The Regime: Evil Advances (8 page)

Rayford wanted to fill the glaring silence with his views on when he was and wasn’t going to church and how he planned to go less and play golf more, but that could wait. He didn’t want to press his luck. He knew he was saying other than what Irene hoped to hear. In fact, he was likely fulfilling her worst nightmare. Well, this had been her idea. She wanted to know where he stood, and this was where.

“We were talking about Chloe,” she said quietly.

“We were? Okay. What about her?”

“She worships you. You’re her hero. She wants to be just like you.”

“Is that so bad? She could do worse. Wouldn’t you love for her to be a successful pilot someday?”

“That isn’t the point. She’s a brilliant student. She can write her own ticket. She’ll be fine that way. You’re a grown man. You have the right to make these decisions on your own, even if I disagree. Even if I hate the consequences. But she’s twelve, Rafe. Challenging the existence of God, saying I can’t know the Bible is true, fighting going to church and Sunday school every week. She criticizes her Sunday school teacher, slouches and folds her arms and closes her eyes during sermons.”

“She hears them.”

“Oh, I know well she hears them, because she picks them apart.”

“So do you, Irene.”

“I give up.” She turned away from him.

“No, don’t do that. At least we’re talking. Do you really want me to feel like you’ve given up on me?”

She turned back. “No, I don’t. But I want you to encourage Chloe to give me a chance. Give the Bible the benefit of the doubt. Make an attitude adjustment about Sundays.”

Rayford sat up and swung his feet off the side of the bed. “Can’t do it,” he said.

“Oh, Rafe!”

“I can’t, Irene. I have to be true to myself and do what I believe is best. You’re not going to browbeat your own child into a life decision this important. You can’t force her to share your beliefs. She has to come to them on her own. I want her faith to be based on her own study and conclusions.”

“Like yours.”

“Yes, like mine! What’s wrong with mine?”

“You don’t have any, Rayford. You attend church the way you go to the club. If you were serious about your relationship with God, you would study the Bible, go to a church that teaches and preaches it. And you’d be sure you raised your children the same way. No, I don’t want to give Chloe an inherited faith. I just want to see her more open, more teachable, more malleable. She’s too young to be so rebellious, so anti-everything.”

“She’s not a rebel, Irene. She’s a good kid, a great student, never in trouble. I asked you to imagine the kind of husband you could have. Imagine the kind of daughter you could have.”

“So I’m supposed to be thrilled with my husband and my daughter—despite their nonexistent relationships with God—because of what they’re not? Well, Rayford,

let me tell you, I’m just so thrilled that I thank God every day you’re not like Hitler. And isn’t it wonderful that you’re not a mass murderer? That could really put a crimp in a marriage.”

“Now it’s my turn to give up,” he said.

With that, Irene was out of bed and pulling on her robe. She turned on the lights and sat before the television.

“You know,” he said, “that thing you said about my going to church the way I go to the club?”

“Um-hm,” she said, not looking at him.

“That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to switch churches.”

She turned to look at him, bewilderment on her face.

“You realize our church is where we met our doctor, our dentist, our insurance guy, and even the man who put my name in for membership at the club?”

Irene turned back to the TV.

Nicolae Carpathia and Leon Fortunato walked and talked until dawn, stopping to take in the beauty of the Romanian sunrise over the Carpathian Mountains. Peter and a bodyguard discreetly stayed about a hundred feet behind them.

The men traded life stories, hopes, dreams, plans. While Nicolae had not yet said it in so many words, it had to be clear to Fortunato that he was being vetted for a role in Carpathia’s future.

The more they talked, the more specific Nicolae became and the more questions he asked. Fortunato soon sounded like a man selling himself, but he was subtle. It was, Nicolae decided, as if it was clear to both men what each wanted, but neither would put it on the table.

Finally they retired back to the anteroom, where Leon slipped on the smoking jacket and Peter had plates of fruit and toast delivered.

“I do not like to play cat and mouse,” Nicolae said at last.

“I figured as much.”

“You are the ultimate kingmaker, Leon. And I want to be king.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Surely you are not surprised to know that I did my homework before accepting your invitation. Your rise in business has been meteoric. Your intelligence has already been celebrated. Your physical prowess is legendary. While you have not announced it publicly, it is getting around that you are restless, eager to expand your horizons, grow your business, widen your influence. Politics cannot be far off.”

“Let me ask you something, Leon. How far would you go to help a man achieve his dreams?”

Leon pushed his plate away a couple of inches and leaned back, crossing his arms. “Ah,” he said. “The true test.”

“I am just curious.”

“Oh, it is more than that and you know it. It is the crux of the matter. I told you I did my homework.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I have an idea how far you will go to achieve your goals.”

“Really? How far?”

“Let me stall by telling you what got me booted from the Catholic university.”

Carpathia loved such stories.

“I told you I loved the pageantry. I never forgot the funeral of one pope and the election of another and all that went with it. What is more beautiful than the red, red, red of the cardinals’ vestments? Even as a student, I always had businesses on the side and, thus, more money than my classmates. Once I had it in my head that I wanted a cardinal’s vestments, nothing could dissuade me. I rushed to the shop at the Vatican, only to have to lie to be able to purchase what I wanted. I was informed that I had to have special permission to buy such garments, so I immediately spun a yarn about it being a gift for my bishop. I said we were the same size, and I was overjoyed when the questions stopped and the measuring began.

“When the vestments were ready and I tried them on before the three-way mirror, I could have gone straight to heaven. I had to harness my emotions to continue the ruse and insist that my bishop would be as thrilled as I was. I wanted to wear them back to my dormitory, but that would have given me away. I couldn’t wait to get back and don them again.

“I wore them everywhere, like a costume. Classmates oohed and aahed. Upperclassmen scowled and derided. I outwitted a professor by telling him I was wearing a rented costume for a masquerade party. He didn’t find it amusing but neither did he imagine it broke any rules. Which was not true of my wearing the getup to classes the next day. Class, singular, would be more like it. By the time I entered my second class, the authorities were waiting for me. I was brought before an administration

council, where I was scolded, reprimanded, and instructed to return the ‘costume’ posthaste.

“I tried to tell the council that my true motivation for wearing the elaborate habit was genuine admiration and respect for them. They weren’t buying. They said my devotion belonged to Christ. And you know, Nicolae, it hit me in that moment. While this had all really just been a lark—a compulsion to have and to wear the beautiful garments—I had no real devotion to Christ. I knew He was the object of the worship of the church, was purported to be the Savior of the world, the Son of God. But I simply didn’t believe it.”

“And so?”

“When I was seen, hours later, still traipsing about campus in my vestments, I was summarily expelled.”

“And excommunicated?”

“No. That was threatened. I accomplished that on my own.”

“On your own?”

“I simply stopped being Catholic. No Mass. No prayer. No rosary. No nothing. I had read widely in Theosophy, and while I determined to remain religious for the rest of my life, its tenets most resonate with me.”

“And those are, in a nutshell?”

Fortunato turned and stretched his legs, crossing them at the ankles. “The beauty of Theosophy, which is not yet two hundred years old, is that basically everything is okay with them. You can bring your own religion into the mix, as long as you agree that everything you believe from here on out comes from your own intellectual study

and not from dogma or tradition or single authorities. We believe all religions are part of man’s effort to relate to one another. And everyone can cooperate.”

“But surely there must be some commonly held beliefs. Otherwise Theosophy becomes everything and nothing.”

Fortunato nodded. “These are not fixed beliefs but rather a way of looking at life. We believe in reincarnation, karma, worlds beyond the physical, consciousness in all matter, physical and spiritual and mental evolution, free will, self-responsibility, altruism, and the ultimate perfecting of human nature, society, and life.”

It sounded like blather to Carpathia, but he wasn’t ready to say so. “Oneness,” he said.

Fortunato nodded. “Oneness is very much a part of it. Our second president, the late Annie Besant, wrote the Universal Invocation. Would you care to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“O Hidden Life, vibrant in every atom;

O Hidden Light, shining in every creature;

O Hidden Love, embracing all in Oneness;

May all who feel themselves as one with Thee

Know they are therefore one with every other.”

Carpathia couldn’t help himself. He howled with laughter.

Fortunato smiled with only his mouth. “What am I missing? This is funny?”

“Hilarious! Has this mishmash of silliness had an iota of impact on the world?”

“It has an impact on its adherents.”

“Really. What impact has it had on you, Leon?”

Finally he truly smiled. “It gives me something to teach. To talk about. It’s harmless.”

“And toothless.”

“Unless—and this is the beauty of it—you bring a bit of your own belief system into it. For instance, among the founders and early leaders are women who were religious, then atheistic, then into Theosophy.”

“As for you, you bring a bit of Catholicism?”

“No. I told you, I never bought into the central theme of that. I believe in the spirit world.”

Nicolae stiffened. He was eager to get back to the subject of the extent to which Fortunato might go to achieve his client’s goals, but now they were getting somewhere.

Irene finally reached the part Rayford had feared and dreaded. She switched off the TV and stood to face him. “The fact is, dear,” she said, “this is not working. We’re not together in the most important areas of life, and something has to change.”

Really. Was she honestly prepared to present an ultimatum, to throw down the gauntlet? “What do you propose changes, Irene? Let me guess. I go whole hog with Jesus, start going to the fundamentalist church, never let golf get in the way of church, and use my influence on Chloe to get her on board too.”

“That would be a start. No, that would be heaven.”

“You’re joking.”

“No,” she said. “Were you? I think you have assessed the situation perfectly.”

“I think you have a blind spot the size of Texas. This isn’t going to happen, Irene, and I’ll tell you why. Chloe is going to make up her own mind with influence from us both. I am not switching churches. And I am not giving up golf or having you tell me what I can or can’t do or when I can or can’t do it. If I miss church for six months, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God or I’m not as spiritual as you. And if you think this gives you license to go to the other church behind my back, I forbid it.”

“There’s a twenty-first century man for you. You forbid it?”

“You heard me. It’s embarrassing enough to have you God-talking all the time, even when we have guests. Now enough is enough. I can’t tell you what to believe or how seriously to take it. But you know where I stand, and this is how it’s going to be.”

Nicolae had thought he finally detected fatigue in the eyes of Leon Fortunato until they got on the subject of the spirit world. He wasn’t ready to dump his whole story on the Italian, but he told him enough that Leon would know they were both on the same page.

Still, he wanted to get back to the other subject. Maybe this was the route. “You have a spirit guide?” Nicolae said. “A contact?”

“I believe I do,” Leon said. “He has never steered me wrong yet. Every impression I get seems solid. Even his leading me to you.”

“You discussed our meeting with a being in the netherworld?”

“I consult the spirits for everything.”

“And?”

“Let’s just say I came with great anticipation.”

“Now let me ask you this, my friend,” Nicolae said. “Is there any length to which your spirit guide might tell you to go that would make you uncomfortable, make you hesitate, make you resist?”

“No!”

The answer was so immediate and forceful that Nicolae flinched. “Indeed?”

Fortunato made a fleshy fist. “Some things are solid, and you just know. Like you knew what to do about your competition.”

Now this was getting eerie. “My competition?”

“You think you didn’t get Mr. Tismaneanu’s attention?”

“Sorry?”

“I thought you eschewed cat and mouse,” Fortunato said. “You’re trying to tell me that your former employee’s unfortunate demise was coincidental?”

Carpathia’s mind was reeling. He had to hold out the possibility that this had all come from Planchette. Rule out all conventional explanations before giving credence to a man’s intuition. He was tempted to excuse himself for a bathroom break and get Planchette on the phone.

“No one told me this,” Fortunato said, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Told you what?”

“Oh, very good. Deny as long as you can. If we have a future together, Nicolae—and I’d like to think we might—don’t sit there and look me in the eye and with a straight face tell me that your accountant jumped to the enemy ship and then was accidentally killed within days. Do you think Emil Tismaneanu believes that?”