Now it was nearly nine o’clock, and the street was something like quiet. Roy had been standing at the windows of his office for nearly an hour, doing nothing. Sometime ago, a noise that sounded like a shot had come from the general direction of the house belonging to the atheist Edith Lawton, but it had probably been some kind of illusion. Roy had sent Fred up to check, and Fred had seen nothing worth reporting. Somebody was moving around in the kitchen, but he couldn’t tell who. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was screaming. Maybe it was a premonition. The atheist Edith Lawton was also the whore Edith Lawton. Her fancy man had come to visit hours before. His car was still parked in the street. Maybe the atheist Will Lawton would come home and find them together and shoot them both. For some reason, the thought of that made Roy feel extremely pleased, as if some part of his life had been vindicated.
Around him, the town-house church was quiet. Fred was leading a Bible study in the living room, but other than that there wasn’t anything going on for the rest of the evening. Roy sometimes stopped in to the Bible study meetings to straighten out whatever mess they’d gotten themselves into. They read the King James, because they believed that was the only true version, but then they stumbled on the language. Sometimes Roy would read to them from the original Hebrew or Greek, and they would sit solemnly, listening and nodding, as if they understood him. If nothing else proved that it was all magic, that did.
Roy went out into the hall and listened. The living-room door was closed, and all he could hear was the low murmur of hesitation. They were “struggling” with a passage, meaning most probably that they were refusing to accept the plain truth of it. It took a long time to convince people that when God said “hate,” He meant hate, and when He said “kill,” He meant kill. America had been corrupted with the False Christ of compassion and love, as if heaven were supposed to be a vast kindergarten whose denizens could commit no more serious a wrong than running with scissors or drawing on the walls. Calvin had had it right. The vast majority of men were born destined to burn forever in the pit of hell.
Roy went out the front door and down the steps to the street. It was cold, and he wasn’t wearing a coat, but he didn’t particularly mind. He walked up the block until he got to the Lawton house and stopped. Fred was right, for once. There was no sign of anything wrong here. The front of the house was dark. The back of the house was lit up—there were lights on in the kitchen and the sunroom—but there was nothing to see, and no sounds of panic. He walked past and up to the end of the block, where St. Anselm’s was, but there was still a police barrier there. It was set up in such a way that people could enter the church, if they wanted to, and some people were doing just that They looked like the homeless people Father Healy had insisted on allowing to sleep on the pews. Roy himself had no patience with homeless people. If they were mentally ill, they belonged in mental institutions. If they were drunks or drug addicts, they belonged in the gutter. If they were anybody else—but Roy knew all too much about the ones who were anybody else. He had grown up with the ones who were anybody else.
He crossed the street to St Stephen’s and stood for a moment at its front gate, resting his hand for a moment on the wrought-iron railing. Two men came out together and looked him over as they passed, but if they recognized him, they didn’t say anything. Roy went up the walk and into the church, which reminded him eerily of the Princeton University chapel—but then, that made sense, because that was “affiliated” with the Episcopal Church, too. He went through the foyer and into the church and saw that, unlike St. Anselm’s, there were no homeless people here—but then, he thought, there wouldn’t be. It was one of the first things he had ever known about religion, and he had known it all the way back in West Virginia, when he was barely old enough to talk. Churches came and went, but the Episcopal Church was now and always would be the Church of the people who had the most money.
He was just thinking that he ought to go home—he had no idea what he was doing here—when he felt someone at his back and knew, with that same sense that had told him about the murder at St. Anselm’s, who it was. At that moment, he was looking at the gold latticework that framed a picture that had been left on the marble altar, and for a moment he went on looking at it, although he couldn’t make out what the picture was about. Then he straightened his back a little and turned, to see Dan Burdock standing behind him.
“I never understood where Episcopalians got the money for all that gold,” he said pleasantly. “Even in West Virginia, where I grew up, the Episcopalian church was full of gold. And it wasn’t as if anybody there had anything like money.”