24

I was wrapped in a spool of anxiety as I rode down the elevator.

It had been way too much. America, Jesus, God, and Mr. Green were all anxious for me to get off the Nazami case? Too much promise and too much threat. The war between Christianity and the ACLU, my ass. I couldn’t say if Plowright believed it all, but I didn’t.

Most of all, too much sweat and too much passion.

The ride down was interminable. I felt like the elevator was being lowered by a hand crank.

So, what the hell—hell—was really going on? What could possibly be going on? What could Plowright, or someone in the church, or someone high up that he owed big time have to do with the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod? So that we all had to be sure that Ahmad Nazami hung for it?

Did I want to go up against Plowright? And the Cathedral of the Third Millennium? I liked him. I owed him. He had more money than anyone but Pat Robertson and God Himself. And he was connected to every power base in the state.

What was I going to do?

Why was the elevator so damn slow?

What about Manny? Why had he lied to me? How much had he lied about? Did he have a secret agenda? Was it true that he had lied? I would have to check.

Finally, the elevator trembled to a halt and opened on the fourth floor. Gwen works in book sales. I went to her office, but she wasn’t there. I asked after her and a sweet Mexican woman named Alissia, whom I knew slightly, said, “She’s with the Angels. They’re rehearsing something from when she was one.”

“Where? The rehearsal halls or the stage?”

“The stage, I think.”

I took the stairs. I had to be moving. I couldn’t bear the slow creep inside a container.

 

I entered the church from one of the side doors.

The Angels have angelic voices. They’re mostly white, and there are lots of blonds. They’re also young and very pretty, in a very wholesome way, of course.

I walked across the church quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Even with the stop-and-go of rehearsal, the music moved me the way it always does. There’s a kind of pure perfection that connects everything in ways I don’t understand, and the musical harmony suggests other types of harmony and clearly induces good feelings.

I walked up the stairs on the side of the stage.

Such beautiful young women. To look at them, to look past the music and costumes of chastity, is to be filled with temptation. So much of religion is about seeing them as angels instead of human beasts to be rutted with like the animals of the field.

Gwen was surprised to see me.

I wanted her to be ecstatic to see me or something like that. I wanted to know that she was swept away by me. Once and forever. Because I had a question to ask. As with any tough question, I wanted to know the answer before I asked.

I took her by the arm and led her away from them so that we wouldn’t be overheard.

“What is it? Is something wrong? Angie?” she asked.

“No, no. I don’t know if anything’s wrong.”

“Why are you here?”

“I have a question to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“If, and I say if, if there were a conflict, between me and the pastor... ”

“You and Paul?”

“Yeah.”

“How could there be?” she said.

“If there were, I need to know, whose side would you be on?” Because if there were, she and Angie might be all that I had left.

“But there couldn’t be. Why would you ask such a question?”

“If there were,” I said. “I want to know. Would you be on my side?”

“How could that happen? Did you have a fight with him? Did something happen?”

“Nothing’s happened,” I said. “I just need to know.” But, of course, by then, she’d already answered. Plowright preaches all the time that God’s plan is for the husband to be the head of the household and for his wife to follow him. That’s what makes the world go around and marriages work. The whole thing is about certainty, you see, certainty and order. Now there was uncertainty.

I addressed her silence. “I’m your husband. Would you follow your husband?” All of this urgency was spoken very quietly so as not to disrupt the Angels or expose our private business.

“I can’t imagine it happening,” she said. And then, she added, “Of course, I would choose my husband. Of course.” As if she’d been called on to recite her homework in class and had, after she’d given the wrong answer, abruptly remembered what the textbook said.

How do you live in an uncertain world? Do you accept what someone like Paul Plowright tells you and let go of all your doubts?

Or do you check and check until you achieve certainty. I could only know who everyone was—Manny: friend or liar; Paul Plowright: pastor or criminal; Gwen: true wife or just some woman I was married to; and myself: someone who would take a deal or keep his word, who would quietly desert the field or crash and burn before he quit—I could only know who everyone was by going forward and finding out who killed Nathaniel MacLeod. Not that it had a damn thing to do with him.

I looked up, and Jeremiah Hobson was up in the balcony staring down at me.