We Are Here (20 page)

What makes a priest lie?

I walked to the end of the street and left a message on Kristina’s cell. She’d be busy in the bar but get it soon enough. I bought a lousy coffee from the nearest deli and wandered back to the corner.

I’d taken the night off and I didn’t have anything else to do. I figured I’d wait a while.

Half an hour later someone turned onto the street, a nondescript-looking man walking quickly. His movements were a little unusual, and at first I took him for one of those people who endlessly circulate the city’s streets, alone, like bugs on a solo trek around a vast windowpane. He turned his head to the side once in a while, as if exercising a crick in his neck. After he’d come twenty yards toward me I caught the sound of conversation, however, and belatedly realized he wasn’t alone. I’m not sure how I could have missed the other guy given he was actually in front, and it became clear that the man I’d noticed first was trying to keep up.

Luckily, they were coming up the other side of the street to where I’d been standing, getting cold. I took a step back into the shadows. As they drew level opposite I saw the man in front was wearing jeans and an untucked shirt and realized: these were the guys I’d observed near the priest in Union Square that afternoon.

The one in jeans led the other through the gates of the church. They trotted up the stairs, and the leading man pressed the doorbell.

I turned my head to watch the priest’s house. He’d stopped practicing soon after our conversation and it had been quiet from there since, though a light had come on once the night came in.

After a moment the upper window opened and Jeffers stuck his head out. He looked across to the church, then pulled his head back and shut the window.

Two minutes later he appeared out of the front door and walked quickly down the stairs.

“What do you want?” he asked when he reached the men. His tone was polite but less generically friendly than when he’d spoken to me.

I didn’t hear what the taller man said, but a moment later the other said “David.”

The priest took the other man aside and there was a short conversation. The guy called David stayed where he was. From forty feet away I could tell he wasn’t happy to be there, but he waited anyway. At one point he glanced across the street, but I didn’t move. Unless you’re confident someone’s already spotted you, moving is merely the best method of making sure that they will.

The priest eventually got keys out of his pocket and unlocked the church. He stood back to let the other men in, then followed. The door closed behind them with a solid clunk.

I stepped out of the shadows. I don’t know much about the lives of priests. I can imagine that tending to the spiritual needs of others is not a nine-to-five job, and requests for guidance may arise at almost any time. I suspect it’s still unusual for two guys to turn up together at eight thirty in the evening, however. They didn’t look like they’d been in doubt that they would be received, either. The taller of the two had presented as though he felt he had a call upon the priest, or a high level of familiarity at least.

They could just be members of the flock, or perhaps the priest ran some kind of outreach program and these people were cautiously scaling the foothills of recovery.

It was none of my business, of course.

But I kept watching.

Fifteen minutes later someone else turned onto the street, but straightaway I knew there was something different about him. It was partly the way he dressed—a dark suit under an expensive-looking long coat—but mainly in the walk. There’s a style of locomotion you see only in a city, the stride of a man—and it’s always a man; women have their walks of power, but this is not one of them—who believes himself the dominant animal in his habitat. You never see this walk in the country or in small towns, which are insufficiently similar to the wild. You have to be in a city.

This is my track through this place, and yes, I do own the fucking road.

As he came up the street, heels making tapping sounds on the sidewalk, I was taken aback to realize I’d made the same mistake
again
. Something about the arrangement of the streetlights and shadows clearly made it hard to pick people out. This man was also not walking alone, or at least hadn’t been the only person to enter the street at more or less the same time.

Following behind him was a small group of people. One was a short, bulky man in a retro suit who looked like he was trying to walk the other man’s walk and not carrying it off. The other three were much taller and thinner, and loped along with heads lowered.

The guy in the coat walked straight up to the church gate and let himself in. The others hung back. I watched the man walk up the stairs, and then glanced back at the second group to see that they’d disappeared.

The man in the coat opened the church door without knocking or ringing the bell. He didn’t close it behind him either. It could be that I’d simply spent too long watching strangers do not very interesting things, but I thought that was kind of weird.

It was quiet for five minutes. Then I heard the sound of shouting, and something being broken.

It was still none of my business, but that’s never really stopped me.

I stepped off the sidewalk and jogged across the street.

When I got to the church door I could see straight into the hall at the end of the corridor. The man in the long coat was walking up and down, hands on hips and coat flared out behind, like a ham actor delivering a key speech. I couldn’t see anyone else and so I kept going.

The priest was in the middle of the hall surrounded by chairs—some of which had been overturned, a couple broken. The second of the two guys I’d seen earlier was behind him, looking totally out of his depth. There was no sign of the other, the man in the untucked shirt, though the door at the other end of the room was ajar.

The man in the coat turned to me. He looked about forty. His hair was cropped and his face broad but the features even. I could feel the power of his presence from where I stood. “Who the fuck are you?”

His accent was flat. Not New York.

“One of the faithful,” I said. “I need to talk with the father about something that’s been troubling me.”

“You shitting me?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“The father’s
busy
,” he said. “I suggest you come back another time.” He turned to face the priest.

“That’s not convenient.”

The man was motionless for a moment. When he turned to face me again there was a smile on his face. It was quite like one, anyway. “Say again?”

“You know how it is with spiritual matters. They crave instant solution. I assume that’s why you’re here too. Maybe we should go somewhere, compare notes.”

He laughed, and turned back to the priest. He liked his body movements, this guy. He was all about owning the space. “Seriously, Jeffers—who the fuck is this person? He a friend of yours?”

The priest said nothing. The man behind him kept glancing at the door, and appeared to be trying to work out his chances of being able to run at it without being intercepted. It looked as though he had nowhere near enough experience of making that kind of calculation to be confident about it, and was aware of the fact.

The man in the coat grew thoughtful. “Wait a minute,” he said to me. “I know you.”

I hadn’t been expecting this. I said nothing.

“Yeah.” He nodded to himself. “I don’t know where, but I’ve seen you.”

“Could be,” I said. “I don’t hide.”

He came and stood about a yard from me. “Sometimes hiding is a good move, my friend. Running never works. But hiding? Sometimes it’s the clever thing to do.”

Up close he smelled of cologne and self-confidence. He wasn’t scared of me but he wasn’t dumb, either. Something random had come into his orbit and he was too smart to do the obvious and throw a punch or pull out a gun—something I was by now pretty sure that he’d have about his person—and I realized maybe I should have sent Kris a message before I came barging in here.

There was a flurry of movement, the clatter of a chair knocked over, and receding footsteps. The scared-looking guy had chosen his moment, and run.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, on coat man’s face. He looked at me a moment longer, then stepped back and laughed quietly to himself.

The father remained where he was, hands by his side, looking pinched but composed.

“This guy’s right,” the man in the coat said to him. “I came here for a talk too. But you’re busy tonight, it seems. You got all these people coming to you for help at once. Some other time.”

He gave me a nod and walked toward the door. Just before he left, he turned back.

“There
will
be another time,” he said, but not to me. I’d already been dismissed. “We will talk.”

He seemed to be directing the remark toward the door at the other end of the hall. Then he was gone.

Jeffers let out a sharp, hard breath, and ran his hands quickly over his face. “Thank you,” he said.

“Who’s down there? Though the door?”

“Nobody.”

“You mind if I take a look?”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “This is a church. But even if I let you, you wouldn’t find anyone.”

Curiously, I didn’t get the sense that he was lying. “I don’t know what you’ve got going,” I said, “or who the hell that man was.”

“His name’s Reinhart.”

“Whatever. I’ve met people like him before. You don’t want them in your life.”

“Thank you for the advice,” he said. “I’ll be sure to bear it in mind.”

When I got back onto the street I looked for the man in the coat, but there was no sign. I did catch a glimpse of the guy who’d bolted, however. He was right up at the corner of Ninth, head down and hands stuffed in his pockets, walking fast.

As he turned the corner, I thought I saw something else—three tall figures, thirty feet behind him, also hurrying, as if following. The image didn’t resolve, however, and I guess it must have been more of the street’s strange shadow patterns.

I turned for home.

After Henderson left, the priest stood for five minutes. He sent up a prayer for guidance, but ran out of steam after the initial formalities. Sometimes it went that way. You picked up the phone and got a dead tone. A lot of people gave up at this point. Jeffers knew some days the plea went to voice mail and that’s that. He’s a busy guy. Give Him a chance. Jeffers believed this, at least, on good days.

In the meantime he turned to dealing with the chairs that had been knocked over. He picked each up carefully, inspected it for damage, and returned it to its place in the rows facing toward the end of the hall. There were twelve of these, divided by an aisle in the middle. On both sides each held seven chairs. The days of the week, multiplied by two, multiplied again by the number of Christ’s disciples, another of the private conceits he entertained in an effort to introduce meaning into his days. With faith, so much of what’s important takes place behind the scenes. Not including the single chair at the head, which faced the other way and on which he sat while delivering his informal sermons, the church provided a hundred and forty-four places for the faithful to sit, less the three that had now been broken.

Too many chairs.

He gathered up the pieces and carried them to the side. One was damaged beyond repair—the chair that had been on the receiving end of Reinhart’s kick. The other two were collateral causalities and had received only superficial damage—legs or spindles dislodged from sockets. Jeffers supposed that they would be relatively easy to repair if you knew what you were doing with hammer or glue. The world of physical objects had never been his domain. Even as a child he’d been prone to playing with ideas rather than things, and had never made much of a distinction. He’d ask Dave to have a look at the chairs. Dave was an ex-alcoholic who’d been coming to the church for years (his conversion an early success of Jeffers’s predecessor, Father Ronson) and transitioned more easily than some to the new priest. He functioned as an occasional unpaid cleaner, but from time to time he’d shown himself to be a halfway competent handyman too. Nothing ever quite worked as it should when he’d had his hands on it (the oil heater, for example, which was now discreetly stowed in the basement, along with its fuel, so as not to hurt the man’s feelings), but fixing a few chairs would be within his capabilities … pointless though it would be. Jeffers was lucky to see twenty people in the church at any one time. The other chairs were merely there to make up the numbers, and as a statement of intent.

One lived in hope, and worked in hope, and that was the way it should be. Hope is how the idea of faith operates in the world.

Hope is how you make faith do real things.

When Father Jeffers turned from the pile he saw Maj on the other side of the room. Maj didn’t look happy.

“Who was the other guy?” Maj asked.

“The one I’ve told you about.”

“The guy who’s been tracking Lizzie?”

Jeffers nodded.

“He looks like trouble.”

“Your friend ran away.”

“He’s always had a tendency toward flight.”

“You’re not going after him?”

“He’ll be halfway to Penn Station by now. I know where he lives. Right now I’m more concerned about Reinhart turning up here.”

Jeffers sensed this wasn’t entirely true and that the man was doing his best to cover intense disappointment. He also knew that Maj, like many of his kind, strongly resisted being told what to feel. Their emotions and memories were all they had. “How do you think that happened?”

“Golzen must have led him here. He’s building up to something. Fictitious Bob told me earlier that he’s been sending out broadcasts designed to hide something. I had an encounter with Golzen myself before I left town, and he and the three ghouls turned up in a bar earlier.”

“Were the messages about Perfect?”

“Not self-evidently. But who knows?”

“If he’s preparing to leave on his quest, why would he bring Reinhart here?”

“Could be it wasn’t his idea. You met the guy. Does Reinhart seem like someone who lets people do what they choose?”