The Trinity Game (6 page)

After giving his statement to the cops, after the firefighters had come and gone, Daniel lay on his lumpy motel bed with the smell of burning chemicals lingering in his nostrils.

Thinking:
Screw it.

Thus ended Daniel’s acetic rebellion.

In the three years since, he’d made peace with the luxury. It wasn’t as if the money he’d saved was being diverted to orphanages, he told himself. And he had to admit that his previous austerity had enabled him to indulge in that pesky sin of pride.

One of the seven deadlies. And one of the three to which Daniel remained vulnerable, the other two being lust and wrath.

Daniel sat at the desk in his executive suite at the downtown Atlanta Ritz-Carlton. To his side, the room service tray held the remains of dinner—filet mignon and Caesar salad. He was not a glutton and always left some food on his plate. He opened his notebook and reviewed his shorthand version of Giuseppe’s transcripts.

Reverend Tim Trinity had done a lot of weather reporting during his tongues act and had given a few traffic and sports reports on the side. And sometimes he got lucky. He even predicted a ten-car pileup on the southbound I-95, just outside Savannah, which came to pass. Of course, pileups happen every day, and usually during the morning rush, when commuters haven’t had their morning coffee. So the prediction was a high-percentage bet on
Trinity’s part. And, as Nick had mentioned, he got the Superbowl right, but so did most football fans, since the underdog lost.

“Trivial crap,” Nick had called it. A true assessment, but far from complete. It wasn’t all crystal ball stuff. Trinity also dispensed sage advice to anyone who could understand English spoken backwards at two-thirds speed.

He proclaimed Mahatma the best brand of rice for making jambalaya.

He cautioned against carrying a balance on high-interest credit cards.

And he said that human beings should love each other as brothers and sisters.

I told you it was gonna get weird
.

Daniel put the notebook aside and moved his laptop to the center of the desk. He tapped on the spacebar, waking the computer. He’d left the browser open, and as the screen came to life, his uncle still smiled at him from the home page of the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries website.

The website featured the standard evangelical
prosperity ministry
crap, illustrated with staged photos of clean-cut, healthy couples (white, black, brown, but everybody please stick to your own race and the opposite sex, the photos said) and their clean-cut, healthy, racially unambiguous children.

Everybody smiling like the world contained no injustice, no misery.

God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be well dressed, and He wants you to spend your leisure hours fishing, horseback riding, or strolling through the park with your family on a sunny day. God wants you to live in a gated community McMansion, drive a Mercedes, fly first class.

All this can be yours.
All
you
have to do is sow that seed of faith by making a vow, and then start sending your money to the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries.

And prosperity shall rain upon you like magic fairy dust.

Daniel knew the whole grift by heart. Knew every inch of it, snout to tail. After all, he was raised in it.

Uncle Tim was the twin brother of Daniel’s mother. He had been Daniel’s closest relative since the day Daniel was born. The day Daniel’s mother died giving birth to him. The day his grieving father threw himself off the Greater New Orleans Bridge and into the Mississippi River, taking his own life and leaving Daniel orphaned.

There was a bio page on Trinity’s website, and Daniel clicked through to read it. The biography waxed nostalgic about Trinity’s years traveling the Southland in a Winnebago, town to town, tent to tent, healing the sick and saving souls. Alongside the text, there was a photograph of Trinity standing beside the rusty RV, taken when Daniel was seven. Daniel was not in the photo, but he recognized his shiny new bicycle leaning against the front bumper. Trinity had given him the bike for his seventh birthday.

He scrolled further down the page, moving past the photo, moving through the years, moving to where Trinity’s life and his life were no longer intertwined. He stopped scrolling after Trinity quit the tent circuit and built a permanent church in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans.

Trinity’s church quickly grew prosperous, and he established the largest soup kitchen (the website called it a “nutritional center”) in New Orleans, nourishing body and soul in the deeply impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. He still took his show on the road regularly, but the road was a series of airports and he rented
arenas instead of pitching tents. A few years later, the
Tim Trinity Prosperity-Power Miracle Hour
premiered on late-night television across Louisiana, and pretty soon Trinity was buying time on cable networks with national reach.

In addition to running the soup kitchen, the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries built fifty schools and dug five hundred clean-water wells in Africa and built a medical clinic in Haiti. A tiny fraction of the haul, Daniel figured, but just enough to make Trinity look legit and protect his tax-exempt status with Uncle Sam.

The bio said that God spoke to Reverend Tim after Trinity’s church was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and instructed him to relocate to Atlanta. Trinity obeyed.

At the bottom of the page was a quote:

“The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” Isaiah 53:11

It was a strange choice, because it was a passage from the Old Testament. Or, as Trinity had always jokingly called it (behind closed doors), “the Jew book.” But what was really strange, the thing that stopped Daniel cold, was that Isaiah 53 was held by Christians to be a prophecy of the life of Jesus, and placing it in this context, at the end of Tim Trinity’s biography, seemed like an attempt to apply it to Trinity himself.

A
lmighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

—P
RAYER FOR
L
ENT

Rome, Italy…

A
s he told the taxi driver to take him to Piazza del Popolo, Father Giuseppe Sorvino was careful to speak in broken Italian with a heavy German accent. He barked the destination as an order, waving a tourist map in the air between the seats, and he did not say please. Giuseppe’s brother was a taxi driver and had complained about German tourists often enough—they were supposedly the only ones ruder than Americans. Accurate or not, that was the stereotype, and it fit Giuseppe’s need to come across as a
type
, not an individual. Just another tourist. Forgettable.

But it’s harder to be forgettable when you’re missing an arm, so Giuseppe was wearing his special windbreaker. The left sleeve below the elbow was filled with foam rubber and a tennis ball was glued inside the elastic cuff and pinned inside the left pocket. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but if you stayed in motion, moving through people’s field of view, you didn’t jump out as an amputee. Otherwise he was dressed as any other casual tourist, with nice blue jeans and a lime-green polo shirt under the windbreaker. Nothing to identify him as a priest.

Sticking with bad Italian and still holding the map out, he added, “I know where it is, so do not get the idea to take me for a long ride.”

The driver sneered and turned to face the road. “
Si,
mein Führer
,” he said as he threw the Fiat into gear.

At the west end of the piazza, Giuseppe told the driver to stop, paid the fare, and got out beside the fountain of Neptune and his two pet dolphins. He walked—not too quickly—toward the center of the vast oval, which had served in centuries past as a favorite location for public executions. Reaching the center, he put on his sunglasses and stopped at the Egyptian obelisk of Ramesses II.

The obelisk had been brought to Rome by Augustus in 10 BC and later moved to this spot in 1589, and every Roman knew its history. Giuseppe had seen it thousands of times, but he stopped and pretended to be a German seeing it for the first time. He walked slowly around it while scanning the tourists milling about the piazza to be sure he wasn’t followed. Then he shoved the map in his windbreaker and pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the back pocket of his jeans. He strode to the east side of the piazza, where he lit a cigarette and puffed away, not enjoying it. He normally smoked Marlboro Lights, but for the next taxi driver he would be French, and so these were Gitanes Brunes, which carried a distinctive odor that would linger in his hair.

This time he spoke French, with a perfect Parisian accent.
“Je vais a la Trinità dei Monti, s’il vous plaît.”
He checked over his shoulder as the taxi pulled into traffic. No one was following. He breathed slow and deep to calm his nerves, again fighting the urge to touch the stump end of his left arm.

It happened whenever he was particularly tired or stressed, this feeling of the phantom limb. Years ago it had been painful,
like paper cuts on his fingertips, bee stings on his forearm. The pain had faded over time, but what lingered was the aggravating feeling that he
had
fingers, a hand, a forearm, where there were none. The doctors had told him to apply sensory stimulation to the skin covering the stump whenever the phantom limb reappeared. They said this would train his brain to stop imagining the missing appendage. And it worked, temporarily, but the damn thing always came back. After five years, Giuseppe had just about given up hope that it would ever go away completely.

The driver stopped in front of the French church. Giuseppe waited until the taxi was out of sight before crossing the street and descending the Spanish Steps, navigating around tourists and college kids, all the way down to the Piazza di Spagna and past the Fontana della Barcaccia, which to Giuseppe’s eye was the least interesting fountain in Rome. He crossed the square and rounded the corner to a small newsagent and tobacco shop—the sign above the door read
Edicola Moderna
.

Giuseppe entered and browsed magazines while the old man behind the counter announced he was closing for lunch. Once the shop was empty of customers, the old man looked at him and said, “Lock the door.”

Giuseppe locked the door and stepped forward to the counter, now rubbing his stump through the windbreaker. “I need to speak with Carter Ames.”

The old man shook his head. “You have something to report, you file a report, let it work its way up the chain. Foundation protocol.”

“This is not just a report. And we don’t have time.”

The old man looked at him for almost a full minute. “Do you know what you’re asking?”