Ordinary Magic

ORDINARY MAGIC

Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Quealy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Jack Daly peered through a slit in the red velvet curtains like an overextended off-Broadway producer anxiously counting the house on opening night. Most people were still in the process of locating their seats in the church. It would be a good ten minutes before magic time could begin.

He descended the stairs to the lower sacristy and hurried along a vaulted corridor, his one-size-too-large loafers making loud smacking sounds against the marble floor as they slipped off his heel with each step he took. Six feet tall, 33, with sandy brown hair and a lean, muscular build, he wore the standard black T-shirt and faded blue jeans favored by computer graphics engineers. His key unlocked a door marked: SUPPLY CLOSET. Inside, the windowless room was crammed with electronics equipment. A bank of seven 35 SONY TV monitors lined the near wall. Exactly in the center of the space a 4x4x4 foot 3-D movie screen sat atop a hardened glass podium. Visible elsewhere to the expert eye were roboti-cally operated Panavision motion picture cameras, film illuminators, splicers, synchronized dubbers, continuous-reel tape feeders, and light diffusers. Highly polished circular mirrors, 18 in diameter, were anchored into each of the room’s four corners at the spot where the walls met the ceiling. And amidst all this hi-tech movie hardware slumped the dispirited pastor of Holy Redeemer Church, Father Frank Shymanski.

Come on, Uncle Frank, give us a big smile now, Jack said, it’s standing-room-only again this Sunday. Your poor boxes are getting stuffed full of tens and twenties, not with the usual nickels and dimes. Daly plopped down at the computer console. God’s creditors will be happy with the turnout. It means that Holy Redeemer is going to be paying off some long overdue bills next week.

The priest grimaced at what should have been great news for the pastor of a destitute congregation hard up for cash. Shymanski was in his mid seventies with a full head of hair, pure grey to be sure, yet abundant enough to be the envy of most men half his age. A million brown spots speckled the tops of his hands, confirming his advanced years, nevertheless, time had been kind to him. He still had all his own teeth; didn’t need to wear bifocals; and, more importantly, the semi-annual CAT scans that his doctors insisted he undergo could find no traces of the pancreatic cancer that had claimed the lives of his three brothers…God rest their souls.

The TV monitors came alive and displayed the bustling church interior from various angles and elevations. Jack adjusted the focus. I’ll bet Holy Redeemer was jumping like this every Sunday a hundred years ago when the neighborhood was full of wealthy German merchants. It’s amazing how things can change, isn’t it? From riches to rags in five generations. I feel sorry for the old place, it’s a sad story.

Yes, Jack, it’s true, the church is filled once more with people who have money in their pockets. But what good is it? All these people have come to see your special effects’, not to worship God. They are here for the wrong reason."

That’s a new one on me, Uncle Frank, I didn’t know there could be a wrong reason for a person to go to church.

There’s still a lot you’ve got to learn, the priest replied, a whole lot.

Jack activated the laser generator. Don’t get me wrong…I love the good folks who live in this piss-poor parish of yours…still…I’ve got to admit that it’s nice to see an upscale crowd filling those pews. Know what I mean?

Shymanski muttered something unintelligible to the floor.

The problem today is that people don’t dress up for church anymore, not even up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue they don’t. Wearing shorts and halters to Mass shows a definite disrespect for God. Don’t you agree?

The priest didn’t bother to look up.

Or maybe it’s just that Catholicism has become the religion of the lower classes today? What do you think about that, Uncle Frank?

Shymanski curled a cassocked arm over his face as though he was trying to hide from himself.

I mean, Jews go all out on their Sabbath, they dress to the nines when they go to Temple. God must like that. Jack scanned the stylish crowd. I see Armani, Gucci and Brooks Brothers today. Take a gander.

The priest avoided the monitors and instead massaged his forehead to seek relief from the migraine that had been plaguing him all morning.

Jack sighed. Don’t go worrying yourself into a peptic ulcer over this. We had no choice, there’s no other way to get cash around here.

There is always another way. The priest shook his head. My own shortcomings are to blame, I didn’t pray hard enough for Divine guidance.

No offense intended, Uncle Frank, but praying is like writing letters to dead people…there’s no way you’re going to get an answer back.

Jack!

No, I mean it. You could make a hundred novenas to St. Jude, your precious saint of hopeless causes, and you’d still go bankrupt.

God would have provided us with the funds we need…somehow.

Jack frowned. God helps those who help themselves. I learned that much from Sister Mary Bridget way back in the third grade.

Shymanski crossed his arms tightly to suffocate a gnawing fear swelling in his chest. It’s not too late, I could still appeal to His Eminence for aid.

Cardinal Peter Armstrong! Jack spat out the Archbishop of New York’s name as though the words left a rancid taste on his tongue.

Yes, he.

Save your breath, Uncle Frank, Armstrong wouldn’t give you the time of day. He’s way too busy lining up votes to be elected the next Pope.

Shymanski nodded. His Eminence might make a great Pope.

Jack rolled his eyes skeptically. Yeah, right, him and me both would.

His Eminence would be the first Pontiff to come from the United States, the priest continued, "and I think it’s time the job went to an American. Don’t you?

Not to that son-of-a-bitch.

You shouldn’t speak so disrespectfully about Cardinal Armstrong, Jack, you never even met the man.

You’re right, he answered, with a mischievous grin, I haven’t met him. And come to think of it, I’ve never met God either.

Jack!

He affectionately patted his uncle’s thin arm. I’m sorry, that was a cheap shot, I just like to get you riled once in a while. It’s good for your circulation.

Shymanski groaned like a concerned parent putting up with the antics of a misguided, but favorite child. I always do forgive you, don’t I?

Yeah, you do. And because you do, I think I’ll go see Armstrong and make him an offer he can’t refuse. Jack’s eyes sparkled. I’ll agree to come back to the Church…if he’ll resign from it. That’s fair, isn’t it?

Always the joker, Jack, aren’t you? The priest searched his nephew’s amused face for any vestiges of the altar boy who’d assisted him at Mass so many years before. For the sake of your immortal soul, Jack, you must come back to Holy Mother the Church. What…God forbid…if something should happen to you…an accident say…and you die without being in The State of Grace?

Jack resumed studying the console. I don’t think about that stuff.

I don’t believe you. You are here at Holy Redeemer most evenings and weekends. How can you not think of God? This is God’s house after all.

Correction. I’m cooped up in this control room writing code, working out camera set-ups, editing film. I’m not thinking about anything else but that.

It is God who brought you back to Holy Redeemer, Jack, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

Jack smiled fondly at his only living blood relative. I love and respect you, Uncle Frank, but you’re wrong. God is an illusion…God doesn’t exist.

Shymanski seemed freshly hurt by the denial he’d heard so many times before.

The only reason I’m here is because I don’t want the Archdiocese closing your church and school. Life is tough enough as it is in the East Village. Too many poor people count on you to keep them going. You’re all they’ve got…and you’re all I got. Besides, you’re too damn old to find another job.

I do what little I can.

You work wonders. But listen to me, Uncle Frank, a person doesn’t have to believe in God in order to be a decent human being.

Morality comes from God, Jack, remember that.

No, it doesn’t, it comes from millions of years of evolution. We’re not tree apes anymore, we live in cities and civilization requires that we live by certain rules.

The priest grew remorseful again. After your parents died, it was me who raised you. It has to be my fault that you’re an atheist now.

Jack blew out his breath. Take it from me, there are far worse things in this world than atheists. Just read the morning newspapers, you’ll see that.

I failed you…I made you into the non-believer you are today.

You make it sound like it’s downright un-American not to believe in God.

America is a God-fearing country, Jack, that’s what makes us so great.

Wrong. What makes us great is our technology…computers that run ten million calculations a second…our decoding of the genome…implanting the first artificial heart.. Intel chips…Microsoft…Sun…schools like MIT and Cal Tech.

Machines don’t make a nation great, only its people can do that.

Let me ask you something, Uncle Frank, would you still believe in God if God couldn’t perform miracles?

What kind of crazy question is that?

I ask you that because God has lost his monopoly on miracles. The modern day miracle workers are physicists, microbiologists, geneticists and other scientists like them. Your God hasn’t performed a miracle of any consequence in two thousand years. That’s why today only the very young and the very old still believe in a God.

That’s not true! The priest’s facial muscles tightened into a massive knot.

Yeah, it is. Little kids have faith because their parents think it’ll be good for their character…and because they’re too young to know any better.

And what would a bachelor like yourself know about kids?

Then life happens to them and the kids grow up. They stop believing in God the same way they stop believing in The Tooth Fairy. It’s only when the end is near, do they look to a God again. And that’s just because they’re scared shitless of death. They desperately want someone like yourself to hold their trembling hands and give them assurances that everything is going to be hunky-dory in the great hereafter.

So you’re an expert on old people too, Jack, are you?

He tinkered with a light sensor. Tell me something?

What could I possibly tell you, Mr. Know-It-All?

Seriously, what would your reaction be, if, one day you found out…beyond the shadow of any doubt…that I’m right after all…that there is no God?

No God in Heaven?

No God anywhere…not in Heaven…not in Rome…not in New York.

The priest cringed involuntarily as if the very notion was a contagious virus in danger of contaminating his entire body. Then I’d have to face up to the fact that my whole life had been a terrible waste…that I’ve lived a horrible lie.

Hey, Uncle Frank, cheer up, it’s magic time. Jack flipped a switch and panels began to slide down over the church’s windows. In the semi-darkness, the crowd fell silent as they waited for the celebrity preacher to make his appearance in the pulpit.

Jack reached down and opened the black box.

Francesco di Bernardone, a short, clean-shaven man in a brown friar’s robe materialized high above the altar rail of Holy Redeemer in an ethereal collision of blue lasers so that those at the rear of the church would be able to see the horrible signs of the stigmata that he bore on his body. His wounds were identical to the five wounds that the crucified Jesus Christ had received on the Cross. The middle-aged monk held up both hands to show them the fresh blood dripping from the jagged nail holes. A large maroon stain soiled his coarse robe near the right underarm in the same spot where the Roman legionnaire’s lance had pierced the Savior’s side. Unlike the barefoot Jesus, however, the canonized saint was wearing sandals, yet blood still managed to ooze its way up through the straps from the gaping rips in his feet.

All things considered, St. Francis of Assisi made for a disgusting sight, yet the young, affluent congregation seemed captivated by the gore. The monk could see that the church was filled to capacity despite the sweltering summer heat that was causing everyone in attendance to sweat profusely. His Sunday sermon for this special audience of lawyers, scientists, investment bankers, and engineers was going to focus on a question that Jews often posed to Christians today. The question was written out in large letters on the church’s bulletin board.

IF THE MESSIAH HAS ALREADY COME IN THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST, THEN HOW COME THERE IS STILL SO MUCH KILLING AND SUFFERING IN THE WORLD?

Francis had been asked that very same question 800 years earlier by Mai-monides, the famous Jewish rabbi and philosopher whom he had met while traveling in Spain.

Downstairs in the Supply Closet unseen by the crowd, Fr. Shymanski whispered into Jack’s ear as St. Francis of Assisi opened his mouth to begin his sermon. Stick to the script, my boy, no improvising this time.

*        *        *        *

Robert Diehl had no routine. Like the proverbial bad penny, there was no telling when or where the tough cop with the skinhead haircut was liable to show up walking his graveyard tour on the gritty streets of the 9th Precinct.

Diehl gave the NYPD its money’s worth, and then some. He rousted the black prostitutes peddling their asses Amsterdam style from the windows of empty storefronts on Avenue C. He arrested the PR dealers doing business from the Jacob Riis Houses down on Avenue B where the playgrounds metamorphosed into the city’s largest open air drug supermarket every evening once the lights on the basketball courts were turned off. He haunted the auto repair garages lining the side streets off the FDR Drive that moonlighted as chop shops during the after-hours, dismantling stolen minivans and 4x4’s for their even more expensive parts. He combed the titty bars on Avenue D searching for teenagers flashing counterfeit IDs and for bartenders serving contraband booze. He busted the all-night Korean produce stores on Second Avenue that took bets on Knicks and Ranger games in their back rooms. He impounded the unregistered vehicles of the illegal gypsy car services clustered around East Houston Street and confiscated the green cards of their unlicensed Sikh drivers. He detained the runaways, AWOL juveniles from dysfunctional families in faraway places like Albany and Harrisburg, who flocked to St. Mark’s Place to get their bodies pierced and tattooed by equally messed up kids who were pierced and tattooed themselves.

In a precinct that was more alive after midnight than before, the possibilities for advancement working the night shift were excellent. Diehl’s premeditated unpredictability had resulted in hundreds of felony arrests over the three years he had been assigned to the precinct. In fact, despite a dozen brutality complaints filed against him at the Civilian Review Board, Captain Flynn had still offered the patrolman a promotion to daytime plainclothes. But he turned Flynn down. For one thing, Diehl liked working alone late at night where he could be his own boss, and his own judge and jury as well, dispensing a brutal form of street justice to the geeks and misfits who called this part of the city their home.

He had another reason to refuse the promotion. Whereas nine out of ten cops would’ve jumped at the chance to work in civvies, Diehl actually preferred wearing the blue uniform of New York’s Finest. Uniforms were a tradition in the Diehl family. His father had proudly worn the camouflage khaki of the Special Forces in Vietnam. And his grandfather had killed as many Jews as he had gotten his hands on while dressed in the chic black tunic of the SS in World War II.

Diehl’s nightly patrol routes in the East Village, however, weren’t completely random. Every couple of hours or so, no matter what else was going down, he made a point of stopping by Holy Redeemer Church to check on the building’s security as a courtesy to its pastor, Father Shymanski. Standing tall and very embarrassed amidst the dumpy tenements of East 3rd Street, the impressive limestone church was an architectural relic of the neighborhood’s more prosperous past. The Gothic Revival house of worship had the capacity to seat up to a thousand worshipers and had been erected back in 1843 for an upper middle-class German speaking congregation. Successive waves of poorer Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants had followed, each European ethnic group gradually bootstrapping themselves up the economic ladder until they could afford to move on to a better life out in the suburbs. Today, the congregation of Holy Redeemer hailed mostly from points due south of the Rio Grande, and they mouthed their desperate prayers to God with Hispanic accents.

Times were hard on East 3rd Street these days, even for God. Only two weeks previously, a consecrated host, the wafer of unleavened bread that Catholics believe is transformed by the sacrament of Holy Communion into the Body of Christ, had been stolen from a ceremonial procession cross left on display in front of the altar’s tabernacle. The theft from the locked church had taken place in the middle of the night. And if kidnapping the Son of God from his own house wasn’t bad enough, the thief had brazenly returned a week later to clip the pastor’s chalice as well. Both thefts were puzzling as to motive. The missing host was indeed priceless, however, it’s value was purely spiritual. And the silver plated goblet had more sentimental than monetary value, it having been a modest parental gift to Shymanski for his ordination fifty years earlier.

The thief’s M.O. made it likely that he would return to the church a third time. It was this expectation that accounted for the cop’s presence on the urine scented steps of the church at 11:25 P.M. on Sunday, July 13. When Diehl saw that the massive front doors of the church were ajar he smiled with the satisfaction of a predator who had successfully cornered his prey. The 9mm Glock slid easily out of its holster as he entered the building. The cop locked the doors behind him to protect his back and to cut off a means of escape for the intruder.

*        *        *        *

Paper money was quieter. The metallic clinking noises produced by the coin counting machines made concentrating difficult in the Counting Room located five stories beneath the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Short and thickset, Monsignor James Lynch, 48, had the tense bearing of a man created by God to take orders, not issue them. He watched while two trusted members of the Holy Name Society emptied sack after sack of coins into the machines. As the headquarters of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the cathedral was the central depository for the collections taken up at the Sunday Masses of all its 413 parishes.

Paper money was much lighter too. The weekly operating budget of the Archdiocese hinged on the New York churches collecting a minimum of $5.4 million in donations each and every Sunday. Unfortunately, about half this dollar volume would be contributed in the form of coins that could weigh up to five tons or more depending on the mix of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

Although he had few Protestant friends, the monsignor was aware that ministers didn’t have to contend with the burdensome task of sorting through so much small change every week. Lynch had no Jewish friends, nonetheless, he was pretty sure that rabbis weren’t up to their armpits in coins either. Roman Catholics were, it seemed, much stingier when it came to giving money to their God.

By 9:00 P.M. every Sunday the collection monies were delivered via four Brinks armored cars to Madison Avenue and 51st Street. After the cash was recounted and tallied by parish, it was stored in the cathedral’s vault overnight. The following day an armored truck ferried it to The Chase Manhattan Bank on Park Avenue. This arrangement was also in place for special holy days like Christmas and Good Friday when donations were apt to be large.

The Archdiocese had marshaled its cash this way since 1931, an era when gangsters were robbing local banks left and right. The New York Church had suffered heavy, uninsured losses during the early days of the Great Depression. A CPA at Price Waterhouse before he joined the priesthood, the monsignor was naturally familiar with the sophisticated cash management systems that business corporations today used to electronically move funds. These were secure, efficient environments in which interest could be earned on the in-transit cash. Lynch had written six memos in the past year recommending that the Archdiocese adopt such a system. The monsignor was still waiting for Cardinal Armstrong’s ok to proceed.

That’s all of it, monsignor, Frank Rosetti said as he and George Abbott handed over the machine receipts.

Thanks for your help, men, see you both next Sunday.

Good-night, monsignor.

Good-night, safe home now.

It was close to midnight when the two volunteers rode the steel cage elevator up to street level. Due to the lateness of the hour, only a single armed guard was on duty at the front door of the rectory. Outside, on a deserted Madison Avenue, they parted company going in different directions, Rosetti dashing for the Third Avenue bus that would take him downtown to his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, Abbott running to catch the M5 uptown to Lincoln Center.

Neither man noticed Jose Rios and Hector Rodriguez huddled in a murky office building doorway across the street. Even if they had spotted the pair, it is doubtful they would have reported their presence as being suspicious. There were 45,000 homeless men and women currently living on the streets these days and doorways often doubled as bedrooms and bathrooms in The Big Apple.

I seen enough, man, Hector said, stepping out onto the sidewalk.

Yeah, me too, Jose agreed, the looking part’s over.

They shambled casually to the battered Honda parked a block away on Lexington Avenue. Their ride downtown to Avenue C and East 6th Street took a scant twelve minutes instead of the usual half-hour.

It was serene now in the Counting Room as the noises of the city that never sleeps were unable to penetrate its thick masonry walls. Lynch sat at his grey metal desk hunched over the PC keyboard, inputting the Mass collection totals, parish by parish, borough by borough, onto the Excel spreadsheet. Twenty minutes later the monsignor was grimacing at the screen. Collections this Sunday amounted to a budget-breaking $3,483,113.42, a record low in receipts.

Donations were down across the board, even in Manhattan where Wall Street employment was stronger than it had been in over a decade. The corrective measures that had been put in place—scheduling more convenient services late on Saturday evenings and on Sunday afternoons, adding Rock & Folk Masses to encourage attendance amongst young people, taking up double collections in the wealthiest parishes of the Upper East and West Sides—were not doing the trick.

Lynch wasn’t a pastoral expert so he had no first hand knowledge as to what was actually going on out in the archdiocese’s 413 parishes. He never headed up a parish of his own…he never even worked in one. By no stretch of the imagination could he be considered a people priest. The monsignor was strictly a numbers man even though he wore a white Roman collar to work every day. His job wasn’t to proselytize or to preach the Gospel, it was to keep the books balanced, recording the money donated to God’s Church and then spending it the way God’s Vicar in New York, Cardinal Peter Armstrong, instructed him to.

That suited Lynch just fine because he liked numbers more than people anyway. And the numbers liked him back. The columns and rows of figures told him a dark secret that none of the priests and bishops out in the parishes knew—that the New York Archdiocese had a very serious cash flow problem.

This would come as a shock, Lynch realized, to both Catholics and heretics alike. New Yorkers assumed that the Archdiocese was rich. Critics considered it to be sinfully so. A visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on posh Fifth Avenue would confirm that. Modeled after the great Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, this white Gothic marvel with its 460 foot twin spires and its ten ton bronze entry doors easily accommodated 2,400 worshipers for Mass in the most ornate setting imaginable.

As the official bean-counter, however, Lynch knew that appearances were deceiving. During the 1990’s the Archdiocese had been transformed into an immigrant Church once again, its congregations growing darker in complexion and speaking languages other than English. Immigration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands, in particular, had mushroomed into a tidal wave of indigent Catholics of color. Hispanics and blacks now made up 45% of the 2.4 million faithful living in the 4,700 square miles of territory that constituted the New York Archdiocese.

Lynch had dutifully advised Cardinal Armstrong that living beyond your means—spending more money than the Archdiocese took in—even if done with the noblest of intentions in mind, would sooner or later result in financial disaster. In their case, it was going to be sooner. Two options remained that could buy time until a resolution of the problem could be found. Armstrong could closedown a dozen parishes and parochial schools in the South Bronx that would never ever be self-supporting again. Or he could sell non-essential church properties like playgrounds and convents located in still decent neighborhoods to real estate developers for quick cash. If an outright sale were impolitic, then the money could be borrowed discretely from banks by pledging the properties as collateral for the loans.

But Armstrong had decried Lynch’s contingency plans as being overly harsh and morally flawed. Instead of cutting back on expenditures, His Eminence had increased the Archdiocese’s spending on the needy. From a humanist point of view, this was an incredible act of charity on the cardinal’s part. From a financial standpoint, it was an incredibly irresponsible act.

The monsignor studied the gloomy spreadsheets again at length, checking and rechecking the numbers. He could find just a single cause for optimism in all the red ink, one parish in the entire listing of 413 that consistently bucked the downward spiral in donations. It was the Church of the Holy Redeemer located in, of all the most unlikely places, Manhattan’s funky East Village.

*        *        *        *

Standard operating procedure for a burglary-in-progress investigation called for the beat cop to radio the precinct for squad car backup. On this occasion, however, Robert Diehl didn’t follow S.O.P. as Holy Redeemer’s pastor had told him that he suspected one of his own altar boys of being the thief. If the kid did turn out to be the culprit, Fr. Shymanski had made it clear that he wouldn’t press charges, that he wanted the matter handled unofficially, off-the-record, so as not to jeopardize the boy’s chances of winning a basketball scholarship to college.

As far as Diehl was concerned, the old priest got exactly what he deserved for allowing blacks to become altar boys in the first place. He had already made up his mind that if he caught the punk inside the church he was going to break a finger on each of his large black hands, scholarship or no scholarship, priest or no priest. If the kid was like the other gang-bangers in the neighborhood, he probably couldn’t read or write well anyway. There was no chance that he’d ever graduate from a college. And he certainly wouldn’t be missed on the court, there were way too many blacks already playing basketball. They dominated the sport today…ruined it. That’s the reason Diehl never watched NBA games on TV anymore.

The policeman stopped by a statue of St. Joseph to allow his eyes to get accustomed to the inky interior of the church. As a precaution, he also removed his shoes. Holy Redeemer happened to be his own parish church and Diehl knew from personal experience that the building’s marble floors and walls, coupled with the great height of the domed roof, made the place a natural echo chamber. The slightest sound was magnified…squeaking soles…even breathing…ten times or more. He strained his ears hoping to use the acoustics to obtain a fix on the intruder’s location, but all he could hear was the rapid thumping of his own heart.

Stray beams of moonlight passing through the church’s stained glass windows helped guide him down the main aisle. Diehl paused periodically and dropped into a crouch, revolving full circle as the Police Manual advised officers to do when stalking concealed perps, his gun always pointed outward at the possible danger lurking in the empty pews. He managed to advance midway to the altar, to a spot directly under the dome, when the pulpit reading lamp was suddenly turned on.

Entra, bienvenido, intoned the dim figure standing in the pulpit, Senor Diehl, he estado esperandolo.

Taking big strides the cop moved speedily towards the pulpit and gripped his weapon with both hands to keep his aim steady. At first, Diehl couldn’t tell if the intruder was a man or a woman because the weak lectern light was devoured by the cavernous space of the church. As the distance between them shortened he became more certain that it was a man, though definitely not a black man. He was able to see his quarry distinctly only when he came within twenty feet.

The man looked to be in his mid fifties and he was so pale that his skin had a translucent quality, making it almost seem as though a ghostly apparition, and not a flesh and blood person was standing up in the pulpit. A prominent brow ridge cast a permanent shadow over his bloodshot eyes that never seemed to blink. His hair was bushy and colorless, frizzled like a mad professor’s, and cut long so that the split-ends brushed the Roman collar and the shoulders of the cassock he wore. A pallid soul-patch grew out of the cleft between his lower lip and chin.

Buenos noches, Senor Diehl, mi amigo.

Diehl relaxed his pressure on the Glock’s trigger as the realization sank slowly into his brain that the individual before him wasn’t a burglar at all, but a priest who had a right to be there. Almost immediately, his finger tightened again. The cleric’s colors were wrong in a subtle way—the reverse of what they should’ve been—this priest’s collar was black and his cassock was white.

You’re no priest! It was a statement as well as an accusation.

The oddly attired intruder smiled as his eyes rose skywards, not seeking a God