True Believers(23)

“Marvelous,” Harriet said. “The dead hand of the patriarchy strikes again.”

“If the dead hand of the patriarchy had been running things around here, you would have been out on your ass years ago. Go buy a veil. Don’t think I’m bluffing.”

There was a sound from inside the main body of the church, and they both turned. It was not repeated. Probably, Harriet thought, one of the homeless people was having a nightmare. She was feeling a little breathless. People did not talk to her this way. Not even the Cardinal Archbishop talked to her this way.

“Excuse me,” Father Healy said. “I’d better go find out what’s going on.”

If she excused him, it was silently. She had no idea what it was she was supposed to say. She looked back at St. Stephen’s and saw that there were now people in the lit-up entryway, Mary McAllister and the most startlingly beautiful man Harriet had ever seen. She had seen him before, she knew, but she didn’t know his name. Mary McAllister was holding his hand, even though there was no way in hell he could be anything but gay.

Underneath her, in the basement, there was noise. The sisters had finished their Office and come over to the church. Their voices were muted and giggly. Harriet was suddenly feeling very high, almost as if she’d taken a lungful of laughing gas.

She had nothing to be afraid of. She really didn’t. She had been waiting for this for years, and expecting it. She just hadn’t recognized it when it first showed up. She was finally going to get what she had always wanted, and when she had it, she was going to be invincible.

There was only one way to gain real authority in the Church, and that was to be martyred for the faith.




9

Bennis Hannaford did not think of herself as someone who had quit smoking, even though it was three months since she’d given up cigarettes. Instead, she thought of herself as someone who was being required not to smoke, both by the person she loved most (Gregor Demarkian) and by her doctor, who seemed to think that she had to either get rid of the coffin nails or die. Coffin nails. It was quarter to six in the morning, and she had spent almost all of the night wide-awake and thinking about death. There was a lot of death to think about. On her desk in her spare bedroom, she had the scribbled message she’d taken when Chickie George had called to tell her about Scott Boardman’s funeral. Scott was a man she had known only slightly, because he did graphic design work for her publisher and they ran into each other at parties in New York, but Chickie she knew very well. Chickie was one of those people who exist in every city, the people who know everybody of any importance without being in any way important themselves. She also liked Chickie, which was more to the point. She got a little uncomfortable with his act every once in a while—was it really necessary for anybody to be that much of a flaming queen?—but he meant well, and there was no malice in him, which was more than she could say for a good many of the straight people she knew. In this case, he also had a point. St. Stephen’s was right there on that same street as Roy Phipps’s Full Gospel Independent Baptist Church. Roy Phipps’s people were always picketing funerals.

“We need all the help we can get,” Chickie had said when he’d called. “We need as big a presence as possible. We can’t let them outnumber us at Scott’s funeral.”

Bennis thought it was very unlikely that Roy Phipps could get enough people together to outnumber the men who would be at Scott Boardman’s funeral even without Chickie’s efforts at organization, but she had agreed to come, and she still thought it had been the right thing to do. The only problem was that she was going to show up so tired, she would barely be able to see. It might even make sense for once to give in and take public transportation. It might make more sense to get some sleep, but at the moment it was impossible. There was more than the message she’d taken from Chickie’s call lying on her desk. There was also the formal invitation to her own sister’s execution, last scheduled for November and then delayed three more times for a month at a shot.

“It won’t be delayed again,” Gregor had warned her, when the invitation came. “The governor is fed up, and there isn’t a lot more room to move. And she doesn’t have the attractiveness factor. Not that a woman’s attractiveness counts as much as it used to in these things. It didn’t count at all for Karla Faye Tucker.”

No, Bennis thought, Anne Marie was nowhere near as attractive as Karla Faye Tucker. If she had been, she might not be in the mess she was in to begin with. Bennis reached to the side table automatically, expecting to find her pack of cigarettes and her Bic plastic lighter, but they weren’t there. Then she looked over at Gregor Demarkian and got out of bed. He looked so peaceful when he was sleeping, and he slept so much. Bennis could barely get five hours a night without feeling awful. Gregor could get five hours in the afternoon when he was supposed to be watching football, and once he conked out, it was worth your life to wake him before he wanted to be woken. A freight train could drive across the ceiling, blowing its whistle at full power, and all he would do was turn over and mutter something incoherent about how somebody ought to get the cows off the tracks.