True Believers(36)
Gregor cocked his head. “Don’t tell me it turns out not to have been a suicide? I thought it was witnessed by all kinds of people—”
“Oh, it was. By Peter Rose, for one. And Father Healy. As well as by a whole lot of homeless people who were sleeping in the church. Father Healy lets them sleep in the church. The Cardinal isn’t sure that he likes the idea. No. Marty Kelly committed suicide. It isn’t about Marty. It’s about Bernadette.”
“Bernadette?”
“His wife. He brought her dead body to the church. She was a diabetic, one of those ones where the disease seems impossible to control. Anyway, he was at work one day and she went into a diabetic coma at home and died. And he—I don’t know all the details, Gregor, it’s very complicated. But to make it short, he brought her body to the church. And he went into the sacristy, to the changing room where the priests robe for Mass, I think because he knew that nobody would be in there until right before seven. And he wrote a suicide note. And then he came out and put her body in front of the altar and, well, you know.”
“All right.” Gregor’s coffee was still too hot for him to drink comfortably. Scholastica seemed to be drinking hers without noticing how hot it was. “So, there was his wife, Bernadette. Kelly?”
“Right.”
“And?”
Scholastica put her hand up to the crown of her veil and tried to adjust it. With these new veils, there was always a little hair showing at the front, and a stiff half-moon at the crown that was almost like a linen tiara. Scholastica’s efforts to put the thing right only made the mess her hair was in even worse. She put her hands down on the table.
“The medical examiner’s office is going to have a press conference today and announce the results of the autopsies. The Cardinal has managed to acquire an advance copy of the autopsy report.”
“Ah. And?”
“Bernadette Kelly didn’t die in a diabetic coma. She died of arsenic. A lot of arsenic. And what’s almost more important, it’s nearly certain that Marty couldn’t have given it to her.”
Gregor slapped his hand against the table. “They can’t possibly know that. Not unless they can pin this man down with certainty at least for several hours, and even then—”
“They can pin him down with certainty. Look, Gregor, it’s not just Bernadette, either. It’s—I really can’t go into all this now. You have no idea. I talked to Father Healy and Father Healy talked to the Cardinal. The Cardinal wants to know if you’d be willing to come down to his office as soon as you can get there.”
“Now?”
“Now. Gregor, please believe me. You have no idea how bad this is. That’s why I came instead of the Cardinal calling you. He doesn’t even want the chance of somebody finding out in advance that he’s consulted you. And under the circumstances, I don’t blame him. Will you come?”
“Of course I’ll come,” Gregor said, and then his eye was caught by Tommy Moradanyan, standing on the book seat at Sister Peter Rose’s back in such a way that her veil cascaded over him, hiding him completely.
It wasn’t really relevant at the moment, but Gregor disliked the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia almost as much as he disliked the mayor.
TWO
1
Like many other people, Gregor Demarkian had long had a love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church. The love was an acknowledgment of cultural achievement. Michelangelo and Bach, Hildegarde von Bingen and Teresa of Avila—it was impossible not to notice that the institution that still called itself Holy Mother Church had been mother to men and women of great talent, integrity, and intelligence over the course of twenty centuries, and still was. Gregor had seen those critiques of religion put out by the various “skeptical” societies that had sprung up over the last twenty years, claiming that all religion was a delusion and all religious people were addle-headed idiots who only believed out of a craven and atavistic fear of hell, but then the people who wrote the critiques seemed to him to be more than a little addle-headed themselves. If you didn’t have an axe to grind, you had to accept it. Catholic art, Catholic music, Catholic literature, Catholic philosophy, Catholic architecture: you could go for years studying nothing else, and always be in the company of the best the human mind could produce. It even worked when you were in the presence of imitations, as he was now, walking through the high-ceilinged halls of the archdiocesan chancery. The pictures on the walls were reproductions, but they were good reproductions of good art. The almost-not-audible polyphonic chant was coming from a CD player and not from monks praying as they walked, but it was soothing to listen to. In the days of the old Cardinal Archbishop, Gregor would have been happy to be where he was. He had enjoyed the chancery then, even though he had never been in it except to discuss a problem, potential or actual. When his interviews were over, he would go downstairs and across the way to the cathedral and sit in a pew in the back for a while. In the late afternoon, this was usually safe. No Masses were being said. He hadn’t wanted to attend a religious service. He liked to watch the changes in himself, the way the place and the quietness of it rocked against the bleakness of his agnosticism. He had felt the same thing when Bennis had taken him to the Cathedral de Notre Dame in Paris, except that the experience had been even stronger. If there was any sense to the phrase “to wake the dead,” this was it. In Notre Dame, especially, Gregor had felt as if he were in the presence of centuries of souls, all still alive, all still alive, all just out of sight—and all, of course, as thoroughly convinced of the reality of God as he was of the impossibility of knowing anything about Him. Gregor sometimes wondered if this would have been different if he had been brought up a Catholic instead of in the Armenian Church. Much as he loved Father Tibor, the services at Holy Trinity, and even Holy Trinity itself, left him cold. He would never in his life be able to shake his childhood conviction that all things connected to it were foreign, and un-American, and second-rate. He supposed Catholics felt that way, too, about Catholicism, if that was what they were brought up with—but not all Catholics, obviously, since Sister Scholastica had both been born one and become a nun.