True Believers(169)

Dan looked down at his hands and saw that he was holding one of his tubes of soft mints and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. He put it in his pants pocket without taking one, then went out the door and down the stone steps to the hall beside the church. When he got to the first floor, he stopped and opened the arched door into the church proper. There were a lot of people in there now, because the march and the exorcism had worked them up, and they didn’t want to leave. Dan saw Chickie George and Mary McAllister, sitting in a pew in the back and looking over something they had laid down on the seat between them. There had been rumors all day that Mary was going to enter the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace at the end of the college term. Maybe she had brochures or something to show Chickie. Did convents put out brochures? Dan had no idea. He looked around the church a little longer and found Aaron and Marc, sitting with two men who were unfamiliar to him. Maybe that would be the best man and the man of honor, if that’s what they were going to call it, when the wedding finally happened. Dan knew that the wedding would finally happen, even if the bishop had apoplexy and the papers screamed for weeks. That was what he was doing here. That was why he had been sent here, and no matter how hard he had tried to be prudent over the years, he had always known it. Now he only wanted to make sure that the church would survive no matter what he did—the church was a small “c,” not the one with the large “C”; St. Stephen’s, not the Anglican Communion  .

He drew his head out of the doorway and closed the door as quickly as he could against the air lock. He went down the hall and then out the door there to the foyer. The foyer was full of people, too, but they were either people he didn’t know well or didn’t know at all. He went out the front doors onto the street and found that far less was happening there. The homeless people were coming into St. Anselm’s. Mary McAllister would have work to do in a little while. Dan saw an old woman with her brown paper shopping bags on a wheeled rack that she pulled behind her, like one of those luggage carts people had in airports. He wondered how she’d managed to get together the money to get it.

He was just coming out of St. Stephen’s front gate and onto the public sidewalk itself when the police cars began arriving farther down the street, and the ambulance came around the corner and stopped there, too. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that the traffic must be for Roy or one of Roy’s people, before he realized that the vehicles were much too close. It wasn’t Roy’s church they were stopping at, but one of the ordinary town houses on the street. They weren’t making all that much fuss, either. None of them had sirens blaring, and except for the fact that one of the police cars was pulsing its red-and-blue top lights, they might have been ordinary cars arriving for an ordinary party. Then an ordinary car did arrive, and Dan recognized Gregor Demarkian being helped out of it. He walked down the block until he was directly across the street from the action. The police had left the town house’s front door open, but looking inside it, Dan couldn’t see anything but a coat tree and a small framed picture whose content he was too far away to make out.

People went in and out, in and out. Dan looked up the street and saw that the door to Roy’s church was open and that Roy himself had come out, alone, to check out the situation. Dan didn’t think he’d ever seen Roy alone anywhere near the town house. The “church” seemed to have something going on every minute of every day and night. Dan walked up the sidewalk until he was standing directly across the street from Roy, and waved.

“The view is better from over here,” he said, loudly enough so that he knew he had been heard.

Roy looked at him for a moment, and then at the police cars and the ambulance. Then he crossed the road in the middle of the block. If this were an ironic movie, something Swedish or Italian, a car would have come out of nowhere and run him down.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Roy asked, when he was safely on the sidewalk.

“I don’t even know whose house it is,” Dan said. “There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of an emergency, though. No sirens. No hurry. Gregor Demarkian is here.”

“Is he? That’s Edith Lawton’s house. Edith Lawton the atheist.”

“You mean like John Paul, the Pope? I didn’t know atheist was a job description.”

“In her case it is. She writes for atheist magazines.”

“Roy—”

“Give me some credit, for God’s sake. I mean atheist magazines, magazines about atheism. She writes for them. She also sleeps with her lawyer.”