CHAPTER 71

A mighty fortress is our God,

A bulwark never failing …

Hymn by Martin Luther

Kraeger and Alan and Homer sat hunched on folding chairs in Donald Woody’s basement office. Woody handed around cups of steaming coffee.

“He was listening,” said Alan. “Remember? Pip was sitting at the organ when I told you about the noises on the cassette.”

“Of course,” said Homer. “I remember him now. And he heard you tell me you’d hidden it in Rosie’s apartment. So he went there and ransacked the place.”

“But he didn’t find it, so he went back later and tried to set the apartment on fire, hoping to burn up the cassette along with everything else.”

“And when that didn’t work either, he came after you with a target pistol.”

Martin Kraeger laughed grimly. “It reminds me of the martyrdoms of saints. What do you do with an aggravating and disagreeable saint who won’t stop being a pain in the neck? You throw her in the fire, but unfortunately she refuses to burn, so you dump her in the water, only she won’t drown, so you stick her full of arrows like a pincushion, but she goes right on praying, so in desperation you cut off her head, and that always works.”

Alan’s hand trembled on his coffee cup. “I owe my life to Harold Oates. He must have come to the church to help me with the voicing, and then he saw Pip getting ready to fire, and he shouted at him—I heard him shout—so the shot missed me. So Pip killed him, and then he would have fired at me again, but the vaults came down.”

“But how could it have happened?” said Woody. “Everything collapsing like that? It couldn’t have been the organ. I mean, you hear about high notes shattering glass, but I never heard of a pipe organ shaking down a building.”

“I suppose it was the pilings,” said Kraeger, gloomily shaking his head. “The pilings must have dried out.” He looked at Donald Woody, trying to keep the note of accusation out of his voice. “Have you checked the water level lately? I suspect it must have gone way down.”

Woody looked at him, bewildered. “Pilings? What pilings?”

There was a stunned silence. “The pilings under the church,” said Kraeger. “The whole Back Bay is built on pilings, wooden pilings, because it’s all filled land.”

Woody’s face turned gray in the light of the fluorescent ceiling fixtures. “I never heard of any pilings. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But I wrote it all down. Last summer, before my vacation. I wrote a whole big thick—You mean you never got my list of directions?”

“Directions? You didn’t leave me any directions. I had to work everything out for myself. I remember, I was kind of surprised that nobody told me what to do.”

Martin stared at him. “But I gave them to Loretta. She was supposed to give them to you. You know, type them up and give them to you when you came in, on your first day at work.”

“Well, she didn’t. I asked her if there was any sort of job description, to sort of tell me what to do, and she said maybe I’d find some down here in my office, but there weren’t any.”

“For Christ’s sake,” murmured Homer.

Kraeger jumped up and strode across the room to Woody’s fish tank. The goldfish were circling idly behind the sparkling glass, unconcerned with the fall of the church. It occurred to Martin insanely that they were nondenominational goldfish who didn’t give a damn whether the church remained standing or fell straight to hell. He shook his head in wonder at the consequences of his failure to fire the abominable Loretta.

Then he turned to Woody, who had risen and was standing with a stricken face. Martin pointed at one of the metal lids in the floor.

“Look,” he said gently, “that thing in the floor, there’s a pipe under it, going down into the fill. It’s an observation well. You lower a measuring tape into it, so you can find out where the water table is, and if it’s below the tops of the pilings, you raise the level with a hose, so they don’t dry out. You mean, you didn’t know what the metal disks were here for? And the manhole in the furnace room?”

Donald Woody had been a solid rock of support all morning. He had been a good right hand to the police department, the firefighters, the building inspector, the street crew from the Water and Sewer Commission. Now he was shattered. “Christ, no, I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I’m from Kansas. We build on stone foundations in Kansas.” His knees buckled, and he had to sit down. “Oh, God, it’s my fault. All those people last night, they could all have been killed, and it’s my fault.”

“It sounds to me,” said Homer wisely, “like somebody else’s fault, namely that woman Loretta Fawcett’s.”

“No, no,” said Kraeger, “it’s not anybody’s fault but mine. I should have fired her long ago. I gave her the handwritten list of directions to type up, only she didn’t type them up because she was too busy embroidering pussycats or something, so she never did it, so you never got the list, and then I never checked with you because you were doing such a bangup job of keeping the place in perfect running order. I should have realized Loretta never does anything right. It’s all my fault.”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Homer. “What matters is what to do now.” He looked at Alan. “You’ve still got the cassette?”

Alan patted his pocket. “I sure do.”

“We’ve got to get it unscrambled. We’ve got to find out more about this kid Philip Tower. And we’ve got to find Rosie. Come on, Alan, it’s ten-thirty. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to do.”

“Ten-thirty!” Kraeger leaped up. “My God, it’s Easter Sunday.”

Homer gaped at him. “Somebody tell this man his church fell down.”

“No, no, it’s all right. Come on, Woody, let’s work something out.”

Outside in the park across the street, they found the entire congregation of the Church of the Commonwealth. Some were dressed in their Easter finery, having come to church without knowing what had happened. Everybody was there—Edith Frederick, Barbara Inch and her singers, all the deacons, all the members of the committees for music, religious education, outreach, stewardship, all the church school teachers, and of course all the ordinary parishioners who came to church every Sunday, and also the ones who seldom really got there, having decided to stay home in bed. There were whole families swarming in the park with their fidgeting excited children. Even people who thought of the church only as a place to be married and buried had come running to see it in ruins.

They were all shocked, and some were weeping. They craned their necks to see across the street the rock-filled hole that had once been their church, while around them the impacted traffic clogged the avenue and police whistles shrieked above the mutter of engines idling in low gear and the disgruntled blowing of horns.

At once Martin was engulfed in tearful embraces. Momentarily, at least, his sins were forgotten. Disentangling himself, he turned to Barbara Inch. “I’m not going to preach,” he told her. “Why don’t we just sing?”

So Barbara ran into the office building to collect the discarded hymnbooks stored in the music room. Coming back down with a teetering pile she almost collided with Woody, who was dragging a trolley of folding chairs. In a moment the books were passed from hand to hand and the older parishoners settled in chairs. Barbara whispered to Martin, “What about hymn number three-six-three?”

Among the motorists stuck in traffic on Commonwealth Avenue were a husband and wife from Brookline, trying to make their way into the North End to visit their daughter. “Oh, Henry, look,” said the wife, “it’s the church that fell down. We just heard about it on the radio. Listen, they’re all singing. See that? They’re singing on the sidewalk. Isn’t that dear?”

Her husband snorted. “What’s that they’re singing, ‘A Mighty Fortress’? Some fortress! Look at it, it’s a pile of rubble. I don’t know what they’ve got to sing about. The place is totalled. You couldn’t build a structure like that this day and age for twenty million dollars. No way.”

Henry was a building engineer, and he spoke from experience. But he reckoned without the treasurer of the Church of the Commonwealth, Kenneth Possett.

Ken was a changed man. While the other men and women of the congregation sang with Barbara Inch and prayed with Martin Kraeger and embraced one another, sobbing, in a transport of emotion, Ken stood at one side doing figures in his head. When the impromptu service was over, he marched up to Kraeger and clapped him on the back. “Martin, old man, don’t worry about a thing.” Ken’s cheeks were like cherries, he beamed as though a thousand tons of rock were not lying in a hole across the street, along with a million shards of stained glass and the splinters of a hundred pews and the smashed remnants of an antique pulpit and the wreck of a dozen marble memorials and the tatters of the precious painting of the divinely inspired Walter Wigglesworth.

Martin was stunned. He couldn’t believe it. Was this the same Kenneth Possett who had opposed him at every meeting of the church council, who had cavilled at every expense and taken him to task over the repair of Oates’s teeth, who had jibbed at bills for hundreds of dollars and gasped at expenses of thousands, and accused him of hiring a prostitute and molesting his little daughter? Somehow the disaster had turned the man around. Ken was in his element, he was galvanized, he was ready to go.

Mrs. Frederick was at Ken’s side. “Dear Martin,” said Edith, her old voice trembling, “we’re forming a committee.”