True Believers(40)

“No,” Scholastica agreed. “You don’t have to like him. I’m just trying to let you know he has his points. The archdiocese settled the lawsuit, and part of the settlement was that a lot of the people involved were either removed from active apostolate or transferred out of the chancery. Not only the priests who did the, uh, the deeds, you know, they went to therapy, and at least one of them went to jail. But other people. People whose only real fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having known what was going on. Secretaries. Schedulers. Of course, the man who was archbishop at the time was long dead. But the old archbishop, the one who came before this one, really couldn’t cope. We thought for a while that the archdiocese was going to collapse, or have to go into some form of bankruptcy. Everything just fell apart. And then he died. And I hate to say it, but it was good for the Church in Philadelphia that he did.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “I’m really not arguing with you. I just find this man cold, and condescending. And I don’t like being condescended to.”

“Nobody does. Will you help us out in spite of that?”

“I’ve promised to.”

“Yes, I know. I was hoping you weren’t just being polite. Father Healy is—well, he’s very young and he’s very conservative and he’s very stiff, but he couldn’t have done anything like this. Believe me.”

“You don’t hold to the theory that any one of us could be a murderer under the right circumstances?”

“The right circumstances in this case would be a fit of rage and a handy mallet. He wouldn’t buy rat poison and plan for days.” Scholastica cocked her head. “Do you believe it? That all of us could be murderers if we met the right circumstances?”

“The fit of rage and mallet kind of murderers, yes,” Gregor said. “The other kind, no. It takes a peculiar kind of personality to plan a death, or several.”

“I think calling it ‘peculiar’ would be something of an understatement.” Scholastica looked around. “I really do have to get back to school. I’ve left Peter Rose in my place, and she’ll be all right for a while, but she’s still very flighty in some ways. She was on my teaching staff in Colchester when, you know, when we met. She was just out of the novitiate. She drove me to distraction.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“It surely has. Do you want to share a cab? In the old days, nuns were expected to take public transportation, but His Eminence must have considered this a special occasion. He gave me money for a cab.”

“Then you use it,” Gregor said. “I want to walk around for a while and think.”

Scholastica looked dubiously up and down the street, at the neighborhood, at the weather. “Well, if you want to,” she said.

There was a cab coming just then, and Gregor waved it down. “It will be fine,” he said. “I’ll help out. I’ll go see Father Healy this afternoon. Don’t worry so much about everything. It doesn’t matter what I think about the Cardinal Archbishop.”

“He’s one of those people,” Scholastica said, settling on the cab’s backseat. “You always want to give him his full title.”

He was one of those people who seemed to have been born with their full titles, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say it, and a moment later the cab had pulled away from the curb and Scholastica was gone. Gregor turned around and around on the sidewalk, as if, by spinning very slowly, he could confuse his own mind about what he had known he was going to do from the moment he had first entered this neighborhood. Then, when that didn’t work, he crossed the street at the light and made his way to the cathedral’s front steps.

Once, about a year ago, Bennis had taken him to Sacre Coeur in Paris. The Church of the Sacred Heart. It sat high on the top of a hill above Montmartre, as white as powdered sugar, as if it had been bleached. To get to it, you had to climb the hill and then a steep flight of wide white steps, to go up and up, up and up, until even athletes in perfect shape began to find it hard to breathe. Gregor had thought at the time that there was something to this. If God was supposed to be up there, somewhere, then it made sense to make people climb to get to him. Bennis had only wanted to buy a small crystal rosary in the gift shop, where they had special ones made and blessed at that church. She had climbed without thinking about it, and without being affected by the atmosphere of the place, one way or the other. Where Gregor was caught by moods and mysteries, Bennis was a blank. When she had discovered, later, that there was an alternate route around the back that required no climbing at all, she had been furious.