“Would screw things up,” Gregor said. He looked around to see if he had said it out loud or not. Nobody was paying any attention to him, so he assumed not. There was a little convenience store at the corner. Gregor stepped inside and bought copies of the Inquirer and the Star. The television news might still be full of the deaths of Marty and Bernadette Kelly, but the papers had drifted off to other things, mostly having to do with Al Gore. Gregor tried, for the ten millionth time, to figure out why that man could make his eyes glaze over just by appearing in a newspaper photograph, but got no better answer than he’d ever had and decided to give it up. The counter in front of the cash register was crowded with candy and Slim Jims. As he folded up his papers, the old man standing next to him began laying out money for lottery tickets: instant tickets, daily tickets, the Pennsylvania Big Game, Powerball. There was at least three hundred dollars in cash on the counter. Gregor could see the holes at the tips of the man’s shoes. He got his papers and got out of there. He wasn’t one of those people who wanted to end all state lotteries as a matter of public morality, left-wing or right. He didn’t think gambling was a tool of the devil, and he didn’t think most people didn’t know what their limit should be. On the other hand, there were other people—He buttoned his coat up to his chin and got out of there.
He walked five more blocks, made a turn, walked five more blocks, and made another turn. By then, he knew where he was going. He could see the church spires rising up over the buildings ahead of him, two of them, next to each other. Of course, they weren’t really next to each other, he reminded himself. They faced each other across a street. It was only from a distance that they looked sort of like twins. No, that wasn’t true either. Even from a distance, he could tell that they weren’t made of the same material. One was that grey stone that seemed to scream “Episcopal Church” all across New England and the mid-Atlantic states, as if the Episcopalians had once owned a monopoly on stone quarries. The other was deep red brick. That was a cliché, too, Gregor thought, the red brick of Catholic churches and schools and convents built at the end of World War I. You could probably write a history of society and immigration in Philadelphia based on something like that, although he had no idea where he would start. His own little corner of immigration history was mostly out of sight, lived by a group of people whose numbers had never become large enough to make an impact on the city.
He turned another corner, and then he was on the right street, only a block away. From this close, the two churches looked huge, imposing, and blank. At this time of the day, they both seemed to be deserted. Gregor looked up at their spires to see if they told the time, and found out they did, but different times. It was either quarter to twelve, or five after. He sighed a little and kept walking, wondering if there was anything to this process of soaking up atmosphere and allowing your intuition to flower. He suspected there wasn’t. He just walked around aimlessly and then, when he was tired of that, he got down to work.
He stopped right in front of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where the glass-framed announcement board hung on a wooden frame at the end of the walk, and looked across the street at St. Anselm’s. That had a glass-framed announcement board hung on a wooden frame, too. He looked at the grey stone walk that led to the church’s grey stone front steps, and then across the street at the ordinary pavement that led to St. Anselm’s brick ones. Both churches had their small patches of front yard framed in wrought iron, though, and both had leaded side windows that came to pointed arches at the top.
“They did it on purpose,” somebody said in his ear.
Gregor turned and found himself faced with the most elegantly good-looking young man he had ever seen, tall, slender, almost perfectly made. For a split second, he thought he was looking at a statue. Then the man’s demeanor changed—Gregor could have sworn it wavered and reconstituted itself in front of his eyes—and suddenly he was all swish and mannerisms, exaggerations and camp. Gregor blinked.
“They did it on purpose,” the man said, his voice now several notches higher than it had been. “The Catholics, I mean. In 1918. This used to be one of the most socially prominent Episcopalian churches in the city, so of course they took the lot over there as soon as they could get it, and just went hogwild. They’re incredible climbers, Catholics are, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
The man held out his hand. “I’m Chickie George. You’re Gregor Demarkian. I’ve seen your picture in the papers.”