St. Timothy's Cross Theft

The St. Timothy's Cross Theft is the event that sets the entire narrative of City of God in motion. One warm autumn afternoon in Battery Park, the novel's narrator—Thomas Pemberton, an Episcopal priest—comes upon a peddler of watches, a man with dreadlocks and a big smile, standing tall in a purple chorister's robe, his sacral presence not diminished by the new white Nikes on his feet. This encounter, with its mingling of the sacred and the profane, foreshadows the strange fate of the church's most sacred object. The theft itself occurs on a Monday night, when Pemberton, having been tipped off, waits in the balcony of his church, armed with a 6-volt Bearscare Superbeam flashlight, prepared to catch the thieves in the act. He dozes off, however, and is awakened by a crash from the pantry—not the altar, where he had expected the intruders. Rushing downstairs, he finds the pantry empty but filled with the smells of hashish, male body odor, and the pungent sanguinary scent of female pheromone, along with something else, like lipstick or lollipop. When he swings his searchlight around, he sees a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner. Running back into the church, he discovers that behind the altar, where the big brass cross should have been, there is only a shadow of the crucifix in the unfaded paint of his predecessor's poor taste. The cross is gone.