The Lever of Faith

The Lever of Faith

(working title)

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Click.

The two men sat in quiet contemplation at the small wooden table, the crackling glow of the fire warming them against the steady autumn rain outside. The day had been dreary and uneventful, and, with no official duties to attend to, they were both content to spend the evening indoors.

Click.

For a long moment, the soft ticking of the clock dominated the room. Then, having reached a decision, Father Joseph Mercer drew a sharp breath. “What do you think of the latest Proclamation?” he asked, reaching out to steady the bishop. Mercer had a deep and gravelly voice, honed by countless homilies and cigarettes. His face still had some of the sharp, chiseled features of his youth, but the passage of time had wrinkled and sagged them. The effect being that he always looked tired and saddened except when he smiled, and then he looked merely tired.

Perkin shrugged. “A minor theological matter, I think. After all, the Church hasn’t actually disputed the heliocentric model for hundreds of years.” The younger man had hoped to escape this evening without any real talk of such matters, but he had known Mercer long enough to know that neither the food nor the drinks they shared earlier would distract the man from his work for long. “It is, I believe, a clever way for the Church to appear to embrace science without having to make any dogmatic changes. What do you believe?”

“I believe that your assessment is correct.” He gave Perkin a knowing smile. His face may have been tired, but his eyes had a purposeful intensity behind them. “And I also believe—”

Mercer moved his arm, and the bishop obliged him by taking two steps to the right and two steps forward.

Click.

“—that is checkmate.”

Father Perkin sagged in his chair. “So it is. Again. And here I thought I would have you in five.”

“Ah, you might have, but remember, Thomas, in all things you must think both strategically and tactically. The two are not always the same thing. Gregory understood that, and I will teach you to understand it as well.”

“Gregory?”

“Cardinal—or rather, the former Cardinal Gregory Angelo was once my student as well. He became quite skillful at the game, although I could always win my share against him. I still can, of course. His Holiness may be infallible in matters of faith, but not in matters of chess.”

“Neither are you, Joseph.” Perkin picked up the game clock. “Another go? I think thirty minutes, this time. The rain doesn’t seem to be letting up anyhow.”

///

The rain outside was, indeed, not letting up. It had not been letting up for over an hour, and the figure in the doorway was feeling rather bitter about that right now. Bitter about it, and cold and wet because of it. He was standing—well, leaning, actually, no, more accurately, huddled—in the doorway because he was waiting. At the moment, he was waiting for the rain to let up, which it wasn’t.

“Bollocks all this, then,” said John Overstreet to no one in particular. Walking home from the pub had seemed like a fine idea an hour ago, when the alcohol was still making him feel warm and talkatively cheerful. Who needs an umbrella, he’d thought. Or rather shouted. To the doorman. Probably the doorman, but possibly just a man coming through the door. There were some other things he thought—and shouted, he supposed—as well, things about embracing the rain and not letting some silly taxicab get between him and nature.

He’d always been fatalistic about the weather, and about rain in particular. His philosophy at the time had been why bother with all the fuss with an umbrella, when you’ll be dry in a little while anyhow? This was a fine philosophy for someone whose major adventures outside seldom extended farther than the distance from the door of a car to the door of a building. It was, however, a rather bad and quite sobering philosophy for someone who has gotten himself drunkenly lost and, now, cold and soaking wet as well.

Why had he gone out drinking in the first place, he wondered. He’d only been in the  country for a week now and hardly knew a soul outside of the new office. Ah, that’s right—he’d gone out to get drunk and to forget about being lonely in this city. And so he went out and got drunk and forgot, which was now why he was lost and sober.

“Bollocks all this, then,” he said again, just for the effect. He stepped out of the doorway and looked up so he could read the sign to see what it was he had been standing in the doorway of for the past few minutes. He cupped his hands to keep the rain out of his eyes and read

Gaskin Street Rare and Used Books

Okay, Overstreet said to himself, I’m on Gaskin Street. He said it to himself mostly to make sure his brain heard him over the dull pounding that was now going on inside of it. He walked down to the nearest intersection to find the cross street—which turned out to be Quarter Avenue—spotted the awning in front of a hotel about half a block down, figured he could at least wait in the lobby while he called for a cab, and set off towards it, the collar of his coat pulled up on his head.

He had just gone around the corner, which is why he heard, but didn’t see, the Gaskin Street Rare and Used Book store explode.

///

“No, it’s been raining all evening here, a really miserable day. Yes, of course. Yes. I understand. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Goodnight.”

With exasperated relief, she ended the call and threw her phone down on the bed. Then she thought better of it, picked up the device and placed it on the charger. If he had gone on any longer, she mused, I could have told him that my battery was low and it would have been the truth, this time. She crossed the room to close the drapes overlooking Quarter Avenue, and began to undress.

Damn this uncomfortable suit—I should have brought one with me. She shook her head to herself. Anthony had been unable to make the trip with her this time, due to some kind of family emergency. He didn’t have time to go into details; she had been on the plane when he called and the flight attendant had been quite insistent that she turn off her phone before takeoff. So she had to attend the meetings herself, which of course required more suitable attire. More suitable than “casual,” which summed up her normal wardrobe pretty much in its entirety.

A shower would be perfect. She went into the bathroom and drew the water. Looking at her reflection, she noticed how tired she looked. And, as if on cue, her body, sensing it was free from any further agenda items for the day, let the tiredness she had been storing up all day uncoil and catch up with the tiredness already in her eyes. With that, she stepped under the steaming shower and finally started to relax.

A little while later, Sara Gianetti stepped out of the shower and wrapped her auburn hair in one of the coarse, bleach-white hotel towels that had become so familiar to her over the last few months.

She had just turned on the news and was climbing into bed, which is why she heard, but didn’t see, the Gaskin Street Rare and Used Book store explode.

///

Father Mercer closed the door to his study. He walked back towards his writing desk, pausing at the window to watch the rain droplets collect on the window and dance their way downward.

“For he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and the rain to fall on the just and unjust,” he said. If someone catches a priest talking to himself, he thought, at least he can always claim to have been talking to God.

He took out a small sheaf of heavy paper and a pen. The church records might all be computerized now, but some things should just be written down. So he began writing.

///

Overstreet was, he felt, a simple man with a simple philosophy: Everything happens for a reason. Usually that reason was a simple one. He found that almost everyone believed that, which was a good start, but people too often left out the most important bit: A simple reason isn’t always an obvious one.

He found that his philosophy—which included the bit that most people left out—helped him a great deal in life. All sorts of simple but not always obvious conclusions fell out from those few simple axioms. For one thing, Overstreet believed that in any organization the most important people were always one person away from the bottom.

Take companies, for instance. Most people would look at a big, successful company, with lots of important executives, and assume that the company was successful because the people in charge were very bright. This was the simple and obvious conclusion, but definitely the wrong one. Overstreet felt strongly that executives were a bunch of bloody idiots, the lot of them. The people at the bottom—the grunts—were important, since they were the ones who did the actual work. But they were either too inexperienced or too clueless to be promoted. It was the people who told the grunts what to do who were the most important. They were like the sergeants in the army: they were given instructions to follow, and it was their job to sort out what it was that the people who gave the instructions had actually meant them to do. Often, what they were meant to do was entirely different than what they were told to do, which is why when the sergeants weren’t busy telling people under them what to do, they were busy getting the people over them to believe that their instructions were brilliant and why don’t they go make some more of those fabulously useful pie charts?

This was why Overstreet liked small, usually family-owned businesses and distrusted all the rest. Small shops and businesses usually had one or two people who gave the instructions (sometimes one of them was called Dad) and a few other people to actually do things (sometimes called Jimmy, or Sally, or Ben-dammit-I-told-you-once-already-don’t-make-me-tell-you-again). Two layers of people you could trust. Any more than that and you got idiots with pie charts.

The Gaskin Street Used and Rare Book shop probably only had two layers or people, Overstreet considered. He watched the firemen work to extinguish the flames. If anyone was inside the shop a few minutes ago, it would probably have fewer layers now.

///

…Overstreet and Gianetti meet in the lobby of the Gilead Hotel in a clever and interesting manner…

///

It was an interesting crime, Overstreet thought. At least it was very probably a crime, unless the shopkeeper had been in the habit of stocking very rare and very explosive books. The problem was, of course, that interesting crimes were usually the simple kinds with not-so-obvious reasons behind them, and while the reasons were still simple, sorting the m out was usually not. This annoyed him very much, because he was tired and hung-over, and they would probably want him to do the sorting out.

Inspector John Overstreet had been a cop of one kind or another for twenty-three years. For most of that time he was the kind people tended to call “Sarge,” although most recently he was the kind people called “sir.” Mostly because “Inspector” didn’t lend itself to being shortened in a clever and catchy way.

He’d been made an inspector after he proved too successful at applying his personal philosophy to his work. Amongst most police forces, this was surprisingly easier than it sounded. In Overstreet’s case, it was a matter of saying things like “No, I don’t think his wife killed him with the lead pipe, because he’s got a bunch of horseshoe-shaped dents in his back and the horse has gone missing,” or “Johnny ‘The Meat’ Johnson couldn’t have done the robbery because he hanged himself in his cell just last week.” This eventually made him unpopular with most of the other policemen because he made them look rather foolish, rather often. He was already unpopular with the Captain because of his habit of taking very useful pie charts and eating his lunch off of them, and clearly wasn’t Leadership Material. So he’d been made an Inspector, which was a promotion of sorts, but rather more sideways than up. Sideways suited Overstreet just fine.

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…

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People place aphorisms in good stead. They figure if the overwhelming chaos of life can be boiled down to a few pithy sayings, everything will work out jolly well. There’s a lot of comfort to be found in the wisdom of Everybody Knows, or the collected works of You Know What They Say. The problem is that proverbs tend to work in ways that aren’t always jolly well. It’s a fine thing that a penny saved is a penny earned, but when you’re trying to keep food on the table you’ll find that a family of four would gladly give you all three volumes of Our Mum Always Said in exchange for a nice, fat turkey.

There were twelve hands all together, though only six of them were really doing anything at the moment. People always forget that the phrase “dead weight” exists for a reason—namely, dead people are generally pretty heavy. Heavier, even, once the weight of the coffin is added in, which is why there were six men, three on a side, carrying the coffin slowly down the steps of the church. There were twelve hands all together because everyone knows that many hands make light work, even when that work is putting your friend into the ground.

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…

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