had heard monologues without end on just how chaotic the Vatican was. Father Tiber’s friend Father Ryan couldn’t make himself stop once he got started. “Just try to get a request processed through Rome,” Father Ryan would say, his eyes beginning to gleam. “Just try it. If it isn’t an ordinary annulment appeal or a request for six copies of an encyclical from the publications office, do you know what you get? Forms! That’s what you get. Forms!”

Gregor was sure Father Ryan got a lot of forms, but he never had to deal with the Vatican. The Catholic officials he did deal with were priests, bishops, and women religious. They not only did not pass out forms, they took to the field like generals promoted from the ranks who didn’t know how to conduct a war without the smell of gunpowder in their noses. It was into this operational mode Gregor saw Reverend Mother General and her Sisters go, after Nancy Hare upended the vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. They went into it instantaneously, and with a precision Gregor would have been surprised to see in a cadre of veteran Bureau agents who had been working together for years. Gregor had seen SWAT teams that worked this well together, once or twice. He had seen an elite unit of the Israeli Army that could do it every time. That these women could do it when they hadn’t seen each other for months and only handled a crisis of this sort once every two or three years, astounded him.

“It’s because religious obedience is absolute,” Reverend Mother General had told him, the one time before this he’d seen such an operation.

Sister Scholastica had demurred. “It’s because not one of us wants to mess up and have Reverend Mother mad at us. Not even for one single minute.”

In the long moment after Nancy Hare proclaimed Mother Mary Bellarmine a bitch, Reverend Mother General did not look angry. She did not look surprised, either. She simply stepped into the middle of the receiving line, raised her hand, nodded her head, and watched her Sisters go into action.

The Sister who grabbed Nancy Hare was not one Gregor knew. She was tall and broad and athletic in a way that reminded Gregor of girls’ high-school gym teachers, and she got Nancy by the shoulders and out of the way in no time at all. Nancy ended up looking more confused than alarmed at being manhandled. She had still been holding the vase when Sister pushed her against the far wall. The movement made her addled and she lost her grip on it. Stoneware isn’t china, but if it hits marble from a sufficient height it will shatter. The Sister dived for it and caught it in mid-flight in one hand, keeping Nancy immobile with the other. On the other side of the room, a nun Gregor did know—Sister Mary Alice, Mistress of Novices, whom he’d met in Maryville—was fussing around Mother Mary Bellarmine in that brisk and determined way elementary-school teachers use to calm small boys. Sister Mary Alice didn’t look like she much liked doing it, but she did seem to be good at it. Mother Mary Bellarmine’s veil was soaked through, and there were trickles of green-tinged water running down her face. The veil had prevented much damage to the rest of her habit. Gregor edged closer in the crowd to get a better look. The modified habit of the Sisters of Divine Grace consisted of the veil—it went over the ears and fastened at the back of the neck—and a long black dress that covered the calf but didn’t reach the floor, and a long garment called a scapular. The scapular was a long piece of black cloth with a hole in the middle for the head to go through, that hung front and back from the shoulders to the hem of the habit’s dress. There was some religious significance to the scapular. It had something to do with Saint Simon Stock and the Carmelite Order and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the way practically everything in the Catholic Church had to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Scholastica had told Gregor about it during the long days they had spent at the Maryville Police Department, doing their parts to straighten out the mess that results in the aftermath of any murder, no matter how successfully solved. Gregor couldn’t remember the explanation, but he did remember most of the rest of that conversation, and that had been about just how important the scapular was as part of the habit.