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sculpture. I took a picture to show my lease-mate, who mauls big pieces of metal into giant abstractions of her own.
    “You don’t have a good track record down here, you know, Eloy,” I said to the statue. “Mateo Guzzo is dead, along with his daughter, and so are the steel mills. Even your church building is falling to bits. What do you have to say about that?”
    The metal eyes stared at me, unblinking. Like everyone else around me, the saint knew secrets I couldn’t fathom.
    It was a heavy brick Victorian complex, church, rectory, school, convent. I knew the school was still active—Frank had told me his kid was playing baseball for the high school team, and anyway, I could hear children’s voices drifting faintly from the playgrounds on the far side of the building.
    As I walked up to St. Eloy’s side door, I wondered what I’d say to Father Gielczowski, but of course he was long gone. The man in the church office was younger, darker, more muscular.
    Unlike Gielczowski, who always roamed the neighborhood in a cassock, this man was on a ladder in jeans and a T-shirt, spackling a hole in the ceiling. He didn’t interrupt his work to look at me, just grunted that he’d be finished in a few minutes, to have a seat.
    The hole in the ceiling wasn’t the only damage in the room, but it was the worst, exposing part of the lath near the windows, and spidering down from there in a series of large cracks. I figured the Spackle would hold for a month, or until the next big storm sent water into the building. The room should be gutted, probably the whole building, and fresh plumbing and wiring put in before anyone tried repairs, but I didn’t imagine the archdiocese put South Chicago parishes high on its budget list.
    Father Gielczowski’s picture was on the wall facing the windows, along with the other priests who’d served the parish. Their names, German, Polish, Serbian, Italian, reflected the waves of immigrants who’d come to the South Side to work the mills. The current incumbent was Umberto Cardenal. I imagined addressing him if he was made head of the archdiocese: Cardinal Cardenal.
    The desk, which was as battle-scarred as the walls, sat near the windows where Father Cardenal was working. I moved the visitor’s chair across the room, since chunks of plaster were dropping almost faster than the priest could fill in the hole.
    When he finally climbed down, a gray sheen covered his face, glued on by his sweat, and the tone in which he asked what I wanted was barely civil.
    “I don’t mind waiting if you want to wash up,” I offered. “I can even put the ladder away if you tell me where it goes.”
    The lines around his mouth relaxed. “I look that bad, do I?” He opened a closet door and studied his face in a small mirror hanging inside. “Yes, this face would do for the Day of the Dead, but perhaps not for church business. The ladder goes in the utility storage room next to the parish meeting hall.”
    I went with him to the hallway, but he headed toward the rectory, waving a vague arm to his left. I opened doors but didn’t see a meeting hall or a utility closet. At one point I found myself in the side aisle of the church, where a young woman was clutching the arm of a short squat man. He looked so much like Danny DeVito, down to the wings of wild hair flying away from his bald head, that I couldn’t help staring.
    “Uncle Jerry, please! We just can’t do it anymore.”
    He shoved her roughly away. “You should have thought of that when—” He caught sight of me. “Who are you and what do you want?” Even his husky voice sounded like DeVito’s.
    “Utility closet, the one where this ladder belongs.”
    “In case you didn’t notice, this is the church, not a closet.” He turned back to the woman. “Get out of here before you get me in trouble.”
    “Are you okay?” I asked the niece.
    “She’s fine. She’s leaving because she’s on her lunch hour and she can’t afford to get