City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(51)
“So?” D’Agosta asked. “Who was it?”
“Nobody. Nobody signed in at that time.”
At that moment Curry emerged from a far corner, after having made a series of phone calls. “Lieutenant?”
“What is it?”
“Roland McMurphy was in the hospital the entire day having a colostomy bag installed.”
*
They emerged from the lobby into the plaza in front of the Seaside Financial building, where a noisy crowd had formed, shouting and waving placards.
“Not another demonstration,” D’Agosta said. “What the fuck do they want now?”
“No idea,” said Curry.
As D’Agosta searched the seething mass for a path through, he began to get an inkling of what was going on. There were, in fact, two very different groups protesting. One was waving signs and shouting slogans like Down with the One Percenters! and Decapitate Corporate Greedsters! They were at the young, scruffy end of the spectrum, pretty much the same crowd D’Agosta remembered from the Occupy Wall Street protests of a few years before. The other group was quite different; many of them were young, too, but dressed in coats and ties, looking more like Mormon missionaries than radical leftists. They were not shouting anything, just silently carrying signs with various slogans, such as WHO OWNS YOU?…WELCOME TO THE NEW BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES… THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T “THINGS”…and CONSUMERISM IS A FATAL ILLNESS.
Even though the two sides seemed to agree on the wickedness of money, there were shouted insults and scuffles where they were crowding together as more and more people arrived from various side streets to join in. As D’Agosta watched, he saw that one man seemed to be the leader of the quieter group—a thin, gray-haired man wearing a dirty down coat over what looked like monk’s robes. He was holding a sign that said
VANITIES
With crudely painted fire underneath the word.
“Hey, see that guy? What do you make of him?”
Pendergast glanced over. “An ex-Jesuit, by the looks of the threadbare cassock underneath his jacket. And the sign is evidently an allusion to Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities.’ That’s a rather interesting twist on the current situation, wouldn’t you say, Vincent? New Yorkers never cease to surprise me.”
D’Agosta had a vague recollection of hearing something about a madman named Savonarola in Italian history but he couldn’t quite pull it up. “Those quiet ones—they scare me more than the rabble. They look like they mean it.”
“Indeed,” said Pendergast. “It appears that we are not just dealing with a serial killer, but with a social protest movement—or even two.”
“Yeah. And if we don’t solve this soon, New York’s going to have a frigging civil war.”
35
MARSDEN SWOPE EMERGED into the December chill in front of his East 125th Street apartment and breathed deeply, trying to rid his lungs of the dead air of his basement studio. Following the protest of the previous afternoon, he felt energized. Ever since—for eighteen hours straight—Swope had been sitting at his old Gateway computer, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, and emailing. It was astonishing, he thought, how one modest idea could snowball into something so big in such a short period of time. The world was hungry for what he had to offer. How strange this felt—after all his years of laboring in obscurity and poverty.
He took several more deep breaths. He felt light-headed, not just from staring at a computer screen for so long, but also because he hadn’t eaten in two days. He felt no hunger, but he knew he had to eat something to keep going; while his spirit was nourished, his body was running on empty.
Out on the sidewalk, in the bright, cold winter light, cars rushed by, heedless people going about their meaningless business. He walked down to Broadway and crossed it, passing under the elevated tracks as a train rumbled overhead, clacking and thundering on its way northward, then he angled toward the McDonald’s on the corner of 125th and Broadway.
The place was occupied with the usual derelicts trying to escape the cold by nursing a cup of coffee and the inevitable group of Asian guys playing cards. He paused: here were the very invisibles, the poor, who had been trodden upon, crushed, and ground into the dirt by the rich and powerful of this fallen city. Soon, very soon, their lives would change…thanks to him.
But not quite yet. He went to the counter and ordered two dozen Chicken McNuggets and a chocolate milk jug, collected his order, and took it to a table. He might as well have been invisible: nobody knew him, nobody looked at him. And to be sure, there wasn’t much to look at—a small man in his fifties with thinning gray hair, a close-cropped beard, skinny and undernourished, dressed in a brown Salvation Army down jacket, slacks, and secondhand shoes.
Formerly a Jesuit priest, Swope had left the Society of Jesus ten years earlier. This was to avoid being expelled, mostly due to his highly vocal disgust with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church regarding all the money and property it had accumulated over the centuries, in direct contradiction to Jesus’s teachings on poverty. As a Jesuit he had taken a vow of poverty, but what a contrast that was with the obscene riches of the church. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” was, in his mind, the clearest statement Jesus ever made in his time on earth, and yet—as he had expressed many times to his superiors, much to their displeasure—it was the one universally ignored by many so-called Christians.