“That’s right,” Gregor said.
“Good,” the young man said. “We’ve been calling your number for hours. We’re from the Chancery. From the Archbishop’s office?”
“I know what a Chancery is,” Gregor said drily.
“Well, the Archbishop would like to see you,” the young man said. “Right away. He says it’s very urgent.”
“I’m sure it is.”
In fact, Gregor Demarkian was more than sure it was. He would have staked the fate of his immortal soul on it.
With Roman Catholic Archbishops, everything was always urgent.
Chapter 5
1
THE THREE YOUNG MEN in clerical collars did not take Gregor Demarkian to the Chancery, or to the Archbishop’s informal residence out on the Main line, but to St. Elizabeth’s College. Since Gregor had been expecting it, he was neither panicked nor annoyed, only a little curious. Would the Archbishop himself actually be at this meeting? Gregor had only met one Roman Catholic archbishop, John Cardinal O’Bannion, up in Colchester, New York. John was an ex-sailor, an ex-boxer, and an ex-the Lord only knew what else, but considering the difficulty he had remembering not to swear it was probably something interesting. What Gregor had heard about the Archbishop of Philadelphia was very different. What he had seen of him—on television and in the newspapers—was very different, too. Tall, elegant, the product of one of the country’s richest and most socially prominent Irish Catholic families, he had been educated at Groton and Harvard before deciding to enter the seminary. Having decided to enter the seminary, he had been immediately recognized as a young man with extraordinary potential and channeled into the heavier academic tracks. After ordination he had spent a year at a university in Rome, another two years working in the Curia, and another year and a half after that writing a book on canon law. His first Explanation of the Catholic Faith, a catechism for adults, had been published when he was thirty-two. A twenty-fifth edition, with an appendix detailing the intricacies of Vatican II, had been published the year before last. He was a Prince of the Church of the old school, a throwback to the days of the Counterreformation, the kind of Archbishop laypeople automatically thought of whenever a pope died. His name was David Law Kenneally, and from what Gregor had heard he liked being called “Your Eminence” very much. Gregor couldn’t imagine Kenneally in the same room with John Cardinal O’Bannion. It was a stretch imagining those two in the same church.
The car went through the gates of St. Elizabeth’s as Gregor remembered them, but turned off almost immediately in an unfamiliar direction. Gregor looked out the windows and saw lawns covered with nuns. There were nuns everywhere and then more nuns again, as if, just out of his line of sight, they had begun cloning themselves. Gregor wondered if this is what it had been like, back in the days when the Sisters of Divine Grace had had enough vocations to staff a college like St. Elizabeth’s entirely with nuns. He supposed even that had been less disconcerting, because even a staff full of nuns couldn’t create the effect he was now seeing. The black car pulled up in front of a tall building with a discreet carved wooden plaque planted in the ground cover on the lawn in front
CONVENT.
Gregor peered up at the double-doored front entrance to see Sister Scholastica pacing back and forth, her arms folded across her chest under the long black collar of her habit, her veil held to her bright red hair by what seemed to be a single bobby pin. Or maybe nuns didn’t use bobby pins to hold their veils on their heads. Gregor didn’t know. He did know what he meant.
The three young men had not said much on the trip in to St. Elizabeth’s, but they had been unfailingly polite, and they were unfailingly polite now. As soon as the car came to a full stop, the one in the front passenger seat hopped to the curb, grabbed the handle of Gregor’s door and opened it. Then he held out an arm to help Gregor to his feet and didn’t look offended when Gregor didn’t use it. Up at the convent’s front door, Sister Scholastica hesitated, looked hard to make sure she was seeing what she was seeing, and then came down the steps toward them. The young man at the curb asked Gregor if there was anything he could do, shook his head a little when Gregor said there wasn’t, and backed away when Sister Scholastica came striding toward them.
“Gregor,” Sister Scholastica said. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you. You don’t know how happy all of us will be to see you. Especially Sister Agnes Bernadette. She’s been hysterical. And Reverend Mother General. Come with me.”