Page 19 of Go Now
‘Patricia Vance,’ she said, holding out a chilly hand with vivid green-painted nails.‘Gallery Director.I heard you wanted to talk.How can I help?’
Kate did the introductions.‘We’re trying to build up a picture of the protestors at the Ashworth exhibition in June.’
Vance glanced around carefully.It seemed ‘protestors’ wasn’t a word that went down too well in this austerely wealthy habitat.‘Let’s step into my office.’
Vance's office was a surprise: a big old tatty sofa, a cluttered coffee table, and a small, snoring dog.Kate and Marcus perched on the sofa with the laptop between them, and Vance scooted across to them on an office chair that had seen better days.
‘We’ve managed to identify most of the protestors, but there’s a couple outstanding Kate said.‘I wonder if you can help.’
'Who came up with the idea of a petition?'Marcus said as Kate looked for the relevant images.'It's genius.'
'The first few days were quite troublesome,' Vance said, twirling her wedding ring. 'They threw eggs and flour at the windows. It just… I guess it seemed likely that things might escalate.And NYPD weren't being overly helpful.It was Anna, one of our summer interns who came up with the idea.She listens to a lot of true crime podcasts.As it turned out, though, protests like this tend to peak and trough.They got noisier and more of a nuisance up to and including days 5 and 6, after which things calmed down.'
‘It’s these two guys.’Kate turned the screen towards Vance; Vance put on a pair of spectacles for a closer look.
‘The…largergentleman… yes, he was here. But he never spoke.Literally.Showed up every day, but never chanted, never shouted.Just stared through the window.Or stood on the opposite side of the road, staring in. Kind of creepy.I’m not sure he was really connected to the protests.He just… he was justthere.’
‘And was that every day?’
‘Every one of the 12 days, yes.’
‘And this gentleman?’
‘You don’t know him? He’s quite a face.Radical priest.His name’s Father Torres. He was here every day, dawn til dusk with a megaphone. Specialised in one-to-one shouting matches with Brandon on the street. In the end, we had to smuggle him in and out via the goods entrance.’
‘Violent?’
A pained expression crossed Vance’s face.‘Insults turned to shoves.Very playground stuff.He pushed Brandon at one point.It was enough for the police to arrest Father Torres, but they let him go a few hours later.And guess where he went.Right back here.They didn’t even confiscate his megaphone.’
She tapped on the screen with a long, green fingernail and a video clip began to load.
From the tinny laptop speakers came the sounds of a street protest: rhythmic chanting, shouts, a siren, a woman’s voice – perhaps Vance’s – saying, pleading, ‘We don’t want any trouble.Please leave, just leave’.The camera seemed to swim through the crush of bodies until it revealed Torres standing nose to nose with Ashworth, the muscles in his neck bulging in tandem with his eyes. And cutting through all the other noises, the voice of the priest - Brooklyn with a distinct Hispanic undertone - hoarse and angry and aflame with religious zeal:
He that offends the Lord let him perish in the lake of fire!
He that scorns the Lord let him be crushed by a thousand rocks!
Marcus and Kate exchanged a look, then both gazed back at the screen, to Torres, his eyes on fire with anger, with religious zeal and… something else. The clear-headed, clearly stated, deeply felt longing to kill.
CHAPTER SEVEN
St.Augustine’s church was right in the middle of East Harlem, a boxy, unappealing red-brick building built in the 1980s, and looking rather more suited to paying taxes or renewing a driver’s license than the adoration of the Holy Spirit.
The main door opened with an ugly, squeaking shudder, interrupting the Mass, causing candles to flicker and prompting a few unwelcoming looks from the congregation.They were few in number for this lunchtime service: mostly Latina grandmothers, plus a handful of people who might have been sheltering from the cold, or seeking a sip of wine. Despite the non-churchy look of the building, Kate was pleased to find that the air smelt of candlewax, incense, and mothballs, a cocktail that took her right back to her Chicago childhood.
At the altar, Father Benedict Torres cut an impressive figure: there was something lean and ascetic about him, his tan complexion offset by robes of deep forest green and brilliant white, his dark wavy hair bent low over the Host in his fingers.Kate and Marcus shuffled as discreetly as they could onto a back row, far from all thebona fideworshippers.
‘For this is my body, which will be given up for you,’ the priest intoned gravely, as he held the white wafer high above his head, to the ringing of bells by what must have been the world’s oldest altar boy. Kate had attended hundreds of masses in her life, but never seen a priest holding the host so high like that, almost as if he was performing a sacrifice.Nor had she ever seen a priest keep his eyes so tightly shut, or pray silently with quite such fervour.Torres trembled slightly, she noticed, as he put the wafer down and took up the chalice.
A large book was open on a stand in front of him, but he didn’t glance at it once.He was either gazing intensely at a point on the horizon, or he had his eyes shut.Even from her seat several rows back, Kate could see the beads of sweat on the man’s brow, catching the light from the candles at either side of the altar.
‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’
Now the congregation joined him in reciting the Pater Noster, better known as the Lord’s Prayer.Torres swayed back and forth, emulating the rhythm of the prayer.Kate was reminded of worshippers at the Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem; it was a style of ritual so far removed from the polite, sanitised Catholicism of her parents’ church and her convent high school that it might as well have belonged to a different religion altogether.Or just to Torres.The grandmas curtseyed and made the sign of the cross, but their movements were muted, routine.Only the priest was involved so deeply; transforming himself, almost, as he transformed the bread and the wine, oblivious to the congregation facing him.
The Mass continued in the same vein, from the Agnus Dei prayer, to the Communion, where the ageing congregation shuffled up to the altar and knelt, with varying degrees of discomfort, to receive the consecrated wafer and the wine from the priest. Kate had attended masses where the priest had seemed bored by the proceedings, others where he’d appeared out of his depth, stumbling and stuttering through the time-honored assembly of words and gestures.But she’d never witnessed one where the celebrant – the priest – had seemed quite so caught up in their own performance. Torres was either very devout, or trying to seem it.That wasn’t exactly a red flag, but it was, nonetheless, noticeable.
After the Mass was over, Torres exchanged a quick word with one of the few men in the congregation, a frail-looking older gentleman in a suit that belonged to another century.His business concluded, the priest shot a brief, curious look in their direction before slipping through a door at the back of the hall.Kate and Marcus waited a couple of minutes, looking at the one, church-like element of the building: a small, rectangular, modern stained-glass window in the eastern wall, featuring a scene from the Book of Genesis, where the dove returns to Noah with an olive twig in its beak.
