He turned back to the door, pressed the bell again, and blew a long stream of white breath into the air. He wanted a great big Easter basket full of jelly beans and marshmallow eggs and chocolate Easter bunnies. He wanted a steak and a lobster and a lot of cholesterol-loaded butter. He wanted anything, in fact, except to have to go on dealing with these people in this place.
The Cardinal was a tyrant. The Colchester Police Department could have been an invention of Mr. Mack Sennet, except that it wasn’t funny. The Colchester climate made Philadelphia’s worst days look warm.
It was all too much.
[2]
Father Tom Dolan answered the door in the daze of a man who has been interrupted at just the wrong point in the sleep cycle. His eyes were glazed and rimmed with red. His skin was so white it made his dark brown hair look black. He should have been a mess, and in a way he was. His rough brown Franciscan habit looked neat enough, until you realized it was supposed to have included a cowl. Then the tabs of cloth meant to be used to pin the cowl down seemed to leap up from the base of his neck and hit him in the chin with every breath. His mass of hair, untonsured—was Gregor wrong to think a branch of the Franciscans still committed to habits would also still be committed to tonsure?—had been combed the wrong way, against a good cut. It hung jaggedly along the bottom of his skull. Looking through the glassed top half of the door, Gregor wished he could see Dolan’s feet. Weren’t monks in habit supposed to wear sandals? Tom Dolan was not the sort of man who would have looked natural in sandals under any circumstances.
Tom Dolan was throwing the bolts in the Chancery’s front door, one by one, making sharp clicks that told Gregor the bolts were expensive ones, bought with an eye to real security. To Gregor, they seemed as out of place as Tom Dolan in a habit—fundamentally wrong, like a Mr. Coffee machine on a table set with a Georgian tea service. He wondered what the Chancery thought it was protecting itself from.
Finally, Dolan got the bolts thrown—he had been fumbling, as if he couldn’t get his fingers working right—and the door open. He stepped back to let Gregor in and then stepped forward again to rethrow the bolts. With the Chancery due to open for business in an hour, Gregor thought it was a waste of effort.
Dolan must have heard him thinking. He said, “I have to lock up again, because if Sister gets here and finds the bolts thrown she’s supposed to call immediately for the police. And I can’t get to Sister to explain.”
“Sister doesn’t live in the Chancery?”
It was a monumentally stupid question, but Tom Dolan didn’t notice. “No nuns live in the Chancery,” he said, “only priests in a rectory wing on the other side. But that isn’t the problem. If she was a normal nun, I could just call her up and tell her what I’ve been doing.”
“What is she if she’s not a normal nun?”
“Primitive Observance,” Tom Dolan said grimly.
The bolts were all thrown and snug. Tom Dolan looked them over one more time anyway, then patted them, as if they were sentient and he had to coax them to behave. Then he looked around the foyer and shook his head.
“It all got done,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Half an hour before Mass last night, I looked around and thought, this is it, we’re finally going to blow it, and in a Cathedral, for Heaven’s sake. In a Cathedral. I was ready to shoot myself.”
“I think you’re overtired,” Gregor said.
“Oh, I know I’m overtired.” Dolan tried on a smile, failed with it, and gave it up. “The problem is, it doesn’t matter if I’m overtired. It’s all got to be done. Like the statues, for instance.”
Dolan waved his hand in the air, and Gregor took a look around the foyer. He hadn’t paid any attention to it before, because it was very hard to see, nothing more than a square box of shadows. There was only one light burning, and that was more properly in the hall that led off to the right than in the foyer. Now Gregor looked around and saw that some of the “shadows” weren’t shadows at all, but large bulky figures covered with black cloth.
“It’s all got to be covered up, you see,” Dolan said. “All the statues and all the crucifixes and the paintings, too. Unless it can be removed, and then we do that. Usually I get set up for it after the Chrism Mass, get the shrouds put out and that sort of thing, but yesterday it was just impossible. The Chrism Mass was late, and then the police—”
“Doesn’t the Cardinal give you anyone to help with all this?”
Dolan looked surprised. “Of course he does. I have nuns and seminarians. But they have their schedules, too, Mr. Demarkian. Holy Thursday—”