Book Deal (21 page)

***

They watched in silence as the announcer passed along what few details had been released: Martin Rosenhaus, founder and CEO of Mega-Media, the nation’s largest chain of media outlet stores, had plunged to his death, falling fourteen stories from the balcony of the palatial suite once regularly occupied by Alphonse Capone into the pool of the fabled hotel where Esther Williams herself had performed aqua ballet. Police were tight-lipped, but unidentified sources reported that a cleaning woman, herself unidentified, had stumbled into the suite only moments after the incident to discover a suicide note.

Deal switched off the set as a white-robed woman wearing something that looked like a turban on her head began to explain for the second time how big the splash was when Rosenhaus hit the water.

“Suicide…” Janice said, shaking her head in disbelief. She glanced at Deal in alarm. “We couldn’t have frightened him that badly…”

“Rosenhaus was right about the asbestos problem,” he said, shaking his head. “It may have slowed him down a bit, but it’s not the sort of thing that could stop him, not all by itself.”

“But if he killed himself…”

“It was suicide all right,” Deal said grimly. “The assisted kind.”

“I knew he was hiding something,” she said, still stunned. “But I thought it was
him
, something
he
’d done…” She trailed off, staring helplessly at Deal.

“Well, I wouldn’t rule that much out,” Deal said, thoughtful.

“But who would want to kill Rosenhaus?” she said.

Deal shook his head, still pondering.

“The police must have learned we were with him last night, Deal. Why haven’t they been here?”

He shrugged. “Maybe because Floyd Flynn’s in charge,” he said. “We were long gone by the time it happened, after all.”

Janice walked slowly through the kitchen archway, sank down on one of the barstools on the other side of the pass-through. “First Arch, then Eddie Lightner, now Rosenhaus…”

As she spoke, an image began to form in Deal’s mind, something from a kid’s primer, a series of ever-larger sea creatures churning a kind of conga line through the depths, each about to swallow the one just in front, each about to be swallowed by the one just behind. “There’s always a bigger fish,” he said, softly.

“What?” Janice said, staring at him in puzzlement.

“Rosenhaus,” he said. “He thought he was the biggest fish, but he was just chum, compared to the thing that got him.”

She was about to snap back at him, demand some human terminology here, but then she softened, sat back in her chair.

“But who?” she said. “Who could have more riding on this than Martin Rosenhaus?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll bet if Driscoll were here, he’d tell you that was the key.”

“If you’re not going to talk to me, Deal…”

He saw the threatening look in her eyes, held up his hands. “I’m serious,” he said. “That’s exactly it. You ask the right question, sooner or later you’re bound to find the answer.” She still had her hands on her hips, was still glaring at him, when he picked up the phone and began to dial.

Chapter 17

“And such a plan demands a certain way of thinking, the need to take the long view. You can see that, can you not?”

When she hesitated, James Ray Willis’s face darkened. Not just a frown or a scowl, but a manifestation of doom incarnate, a massive wave poised on the horizon and about to crash down. It suggested the dismay of the Egyptians, cowering as vast clouds of locusts obliterated their sun, the fear of the fleeing money-changers as the splintering of their tables echoed through the temples and the lash split their backs, the agony of the masses of Sodom as the fire rained down and lit them like tinder as they ran.

It was an expression that the Reverend Willis had spent years perfecting, and it had become effective enough even when viewed from distant rows in vast pavilions, or passed through the cool, filtering lens of the television camera. But viewed up close within the confines of an airless, windowless editing room buried under countless tons of rock and rich Midwestern soil, the effect would be palpable. A reminder that while the promise of the Word was of gentleness and forgiveness and of ultimate transcendence, there was nonetheless no unpleasant measure that would not be undertaken in order to move the benighted toward the light.

“Can you not?” Wills crooned again in his oddly formal speech. No one had ever spoken in such a way in the various places where he’d grown up, but that was part of the point, wasn’t it, big Oakie boy with a moon face and the mark of a century’s in breeding, overlay a hundred-dollar haircut and an off-kilter Alistair Cooke accent. Throw them off-guard, never give them what they expect.

Along with the odd syntax had come a note of urgency, however, and this time she nodded.

“Good,” he said, settling back in his chair. The mask of doom was replaced by an avuncular smile, everything forgiven in an instant, a harbinger of God’s gentle rain drifting down in endless bounty. Years of practice, years of preparation. “Of course you understand the plans. You read all these before you sent them off to your brother, didn’t you.”

He lifted a sheaf of papers from the desk beside him, riffled the pages with a finger, noted the widening of her eyes. “Oh yes, I had to take these papers back, the ones you sent off to your brother, Sara. I had to go to considerable effort and expense, send some of my best people all the way down to Miami to see that these were reclaimed. We just couldn’t have knowledge of all these plans floating about, because it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Sara. One little piece falls out of a great big puzzle like this…” He smiled, tapped the sheaf of papers. “Well, the whole works could get tangled up.”

He paused, gave her a fatherly look. “And I want you to remember who sent these documents where they shouldn’t have gone in the first place. It wasn’t your intention, I know, but everything that’s happened, Sara, well, ask yourself who’s responsible.”

He saw the look of pain and despair in the eyes, knew that if the gag were to be lifted from her lips, he would see the lips tremble, too. It was not his purpose nor his intention to distress her unnecessarily, but he was human, and she had disappointed him mightily.

“I am sorry,” he said, and renewed his smile to show that he was sincere. “But you have been meddling in some extremely important matters, Sara.” He gave her a sadder version of the smile meant to convey how much he cared, how difficult this was. “And before I decide what we’re going to have to do, I thought we would take this opportunity…” He paused, searching for the words. “…to reorient ourselves, to
rededicate
”—he waved his arms in an encompassing circle—“to let you understand fully, once and for all, the importance of this mission.”

He sat back in his chair, gazed up at the unpainted concrete ceiling past the blank eyes of half a dozen television monitors as if seeking counsel. He closed his eyes, began to shake his head gently from side to side.

“Lust,” he said, clucking his tongue. “Lust,” he repeated, the thought penetrating, clearly paining him.

He turned to her, and his eyes roamed her body, seeing, despite the shapeless dress that had been found for her, the mounds and curves and valleys he well knew.

“I cannot tell you what a disappointment it was. ‘This person is different,’ that is what I told myself when you joined us. And then…” He realized that his voice was rising again, and he forced himself to calm. He reached out, placed a reassuring hand on her inner thigh, patted gently.

“There is lust,” he said, “…and there is love.” His hand was moving slowly upward. Her eyes flickered at his face, then toward the hand that she could not raise her head high enough to see.

“The distinction is a fine one, of course.” He held flesh cupped in his hand now, still smiling wistfully. “…but we have to make it…”

He left off his stroking motion, grasped a fold of flesh and twisted, watched her eyes widen with shock, her body turn rigid with pain and rise off the narrow bed.

He withdrew his hand and sat back in his chair. “I blame myself, of course. I let my own affection for you cloud my better judgment.” His lifted his brows as if to countenance the fact that even he had been human.

“And I may have kept too much back from you, kept you from appreciating what I’ve undertaken.” He gave her a chaste pat on the knee this time, waved his hand at the banks of electronic equipment lining the room behind him.

“And so that is why we have to talk now. Maybe we can reach some understanding yet, Sara. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

He bent forward then, and cupped her cheeks tenderly in his palms. His smile was back, blooming with the force of many suns. Seared by the force of this gaze, the lame might cast away their crutches, the aged turn lithe, the wayward become whole again.

“I know you can do it, sister. I by God
know
you can.”

***

No telling what time it was, nor how long she’d been unconscious. A few minutes, a few hours, an entire day. No way to calculate by the nature of the litany above her, either. The fulsome voice recycled itself at intervals, as if the man were not a man at all, but some holographic image plucked out of the ether somewhere between the cameras of the soundstage and the satellites that boosted his image at one time within the cycle of a week to every country in the world.

She was locked in an awful unending nightmare, that was all she knew. Here, in the room where she’d been brought—Willis’s private command post, a production room somewhere in the bowels below the subfloors of the deepest paranoiac bunker—James Ray Willis could be fully and finally transformed.

Down here he could blithely throw off whatever vestiges of humility he maintained in his guise of a “normal” life and become the creature he’d always dreamed of being. And it was her role to serve as witness. That much she knew. But for how long she had no idea.

She should have been able to see the signs earlier. His gradual withdrawal from everyday business affairs, from public appearances, his loss of zeal even for his legendary Sunday performances, his growing obsession with the technology that beamed him farther and wider with every week that passed. But instead, she’d unwittingly become a part of things, hadn’t she. Computers, Reverend Willis. Let me tell you about some other things they do. Let me tell you about the World Wide Web.

With a sigh that died somewhere between her intention and the gag that bound her tightly, she rolled her head to the side, let her eyes fall open. His clothes looked the same as the last time she’d looked, but then they seldom varied: dark blue suit, perfectly pressed and starched white shirt, expensive silk tie in muted, abstract swirls. A television preacher who’d been to town. No clue there. Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow?

He’d told her the documents she’d sent to Arch had been recovered, that much she remembered. No hope then, no chance discovery, no person to put two and two together, come riding to the rescue. How much longer, then? How much more to endure?

Willis acknowledged her open eyes with a nod, as if he’d been waiting for her to return from some errand, a phone call, some distracting task. “When I began my planning,” he said casually, his knee clasped in his hands, “I frankly despaired that all I aspired to could be accomplished, in any earthly lifetime. Hearst, Hapsburg, Holy See, they all had dreams and unlimited resources, and what did it get them?” He shrugged, adjusting his perch on the metal chair.

She was thirsty, and she needed to go to the bathroom, but if she signaled these things to him, there’d be the nearly unbearable show of solicitousness on his part. And there would also be the watching, no chance he’d allow her in that tiny rest room by herself. What might she do, crawl away down the drain? Hang herself with toilet paper? Wouldn’t it be better for him if she did manage to kill herself?

Worst of all was the way he looked at her. As if all this pained him, somehow. As if prolonging the matter were some act of mercy. She’d be dead already had she never been intimate with the Reverend James Ray Willis, that much she knew. Never mind that it had lasted all of a month, that she’d meant as much to him as a new shirt. To Willis it meant he had to appear to ponder matters for a while, until he could manufacture some reason why she had to die, just as her brother had had to die, as the others he’d told her about had had to die, for the greater good of his cause.

Remembering how naïve she’d been sent a wave of shame over her, accompanied by a brief surge of anger. She tried to laser her fury toward him, beam it across the few feet that separated them, but Willis was looking elsewhere, and she was so tired, even such a pathetic attempt exhausted her.

“A knowledge of history did not keep me from pointing myself in the right direction, of course,” Willis was saying. He seemed to be talking more to the ceiling now, or perhaps to the ages. “As the poet says, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?’” His smile broadened, and he reached to pat her hand, just where the heavy strap crossed her wrist.

This could not last much longer, she thought. Today, tomorrow, he would weary of the charade, worry that someone would find her, soon he’d shift from history to Revelations, show her the fate of the unfaithful.

“But so much has happened in this era, the network expanded so pervasively, I began to think, what if we’d been wrong all along, the way we’d been envisioning the millennium.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Forgetting all the old scenarios, the rain of hellfire, the scourging of the unworthy, the ascension of the few, all of that.”

He leaned forward, eager, so close she could feel his breath—hot, dry, the scent of mint—on her cheek.

“I see those images of African Bushmen drinking Coca-Cola, of Australian Aborigines wearing Nike ball caps, Mongolian cave dwellers where there’s one pair of trousers for an entire family and it’s a pair of Guess jeans, and I ask myself, how far away is the day? and what I mean is this”—he was so close to her ear now that his voice had dropped to a whisper—“how far away is the day when we can finally transcend the boundaries of race and nationalism and parochial self-interest and enter the common world, where the goals are made sensible once again, goals within reason. Where there’s no longer a need to make a killing, but a simple living…where we have work that matters, modest homes, personal safety, our neighborhoods back…”

He fell back in his seat as if he’d overwhelmed himself with his rhetoric. “You and I know this, Sara, and everyone knows it in their heart of hearts. But no one’s able to get the message across any longer. Doesn’t it make more sense for me to be in control of the message-making than the godawful demons who are?”

He was no longer talking to her, she knew. The question, if it were a question, was meant for some far greater authority than herself.

There was silence then, and she saw that Willis sat now with his head back, his eyes closed, sweat glistening on his face, the very picture of a fighter collapsed in his corner after an exhausting match. The muscles were still working in his jaws, as if they were part of an unruly machine that simply refused to stop altogether and on command. He worked his shoulders, swung his head about, took great inhalations of breath, which grew more and more regular, until finally he calmed. When he opened his eyes again, she saw that he had become the old James Ray Willis for an instant, at least, a person, a human being who blinked, seemed to register her presence as if for the first time: who has bound this woman to a cot? how did I come to be here with her?

An instant only, and then it was gone. Willis averted his gaze, checked his watch. “There will be one world, sister,” he said in a calm voice. “And it’s coming soon, much sooner than anyone suspects.” He gave her a smile. “Whoever controls the means of distributing the Word will also control the Word itself.”

“Martin Rosenhaus understood something of what I’m talking to you about, but he failed, finally, because he took himself to be more important than the aim itself. He was a good businessman, but a poor prophet. His failure was a failure of vision.”

Willis checked his watch again. “It will take a patient person and a humble one to bring these plans to fruition.” He stood then, came toward her. “I intend to be that person, sister.” His eyes swept over her, lingered here, lingered there.

“Who else did you tell about my plans, Sara? You want to tell me that?”

The question struck her like a slap. That’s what it was all about, she realized suddenly, the only reason she was still alive. Distract her with all this talk of plans and goals and a better world, wear her down, then spring it on her. Of course. The moment he was sure his tracks were covered, she’d be gone. She stared back at him, her eyes as full of fury as she could make them.

Willis nodded, his expression unflappable. It was as if he’d forgotten he’d even asked the question.

“Well, that’s enough for now, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes swept over her once again. “You look worn out, sister. You need to rest and reflect.” And then he was reaching for her. “Let’s first just get you tidied up.”