When the limo set him down in the Hyatt parking lot he crossed to the other side of Peachtree Road, as directed, and waited at the MARTA stop for the bus marked “23 Oglethorpe.” He stood in the glory of the afternoon and savored the gentle breeze and thought about the girl’s face, resurrecting her image in his mind’s eye, conjuring up her features from the photographs he had been sent and focusing mentally on them until he was satisfied he would know her as soon as he saw her.
The wait was longer than he’d been told; the bus must be off schedule. When it finally drew up at the stop and he paid the fare and took a rear seat, he shot a glance at his wristwatch and knew he would not be in time for the beginning of the service, for the procession of the choir up the aisle of the cathedral to the altar. He had wanted very much to arrive early. There was always the chance that she could have got sick, or that some other reason would keep her from taking part in the evening’s service. If the timing had been better he could have watched the choir in procession and made sure she was among them. He felt unease return to his stomach. The faulty timing was unavoidable, as it had been on his last mission, but he might be blamed anyway.
Impatiently he read off the cross-street signs, resisting the impulse to sneak glances at his watch every few moments. The landmarks he’d been told to watch for slid past the bus window, first the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, then two churches next to one another a few blocks farther on. And then he saw it, across Peachtree from the adjacent churches and one block beyond them. St. Philip’s Cathedral. As directed, he stayed on the MARTA bus for three more blocks, then got off and walked back. Quickly.
Massive in tan stone, the cathedral stood on a small hill, surrounded by the warm blue of the sky. He strode up the paved pathway to the entrance doors and let himself in. As he adjusted his sight to the dimness of the vestibule an usher offered him a leaflet. Above a red-tinted artist’s rendition of the building the heading THE CATHEDRAL OF SAINT PHILIP IN THE CITY OF ATLANTA was printed in Gothic script, and then in larger ornate letters THE OFFICE OF SOLEMN EVENSONG. He smiled vacantly, folded and pocketed the brochure, and passed into the cathedral proper, down the long aisle to an empty pew.
The service had already begun. Behind the ornately carved altar he could make out tiny violet-robed figures. Their voices rose, filling the church with the sounds of a hymn he didn’t remember. Maybe it was part of the new liturgy; he had been away from church for so many years, and a lot of things seemed to have changed. The altar cloths and the priest’s vestments were rich violet, the Lenten color of his youth. The awesome stained-glass windows, the red-padded kneeling benches brought back memories of Sunday morning Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.
He felt a return of the old terror, the sense that he was under judgment, that those open vaulting spaces high overhead were full of invisible all-seeing powers. He tried to concentrate his thoughts on the distant altar, on the loveliness of the voices lifted in sacred song, and wondered if the woman he had come for was really in the choir.
But his mind fought back, kept driving him backward in time to his youth. The catechism questions. Who made the world? God made the world. The indoctrination in the dogmas of the One True Faith. The gagging fear they instilled in him, that in a lightning flash of divine vengeance he would die suddenly and alone and in a state of mortal sin, and would suffer unbearable torments in hell, forever and ever and ever... The long-forgotten terror was so vivid he almost rushed out of the cathedral. Give me the children, and they are mine for life. One of the Popes had said that. Or was it Lenin, or Napoleon? Maybe all three of them had said it.
There were no more than 30 worshippers scattered through the cathedral, and he made himself watch them so that he would know when to stand or sit or kneel, following the others’ lead a split second later. Prayers and psalms were sung, there was a reading from the Old Testament, then another hymn and a reading from the Gospels and the recitation of the Creed which he found he still remembered word for word. The rite kept sweeping him back in time, so that he might almost have forgotten what he had come here to do. He flexed his powerful tapered fingers in preparation and waited.
And at last the ceremony ended. The violet-robed choir emerged from behind the altar in recessional, still singing, gliding back up the aisle to the rear of the cathedral. Ahead of the double file of choristers a priest marched, holding a tall gold crucifix aloft. He saw the worshippers in the pews in front of him bow their heads as the cross passed them, and he bowed too but kept his eyes open, concentrating on the faces of the singers as they went by. Not that one, not the next one — there, there she was, the tall one with the light brown hair and the harlequin-framed glasses. She moved up the aisle as if in a trance, eyes fixed on the open hymnal in her hands as she sang.
When the last of the choir had glided out of sight the worshipers slowly began to file out of their pews. He hung back until all but a few stragglers had left. Then he retreated up the aisle to the empty hush of the vestibule and waited. The choir room was somewhere in the basement, he had been told. They would deposit their robes in a closet until next Sunday and say their goodbyes and separate, each person leaving by whatever exit was nearest to his or her car. The girl he had come for would return up the staircase to the vestibule and leave through the main doors. That was what he had been told and he had to accept it. He paced the vestibule in silent discomfort and wished it didn’t have to be done in a church.
And then, when he removed the brochure from his pocket and studied it more closely and realized that all the time he had been in an Episcopal not a Catholic cathedral and hadn’t known it, he almost laughed aloud, and the old terror and guilt vanished in an instant. He was a professional again.
Footsteps tapped sharply, rising, and he positioned himself beside the doorway at the head of the stairs. She walked past him without looking behind her. She wore blue jeans and a blue denim jacket and high reddish-brown boots. “Miss Smith?” he said softly. “May Smith?”
She swung around. The two of them were alone in the dim empty vestibule. “Yes?” Her eyes widened slightly behind the harlequin-framed glasses. She was the one all right. It was a shame she was so beautiful.
“Company,” he said. “Please take me to your car.”
She did not turn pale or show any sign of fear. She didn’t even blink. It was as if she had known what to expect, or maybe she just didn’t care any more. “This way,” she said, and led him along a branch corridor to an unobtrusive exit door, then through four interconnected parking lots that sloped down the far side of the hill. He flexed his fingers as he walked beside her in the softly falling twilight, and wondered absently why she had parked so far away.
A dark green sedan stood alone at the rear of the remotest lot, glistening in the last of the light. “You drive,” he said. She unlocked the front passenger door and slid across the seat. He entered after her, looked at her with a sort of envy as she sat stoically behind the wheel. None of the others had been so calm, and he wondered how she managed it. “Drive,” he instructed her. “I’ll give directions as we go.”