“Of course I will, Father.”
“Oh, and while you’re at it, do you think you could call the hospital and find out when they’re going to be letting Chickie out? Aaron thinks we should do something in the way of a homecoming. I think we should have somebody there with a car. Whatever—”
“Mr. George is being released this afternoon,” Mrs. Reed said. “That Miss McAllister from across the street is picking him up. He called this morning to let us know.”
“Oh,” Dan said. He got up and took the cell phone out of its leather case. The leather case was from Coach. It had been a gift, but he couldn’t now remember from whom. “Is Chickie coming here? If he isn’t, do we know when he will come?”
“Miss McAllister is taking him to his apartment so that he can change,” Mrs. Reed said. “Then I believe she’s bringing him here.”
“Right,” Dan said, then he thought: trust Chickie to have made the kind of friend willing to do all that for him. He got the cell phone open and put it to his ear, and then put it down again. There was nothing on it but a dial tone. “I’m going to take this thing and walk,” he said again.
“I’ll put the Cardinal Archbishop through,” Mrs. Reed said.
She went out, and Dan went out after her. She sat down at her desk, and Dan walked past her into the hallway and down the stairs. He was going around to the choir balcony in the church proper, where he had been going on and off all day, compulsively, as if merely being there would somehow straighten out the mess his mind had become. It was beautiful, this church. It had been built to be beautiful, and to show the rest of Philadelphia that the people of this parish were solid. The Anglican Communion was not a Calvinist stronghold, but there had always been a streak of predestination in it. God had His elect, and you could know them by their exalted positions in the community of the people of God.
The cell phone rang in his hand just as he was starting up the stone steps to the balcony. He flipped the switch that put him on just as he was entering the balcony. From where he stood, the church below might have been empty. He got only the soaring height of the ceiling and the gleaming pipes of the organ. He headed toward the railing that would allow him to overlook the church.
“Dan Burdock,” he said.
“Father Burdock.” The Cardinal Archbishop’s voice was unmistakable. If you heard it once, even on television, you knew it forever afterward. “This is Aidan Kennedy.”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” Dan said. “I recognized your voice.”
He also couldn’t imagine anybody calling this man “Aidan.” He got to the very front of the balcony and sat down, so that he could watch everything that was happening in the church. At the moment, nothing much was. There were still a few people left over from the night before, but the wounded had mostly been dispatched to emergency rooms and their own apartments. Aaron was working on collecting bail and fine money in another part of the church complex. The few people who were straggling through were mostly cleaning up. Dan fished around in his trouser pocket for his roll of soft mints, pulled it out, and ate two.
“I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” the Cardinal said. “I suppose it means I should never say anything compromising over a cell phone.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I have a recognizable voice.”
“Oh.” Dan blinked. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I’m very tired at the moment.”
“Yes, I would expect. I shouldn’t think any of us slept very well last night. Has there been any damage done to your church?”
“Physical damage, you mean? Not a thing. They didn’t even knock over the gate, and they’ve done that a couple of times before.”
“There have been riots a couple of times before?”
“No, no,” Dan said. “Not riots. Just demonstrations. That’s what Roy and his people do. They demonstrate. They picket AIDS funerals.”
“Yes, I’ve heard.”
“We have a fair number of AIDS funerals here,” Dan said. “Although not as many as a few years ago, thank God. Sometimes they picket if they think one of the gay men is acting as reader. Sometimes they picket just because they don’t have anything else to do. I don’t know, your Eminence. They’re a fact of life around here.”
There was the sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. Two men had come into the body of the church with rags and spray cans of Pledge and started to polish the pews.
“I wanted you to know,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, “that I’ve spoken to Father Healy, and the pray-in for the conversion of homosexuals has been canceled. Under the circumstances, it seemed to be the only responsible course of action. I didn’t want there to be even the possibility that something we did could set off Mr. Phipps and his, uh, parishioners.”