Spellbinder

by Harold Robbins

  “Then I pity them.”

  “That does you no good if you’re dead.”

  Preacher nodded. There was a finality to his words they had never heard before. One that brooked no argument. “Jesus knew that when he went to face the Romans, yet he was not afraid. And it still took Pontius Pilate to order his death.” He looked around the table at each of them. “Do not fear for me, my children. I will survive even as our Lord survived.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The ringing telephone blasted into his sleep. He rolled over in his bed, fighting its insistent call to consciousness. Finally he opened his eyes. The digital clock at his bedside read 5:55. He groaned and looked toward the window. The gray light of dawn didn’t even cast a shadow. He groaned again. Less than three hours’ sleep and they were on his back again. He could hardly move. It took all his strength just to pick up the telephone. His voice rasped into the instrument. “Lincoln.”

  The whispering voice was faintly familiar in his ear. “Abraham?”

  He was sick of the joke. It had plagued him since childhood. “No, Goddammit! Marcus!”

  “What’s the trouble, Marcus? Did I wake you up?” The voice laughed.

  Suddenly he was wide awake. He knew the laugh. “Are you—?”

  The voice cut him off. “No names, please. Go out to the public telephone booth at the corner and I’ll call you in three minutes.”

  “All right,” Marcus said.

  Three minutes later Lincoln was standing in the narrow telephone booth when the phone rang. “Is that you?” he said breathlessly as he picked up the receiver. “How are you?”

  “Never better.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “I tried to find you everywhere.”

  “Around. Learning. Thinking. Praying.”

  “You should have called me,” Marcus said. “I am your friend.”

  “I know. But I couldn’t. I was busy getting all the shit out of my head. I need some information. And a favor.”

  “Go.”

  “Are the wireless mikes still on the same frequency as before?”

  “Yes. We’ve never changed it.”

  “Would a superpowered pin mike running off twenty-four volts drown out all the others?”

  “Easily. They’re only one point five volts. It will easily put away all the hand-held wireless mikes. They’re only three volts. Twenty-four volts will take out everything within a thousand yards.”

  “Still use only one panel for the wired mikes?”

  “Check.”

  “And a separate rebroadcast unit for the wireless?”

  “Check.”

  “How many video cameras are you using?”

  “Twenty. Our monitor board can’t carry more than eight. We’ll have to keep pulling in and out according to the cue sheet.”

  “Can you lock your best Zoomar onto the cross and fix it so that it can’t be pulled out?”

  “Yes. Care to give me a focus?”

  “Do you have a good man for it?”

  “I’ll stay on it myself.”

  “Dead center of the cross where the panel slides into the arms so that the battery of night floods can roll out on their platform.”

  “Got it.”

  “Can you kill every monitor except that one when the panel begins to open?”

  “Easy.”

  “And the wire mike panel?”

  “Zap.”

  “Okay. Then you got it.”

  “Wait a minute. When does all this action start?”

  “When you see me.”

  “You’ll never get in here.”

  “Why not? They still have me listed on the program, haven’t they?”

  “Of course they have. But you know better than that. They never intended to let you get on the air. They’ve already got Sorensen down on the cue sheet to take your place.”

  “He’s going to be awfully disappointed, then.”

  “The old man’s got three hundred special police crawling all over the place and each of them has a picture of you. The minute you show your face, even anywhere near the gate, they grab you.”

  “They’re never going to see me.”

  “They sure as hell will. The only way you’ll ever make it is if you take invisible pills. Please, do me a favor and don’t try to get inside. Those guys are rough. And they have orders to really hurt you.”

  “Too bad. That means I can’t even try to get out.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve already been inside for the last three days.” The warm familiar laugh chuckled in his ear. “May God be with you, Marcus.”

  The phone went dead in his hand. Slowly he came out of the booth. The sun was already coming up. It was going to be a beautiful day for a Crusade.

  ***

  By noon, four hours before the Crusade was to begin, the ten-thousand-seat amphitheater built in the parking lot in front of the main building was already jammed. Every parking lot was filled with cars and every green patch of lawn was swarming with people. There was a gay festive air over it all. The popcorn, hot dog and cold drink vendors were already doing a land-office business. Even the people in the lines in front of the hundred Johnny on the Spots were in a good humor as they waited their turns to enter the sanctum of relief.

  From the control booth, specially erected, high behind the amphitheater, Marcus looked out. Below him there was nothing but a landscape of moving and flowing colored bodies. On the roof of the black-windowed building he saw the guards with their binoculars swinging from the straps around their necks and their rifles with the telescopic sights in their arms. Reflected in the mirror-like glass of the building, he could see the guards pacing on the roof of the control booth over his head.

  Forward in front of the building was the newly built stage, large enough to accommodate the more than six hundred specially invited guests under its brand-new red-white-and-blue-striped canvas sun shelter. He looked up at the giant golden cross that reached into the sky, suspended between the two towers of the building. His eyes squinted to make out the lines of the sliding panels. For a long moment he stared at them, then he turned and went back into the control booth.

  Quietly he turned on remote camera one, suspended outside, just under the overhang of the control booth. Watching the monitor, he focused it on the sliding panels, then zoomed in tight until it filled the monitor screen. He locked it into position, watched it for a moment more on the monitor, then turned off the switch and the monitor screen went to black. Suddenly soul-weary, he went into the tiny bathroom. He closed and locked the door behind him. He turned and looked into the mirror. He never knew that his eyes could hold so much pain. After a moment, he took a small vial of cocaine from his pocket and took two giant snorts in each nostril. Then he closed the vial, clasped his hands, bowed his head and closed his eyes and prayed.

  “Please, dear God. Don’t let him do it.”

  ***

  Marcus looked at the program clock on the panel. There were six minutes left of the two-hour program, one minute left to final cue time. There was no doubt about it. This had truly been the greatest revival meeting of all time. Reports coming in on the clattering telex indicated that everywhere in the country the results had been the same. It seemed as if the love of God had reached out and touched all of America. Preacher’s great dream had become reality.

  He moved in closer to the panel. “I’ll take over,” he said to the engineer. “You must be beat.”

  The engineer nodded. “Yeah. And I gotta take a piss or I’ll bust.”

  Marcus put the head mike on over his ears. He spoke into the mouthpiece. “Camera seven, in tight on Randle. He’s the man in the white suit with dark glasses, just behind the pulpit left.” He watched Randle appear on the monitor, the old man’s bodyguard towering behind him. Randle seemed to be dourly staring into the ground, no expression visible at all behind the glasses. He didn’t even seem to care what was happening in the pu
lpit before him as the announcer moved into place.

  Marcus stole a glance at the panel clock. Thirty seconds. The announcer began on cue as the giant smiling face of California’s most famous minister, beamed in directly from his own pulpit on the Coast, faded from the moving-picture-sized screen behind him.

  He switched on remote camera one and watched the sliding panels in the center of the cross while listening to the announcer. The announcer’s face and voice were going out on the relay. Marcus dropped both hands to the switches, the announcer’s professional voice booming in his ear.

  “—the man whose love of Jesus Christ led to this first great nationwide Crusade for Christ, the great pastor of the Community of God Church of Christian America Triumphant, Dr. C. Andrew Talbot, unfortu—”

  Marcus hit all the switches, cutting the announcer off the air as the panel doors slid away and the floodlight platform rolled out from inside the cross. The floodlights were partly hidden by an almost seven-foot-tall dark wooden cross. A man dressed in a loose white wool robe, belted with white rope and falling almost to his bare feet, moved slowly to the center of the platform, his hands holding lightly to the guard railing around it.

  Marcus stared with unbelieving eyes at the monitor. The man’s hair was long, falling below his shoulders; his beard almost reached his breast. He stood there silently for a moment, looking down at the crowd. It wasn’t until Marcus heard his voice that he really believed it was Preacher. Marcus hit the switch that threw the picture onto the giant movie screen down on the stage so that Preacher could be seen there as well as all over the country.

  Preacher’s voice boomed through all the loudspeakers in the amphitheater. “Brothers and Sisters in Christ—” Then the roaring and screaming love rising from the crowd reached up, drowning out his voice.

  The panic-stricken voice of the stage director came through the earphone. “What the hell is going on up there? You’ve blown your cue. Get back to Dr. Sorensen on the pulpit!”

  Marcus stole a glance at the stage monitor. Randle was on his feet, screaming at the bodyguard behind him, while staring up at the screen. Then he pushed his way angrily to the pulpit, shouting at Sorensen, who was standing there apparently in a dazed shock at what was happening. “Fuck you, Jake,” Marcus whispered to himself and turned his eyes back to Preacher.

  Preacher held up his hands for silence. Quickly the crowd began to quiet down, many falling to their knees in prayer, some fainting with their love for Christ. His voice boomed once again through the many loudspeakers.

  “I have not come here today to preach to you to love God. Because this you already do. I have not come here today to tell you that He loves you. Because this you already know. I have come here today instead to tell you about Judas. Not the miserable Judas who betrayed our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But the hundreds of Judases who selfishly use your love of Christ Jesus to betray both you and Him.

  “Look with your hearts into the faces of the men you trust, those men who promise to lead you to His heaven for the pittance you send them and then use that money to enrich themselves and to gain the power they seek. I know these men well, for once I was one of them.

  “For the past months I have been wandering among you, listening to your pains, your sorrows, your struggles and your dreams. And in so doing, I learned that I have sinned. Not only against Him whom I love but also against you who are my brethren. And because of that I have doubly sinned. And I pray to the Savior Christ Jesus, who died on the cross for my sins and yours, that hearing my confession, He gives me of His mercy.

  “This ministry, as well as many others, was built on the tiny bricks of dollars that you, in your desire to show your love of God, have given to us. And what did we do with that money to show our love of God? We bought limousines to ride in, airplanes to fly in, rich homes to live in, fine clothes to wear and fine food to eat. This we had. You did not. Even though it was your money that made it possible. Then, not content enough with that, we began to build monuments to our names; we called them schools and hospitals, churches and cathedrals. And when these things drained our resources we turned again to you and sold you pieces of land which you did not own except symbolically. We pled for you to match gifts of large sums of money we knew we would never get; we asked you to become faith partners with us, to send tithes, love gifts, and to support our radio and television programs, which were basically designed—like all radio and television—to sell a product. Only this time we were our own product—wrapped in the latest package design of our Lord. We spent half the money you gave us to persuade you to give us more money.

  “Then there are the other uses we make of your money. We buy power. We make gifts to those politicians who make it possible for us to gain power over your minds, your thoughts, your lives. In just the last few years we have brought to power men who have taken from you the food you eat, the jobs at which you work, the education you sorely need, the medical care you deserve, the security of your old age that you have worked all your life to gain. We have given money to men who wish to deny you your God-given rights to equality because of your race, your creed, your color or your sex. We have given money to these men who, while spending untold billions of dollars on weapons of destruction, tell us that we must tighten our belts and suffer the pangs of hunger so that the budget may be balanced while they meet the threat of Communism.

  “And by so doing, by supporting and condoning all these things with the money we take from you in the name of the Lord and thereby assuring ourselves of our power in the structure of our society, are we also not unlike the Communists we cry out against in the name of God? If we must find a name for ourselves should not that name be ‘religious Communists’? Should not our creed be called ‘religious Communism’? Because do we not do the very same things we charge the others are doing in the name of atheistic Communism?

  “I have in my hand a piece of paper taken from the computer of this church. In the past few months we have used God’s money, your money, to buy this land on which we presently stand for twenty-five million dollars. The very same land and the buildings on it that cost no more than six million dollars six years ago. Another ten million dollars of God’s money, your money, went to political causes not in your interest and to propaganda or so-called educational programs designed to assure certain people that their stature in society will not be threatened by non-Christians—whose prayers we are told God does not hear—by human beings of other colors who threaten our purity, by men and women whose sexuality does not happen to agree with ours. If what this church has done is not religious Communism, I do not know the meaning of the word.

  “But perhaps the greatest of all the sins we have committed is the one we commit most often. Every day many churches like ours keep you from your local house of prayer and give you instead a graven image to worship. The image on your own television screen. Think. The Lord has commanded us not to make graven images of anything on this earth to worship. And is that which we see on the screen not also an image?

  “Because of all these things I have done and all these sins I have committed, three days ago I petitioned a federal court on behalf of you and the affiliated churches who are the rightful owners of the Community of God Church to ask the court to appoint a receiver for the assets of this church and determine whether or not there has been an improper or illegal use of these moneys you gave us to enrich certain of us or to gain illegal powers for ourselves. I have learned that this court has appointed a receiver and, I, too, will face the proper authorities for any crimes that I may have committed.”

  He paused for a moment. Not a sound came from the crowd of people. He clasped his hands on the railing. “Brothers and Sisters in Christ, please join with me in a prayer for His mercy—”

  Marcus pushed the switch to pick up the prayer of the audience. A rasping voice came roaring through the loudspeakers. Startled, Marcus turned to the stage monitor. Randle was screaming, “I don’t give a damn what you think! Kill the son of a bit
ch!”

  The sound of the three rifle shots seemed to come almost together. With horror-stricken eyes, Marcus stared at the screen. The first bullet had torn through Preacher’s robe, ripping a wide hole in his side, as his body spun from the impact, the second tore through both his hands, still clasped in prayer. He grabbed at the wooden cross behind him for support. The third bullet blew him off his feet and he fell backward over the railing, still clinging to the cross. His body tumbled over and over in the air, hitting the canvas sun roof with a sound like a roar of thunder, the cross beneath him. The left arm of the cross tore partly through the canvas and Preacher rolled lifelessly onto his back, arms outstretched on the cross.

  Automatically, Marcus zoomed in on Preacher. At the same moment the rays of the sun crested between the towers, bathing his body in glowing gold. A strangely painful moan seemed to rise from the bowels of the people who could see him on the giant screen. Many of them fell to their knees, tears mingling with their prayers.

  Marcus stared in an almost hypnotic state. There was a hole in the open palm of each outstretched hand, a gaping torn-open space in Preacher’s side, through which the last few drops of his blood flowed, and a hole in his crossed ankles where the bullet inside still held them pinned together. Marcus zoomed the camera in on Preacher’s face, then felt himself choke as his eyes filled with tears.

  There was a look of loving peace on Preacher’s face that he had never had in life.

  10. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

  11. But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.

  12. Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.

  13. I give thee charge in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and before Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession;