"I'm just passin' on the message." The demon turned to Chesney. "You want anythin' else?"
"Just put the costume away."
A moment later, he was back in his normal Sunday garb of khakis and checked shirt. The demon was a memory in sulfur, and the prophet was turning away from the window to say, "Now what?"
Melda got up from the couch. "Lunch," she said, then turned to Joshua. "Are there things you're not allowed to eat?"
"There used to be," he said, "but I think all of that's lapsed now."
"Good," she said. "Let me introduce you to a Ball Park Frank."
Monday morning, Seth Baccala called Denby and said, "I think we should talk."
"So do I," said the detective, "and soon."
"Where?" It was an important question for the executive assistant. If Denby wanted to talk down at Police Central, that was one thing; if he wanted to talk at Baccala's office in the Paxton building, it was another. If he wanted to talk at the offices of Baiche, Lobeer, Tressider, that was another thing altogether.
"I'll come to you," Denby said, and Baccala let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.
When the policeman arrived, the executive assistant told his secretary to hold all calls.
"Even from W.T.?" she said.
"He won't be calling." The old man had not been seen in the building since the disappearance of his political consultant and his daughter's nervous collapse.
Denby sat across from Baccala in the visitor's chair, the polished and orderly desk between them. The younger man's seat was slightly higher, and the chair the policeman was in had front legs that were slightly shorter than the back, forcing the sitter to lean forward in a supplicant's pose; it was all intended to give the owner of the office a psychological advantage. Today it didn't.
"Well," said Baccala and waited for what would come.
Denby gave him the same look he'd given the chief of police at the news conference. Then, to make sure there were no mistakes, he said, "I know."
Baccala saw no point in fencing. "The time traveler," he said. It was not a question.
"I saw you. In the file room. On the loading dock."
Baccala nodded. "And you saw them bury her."
"Uh huh."
"Can you make a case?"
Denby looked up into a corner of the room, then back to the other man. "I can go back and record it," he said. "Say they were tapes from security cameras that had just come to light."
Baccala put his hands flat on the desk, looked down at them, and blew out another breath. "That's it, then." A moment later, what the policeman had said sank all the way in. He looked up. "You say you 'can'," he said. "But you haven't."
Denby held his gaze. "No, I haven't."
Baccala waited, but so did the detective. After a while, the younger man said, "You want something."
"Uh huh."
"What?"
Denby did not blink. "The Twenty."
Baccala had been feeling a sense of relief, reading into the policeman's words and manner a growing conviction that Denby was like Hoople and Hanshaw: a man in search of a payoff. But now a cold shiver went down his back and somehow lodged in his bowels, which were turning to a roiling liquid behind the fine-spun wool of his handmade suit pants and the silk of his boxer's.
"No," he said.
"Okay." Denby stood up. "Do you want to turn yourself in, or will I take you now?" He reached to the small of his back and came up with a pair of handcuffs.
"They'll kill me," Baccala said. "They'll kill you."
"That could happen," the captain said. "And you'd only do a couple of years for manslaughter and concealing a body."
Baccala waited. He knew that wasn't all of it.
"That's right," Denby said. "They wouldn't take the chance on you in prison. You don't have the…" He sought for the word, then went on, "Well, let's say you don't have the breeding. The first time some big lifer showed you what happens behind bars to the delicately boned, you'd be looking for a way out."
"And there is no way out," the younger man said, "is there?"
Denby put away the cuffs but didn't sit down again. He leaned over Baccala's desk and said, "There's one. We take them all down. Make an airtight case and hand it over to the feds. To a federal attorney who wants to be President some day."
Baccala's face felt cold. He knew he must look as pale as the skull beneath his flesh. "Can't be done," he said.
"Can," said the captain. "In a month, I'm going to be the new chief of police. You've already taken Paxton's place at the table." He leaned in closer. "Everything will be compartmentalized. I know that. So one of us on the inside is not enough. Two of us, it's no better than a maybe."
Baccala sensed a "but" in the offing. He raised his brows.
Denby smiled. "But we've got the time traveler. It's his project. So we'll turn one or two more," he said, "even three or four. We'll cut a few steers out of the herd, then use them to round up the old bulls."
Baccala's hands were trembling. "And what happens to us steers?" he said.
Denby shrugged. "Nothing. At worst, witness protection." Then his tone turned conspiratorial. "Or maybe when that federal attorney gets sworn in as President, you're up there on the platform, too, sitting in the seat reserved for White House Chief of Staff. He'll owe you enough."
The executive assistant was still feeling a vibration passing through his flesh. But now he couldn't tell if it was fear or expectation. "All or nothing," he said.
"Don't it make life interesting?" said the policeman.
"How long do I have to decide?"
"Five seconds."
Baccala swallowed something that didn't taste good. Then he said, "I'm in."
Chesney was at his desk, immersed in a matrix of probabilities that connected risk to cost and profit in the insuring of single women who managed their own white-collar businesses. There were more of them than there had ever been before. He looked up to see Denby opening his office door. The policeman came in and told him about recruiting Seth Baccala to the cause of bringing down the Twenty.
"He gets away?" Chesney said.
"It's how it often works. You use a little fish to catch a bigger one." The captain thought for a minute. "Besides, I bet there hasn't been a day go by that he hasn't regretted what happened to Bannister. Not to mention the way she played him for a sucker."
"Now we'll be doing the same thing," Chesney said. "Playing him the way that reporter did."
"Some people, that's what they're good for."
Five minutes after the policeman left, it was Baccala's turn to step into the actuary's office and close the door. "Denby told you," he said.
"Yes."
There was a peculiar expression on the executive assistant's face. Chesney thought it might be the faintest hope he had ever seen. "The time traveler," Baccala said, "he can't change the past, can he?"
"It doesn't work that way," Chesney said. He saw the emotion disappear from the other man's face, like a few drops of water evaporating from a skillet once the heat is turned on under it.
Afterwards, Chesney tried to think his way through the man's situation. He found that no pool of light shone around Baccala, the way it had around Melda, right from the start. But neither was the man hidden from him in darkness. If he thought about it, he realized, the way he'd thought about not being a prophet, he would be able to bring the man into clearer focus. That was new and different. It was as if he could see the first steps of a trail that led into the murk, and somehow he knew that if he took those first steps, the next ones along the way would become clear to him.
Right now, he didn't feel like pursuing the matter. He had work to do. But before he switched his focus back to the incidence of stress-related illnesses among female management and marketing consultants, Chesney realized something else: the image of a trail leading into darkness was a metaphor – the first he'd ever conceived.
Something is happening to me, he thought. I'm changing. The thoug
ht gave him a small frisson of anxiety. But then he thought: Melda will like it. And that was enough. He went back to the numbers, and soon he was at the center of a pool of clear light, listening to the elegant song the statistics sang. He didn't notice himself humming.
The phone rang that evening. Melda picked it up and held it out to Chesney. "Your mother," she said.
If he'd been sitting nearer the phone he would have read the caller ID and not answered. But his girlfriend gave him a meaningful look which he interpreted as you've got to talk to her, and he took the phone.
"Billy Lee wants to see you," Letitia Arnstruther said.
"I'm not responsible for what happened to that Bruster fellow," Chesney said. "Billy Lee wanted a prophet. I got him one. The rest of it has noth–"
"You haven't been watching the news, have you?" his mother said.
Chesney hadn't. He'd come home, had dinner with Melda and Joshua and they had sat around talking about inconsequentials. None of them had watched the news, although the prophet had spent most of the day watching television, clicking the remote from one thing to another; mostly, he had been drawn to old situation comedies and soap operas. He found them more comprehensible than much of what else was on the tube, especially the commercials, and especially the ads for forthcoming movies. He'd turned off the big plasma screen when Melda came home from work.
"Turn it on now," his mother said.
"Which news channel?"
"Any of them."
The first scene that came into view was the yellowclawed demon hauling its segmented body out of Hall Bruster's grossly stretched throat. Then there was footage from Hardacre's show, with Joshua talking about Heaven.
"Is that what I look like?" said the prophet. He cupped an ear. "My voice sounds wrong."
Chesney began an explanation about sound waves heard through the eardrum versus those heard through the maxillary bones behind the ears, but Melda shushed him. The screen was showing the face of Hall Bruster behind a thicket of hands holding microphones. He was wearing a collarless garment of blue cotton. Then the camera pulled back to show him sitting up in a hospital bed, surrounded by reporters.
"…no question," he was saying, his eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses and with an expression Chesney read as childlike delight on his owly face. "No question at all. I had been in the grip of demons for years and years. They controlled me, spoke through my voice, made me do and say terrible things. Terrible."
His face was shaded by a deep sadness as he spoke those words. Then, like the sun coming out from behind smog-filled clouds, it lit up again as Bruster said, "And then he came in and – wham! bam! – set me free."
"When you say, 'he,'" – the voice belonged to one of the off-screen reporters – "for the record, Mr Bruster, who do you mean?"
The talk-show host looked straight into the camera, his eyes wide behind the spectacle lenses. "I mean Jesus Christ, himself, the son of God."
"Oh," said Joshua with a sigh, "not again."
"So you believe," the reporter was saying, nailing it down, "that you have witnessed the second coming of Christ."
Bruster laughed, and for the first time Chesney had heard the sound come out of the man, there was no harshness in it. It was a peal of pure joy. "Witnessed it?" he said. "I participated in it!"
"So you retract all the things you said about the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre?"
"Without hesitation; without qualification. Billy Lee was absolutely right. He has brought us the Messiah!"
"Does that mean," another reporter asked, adopting an ominous tone, "that we have reached the End of Days?"
Bruster shrugged. "What do I know?" he said. "All I can tell you is that I have been delivered from bondage. I was a slave of Hell, but now I am free!"
The camera pulled farther back and focused on the reporter who had lowered his voice to ask the final question. He moved away from the scrum until he was in front of a window, then said, "Well, there you have it, Wolf. If it was some kind of a stunt, it was one for the record books."
The image shifted to a bearded man in a studio backed by a wall of monitors. He said, "I don't know which was the greater miracle, Todd – the casting out of demons or the sight of Hall Bruster praising Billy Lee Hardacre." He looked down, shaking his head, then came back to the camera. "Perhaps it really is the end of the world."
The image cut back to the reporter in the hospital room. He was half turned, looking out the window, saying into his microphone, "That seems to be the dominant opinion, Wolf, judging by the crowd that's forming outside Our Lady of Mercy Hospital." He stepped aside so his camera operator could move up to the window and angle down for a shot of the parking lot, three stories below.
At least five hundred people were massed among the scattering of parked cars, most of them looking up at the camera. Some of them carried home-made signs – Chesney read one that said Repent in bold red letters; another said: If nobody's holding this sign, I've just been raptured. A pair of police squad cars were belatedly arriving, disgorging uniformed officers who fought their way through the mob to reinforce whoever was keeping the crowd from pushing through the ground-floor doors into the building.
Behind the cops, more people were arriving, including a big yellow ex-school bus that now belonged, according to the black lettering along its side, to Land of Goshen African Baptist Church. From its single door emerged a file of young men and women, all with dark skin and wearing purple robes, who immediately struck up a hymn Chesney remembered from his mother-dominated youth. The strains of Oh Happy Day came faintly through the hospital window and were transmitted to the twin speakers of his big-screen TV.
Now the bearded man was back on screen, and this time the memory cue for Chesney was the location shown on the banks of monitors behind him: the wide front steps of Billy Lee's mansion. The door was closed, but Chesney didn't expect that to remain the case, because obviously the preacher had allowed the media past his iron gates. "We're going live," said the program's host, "to the home of the man who began this unprecedented and bizarre series of events, the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre. He's expected to make a public state–"
The door opened and Chesney's mother stepped out, wearing an expression the young man had often seen before. It told him that his mother had not altered her jaundiced view of persons employed in the media – "guttersnipes and scoundrels" were her usual epithets – but that today she was compelled by a higher calling to place herself, however reluctantly, in proximity to them. He was sure that an eighteenth-century French countess forced to make her way through a rabble of ill-smelling, manure-smeared peasants would have done so with an identical countenance.
Another hedge of hands holding microphones appeared before Letitia Arnstruther's face as the reporters rushed up the steps to catch whatever she had to say. Which was, "Get back, all of you!"
The hedge did not recede, even when the woman folded her arms across her considerable chest and elevated her chin to a devastating angle. Finally, she sniffed a disdainful sniff, and accepted the inevitable. "My husband," she said, then repeated the words as if savoring them: "My husband will make a statement shortly. He will take no questions."
She hadn't said that she would take no questions, and was immediately bombarded with them. Most of them could be expressed in the two words spoken by a brunette whose hair swept down to become twin sharp points beside her chin, their tips seemingly hard and sharp enough to pierce her flesh if ever she swung her head too briskly to either side: "Where's Jesus?"
Letitia favored the woman with another look that Chesney remembered, the one that ought to have laid its recipient instantly unconscious, if not actually dead on the spot. "He's not Je–" she managed, in her iciest tone, before the door behind her opened and Billy Lee Hardacre stepped into view.
He was dressed in his television outfit, with lifts in his boots and the silver mane of expensive acquired hair shining in the lights mounted on the cameras. He patted the air in front of him in a quieti
ng gesture and said, "I have a statement."
"Where's Jesus?" said the brunette, but Hardacre ignored her.
"As you know," he said, "for some time now I have been telling you that a prophet would soon arrive. My statements were met with widespread disbelief, even mockery from some figures in the media." He paused and looked around at the throng of reporters. "Maybe from some of you here today."
Chesney studied his stepfather's face. There was an expression there that he hadn't seen before. He said to Melda, "Does he look all right to you?"
"He looks," she said, "like he's as batty as a bipolar bedbug. But I think we'd better listen to this."
Hardacre had been itemizing some of the things that had been said about him, and the media personalities who had said them. Hall Bruster came in for special mention, but so did the man with the neatly trimmed beard standing in front of the banks of monitors. Chesney was impressed at the power of Hardacre's memory, which apparently gave the preacher total recall of every unkind cut and the ability to reproduce them with the same fidelity to accuracy that Letitia had demanded of her son when she used to make him recite an entire psalm, of her choosing, before letting him taste a first bite of dinner.
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