Costume Not Included (23 page)

  "Besides," he went on, "that was only a part of the message. I was preaching the end of the world as we know it, the descent of the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, the redemption of the children of Israel after generations of trials and tribulations." He spread his hands. "Turned out I was wrong. The world didn't end; it just went on to a new chapter."

  Hardacre was a patient man. He wouldn't have lasted long as a labor mediator if he hadn't been. But two days of dealing with the historical Jesus had worn him down. "Listen," he said, "this is Saturday."

  "The Sabbath. I was going to ask about that. Do you have gentiles who come in to make supper?"

  "Saturday is not the Sabbath anymore."

  "Says who?"

  "We moved it to Sunday."

  "You're kidding me."

  "And we're not Jewish."

  The prophet's bushy brows knit. "Tell me you're not Greeks."

  Hardacre sighed. "Can we concentrate on what's important?"

  "A commandment's not important?"

  "Please. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow I go on the air– " He checked himself as the prophet's brow wrinkled. "I speak to millions of people through the far-seer. I have been telling them for weeks that the prophet is coming." He leaned forward in his chair. "Do I tell them he is here?"

  Joshua chewed his lip, then his expression cleared. "I suppose you have to. Because I am."

  "All right," said Hardacre, "I tell them you are here. I step aside, you come out. Millions of eyes and ears are turned your way. What do you say?"

  The prophet folded his arms across his chest and tucked in his chin. After a long pause, he looked up and said, "I'll tell them the truth."

  "What truth?"

  Joshua laughed. "Who are you, Pilate the Procurator? How many truths are there?"

  "I mean, the truth about what?"

  "About life and the Lord and Heaven. What they ought to do."

  "Love thy neighbor?"

  "That could come into it."

  Hardacre said, "You mean, you don't know?"

  "I often used to let it just come out of me. Trusted in the spirit."

  "No preparation?"

  "I tried that the first time, in Nazareth," said Joshua. His eyebrows bounced around for a moment. "Notes, citations from Torah, the whole megillah." He laughed. "They ran me out of town. After that, I just trusted the Lord to put words in my mouth. I did all right."

  Hardacre went and got a decanter of whiskey and two glasses. The prophet had developed a taste for bourbon. He poured them a glass each and took a good swallow of his own. "So," he said, "I go out there tomorrow, introduce you, and you say whatever comes into your head.

  Joshua took a sip of the liquor and rolled it around on his tongue. "You're in the faith business, aren't you?" he said. "Then have some."

 

Chesney, Melda and Denby were inside the offices of Baiche, Lobeer, Tresidder, having passed through the window on their hovering disc. They saw the lawyer take the young man by the arm and propel him from the room, down a long hallway, and into a corner office. He put Baccala in a chair and said, "Stay there," then left the room.

  "Stay on Tresidder," Denby said and they did, floating back to where he had left the body.

  Tresidder closed the door and locked it, then went to the reception desk and dialed a number. "I've got a problem," he said to whoever answered, "same as that time with the girl at the Breaufields' New Years party." He listened for a moment then said, "By the service elevator in the underground parking lot." He listened and looked at his watch, then said, "Right."

  He hung up and went back to his office, the three invisible watchers following. He poured himself a serious Scotch, did not offer one to the young man in the chair, drank half of it in one swallow then said, "Tell it."

  Baccala told the tale, hesitantly at first, and in a low voice so that the lawyer had to order him to speak up. He'd met her at a party at his sister Maddie's house. Maddie had been afraid there would be a shortage of men and had browbeaten him into coming. But he was glad he'd come when he met Cathy Bannister, even though she hadn't responded to his overtures. He was smitten. He'd never felt such an itch for a woman before and he couldn't stop thinking about her, even though she didn't return his calls.

  Months went by, he finished law school, and was taken on as an articling student at Baiche, Lobeer, Tressider while he prepared to take the bar exam. Somewhere along the way, Maddie must have mentioned that fact to the woman of Baccala's stickiest dreams, because one day the phone rang and it was Cathy Bannister herself, inviting him to lunch at a little place where students hung out. And, he soon found, to a role as a stepping stone in her journalistic career.

  It was 2001 and the city's south side was the scene of major redevelopment projects. Four square blocks of derelict factories were coming down to be replaced by condo towers with commercial and retail space in the lower two floors – Chesney lived in one of the blocks. Streets were being repaved, sewers relaid, underground wiring and fiber-optic cables replacing the old overhead power and phone lines. All of this was attended by a brisk traffic in permits and licenses, easements and rezonings, plus a swirling paperstorm of contracts and subcontracts involving builders, demolition firms, trucking and cement outfits, all manner of suppliers, and nine different unions – and all of that was generating an even thicker blizzard of kickbacks, skims, sweeteners, backhanders, rake-offs and straightforward bribes.

  Most of those illicit transactions involved the Twenty, and, as customary, were coordinated through the law firm in which Seth Baccala had just become a fly on the wall. And Cathy Bannister wanted him to become her personal insect.

  "You could get me fired," was his first reaction, "and worse." He lowered his voice. "The Twenty are all over that thing."

  "That's why I'm interested," she said. She had been drinking a vanilla shake through a straw. Now she moved the fat tube in and out of her astonishingly well formed lips, and Seth Baccala felt a stirring in his groin. "I'll make it worth your while," she said.

  "How?"

  She moved her eyes and brows in a way that invited him to figure it out for himself. But Baccala asked her to spell it out, knowing as he did that the moment she made the offer plain, he was going to accept it.

  "But," he told Louis Tresidder, "the deal was that I'd show her the master tally of who got what, but she couldn't take it away or copy it. That way, the best she'd have would be some unconfirmable names and figures. Without confirmation, she'd never get anyone to run the story."

  "But she screwed you," the lawyer said. "Of course."

  "I didn't mean to kill her."

  "If she'd got out of here with that camera, somebody would have had to." He looked at his watch, said, "Come on."

  They went back to the file room. Nothing had changed. "At least there's no blood," Tressider said, examining the bruise on one temple. "Broke her neck." Then he said, "Get her ankles."

  They hauled the body through the door, then put it down so the lawyer could go back into the file room and recover the camera. He pocketed it and locked the door, said, "Right, service elevator."

  There was no room in the elevator for six, especially with one laid full-length on the floor and three on a floating disc. Xaphan took them down the shaft to the underground parking lot and out into the loading area before the two men had wrestled the corpse into position. They hovered to one side, listening to the car descend. At the other end of the basement the door to the exit ramp rolled up and an unmarked windowless van came into view. When it neared the loading area, it did a three-point turn to aim its rear doors at the service elevator just as the bell rang and the doors slid open.

  The van doors opened from within. A short, heavyshouldered man got out of the vehicle. "Come on," he said.

  Tresidder and Baccala lifted the body and carried it to the van. There was a sheet of heavy plastic on the floor of the cargo bay. With the stocky man's help, they laid their burden on the thick membrane and the newcomer swiftly and efficiently wrapped the corpse. Then he looked at the lawyer and said, "Him, too?"

  Baccala took a step backward but Tresidder shook his head. "Not this time," he said.

  The shorter man shrugged, slammed the doors of the van and went and got into the passenger seat. The driver had not moved. Now he put the vehicle into gear and headed for the exit ramp.

  "Follow them," Denby said.

  Chesney thought the captain seemed to have something blocking his throat. To Xaphan, he said, "Do as he says."

  The disk moved silently after the van, followed it up the ramp and out into the city night. As the vehicle picked up speed, so did everything else as the demon fast-forwarded them through the streets, over the river and out past the suburbs to where a remnant of a state forest still stood.

  The van turned onto a dirt road and passed through a gate made by a four-inch pipe that was usually padlocked to a concrete post. They drove a half-mile or so into the woods and came to a clearing where a car waited. A flashlight blinked from the trees and the driver and the stocky man carried the body towards it.

  Two other men waited there, beneath a mature maple. They had already dug a grave and stood, leaning on their shovels. Without ceremony, Cathy Bannister's remains were tossed into the hole, and the shovels worked fast to cover her over.

  Denby, watching, said, "The driver is Petey Worrance. He was a wheelman for the mob, died of cancer a few years back. The muscle is Turk Something; he's still active – I've seen him around the cardrooms." He peered at the action by the grace. "I can't make out the guys with shovels."

  "Let him see them," Chesney said to Xaphan. His own night vision showed them clearly.

  One of the men was now scraping leaves and twigs over the disturbed earth. "Jesus!" said the captain, when he saw the man's face.

  "You know him?" Melda said.

  "He was only a senior inspector back then," Denby said. "No wonder he rose so fast." He swore quietly to himself then said, "That's J. Edgar Hoople. The chief of police."

 
 

 
 
 

Here is how Billy Lee Hardacre saw things.

  He had trained as a specialist in labor law and soon found out that he had the peculiar set of skills that made him a good mediator. By his early thirties, he was rich.

  It was then that he was bitten by the fiction bug: he began a new career as an author of fat-spined novels in which men and women of power intrigued against each other's interests and interfered with each other's bodies. His characters had unending appetites for sexual encounters and a predisposition to solve disputes with unrestrained violence. His books were hugely popular, and sold by the truckload through Wal-Mart and discount stores, making Billy Lee Hardacre even richer.

  Then, at the age of forty-seven, while writing his seventh novel, he was struck by an epiphany. The universe suddenly made sense to him: the world was actually a book being written by a deity; probably, he thought, to work out that most fundamental of questions – what was right, and what was wrong? There had been previous drafts, which explained why the holy scriptures were full of events that had never really happened. The story was open-ended, and depended – as good novels do – on the conflicting wills of the characters to drive the narrative forwarded.

  The revelation was a life-changing event: Billy Lee abandoned his literary career and enrolled in a seminary to pursue a doctorate in divinity. He expanded and amplified his revelation, but his ideas were not well received, however, and his doctoral thesis, in which he expounded the god-as-author theory, was rejected – even ridiculed. Unused to failure, Hardacre fell prey to emotions he had never before experienced: self-doubt, depression, anxiety.

  But he overcame these demons by transmuting them into righteous anger, then turned his resentment into the foundation for a third career, this time as a television preacher. His weekly cable program,
The New New Tabernacle of the Air,
was broadcast live at 11am every Sunday morning. For years, the program's format saw the preacher sitting at a desk, like a news anchor, trolling through the week's events and offering a commentary focused on the persons he deemed responsible for them. Those persons might be politicians of any ideological persuasion, movie stars, authors, professional athletes, academics, pundits, and even fellow men and women of the cloth – in fact, especially the most prominent whited sepulchers of his new-found field. One thing they had in common: they had all failed to live up to Billy Lee's standard of moral behavior.

  It had been Hardacre's practice to make one of the week's offenders the subject of a pointed, even barbed, sermon – a real balls-scorcher, was how one not-very religious journalist described a typical Hardacre screed. After fifteen minutes of verbal flaying and skewering, the TV screen would display a card with the target's mailing addresses so that Hardacre's legions of devoted fans – none more so than Letitia Arnstruther – could bury the week's victim in letters, and later, emails that detailed the reception the miscreant could expect when he, and sometimes she, eventually passed through the Gates of Hell.

  But then came the events surrounding Chesney Arnstruther, and from then on Billy Lee did not just believe that his rejected doctoral thesis was nothing less than the explanation for life, the universe and everything, as another novelist had put it. It was the literal truth and it offered the preacher a new way forward. The negotiations that ended the strike by Hell's demons, accidentally sparked off by Chesney's innocent summoning of a demon, put Hardacre in touch with a high-ranking member of the heavenly hierarchy.