Chapter Three

FATHER HARRY GOODWIN WAS AWAKENED suddenly by the ringing of his telephone. The rings exploded in his head, one, then another, then another. Silence. Please keep ringing. Please!

No. The silence continued. There would be no fourth ring. Harry dragged himself to the edge of his bed. His skull felt like it was going to pound itself to bits. He was nauseated with fear.

All these years he had been dreading the three rings on a night the Tituses were using the church. Three rings were the maximum emergency signal. They meant only one thing—they have had a terrible accident and his church was in danger.

His impulse was to race across to the church but he seemed plunged into stifling muck; his fear paralyzed him. It was several minutes before he managed to go to the window and look across at the Spirit. He expected to see destruction, a mayhem of flames, or some unspeakable horror—maybe a conjured thing—crawling the roof slates.

But there wasn't even a haze of smoke along the roof line of the old building, nor a flicker behind the stained glass. Harry Goodwin tapped his own window. Should the Spirit burn there was no chance at all of building a new church. A fire would mean the end of this fine old parish.

Maybe the three rings had been a coincidence. The church across the parking lot seemed utterly at peace, blurred by the beginnings of a predawn shower.

Harry's familiar morning exhaustion bowed him. His alarm clock said four fifteen. In two hours he must say his first Mass . . . before a congregation of perhaps seven, in a church built to accommodate five hundred.

"Friday," he muttered. "God give me strength." He felt awful. Had he taken a sleeping pill last night? No, there weren't any left and so much the better. Leave the pills alone. Valium priests, Seconal priests, Thorazine priests. They were worse than the old-fashioned whiskey priests. He had so far escaped the lure of depressants and tranquilizers. As a result, his life was raw with loneliness and a sense of unfulfilled promise. The issue, of course, was faith and the lack thereof. His confessor, Father Michael Brautigan, a bluff and kindly Jesuit, red with drink, would say that faith was a matter of relaxing one's instinct to touch. "Don't try to touch Christ," he would say. "That's the point of Thomas, isn't it?"

Harry had to touch. But it worked both ways: one who had to touch also needed touching. Sometimes, naked in the middle of his silent rectory, he would dip his hands into cold water until they were numbed and did not feel his own, then he would close his eyes and embrace himself and dance around and around with himself in the dingy rooms.

Lately he had become too desperate, too full of self-pity even for that. Never to be touched—or even needed, for that matter—had emerged for him as the poisonous central issue of his life. When he had first entered the priesthood, he had assumed that his services would be ardently desired by Catholics hungry for the succor of their Church. Instead he had spent his life struggling to pay bills, working against the relentless dwindling of his flock, forced to hold jumble sales and bingo and raffles, until finally even those measures failed.

Then came the Tituses. Old Franklin and handsome Martin, just wanting to rent "the plant," as they had called it, a few nights a week.

Nobody will know, Father. We help out dozens of parishes in the same shape as Holy Spirit.

Nobody will even care except you.

Our money will keep you going. You won't ever have to close your doors.

At first he had thought perhaps it was drugs or counterfeiting or some sort of white slavery.

He had heard their soft chanting, though, and seen the flicker of their candles. He did not actually say it to himself but he knew the truth. Every Monday and Friday morning, after their nights, he had taken to reconsecrating his altar. And he no longer kept the Host in the tabernacle on those nights. It stayed under his pillow, tucked away in the pyx.

Twenty-seven years a priest, twenty a creature of the Tituses. Traitor to his own faith, to his own soul. How black can sin be? He put his hands to his stubbly cheeks and rubbed. He longed for the velvet fingers of a woman, or of death.

As time unfolded the sad destiny that had been contrived for him it became obvious that his whole life—the vocation itself—was not really very valuable. In the world of his youth priests were essential people, needed by their congregations for all sorts of succor. Now when the leaves fell on his walks they stayed, and his leaking roof leaked on.

Did people sense that he was a traitor? Could they somehow smell the taint of the Night Church in the great nave of Holy Spirit?

He didn't want to be a priest anymore. He did not even want to live. No, he had a plan for himself. He intended to die unconfessed, and go to Hell—in which, despite the modern theologians, he still firmly believed. He actually looked forward to it: he deserved his damnation, wanted it, and had for some years been seeking the death that would bring it. Once he had attempted to commit suicide by suffocating himself in a plastic bag, but it had been too terrifying. So he had tried sleeping pills—and vomited them up.

He had asked Martin Titus to kill him, just a few weeks before Titus himself had been killed in an airplane crash. "I'll think it over," the man had replied absently, and changed the subject. Harry was not even important enough for martyrdom.

He said a bitter prayer, a Hail Mary, and turned once again to his bed.

As he slid beneath the sheet he heard quite distinctly from the church a human sound. It was a loud, woeful groan, loud enough to carry across the parking lot to the rectory.

He should have gone straight over there. Damn fool not to. Three rings at this hour, and he had made himself believe it was a coincidence. Harry Goodwin was a weak man, and that was a fact.

He put his hand on the bedside table. In the drawer was a small pistol. Mike Banion over at the 112th Precinct had given it to him after the ritual murder of Father Santa Cruz at Saint Thomas in Brooklyn. He shouldn't have accepted it, but he didn't want Mike to know how he envied old Santa Cruz.

This was the right time to have a pistol. He felt the comforting steel of it in the palm of his hand. One day soon, when he could bear the taste of the barrel in his mouth, he was going to use it on himself.

As he pulled on the old raincoat liner he used as a robe and jammed his feet into his aged and corn-cut Adidas, he struggled for some sort of inner stability. Gun or no gun, he was terrified. The Tituses did horrible things over there.

He hurried past empty bedrooms (it had once taken six priests just to administer this parish) and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. There was a folding umbrella in the bottom of his briefcase. He fished around for it, opening it as he went out the kitchen door.

Curtains of rain swept the muddy parking lot. As Harry crossed it he was reminded by the sucking of his shoes that he could not afford reasphalting. He opened the side door to the sacristy. Inside, the Spirit was inky black. As he carefully pulled the door shut behind him he twisted the little pistol's safety to the off position.

All he heard was the din of rain on the roof. Just as he was beginning to think he had dreamed the human sound he heard another one—a long sigh. At first he was frightened, fumbling for the lights. Then he realized the sound was coming from the altar and a flash of anger mixed with his fear. How dare they leave him to clean up one of their desecrations.

In the dancing, vanishing light of the votive candles he could just make out a dense shadow splayed across the altar. Harry stared hard. Wasn't that a large animal? He raised his gun but he could not take aim in the dimness. Then he realized that the shape was not a crouching animal but a prone human body.

His fingers found the right switches and he flipped them all at once. Light flooded the church.

There was a woman on the altar, lying on her back. Her blood flowed down to the sacristy floor in thin streams like bars. Harry had only a moment for astonishment. The girl moaned again, horribly.

He approached the altar. The poor child lay in a dark pool of her own blood, her legs spread, her arms akimbo, her hair tangled about her face.

The fact that he knew this woman so well pulled the first sound from his throat. His own scream was more real to him and more frightening than even the horror before him. In his urgency to get to the phone in the sacristy he dropped his pistol, which went clattering into the dark behind the high altar at the back of the nave.

This was incredible. This could not be condoned. And yet ... he had to deal very carefully with the whole affair. His own life, his very soul, was teetering on a knife edge.

Turning away from the horror he dashed on his long legs to the phone, grabbed it, dialed 911. The Tituses would be furious with him for calling the police, but what else did they expect him to do? They had just gone off and left him with this tragedy and not one word of instruction.

There were voices outside. Neighbors. Of course—the girl's screams had roused the neighborhood. The Tituses must never have intended to leave her behind. Circumstances had forced them. Perhaps they even wanted her saved.

In any case, she would be saved. He might not be much of a priest anymore, but Harry Goodwin was still a human being.

He heard the first siren start not long after he had hung up the phone. The New York City Police Department was more than half Catholic, and it protected the Church almost as carefully as it did itself. Harry knew one of the two patrolmen who came sprinting up the aisle, their guns in their hands. Timothy Reilly was his name. Impossible that such a scrawny, mischievous altar boy could have grown into this enormous, competent-looking man in blue. Reilly took in the scene at once.

"He still in the church, you think, Father?"

Harry told the first of what he realized miserably would be many lies. "I thought perhaps I heard him. I'm not quite sure. It could have been the echo of a door closing." Trick the cops into searching the church. Give the Tituses and their congregation a little more time to get well away.

Reilly's partner began to search with a flashlight while Reilly joined Harry beside the poor, damaged girl. Her eyes were rolling slowly up into her head. "Her name is Patricia Murray," Harry said, and woe tugged his heart. "She's one of the hardest-working young women in the parish." His throat closed. "One of my best people." He wept and could not stop, and it was useless and stupid but he was so full of anger and self-disgust and sorrow that he wished right now he could be torn to pieces, and the rancid bits of himself scattered through the filthiest deeps of the Pit, each to suffer separately the full and eternal measure of damnation.

"She's hurt bad, Father. That bleeding's gotta be controlled. EMS better get here damn soon."

"I'll get my kit." He raced into the sacristy and dragged his ancient first aid kit from the bottom of the old armoire. As he ran back he fumbled with the latch, only to open it and find the bandages rotted and covered with roach sacs, the medicines dried and useless, the tourniquet a brittle mound of rubber.

"Aren't you going to anoint her, Father?"

"Anoint?" The kid had assumed he was getting the chrism. "Oh, of course."

Another siren ground down outside. Two black paramedics sprinted past the rows of age-darkened pews carrying their stretcher and other equipment. When they reached the altar they set to work with lightning choreography, producing bandages and plasma and intravenous needles and syringes. In seconds her nakedness was obscured by gauze and tape. She lay as blue-bruised and destroyed as if on a slab in a morgue. Her eyes were waxen and staring now, her skin gray.

"She use drugs?"

"Certainly not. She's a very good Catholic."

"Then she's been drugged. You better call the next of kin, Father."

"There are no next of kin. She was orphaned in her teens. She was raised at Our Lady of Victory. She rarely spoke of her past. She's not been in the parish more than six months."

More police were pouring into the church. Outside, siren after siren moaned to a stop. The whole precinct must be turning out. It occurred to Harry that he ought to make a big pot of coffee.

No, that was a silly idea. He realized when he looked down and found the holy oil in his hands that he was in shock, moving like a robot. Part of him was still performing priestly duties. The rest wanted at this moment to be, to do, anything else. Anything.

Patricia was already on the stretcher. Harry fumbled to her side and began administering the sacrament. The paramedics wheeled her rapidly down the aisle. He muttered his prayer as one of the men spoke another sort of ritual into a walkie-talkie. "Multiple pelvic fractures, possible severed spine, copious vaginal bleeding with developed pallor. Administering plasma and anti-shock procedures with cold pack. Patient in shock, stage two, possible drug OD."

The ambulance began sounding its siren and flashing its lights as the stretcher was wheeled up to it. The doors slammed on the two solemn black faces and their white-draped patient.

Harry was left with chrism in hand, his sacrament incomplete. Carefully he wiped the remaining oil from his thumb onto the edge of the container. Then he snapped it shut and started to go back to his church.

Mike Banion stood in the doorway, looking with the light behind him like a blocky tree stump. He was an important cop, Detective Inspector, eighteen years on the force, as good a friend as Harry Goodwin had ever had. Mike was both physically and politically powerful. You saw him at all the police funerals and the big, famous crimes, looking through the familiar bifocal glasses out of his hurt-child eyes.

Seeing him here confirmed the seriousness of the affair. So this was to be a famous crime.

As if to certify the awfulness of it all, a car from Channel Two News came roaring up Morris Street and screeched to a halt. The rain had gone soft and dawn was beginning to outline the jumble of flashing cars, and to touch the cross above the dome with a delicate gray glow. When Harry looked up at it he was almost in control, but when he looked down, his throat was tight and his eyes were once again tearing.

"Father Goodrich, I'm Charles Datridge, Channel Two News." A young man stuck out his hand as a plump girl patted at him with a powder puff. "Mind if we get started?"

"I—" There was a sudden bloom of iron-blue light. Harry squinted.

"Rolling," cried a voice beyond the glare. "Sound! Speed!"

"This is Charles Datridge here at Holy Ghost Parish in Queens. With me I have Father Michael Goodrich. Father Goodrich—"

"Cut it, Charlie."

"Right, Inspector. Kill the lights, Benny."

"Holy Spirit Church, Charlie. And the priest's name is Harry Goodwin, not Michael Goodrich. You guys stay in your car until we get the perpetrator pinned down. You'll get your pictures then, assuming you play my way now."

"Playing your way, Inspector."

"Thank you, Charlie. Come on, Father, let's go where we can talk. You got any coffee in the kitchen?"

"Sure, Mike, we can make some."

Mike Banion moved toward the rectory. "Charlie's a news tiger. Channel Two's lightnin' reporter." He laughed, a deep, reassuring sound, the easy mirth of authority. "You're gonna get a horde of 'em in the next couple of hours. First there'll be the Post lookin' for pictures. 'Where'sa body?' they'll yell. Then the News, and they'll want a shot of the altar. Then TV and radio stations, all of 'em hollerin' like crazy." He laughed again. "Along about dawn a guy from the Times will probably phone, name of Terry Quist. Only since you're a priest, he'll introduce himself as Terence. He'll already know the story back to front. But he'll get the real stuff out of you, the dope about how it feels." They reached the rectory. "I'm sorry to say this, Harry, but you're gonna be famous. So's that poor girl."

"Mike, she was a parish leader, one of the few young people who really cared. She was wonderful. My star."

"I hate to hear that, Harry. You must be hurting awful bad. I gotta think the perpetrator knew. I mean, the beautiful parish star, and he takes her and brutally rapes her on the altar. That's tellin' me he did know, and this is one of these weirdo deals. Probably somebody she was familiar with. Struck up an acquaintance with her on purpose. Hell, maybe even at some parish affair. Psychopath."

They reached the kitchen. Harry turned on the lights, revealing the aged stove, the greasy counters, the yellowing oilcloth on the table. "Let me get the coffee," he said.

" 'Fill it to the rim with Brim.' "

"I don't have any decaffeinated, Mike."

"And I don't drink it. I'm just trying to take an easier tone. Lower our blood pressure before we both get strokes. A crime like this works on you, Father. Eats you alive."

Harry looked at him. He could not find words.

After a moment Mike continued. "So this kid was one of the parish stars. And she was in the church alone at a very odd hour. Was she a little loony on religion? I mean, was there any likelihood she might have come there on her own and surprised some derelict sleeping in a pew? It's important we know that."

"She was a stable, normal sort of a person. Her parents died in a fire, she told me. She had been here in Queens for about six months. She was vague about her past. Quite vague. But Mike, she was a good girl. A darned good girl."

Mike Banion sank onto a chair. The kettle began to whistle and Harry poured water into their mugs. When he inhaled the steam Mike coughed, a sound like a car refusing to start. "Foggy morning," he said, cradling his mug in his hands. Suddenly he looked directly at Harry. As always Harry was startled by the depths of pain in those eyes. From the day Mike's first wife had died, they had been like that. Despite his remarriage, Mike still went to Beth's grave every Sunday. "Harry, tell me your story. What did you see?"

"I was awake. The usual morning hells. We've talked about it."

"Awake, horny, worried."

The chill in the room enveloped Harry. He talked too much to Mike Banion, telling him all except the really bad part, the part about the Tituses. Should a parishioner know his priest so intimately? But who else, if not Mike? Harry nodded at the accuracy of Mike's statement. "I heard a noise. Loud. A terrible groan. So I went over to investigate."

I heard the three rings. Their emergency signal. But I can't tell you that.

"Must have been awfully loud."

"Very."

"Church unlocked, of course."

Harry had been waiting for that. "You know it always is."

Mike's face darkened. Harry had been through this with him dozens of times before. He watched Mike relight his cigar and take a long pull. Mike smoked cigars the way other people did cigarettes. He claimed he never got drunk because there was so much nicotine in his blood there was no room for the alcohol. Given a pint of good scotch he might nod a little, but that was all. "You lock your church at ten p.m. in the future, Harry, and consider that an order. I'm gonna tell the patrolmen to check it out, so don't think I won't know."

Mike's big, spotted hand came across the table and covered Harry's. The touch lasted only an instant, but the tenderness in it shamed Harry almost unendurably. Thank God for good friends, there when you need them. The gesture did nothing to dismantle Harry's shame at what he had come to, only painted it in a more bitter light. "Churches belong open," he said.

"You're sentimental. That's a weakness."

"God help me, the poor girl was raped in my church! Mike, don't tell me it's because I leave the place unlocked."

"I'm not accusing you, Father. You just tell me if you saw the perpetrator closely enough to make an ID."

Now the lie again. "I heard a noise. Maybe a cough, maybe the sound of the side door closing."

"Meaning the guy was just that second leaving. He must still be in the neighborhood."

"Yes. I told Officer Reilly—"

Mike Banion stood up and went out the kitchen door. A few moments later he was shouting. Harry heard him yell that roadblocks should have gone up and a house-to-house search started long ago, on and on. Cops trotted here and there, lights flashed, voices kept fracturing the dawn silence

A moment later Mike was back in the kitchen. "By God, why didn't you tell me her name?"

"I—I didn't?"

"Reilly says it was Pat Murray. Father, is that true?"

"Well, yes, that's right, Mike."

"She's a good friend of my wife's. She was on a date with my stepson!"

Mike Banion thundered off into the churchyard. A moment later his old Dodge was skidding its way out of the muddy parking lot.

For a long time Father Harry Goodwin simply sat, staring. Then he tried to pray. His words mocked him, and soon lost themselves in silence.