True Believers(154)

“Your Eminence?” Father Doheny asked anxiously, hurrying around from the street side. “What’s going on here? This looks like the start of another riot.”

“It is. It’s my personal riot Mine and Father Burdock’s.”

“Your Eminence—”

“Don’t worry,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “The police are already here.”

It was true, too. The police were already there. The Cardinal Archbishop could see them, lined up on either sidewalk but standing well back so that they didn’t become too obvious either to the television cameras or the crowd. There was a crowd, too, just building up, coming from both the St. Anselm’s side and the St. Stephen’s side of the street. The Cardinal Archbishop looked down the street, but everything at the other end seemed to be quiet and dark.

“I only hope Father Burdock and his people did their part,” he said. “We’re going to look pretty silly if we’ve gone to all this trouble and they’re not at home.”

“Your Eminence—” Father Doheny said again.

The Cardinal Archbishop walked away without listening to the rest of what Father Doheny had to say, mostly because he had already said it himself to himself several times over the past few days since the riot. He walked across the street to St. Anselm’s and mounted the steps. He should have brought a censer to waft incense at the crowd. He could hardly believe he’d been so stupid as to forget it. He got to the top step in front of St. Anselm’s front doors and held his hands out at shoulder height.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen,” he said, in the loudest voice he had, which was very loud. He had a good deep bass when he wanted to use it.

In front of him, the crowd calmed down. The nuns fell into ranks and repeated the Latin to him. People began spilling out of St. Stephen’s Church. Some of them sat down on the frozen sidewalk to listen.

“Pater Noster,” the Cardinal Archbishop started, and after that it was a piece of cake. He was old enough to have been taught all these prayers in Latin as a child. He had been trained as a priest in the days when speaking Latin was expected of everyone who took Holy Orders. The words rolled out of his throat the way thunder rolled out of a valley before a storm.

Over on the other side of the street, the doors to St. Stephen’s opened one more time and Dan Burdock came out, looking far less impressive in green-and-gold vestments than he might have—but then, the Cardinal thought, even High Church Episcopalian wasn’t as high church as Rome was on an off day.

Since the Pater Noster was over, the Cardinal Archbishop started in on the Ave Maria.





2


For a long time after the Cardinal Archbishop arrived on Baldwin Place, Dan Burdock had stayed inside his own church, his hands resting on the green-embroidered cassock he had made up his mind to wear, hesitating. He had not been surprised, and he had thought he should not be afraid. This was what his meeting with the Cardinal Archbishop had been about, and as he watched men stream out of St. Stephen’s front doors into the street, he thought that he ought to be glad of it. God only knew, the men were glad of it. Aaron was nearly euphoric. Dan had been careful about security, as the Cardinal Archbishop had been careful. He had called the men he needed and told them it was urgent, but he had not told them why. Given the events of the last few days—maybe even of the last few months—they had all assumed the emergency had something to do with Roy Phipps, and they had not been wrong. What Dan had not done was call his own bishop. His bishop was a gentle, wise, intelligent man who believed more of the Christmas story than Bishop Spong, but he was essentially cautious. He would worry, as Dan had worried, about what would happen if something went wrong. Then, looking out on the street at the crowd swelling slowly and relentlessly, Dan realized that, of course, something was going to go wrong. The Cardinal Archbishop had always expected that something would go wrong. He was not afraid of what the wrongness would bring, or what it would mean, or how he would look tomorrow morning on the front page of the Inquirer. That was when Dan had finished up dressing in his silly ritual clothes. They weren’t even the right ritual clothes. Episcopalians didn’t have pompous costumes for everyday life. He’d had to put on Mass vestments, although he was sure there was some rule telling him he couldn’t. Even so, he could see the Cardinal Archbishop’s point. The brighter their clothes, the more easily they would be seen on television.

Dan finished dressing and went out to the front steps of the church. Aaron was there, hopping from one foot to another, hard-pressed not to double over, he was laughing so hard.