The Trinity Game (12 page)

Trinity lashed out at the air with his Bible. “Get away, Satan! You can’t stop me from speaking the truth—I’m anointed by the blood of Christ!” Then he froze, his Bible in mid-strike.

He remained frozen far too long, and worried murmurs began spreading through the congregation.

His timing is usually perfect
, thought Daniel,
why is he doing this?

Trinity’s entire body shuddered once, froze again, and jerked to the left, sending him sprawling on the stage. He bounced back up, Bible in hand, but the prayer requests lay scattered at his feet.

Then the tongues began, unnatural sounds erupting from his mouth and his body lurching spasmodically around the stage.

Seeing it on the television screen, Daniel had convinced himself that this was just Trinity’s latest act. But it looked different in
person. This was not the kind of performance his uncle would ever concoct. It looked too…
real.
Trinity was always smooth, and this was anything but. Worse than inelegant, it was ugly. There was just something
wrong
about it. Something profoundly wrong.

Daniel couldn’t watch another spasm, couldn’t listen to another eruption. He jumped from his seat and bolted for the exit, his skin crawling. Thinking:
It has to be an act. It has to be…

Outside, he retrieved his camera from the car, stood in the sun and waited until the doors opened and Trinity’s flock flooded the bright parking lot, chattering happily about what a great service it had been, about how they felt the presence of God today, about hundred-fold paybacks and their imminent prosperity.

Daniel wanted to grab them by the shoulders, one by one, and say:
Don’t you see? He’s a con man—you’re being played for chumps. You should be paying off your debts and going back to school to get a better job, or building a college fund so your children won’t have to struggle like you struggle—not giving it to some grifter
.

But what good would it do? All those things took real work, real sacrifice. Trinity offered these people an easy escape, a way to tell themselves that they were doing something to improve their lot, while never really having to take responsibility for their lives. All they had to do was throw money at him.

Daniel couldn’t help these people. But he could bring down the con man. In his right hand he held the camera that contained digital surveillance photos he’d taken at Trinity’s Buckhead mansion. Photos that exposed the truth behind the phony
Man of God
sham.

Finally.

He waited for the crowd to thin out and went back inside. A burly security guard stopped him in the empty hallway.

“I’m sorry, sir, service is over for today. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“I need to speak with Reverend Trinity,” said Daniel.

The guard smiled indulgently. “Lots of folk need to speak with Reverend Trinity. If you fill out a prayer request form, I’ll be sure he gets it.”

“Just tell him that Daniel Byrne is here. He’ll see me.”

T
he security guard emerged from the dressing room, nodded politely, and left. Daniel stared at the door, took a deep breath. He reached for the knob, turned it, and stepped through the doorway.

Tim Trinity sat before a mirror framed by little round light bulbs, removing his stage makeup with cold cream. He caught Daniel’s eye in the mirror, finished his task with one last swipe across the chin, and dropped the cotton ball on the table. He sniffed sharply, as if he had a cold.

“The prodigal son returns. Never thought I’d live to see the day.” Trinity forced a smile, but the pain showed through.

When Daniel had walked out on his uncle at thirteen, it was with the firm intention of never speaking to the man again. But now, two decades later, he had to fight to hold his tongue. The weight of so much left unsaid, a weight he’d been carrying all these years. The urge to unload it, to say everything now, to dump the weight on Trinity, where it belonged. But what was the point? He was here to do a job, nothing more.

“Hello, Reverend.”

“Twenty years.” Trinity swiveled the chair and faced his nephew. Up close, without the benefit of stage makeup, he looked older. Still handsome, still had the salon tan, but the facelift had
left his skin abnormally taut and shiny, and the broken veins of a drinker spiderwebbed across his cheeks and the left side of his nose. “You coulda at least said good-bye.”

“And you could’ve told me the truth, instead of playing me like one of your suckers.” He couldn’t help himself, it had to be said.

Trinity lit a cigarette. “Shit, I tried. When you started questioning things, I tried, but… Guess I shoulda told you from the start. But you were just a boy, and…” He cleared his throat. “And you believed, and it was beautiful. And when you looked at me…I couldn’t bring myself to let you down like that.”

“You think I wasn’t gonna get wise to the grift? You think I wouldn’t recognize the shills? The deaf man in Biloxi who showed up in a wheelchair in Mobile? The blind woman in Pensacola and the one who was arthritic in Gainesville?”

“Sure, I had shills,” said Trinity. “But you were there, and you saw the other ones. Some of those folks were really healed.”

“Power of suggestion,” said Daniel. “Placebo effect.”

“Right. And it works. And who cares, so long as people get better? What about Jesus? The man always said, ‘Your
faith
has healed you.’ He never once said, ‘
I
have healed you.’ You don’t think He sometimes put shills in the crowd to rev up people’s faith?”

Daniel said nothing.

“I was gonna tell you, I swear. I just didn’t get up the gumption in time. The other preachers’ kids still believed, and I guess I always told myself I had more time.” Trinity tapped his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. “Should’ve known better, you were always ahead of the others.”

“Had to grow up fast, thanks to you.”

“Hell, son, you were
born
old. Look, I did wrong by not telling you before you figured it out on your own, and I’m sorry for that,
but you didn’t have to run off, we coulda talked about it.” He took a long drag on his smoke, blew it out, and looked up for a reaction, but Daniel gave him nothing. After a long moment Trinity said, “You remember the summer of ’85?”

Daniel remembered. He was nine years old. It was the only summer of his childhood they hadn’t spent on the road. “Yeah. You took the summer off from preaching. Bible study, you said. A lie, I’m sure.”

“It was a lie, at that,” said Trinity. “Wanna know what I did that summer? I got a
job
, is what I did. Selling homeowners insurance. See, that was the year I first saw real doubt in your eyes—serious doubt—so I figured to make a career change. For you.” Trinity reached into a pocket and held out a gold Cross pen to Daniel. “Look at that.” On the clip was a little plaque with a B-I logo. “Each month, Bedrock Insurance gave one to their top-producing salesman. I got three more just like it. I mean, I wrote up a ton of business that summer. Worked the poor neighborhoods…those were my people, I knew how to reach them.” He took the pen back from Daniel. “And then came your namesake.”

“My—?”

“Hurricane Danny. Made landfall in Lake Charles, but the Big Easy got drenched, couple hundred homes destroyed. Including thirty-three I’d personally written up. And guess what? Bedrock welched, some technicality written into the fine print. Didn’t pay out a goddamn dime to those folks. I quit the next day and gassed up the Winnebago again.” He placed the pen back in his pocket. “I keep it as a reminder. Sure, I’m a grifter, but there ain’t no clean way to get rich, and my grift never hurt anyone. Not like that.”

Daniel wanted to say,
It hurt me,
but the words caught in his throat. “It hurts plenty of people,” he said.

Trinity stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray. “OK, Danny. You come here to tell me I’m a scumbag? Mission accomplished.”

Daniel shook his head. “Not a social call. I’m here on business.”

“Thought you’d become a priest.”

“I am a priest.”

“But…” Trinity gestured to his neck.

“I work out of uniform most of the time.”

“Lucky you. So what does the Catholic Church want with a man like me?”

“We want to know how you’re doing it,” said Daniel.

“Doing what?”

“The tongues.”

Trinity’s eyes went wide. “What do you know about that?”

“We’re on to you. I also know about the cocaine…which is a new low, even for you.” He’d planned to confront his uncle with the surveillance photos, but now he’d lost the taste for it.

“Yeah, I’m using, but that’s because of the fucking voices,” said Trinity. “What do you know about the tongues?”

“How are you doing it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What about the predictions?”

“The hell are you talking about? What predictions?”

Trinity was a skilled liar, but there was no mistaking real desperation in the man’s voice. “Your tongues act. You play it backwards, speed it up, it’s English. You’re making predictions. And they’re coming true.”

Trinity’s face went ashen and he slumped back into his chair. “Jesus…Fucking…Christ,” he said, between ragged breaths. “No. No, that’s just not—no, it isn’t…it’s just not possible…”

Daniel smiled without any humor. “You can do better than that.”

“No, you’re lying. You must be lying…” Trinity’s confusion looked genuine, but then, he was good at this. “You gotta believe
me, Danny, I don’t know anything about any predictions.”

“Given that my entire childhood was based on a lie, you’ll understand if I choose not to believe you,” said Daniel. He turned to leave.

“No, wait! Please. Something strange is—I-I don’t know what the hell is happening to me.”

Daniel watched in silence as his uncle reached for a bottle of bourbon on the dressing table, uncorked it, and poured with a shaking hand, the bottle’s neck rattling against the edge of the glass. Trinity put the bottle down and steadied the glass with both hands as he drank. He looked nothing like the big and powerful man from Daniel’s childhood memories, nothing like the confident preacher on stage in front of a crowd.

“See, it’s not just the tongues,” said Trinity. He tapped on the side of his head with an index finger. “It’s also the voices.” A tear tumbled down his right cheek. “I’m scared, son. You gotta help me. I’m shit-scared.”

Could this all be an act? It didn’t seem like one.

Daniel took the chair across from Trinity. “I still think you’re full of shit, but I’ve been sent here to find out what’s going on with you, so I’ll listen. Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out. And be warned: if it turns out you’re running some con, I promise you will be one sorry-assed con man.”

W
illiam Lamech sat in his expansive office, twenty-three floors above the Las Vegas Strip. The glass city shimmered beneath him as the sun moved into the western sky. He pushed a button on a control panel set into his desktop, and the floor-to-ceiling windows automatically darkened to a comfortable level.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It was the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction. He’d forgotten the other two, but he enjoyed this one and it pleased him to remember it.

The phone on his desk trilled softly, and he answered it.

“Mr. Lamech, it’s me.”

“Go ahead.”

“That priest you said to watch for, he’s here. Only…”

“Only what?”

“Well, he doesn’t look like a priest. I mean, he’s a young guy, doesn’t look like a square. And he ain’t dressed like a priest. But it’s the name you gave me, Daniel Byrne.”

“You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“Baptist.”

“Well, they don’t all look like Max Von Sydow.”

“Uh…yes, sir. I guess not. One other thing, might not be important…”

“Yes?”

“He’s the preacher’s nephew.”

The preacher’s nephew.
It brought Lamech forward in his chair. “Interesting. Where is he now?”

“I took him to Trinity’s dressing room, and they talked for about an hour. Then he left. I got his license plate.”