American Savior (6 page)

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

“Courage is the main thing in this life. And it comes in various forms. Give your notice and we’ll talk,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”

NINE

I got up and used the toilet and shaved, starting off, as always, to the right of my Adam’s apple. There were, it seemed to me, two choices: I could write the guy off as a complete crank who happened to have psychic abilities, start screening my calls, and refuse to have lunch meetings ever again with anyone who referred to himself as Jesus Christ. I would keep my job, that was the good part. The bad part was that Zelda would lose all respect for me, probably break up with me, and if it turned out that Jesus was actually who he said he was, I’d be up the creek for eternity.

The other option was not much more pleasant: I could drive over to WZIZ, walk into Wales’s office and tell him I was leaving in two days. Boom, career gone. I’d never get another job in the industry after a stunt like that because if there is one quality you have to have if you work in TV news it is dependability. I had some savings. I could probably get by for a few months, maybe even half a year, without losing the condo and the car. And then I would be starting from scratch in some other line of work.

It occurred to me, as I took a shower, got dressed, made my way downstairs into the garage and drove to the station, that it was perfectly easy to go through life saying you believed in God as long as there was no price to pay. You believed in God, you didn’t believe in God—maybe it would make a difference after you died, but saying one thing or saying the other didn’t make much difference in terms of actual, immediate consequences in your ordinary walking-around life. And then something like this happened,
and you were forced to put your money where your mouth was, as it were. Walk the walk, so to speak. I’d grown up with stories about people who had to pay a price for their faith. My dad was always telling me about his relatives in Poland (our real name had been Tzomascevic before the people at Ellis Island Americanized it), who’d never tried to hide the fact that they were Jewish and had been tortured and killed for it. And my mom was big on the early Christian martyrs, who could have avoided being burned at the stake or eaten by lions, just by saying, “Nope, not me. I don’t believe in the guy,” but hadn’t done that.

I don’t mean to compare myself with those people, but for once in my life I believed I could relate to them. And even though I could understand that there was an important difference between being eaten by a lion or sent to the camps and losing my job, still, the point was I would be paying a price for saying I believed in something. And, usually, in this blessed nation at least, you can go a whole lifetime without having to do that.

At the office I went to my desk and procrastinated. Shuffled papers. Listened to phone messages. Checked e-mails. At last, I got up and went into the men’s room, stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. And then I pronounced, pretty quietly, these strange words: “Nice face. Trustworthy face.” And then, two seconds later, “But what good is it going to do you?” And then I unlocked the door and walked out, still in a kind of trance, toward my boss’s office.

TEN

After making it past Enrica Dominique, Wales’s martial-artist secretary, I knocked, opened the door to the corner office, and saw that my boss was standing next to his gracious wife, Esmeralda van Antibes, and the two of them were hard at work taking things from his shelves and drawers and placing them into cardboard boxes.

“Hi, Boss. Hey, Ezzie,” I said, cool as could be. I closed the door quietly on Enrica Dominique’s not very subtle snooping. “Let me guess,” I said. “You got promoted to general manager and you’re moving to the big office upstairs.”

Wales did not look at me. Struggling clumsily with a sheet of bubble wrap, he was packing his lone golf trophy—eighth place, net, at the local muni. His wife of only a year or so, a mostly blonde, bejeweled, braceleted creature I liked quite a lot, said, “He quit.”

“Quit what?”

“You’re as much of a moron as you ever were,” Wales said, but I had learned, over the years, that he spoke that way only to people he admired.

“He resigned this morning,” Esmeralda said calmly.

“You can’t quit, Boss, and you can’t resign either.
I’m
the one who’s quitting.”

They did not seem to hear me, or to care. They went on wrapping and boxing, as if intent on clearing out twenty-one years of memories in half an hour.

“I’m giving my notice.”

I waited. No response.

“Two days.”

Nothing.

“I’ve been hired to work on a presidential campaign.”

Still nothing. Wales finished with the bubble wrap and then sat in his chair with a kind of tired-of-you sigh, at a desk that was now as empty as it had been the day he moved in. He picked up an unlit cigar he’d set down on one of the boxes, and then, at last, looked at me. Esmeralda, ten years younger and in possession of more energy, went on working.

“Sit,” Wales said, pointing the Habana at the chair opposite him. When I was seated he put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward so that his face was only a few feet from mine. You could see the signs of age, the jowls forming at the sides of his mouth, the wrinkles around his eyes. Rumor had it that Wales had considered a life in the clergy as a young man, but for those of us who met him in later years that seemed preposterous. Well into middle-age he’d been the quintessential vodka-and-party-loving guy who enjoyed deep-sea fishing, sports on TV, and the company of women. And then, a month after we threw him a surprise fiftieth birthday party, he announced he was marrying the very well-off Esmeralda van Antibes, with whom he’d been keeping company for a year or so. Ezzie had so much money we assumed Wales would retire and fish and golf and watch the NBA. When I saw him packing, naturally enough I assumed that time had come.

“He’ll be here in five minutes,” Wales said.

“Who?”

He blinked. Without releasing me from his hard gaze, he brought the cigar up to his mouth, took a pretend puff, and lowered it again. “How does it feel,” he asked me in the most sincere of tones, “to be stupid?” He paused, as if waiting for an answer, though I knew he wasn’t. “You could have had a nice career in this business. The face, the voice, the man-of-the-people attitude. But,” he tapped his graying head, “not enough upstairs. Low octane. Short weight. Small thread count. You grasp my general meaning?”

“Everything I know I learned from you,” I said, and Esmeralda half turned her head toward me and bent her pretty mouth into an approving smile.

“Jesus,” Wales said.

I misunderstood. I thought he was being critical of me for my decision to quit and was, as my mother would have said, taking the Lord’s name in vain. So I defended myself with a line I’d been rehearsing during the drive to the station. “At some point in a man’s life he has to make the tough choices and stick by them. I know it seems nuts. But this opportunity came up and it felt like the right career move at the—”

“Jesus will be here in three or four minutes,” Wales said, still skewering me with the baby blues.

“We spoke,” I said, too surprised to be thinking. “Just recently. An hour ago or less.”

“And you decided, on the basis of that conversation, to torpedo your career and work on his so-called campaign, am I right?”

“Yeah, sure, but ‘torpedo,’ you know, that’s a bit strong.”

“I know.”

“Good.”

“Know why I know?”

I shook my head. Esmeralda turned to look at me. I was suddenly uncomfortable.

Wales said, “Because I’m doing it, too.”

“Doing what?”

He kept looking at me in what appeared to be disbelief. Slowly, relentlessly, an understanding was coming over me. It would be years before Wales would reveal, after several martinis at my daughter’s first birthday party, that he’d had what he called “a visitation” shortly after the miracle in Fultonville. He’d been taking a lunchtime walk in a city park and Jesus had come to him as “more or less a ghost,” as he put it. That was why he’d steered me in the direction of the Amelia Simmelton story when producers at the other two stations in town had chosen to ignore it.

Wales turned to his wife. “Can’t be sure,” he said to her, “but if I had
to guess, I’d say there’s a light coming on in there. A small light, but a light all the same.”

“You’re joking about quitting, correct?” I said, but just then we heard a knock on the door. Two sharp raps. I thought it must be Enrica Dominique, making sure I was not overstaying my welcome. She was the daughter of a Roller Derby queen. She ran a Thai kickboxing school at night, and she guarded Wales’s privacy as if it were the crown jewels.

Wales yelled, “Come on in,” but before that he jabbed his eyes back into me and said, “We’re on the campaign, too, Einstein. Ezzie and I.”

Which was, and let me not hyperbolize this, the astonishment of my life.

ELEVEN

It had been a day of shocking news, and I was still wobbling from that latest blow, when who should walk into the room but my friend from Pete’s Cafe. He was dressed—and these were the kinds of things I noticed—in a stunning gray suit and red power tie against a white shirt. Diamond-shined black tassel loafers on his feet. Cufflinks. An elegant gold and sapphire ring on his left hand. His hair had been slicked straight back, and it looked like he’d just shaved, or had just come from the makeup room. For one awful, awful second, I was revisited by the stray, buzzing, nasty thought that the man was moving in on my territory: he’d tricked me into quitting so he could take my spot at ZIZ, plus he was after Zelda. He’d done his research, played his hand perfectly, and here he was, pushing me out the door.

I stood up, and saw that Wales was on his feet, too.

“Cease with the formalities,” Jesus said. “Let us get to work.” He sat in the high-backed leather chair in the corner, the chair nobody but Wales ever sat in. Wales not only failed to object to this, he brought a chair over closer to Jesus, carried one over for Esmeralda, and, scowling, motioned for me to scoot over, as well. We formed a little half circle around the man who, after my brief flirtation with true faith and potential martyrdom, I was starting to doubt again. Maybe it was because of the image I’d held in my inner eye all those years. This particular Jesus simply did not fill the bill. He looked more like the character they always found to play the leg breaker in mob movies, though trimmer, classier, better dressed.
I have to admit he brought a certain something into the room with him. Same thing I’d noticed at lunch. A presence. I glanced at Wales and was shocked to see him looking at the Good Visitor with reverence painted all over his sagging face. Esmeralda looked like she was, as Zelda liked to say, about to have a tremble.

“We announce next week,” Jesus announced. “Wednesday.” He pointed at Wales, “campaign manager”; at Esmeralda, “fundraising and etcetera”; then turned his eyes to me and paused before pointing at my chest and saying, “And you of little faith … security.”

“What? You? I thought—” I was hurt at first. I’d hoped for bigger things.

“You were hoping for bigger things,” Jesus said, and he winked at me with the eye that Wales and Ezzie couldn’t see.

“Yes, frankly.”

“You’ll do an excellent job,” Jesus said. “I’m thinking of making Zelda my press liaison. What’s your opinion on that? You know her better than anyone here.”

I sensed some kind of trick. I did battle with a wave of jealousy.

“Good thought,” I managed.

He nodded. “And I want your parents on the team.”

“You have to be kidding.”

“Not kidding in the slightest. I want them on the team.”

“My father’s a Jew.”

“We have that in common. My dad was also a Jew.” He smiled. Wales and Ezzie were smiling, too.

“The Jew part isn’t that important,” I said. “The important part is that he’s a nut. My mother’s even nuttier. And the two of them know as much about running a political campaign as they know how to, I don’t know….”

“I want them. And I want your brother, Stab, too.”

“Stab’s, you know. Different.”

Jesus looked at me for a few seconds, then turned his eyes to Wales. “Everything you said about him is true,” he said.

“What did he say about me?”

My question was ignored. I was beginning to harbor the suspicion that
this whole thing was an exercise in ego destruction, and that my ego was exhibit A.

Jesus said, “We will announce one week from today. Here, in West Zenith. Banfield Plaza. Noon. Get everything set up.”

“Banfield Plaza?” I said. “There were two shootings there last month. Even the news guys are afraid to go there. Even in daytime. Even Randy Zillins, who’d go anywhere for a story, and who hangs out at Pinkie’s Shooting Range with some of the wildest guys on—”

“Zillins is not to be considered part of our operation,” Jesus said firmly.

“Well, I’m glad we’re particular, at least.”

Jesus ignored me again and turned to Ezzie. “The Simmeltons are on board?”

“They are,” Ezzie replied. “I saw Nadine today at the club. She said they’ll make an initial contribution of two million.”

“All right. That’s a start. No one else knows about this, I hope I’m right in assuming? No leaks?”

We all shook our heads.

Jesus got to his feet and motioned for us to stay seated. “Think about Enrica Dominique for your team,” he said to me as he headed toward the door. “I could barely get past her.”

“But—”

“Noon, Wednesday. Banfield Plaza. Get a few dozen banners printed up that say “Jesus for America.” Use the Rodriquez Brothers for the printing. They’re friends. Go in peace, the meeting is ended.”

When he had closed the door, we sat there, not moving. “One question,” I said to my boss after a minute had passed. “Why does he ask if there have been any leaks? I mean, if he is who he says he is, he already knows if there have been any leaks, correct? Is there something I’m missing?”

“Always,” Wales said. “He’s trying to act human. He tries to limit himself, same as last time.”