The Trinity Game

by Sean Chercover

  One of the seven deadlies. And one of the three to which Daniel remained vulnerable, the other two being lust and wrath.

  Daniel sat at the desk in his executive suite at the downtown Atlanta Ritz-Carlton. To his side, the room service tray held the remains of dinner—filet mignon and Caesar salad. He was not a glutton and always left some food on his plate. He opened his notebook and reviewed his shorthand version of Giuseppe’s transcripts.

  Reverend Tim Trinity had done a lot of weather reporting during his tongues act and had given a few traffic and sports reports on the side. And sometimes he got lucky. He even predicted a ten-car pileup on the southbound I-95, just outside Savannah, which came to pass. Of course, pileups happen every day, and usually during the morning rush, when commuters haven’t had their morning coffee. So the prediction was a high-percentage bet on Trinity’s part. And, as Nick had mentioned, he got the Superbowl right, but so did most football fans, since the underdog lost.

  “Trivial crap,” Nick had called it. A true assessment, but far from complete. It wasn’t all crystal ball stuff. Trinity also dispensed sage advice to anyone who could understand English spoken backwards at two-thirds speed.

  He proclaimed Mahatma the best brand of rice for making jambalaya.

  He cautioned against carrying a balance on high-interest credit cards.

  And he said that human beings should love each other as brothers and sisters.

  I told you it was gonna get weird.

  Daniel put the notebook aside and moved his laptop to the center of the desk. He tapped on the spacebar, waking the computer. He’d left the browser open, and as the screen came to life, his uncle still smiled at him from the home page of the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries website.

  The website featured the standard evangelical prosperity ministry crap, illustrated with staged photos of clean-cut, healthy couples (white, black, brown, but everybody please stick to your own race and the opposite sex, the photos said) and their clean-cut, healthy, racially unambiguous children.

  Everybody smiling like the world contained no injustice, no misery.

  God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be well dressed, and He wants you to spend your leisure hours fishing, horseback riding, or strolling through the park with your family on a sunny day. God wants you to live in a gated community McMansion, drive a Mercedes, fly first class.

  All this can be yours. All you have to do is sow that seed of faith by making a vow, and then start sending your money to the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries.

  And prosperity shall rain upon you like magic fairy dust.

  Daniel knew the whole grift by heart. Knew every inch of it, snout to tail. After all, he was raised in it.

  Uncle Tim was the twin brother of Daniel’s mother. He had been Daniel’s closest relative since the day Daniel was born. The day Daniel’s mother died giving birth to him. The day his grieving father threw himself off the Greater New Orleans Bridge and into the Mississippi River, taking his own life and leaving Daniel orphaned.

  There was a bio page on Trinity’s website, and Daniel clicked through to read it. The biography waxed nostalgic about Trinity’s years traveling the Southland in a Winnebago, town to town, tent to tent, healing the sick and saving souls. Alongside the text, there was a photograph of Trinity standing beside the rusty RV, taken when Daniel was seven. Daniel was not in the photo, but he recognized his shiny new bicycle leaning against the front bumper. Trinity had given him the bike for his seventh birthday.

  He scrolled further down the page, moving past the photo, moving through the years, moving to where Trinity’s life and his life were no longer intertwined. He stopped scrolling after Trinity quit the tent circuit and built a permanent church in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans.

  Trinity’s church quickly grew prosperous, and he established the largest soup kitchen (the website called it a “nutritional center”) in New Orleans, nourishing body and soul in the deeply impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. He still took his show on the road regularly, but the road was a series of airports and he rented arenas instead of pitching tents. A few years later, the Tim Trinity Prosperity-Power Miracle Hour premiered on late-night television across Louisiana, and pretty soon Trinity was buying time on cable networks with national reach.

  In addition to running the soup kitchen, the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries built fifty schools and dug five hundred clean-water wells in Africa and built a medical clinic in Haiti. A tiny fraction of the haul, Daniel figured, but just enough to make Trinity look legit and protect his tax-exempt status with Uncle Sam.

  The bio said that God spoke to Reverend Tim after Trinity’s church was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and instructed him to relocate to Atlanta. Trinity obeyed.

  At the bottom of the page was a quote:

  “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” Isaiah 53:11

  It was a strange choice, because it was a passage from the Old Testament. Or, as Trinity had always jokingly called it (behind closed doors), “the Jew book.” But what was really strange, the thing that stopped Daniel cold, was that Isaiah 53 was held by Christians to be a prophecy of the life of Jesus, and placing it in this context, at the end of Tim Trinity’s biography, seemed like an attempt to apply it to Trinity himself.

  Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

  —PRAYER FOR LENT

  Rome, Italy…

  As he told the taxi driver to take him to Piazza del Popolo, Father Giuseppe Sorvino was careful to speak in broken Italian with a heavy German accent. He barked the destination as an order, waving a tourist map in the air between the seats, and he did not say please. Giuseppe’s brother was a taxi driver and had complained about German tourists often enough—they were supposedly the only ones ruder than Americans. Accurate or not, that was the stereotype, and it fit Giuseppe’s need to come across as a type, not an individual. Just another tourist. Forgettable.

  But it’s harder to be forgettable when you’re missing an arm, so Giuseppe was wearing his special windbreaker. The left sleeve below the elbow was filled with foam rubber and a tennis ball was glued inside the elastic cuff and pinned inside the left pocket. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but if you stayed in motion, moving through people’s field of view, you didn’t jump out as an amputee. Otherwise he was dressed as any other casual tourist, with nice blue jeans and a lime-green polo shirt under the windbreaker. Nothing to identify him as a priest.

  Sticking with bad Italian and still holding the map out, he added, “I know where it is, so do not get the idea to take me for a long ride.”

  The driver sneered and turned to face the road. “Si, mein Führer,” he said as he threw the Fiat into gear.

  At the west end of the piazza, Giuseppe told the driver to stop, paid the fare, and got out beside the fountain of Neptune and his two pet dolphins. He walked—not too quickly—toward the center of the vast oval, which had served in centuries past as a favorite location for public executions. Reaching the center, he put on his sunglasses and stopped at the Egyptian obelisk of Ramesses II.

  The obelisk had been brought to Rome by Augustus in 10 BC and later moved to this spot in 1589, and every Roman knew its history. Giuseppe had seen it thousands of times, but he stopped and pretended to be a German seeing it for the first time. He walked slowly around it while scanning the tourists milling about the piazza to be sure he wasn’t followed. Then he shoved the map in his windbreaker and pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the back pocket of his jeans. He strode to the east side of the piazza, where he lit a cigarette and puffed away, not enjoying it. He normally smoked Marlboro Lights, but for the next taxi driver he would be Frenc
h, and so these were Gitanes Brunes, which carried a distinctive odor that would linger in his hair.

  This time he spoke French, with a perfect Parisian accent. “Je vais a la Trinità dei Monti, s’il vous plaît.” He checked over his shoulder as the taxi pulled into traffic. No one was following. He breathed slow and deep to calm his nerves, again fighting the urge to touch the stump end of his left arm.

  It happened whenever he was particularly tired or stressed, this feeling of the phantom limb. Years ago it had been painful, like paper cuts on his fingertips, bee stings on his forearm. The pain had faded over time, but what lingered was the aggravating feeling that he had fingers, a hand, a forearm, where there were none. The doctors had told him to apply sensory stimulation to the skin covering the stump whenever the phantom limb reappeared. They said this would train his brain to stop imagining the missing appendage. And it worked, temporarily, but the damn thing always came back. After five years, Giuseppe had just about given up hope that it would ever go away completely.

  The driver stopped in front of the French church. Giuseppe waited until the taxi was out of sight before crossing the street and descending the Spanish Steps, navigating around tourists and college kids, all the way down to the Piazza di Spagna and past the Fontana della Barcaccia, which to Giuseppe’s eye was the least interesting fountain in Rome. He crossed the square and rounded the corner to a small newsagent and tobacco shop—the sign above the door read Edicola Moderna.

  Giuseppe entered and browsed magazines while the old man behind the counter announced he was closing for lunch. Once the shop was empty of customers, the old man looked at him and said, “Lock the door.”

  Giuseppe locked the door and stepped forward to the counter, now rubbing his stump through the windbreaker. “I need to speak with Carter Ames.”

  The old man shook his head. “You have something to report, you file a report, let it work its way up the chain. Foundation protocol.”

  “This is not just a report. And we don’t have time.”

  The old man looked at him for almost a full minute. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “I do.” Giuseppe scratched his stump harder, willing his phantom hand to recede. “I do understand. But it’s already in motion and they’ve sent a priest to investigate. Tell Mr. Ames it is about a preacher named Tim Trinity. And tell him I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Emory University – Atlanta, Georgia…

  Professor Cindy Elder, head of Speech Pathology at Emory University, led Daniel into her book-lined office and offered him a seat. “I haven’t spoken to Father O’Connor since my wedding,” she said. Then she peered over the rims of her elegant glasses. “Sorry to say, I’m a bit of a lapsed Catholic.”

  Daniel smiled. “We’re all lapsed, in one way or another. Anyway, I came for your professional advice. I promise I’m not here to measure your faith.” Then he added, “I told Father O’Connor I needed the best.”

  The professor seemed appropriately flattered. “Well, I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

  Daniel opened his notebook. “If I wanted to learn how to speak backwards, how would I go about that?”

  Cindy Elder’s eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Speaking English backwards, say, so if you recorded it and played it in reverse and sped it up a bit, it would sound normal.”

  Cindy Elder shook her head and smiled. “I’m guessing you don’t know anything about speech pathology.”

  “You’re guessing right,” said Daniel.

  She picked up the telephone receiver, punched in a number. “Gerry, is the sound lab free? Great, meet me there in five. Thanks.” She hung up the phone and stood. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The lab looked like a scaled-down control room at a recording studio—a large mixing board on a counter, facing a window that looked onto a small room with microphones and sound-deadening foam lining the walls. Alongside the mixing board was a computer screen and a panel with various recording devices and visual sound monitors and other gizmos.

  Cindy Elder introduced Daniel to Gerry, a graduate student who looked like a California surfer dude. Daniel told Gerry what he was after—a way to speak English backwards at two-thirds speed so it sounded natural reversed and sped up.

  Gerry laughed, incredulous. “You serious?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “’Cause it’s not possible, Padre.” He caught himself. “Mind if I call you Padre?”

  “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

  “Cool.” Gerry smiled. “I could tell you were one of those hip priests.” He flipped a couple switches on the mixing board, brought up a couple of faders. “Here, check it out.” He pointed to a microphone on the counter. “Say your name into the mic.”

  Daniel leaned forward, said, “Daniel Byrne.”

  Gerry tapped on the computer keyboard, and Daniel’s voice came through the monitors. Gerry tapped some more. “Here’s what it sounds like backward. Listen carefully, I’ll play it a few times.”

  Daniel listened as Gerry played his name, in his own voice, backwards, five times. Gerry pointed at the microphone again. “Now try and say what you just heard.”

  Daniel did.

  “Again.”

  Daniel did it three more times. Gerry tapped on the keyboard some more, recording Daniel’s efforts. “Now I’ll run that backward,” Gerry said.

  It didn’t sound close to natural. It didn’t even sound much like his name.

  “But with practice,” said Daniel, “I’d get better.”

  “Not better enough. With practice, you could speak it so we’d understand your name clearly, but it would never sound natural. And your name is very simple, no problematic consonant digraphs like ‘st’ or ‘th’ or ‘dl’. Add to that, you want to speak it, what? Slowed down by a third?”

  Cindy Elder said, “Gerry’s right. You could work with a speech pathologist for ten years, and you still wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I just don’t think it’s possible.”

  Daniel pointed at the computer screen. “Gerry, can you access the Internet on that?”

  “Can do, Padre.”

  After giving them a quick summary of the Trinity Anomaly, Daniel directed Gerry to the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries website, to the page where Trinity’s broadcasts were archived as Quicktime movies. Checking his transcript notes, he said, “April twenty-third broadcast, beginning forty-two minutes in, lasting for a minute-thirty. Can you record that?”

  Gerry did, and they all watched as Tim Trinity did his tongues routine.

  “Audio manipulation?” asked Daniel.

  “Must be,” said Cindy Elder.

  “Looks smooth too,” said Gerry. “But you can’t fool el waveform monitor.” He flicked the switch on a little round monitor, and the screen glowed green, like an old radar screen. Then he tapped on the computer keyboard, brought the downloaded video to the end of the tongues act. “Speed it by a third, you said?”

  “Yeah, he speaks it at two-thirds normal speed.”

  Gerry let out a broad smile. “Whoa, dude.”

  “What?”

  “Two-thirds. That’s 66.6 percent. Number of the Beast.” Then he made a noise like a cartoon ghost. “Oooh, spooky.”

  “Gerry, please,” said Cindy Elder.

  “Just sayin’, is all,” Gerry shrugged. He tapped the percentage into his computer, spoke to the video image of Trinity on the screen, “Get ready to be busted, Mr. Holy Roller.” He hit the enter key.

  Trinity gave the same weather report Daniel had heard in Nick’s office, his inflections sounding completely natural.

  Green lines danced around the screen of the waveform monitor, mapping the audio profile of Trinity’s speech patterns. Gerry stared hard at the screen, and his smile disappeared.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What do you see, Gerry?” said Cindy Elder.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t see anything. Can’t believe it, but I don’t
see any evidence that the audio’s been messed with.”

  “There must be a mistake,” said the professor. “He just said ‘thunderstorm.’ Impossible to say backward. Would never sound natural.”

  “I calibrated the monitors this morning. I’m telling you, this is for real.”

  Daniel stood stock-still, feeling like the floor had just been removed from under his feet. Like the dream of falling that jerks you back from the edge of sleep.

  Las Vegas, Nevada…

  William Lamech sat behind bulletproof glass in the wood and leather lounge of his Bentley limousine, a crocodile-skin briefcase on his lap. Inside the briefcase was something more explosive than dynamite, more dangerous than powdered anthrax.

  Inside was something that could take down the entire gambling industry, or at least the sports books. And William Lamech was not going to let that happen, whatever the fuck he had to do. He’d been in the gambling business fifty-three years, had survived the cowboys and mob wars and the F-B-fucking-I, all while quietly building a personal fortune of over one hundred million dollars and earning many times that amount for his employers. He had a talent for turning peril into opportunity, and he thought he’d seen it all. But he’d never seen a threat remotely like the one now sitting in the briefcase on his lap.

  Lamech was not your average septuagenarian. At seventy-three, he still swam lengths in the casino pool an hour each morning, did crunches and push-ups in reps of fifty, and worked with weights three days a week. People often said he wore his age like Clint Eastwood. He preferred to think of himself more like Jack Palance, but most people had already forgotten Palance, a mere fifteen years after the great man’s death.

  You’re here, you’re gone, and no one remembers. Not a complaint, just a statement of fact. While Lamech intended to stick around as long as he could, he wasn’t afraid of melting into the sands of forgotten history when his time came. In fact, he’d already started melting.