True Believers(84)

“Oh, no,” the young nun said. “I’ve got to get back to the other side.”

Jackman kept pushing her along. There was no time. She could get back across the street sometime later. Down the block somewhere, there was the sound of glass breaking. Gregor had a sinking conviction that he knew what it was.

“That’s going to be Roy Phipps’s church, isn’t it?” he asked Jackman.

“Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” Jackman said.

There was another break in the crowd—caused, Gregor saw, by two patrolmen who were clearing their path—and they all pushed through St. Stephen’s front gates and up to the church’s front steps. The street was full of people, and they were all crazy. Men like the ones who attended Roy Phipps’s church forgot that gay men were at least as much men as they were gay. Some of them might be small and delicate, but most of them were tall, broad, strong and, on top of that, they worked out. There was no way to tell who was getting the better of this fight. The cops were pulling up a van with a loudspeaker on it. Some of the people lying in the street were recognizable as angels, but some of the angels must have lost their costumes. Some of the gay men were making an effort to strip them off.

“Now hear this,” the loudspeaker said. “Vacate this area immediately. I repeat. Vacate this area immediately.”

“Let’s go,” Jackman said, pushing them all those last few feet to St. Stephen’s front door.

Gregor turned back at the last moment, and that was how he happened to see it, the image that would forever afterward define this riot in the history of Philadelphia.

There was a gay man with a feather boa wrapped around his neck, pummeling an angel with his sign, over and over again about the head and shoulders. Another angel, already on the ground, reached up and touched the boa at its lower tip. A second later, the boa exploded in flames, and the gay man was on the ground, his shirt on fire, his pants on fire, his skin turning black in the unnatural light.

“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said.

Then he pushed Gregor all the way back into St. Stephen’s foyer and ran out to the aid of the man on fire.





2


It took nearly two hours to clear the street. There were too many people injured on the ground to use the tear gas after all. That left nothing but phalanxes of uniformed cops to clear the area, and nobody wanted to leave. For the first half hour, Gregor sat in St. Stephen’s foyer and watched the action. Every once in a while, Dan Burdock—the man in clerical black—would come out to bring in one of the gay men that Jackman had convinced to leave the fray. Most of them were bruised. Many of them were bleeding. Of course, the angels were doing no better.

Most of them were bruised and bleeding, too, and, unlike their gay opponents, most of them didn’t have sense enough not to fight with the police. Police vans came and went. Gregor found himself surprised that there were that many pairs of handcuffs in the entire city of Philadelphia. The young nun who had been with the young woman at Chickie George’s side came out and tugged him by the sleeve.

“Mary called from the hospital. I mean she called across the street, and they called me.”

“And?”

“Chickie’s going to be all right. He’s got four broken ribs, but it isn’t anything serious. He doesn’t even have a concussion.”

“What about the man who was set on fire?”

The young nun looked away. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if she knows about it.”

Well, Gregor thought. She probably didn’t know about it. It happened after she’d left. Out on the street, all sorts of things seemed to be happening, but none of them made any sense. Some of the angels had never moved from their original positions. They were kneeling on the sidewalk by St. Stephen’s front gate, frozen solid.

Jackman came in one more time, with one more gay man, and Gregor grabbed him. “Look,” he said. “I can cross the street and do what I came to do. What’s the point of keeping me in here?”

“How about making sure that none of my officers hits you over the head by accident?”

“So walk with me.”

Jackman looked outside. It was no calmer now than it had been a few minutes before, but Gregor didn’t think he had expected it to be. What it really looked like was the night scene in an early Fellini movie. It was full dark, and there were all kinds of lights everywhere: the streetlights, the lights from the churches and the other buildings on the street, the lights the police had put up to “illuminate the area.” In all this artificial light, the battlers looked more animated than real, like the characters in one of those New Age video games where verisimilitude mattered more than plot. Even their bleeding looked fake.