Renaissance was remodeled.
The driver let him out at the end of the block and Kingsley
quickly found the WTL offices. They were housed in a threestory brick building wedged between a school and a run-down
apartment complex. Kingsley entered it warily feeling like a
soldier encroaching on enemy ground. In fact, everywhere
he looked he saw signs and posters warning of the dangers of
sin, the inevitability of judgment.
Are you ready to meet your Maker?
The way is narrow.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Flee from the wrath to come.
He studied another poorly designed poster that depicted
human beings stretching their arms toward heaven in supplication even as their lower bodies burned up in a fire. “Cheerful,” Kingsley said to himself.
He caught sight of another poster—an aborted fetus lying
on a bloodied blanket—with the words I formed you in the womb
underneath in a melodramatic font. A grotesque image, it did
nothing to change his opinion about abortion and did everything to make him want to lose his lunch on the church carpeting. Did people truly find comfort or enlightenment in a
place like this?
He’d found comfort and acceptance back at St. Ignatius
Academy, the Catholic school where he’d met S?ren. He
wasn’t Catholic, never had been, but the Jesuits at the school
had been hard-drinking, open-minded intellectuals. Jesuits
were notoriously liberal, at least by Catholic standards. He
remembered one brave boy in a social ethics class asking Father Henry under what circumstances an abortion could be
permitted. Father Henry had answered, “Never on an empty
stomach,” and the class had been too shocked to laugh for a
full five seconds.
Something told him abortion jokes wouldn’t be welcome
in this church.
“Awful, isn’t it?” Kingsley turned and saw a young woman
standing in the door to an office at the front of the church.
“That poster.”
Kingsley took the necessary two seconds to reorient his
brain, so he could speak without any trace of his French accent. “It is awful,” Kingsley agreed. “My religion forbids engaging in propaganda.”
“Excuse me?”
Kingsley gave her a placid, nonthreatening and therefore
entirely fake smile.
“I was wondering if Reverend Fuller was in. I’d like to
speak to him.”
“He’s not here,” she said with a nervous lilt in her voice.
The girl was pretty and could have been beautiful if she wasn’t
hiding under a shapeless f loral dress. She looked young, twenty
or twenty-one, and she had a sweet innocent gleam in her
eyes. “The WTL headquarters are in Stamford. He doesn’t
stop by here very often. He’s a busy man.”
“I hear he’s also a very godly man.”
The girl smiled broadly.
“He is. So inspiring. Reverend Fuller truly loves the Lord,
and his church loves him.”
“No one loves men of the cloth more than I do.” “My name is Chastity. Could I do something for you?” “No, Chastity does nothing for me.”
“Sir?”
“Actually you might be able to help me,” he said, walking
up to her and putting the bare minimum of socially required
distance between them as possible. “I have a friend. She has
a serious problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“She’s a lesbian.”
Chastity’s eyes widened.
“That is a problem. Have you talked to her about it?” “I have. She’s unrepentant.” He exhaled heavily in faux
disappointment.
“Those people often are. The heart of the homosexual gets
hard the longer they stay in their sinful lifestyle.” “Yes, her heart is very hard. So hard it makes me hard.” “Oh, no, you can’t let your heart get hardened. God loves
a soft heart.”
“So I should be soft?”
“You should. Soft and open to God.”
“Are you soft and open, Chastity?”
The young woman blushed a little. When she spoke she’d
developed a slight stammer.