He looked sideways at Father Doheny, and nodded slightly. Andy O’Reilly caught the look, and the nod.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is there more of the scandal still in the closet? Is there something else about to come out?”
“Not about the scandal, no,” Father Doheny said. “There is something else.”
“I think I’ll leave you to explain it,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “I’m wanted at the convent” He stood up and held out his hand to Andy O’Reilly, who kissed his ring and came close to kneeling while he did it, but stopped just short.
“You won’t be disappointed, bringing good laymen into your confidence,” Andy promised. “We’ve got the Church’s best interests at heart.”
The Cardinal Archbishop had no idea if that was true or not. He only knew he did not want to stay around here to find out. He didn’t want to be in this room any longer with the creature this man was. He nodded to both Andy and Father Doheny and went out, walking so quickly that the folds of his cassock beat against his legs like streamers in the wind. He was sick to his stomach, and what frightened him was that he might have to stay this way, for months, for years, until life would become one long exercise in nausea. Take up your cross and follow me, the man had said, but the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia was sure he couldn’t have meant anything like this.
3
For Roy Phipps, the decision to watch the medical examiner’s press conference on what the news stations were calling “the Kelly killings” wasn’t even a decision. Since the first he had known about what had happened up the street, he had been nearly obsessed with it. It had been bad enough on the day it happened, when the street was full of police cars and ambulances, and there had been nothing he could do to find out what was happening. He had sent Fred Havers into the crowd, but Fred was not an actor. Catholicism scared him. He looked on St. Anselm’s as the home of the devil, with a cloven-footed old goat seated right out in the open on a throne on the altar, and parishioners dancing naked to the accompaniment of a jingling tambourine. Of course, there was no Mass going on at the time. Father Healy was standing right out on the sidewalk where both Roy and Fred could see him. So were a dozen nuns, in habits, and the stocky, angry woman who was addressed as “Sister” but wore ordinary suits. Fred still found it hard to believe that something was not going on in the sanctuary, even while the police were coming in and out. In the end, he had gone, because Roy asked him to, but Roy had watched him. He hadn’t gone any farther than the edges of the crowd, and even then he had held his arms stiffly at his sides, trying not to touch or be touched, as if Catholicism were a disease that could rub off on him. Whore of Babylon. Mark of the Beast. When the Antichrist came he would come in glory, and his instrument would be the Pope in Rome, and all men would bow down and worship him.
“Somebody died,” Fred had said, coming back, and then, “somebody committed suicide.”
That was all, and Roy had known better than to try to get something more out of him, or to send him back. There were members of Roy’s congregation who would love to be sent off as spies, but for that very reason they would have been unsuitable. Even Fred himself stuck out a little too much on this city street. There weren’t supposed to be real rubes and hayseeds anymore. That was all supposed to have been taken care of by movies and MTV. When Fred was growing up, though, his parents hadn’t had a television, and the only movies they had approved of had been the Disney animated features from the nineteen fifties. Then there had been home schooling, and church Sundays, and Bible college. It wasn’t hard for Roy to understand how Fred had come to be Fred. It only angered him sometimes, the way they all angered him, all the members of his congregation. Their lack of education was appalling. Their lack of sophistication would have been comical if it weren’t so dangerous. Their superstitions were tangled knots of confusion that couldn’t be hacked through with a sword, no matter how many sermons he gave on the sin of credulity, no matter how often he railed against astrology as a tool of the devil. They were committed to him, but he thought they wouldn’t have been, if they could have found someone who frightened them less. Then again, maybe not. They were used to living on fear. They were afraid of everything. Maybe a man they couldn’t fear would be, as well, a man they couldn’t respect.
Roy kept the television on the second floor in a special room that only a few people were allowed access to, and then only when he gave them explicit permission to come in. It was important that they understand how spiritually dangerous television was. This was true not only of the obviously bad channels, like Playboy and HBO, but of the ordinary broadcast ones as well. There was enough heresy on the evening news to send a hundred souls to hell. A hundred souls probably went, too, because they had learned to doubt from Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Doubt, Roy always told them, was the worst possible thing. Doubt was the worm eating into the apple of your soul, eating out your spiritual eyes, until you couldn’t see the majesty of God standing right in front of you, but thought you were alone. The problem was, they were not only stupid, but opaque. He had no way of knowing how much of what he was saying sank in and was taken to heart, and how much just passed over them like so much wind. He was sure most of them either didn’t have televisions at all, or had those specially sealed sets sold by Home Life that played videotapes but did not get channels. He was sure most of them didn’t have cable. He had to stress, over and over again, that even “Christian” programming wasn’t necessarily Christian. Kenneth Copeland praying for prosperity, or Benny Hinn working up a sweat while he “healed” one poor deluded soul after the other—the devil could heal; the devil could perform miracles; the devil knew what backsliding Christians wanted to hear—all that kind of thing was just as dangerous as watching a sex show or listening to one of those book channels where the author had written another book on how the Bible wasn’t true.