The Acolyte (33 page)

At first I mistook it as nothing more than a show of disdain: Father, Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. But he took off his sunglasses, fixed his gaze, and said:

“But isn’t that a touch formal? Dad, is what I should’ve said. So wonderful to meet you, Dad, after lo these many years.”

Daddy Issues

There’s a phrase common in police detection that goes: More often than not, the simplest reason
is
the
reason. When a wife murders her husband, it’s because she has grown to loathe him or seeks his fortune or discovers he’s fondling the babysitter. No deep underpinnings or hidden agendas. Humans are, at base level, pretty straightforward. Their motivations are often predicated on raw emotional states: greed, jealousy, rage.

Revenge.

“Dad.”

An expression crossed The Prophet’s face—wry and resigned: the look of a man who’d been expecting this outcome in one form or another for years—and it was as though a cotter pin had been pulled inside my head: disparate facts and hints and assumptions slotted neatly, obviously, and left me to curse my ignorance.

Again Swift said it: “Dad.”

Had the word ever been spoken less lovingly?

The Prophet took the measure of his son—the pigeon chest, the blood—and even in his own doleful state managed to express genuine distaste by way of a flippant shrug. For his part, Swift seemed to be struggling with the image of his father. I suppose he might’ve expected to find him as he was commonly recalled: the vanilla suit, the copper tan, the high-stepping gospel routine.

Rockwell pushed a second chair in front of The Prophet. Swift sat on it. The two met face-to-face. The same sharpness of jaw. The same widow’s peak.

“Lydia Cromwell. My mother.” When The Prophet failed to acknowledge this name or the life attached to it, Swift asked: “During your years on the road, just how many women did you fuck, Dad?”

“Stop calling me that,” The Prophet said. “You’ve got no proof.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Swift went on, “every man has needs. So you fucked your way across the heartland, a horny ten-penny Bible salesman—so what? What I can’t quite square is why you’d order every one of your conquests dead after you assumed this office.”

I was considering the possibility Swift was mistaken when The Prophet copped to it.

“Those women might have exploited the situation,” he said simply. “Tried to impugn me. Unravel all the good works I intended to implement.”

Swift nodded as if in understanding to this pragmatic stance. “Were you ever told how they were killed? Did you have the courage to ask exactly how it was carried out?”

The Prophet said: “There was the matter of a new ministry to be founded in New Bethlehem. I needn’t concern myself, I was told; I had the Lord’s work to attend to. And He has long forgiven me my past trespasses.”

Swift said: “My mother and I lived in an isolated farmhouse. It would’ve been safer if we’d lived closer to a city but my mother, your lover, was stubborn. I don’t remember much about her—I was four when she was killed, and at that age you don’t recall a lot about people: their voice, the way they smell. Mother always smelled of lilacs. I didn’t know then that I was the product of a silver-tongued revivalist preacher in line for The Prophet-ship of New Bethlehem. But those circumstances isolated her; otherwise she may have moved somewhere safer. Not to say it mattered in the end.”

The lights dimmed. The generator coughed, ran smooth. The gas fumes made me dizzy.

“One day a sedan pulled into the drive. Three men in white suits. My mother saw them through the window. She bundled me into the closet and told me
shhhhh
. In the dark with the smell of her wool coat, I peeped through the slats. One man took her elbow, softly, and led her down the hallway. She jerked free, told him she could walk on her own. The back door opened and for a long time, nothing. I stood in the closet, breathing the wool smell of her coat. Footsteps around the house. A voice said, ‘In this photo—a boy.’ They searched and found me. One man pulled me from the closet. He placed the tip of a knife under my eye and, as delicately as one could do such a thing, slit the skin down my cheek.”

Swift removed his sunglasses. The wound looked as raw as it must’ve been all those years ago.

“A cattle brand. Mark of shame.” He glanced at me and said: “But I was never ashamed of my mother. This wound will heal. But every time the flesh knits I take a razorblade and slit it open. It keeps the memories fresh. Yet I do wonder,” he said, “why those men didn’t kill me.”

“I told them not to,” said The Prophet. “I said, not the child.”

Swift scrutinized his father. “Liar.”

The Prophet’s eyes ducked to an empty corner of the room.

“The men got back into the sedan. I stood in the hallway, blinking, blood sheeting my face. It was getting dark when I went out to the shack in our backyard. I found her lying over sacks of peat moss. Her skin had gone purple, shiny. Dried foam caked round her mouth.

“I was sent to a Republic orphanage,” Swift continued. “God’s Children, in Kingdom City. I knocked around until I was adopted by a man and his wife. The man’s name was Elwood Chalmers. It was a publicity stunt; he adopted three of us at the same time—Chalmers’ Children, as we were known. He wasn’t seeking an office, not then, but knew such an act of largesse would feather his nest down the road.”

Elwood Chalmers had once been the chief fundraiser and bulldog lobbyist for the Christian Family Coalition. After the dawn of the Republic he continued to work on behalf of state-selected candidates and was later confirmed one of the five Fathers of the Divine Council.

“Chalmers knew how I’d gotten this”—trailing a finger along his eye-wound—“and realized I might be an asset. He taught me statesmanship, the use of faith as a tool: a mallet, a placebo, a balm . . . a bomb. I was a quick study.”

So Elwood Chalmers had taken young Tom Swift—Tom Cromwell?—under his wing. Groomed him for a future contingency. That contingency was now almost fully realized. But why?

“Do you think they didn’t know, Dad?” Tom said. “The graft, the money-hoarding? You’ve been keeping tithes to yourself, sending only a trickle to the Kingdom City coffers. You made the mistake of bilking the boss. The boss was not impressed.”

“But why eradicate us all?” I had to ask. “Make a laughingstock of our Prophet, okay; kill
him
. This . . . you’re talking tens of thousands of innocent people.”

Swift said: “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Controlled burn,’ Jonah? Forestry term. The best way to rehabilitate a parcel of land is to burn it. Dig a trench round the perimeter, soak it in flammables, and light it. You could trim all the scrub, weed the valuable trees from the junk, but it’s not economical. When things are that overgrown and unruly, it’s expedient to get rid of it. Start over. That’s what happened in New Beersheba.”

“Why destroy New Beersheba? They did nothing to you.”

“That was the Divine Council’s choice,” said Swift. “I had to do that in order to do this. It was a deal we struck.”

“So you went into New Beersheba,” I said, “backed by the Divine Council. They outfitted you with the explosives. You co-opted people like Lucas Hogan, his wife and daughter, deceiving them while ingratiating yourself. The higher ups in the police force were in the bag. You knew everyone’s secrets, their histories—everything the Divine Fathers knew. The local Prophet was clueless.”

Swift was nodding, nodding to everything I said.

“Then the Quints were sent in, ostensibly to stop you but really you were both working in cahoots to destroy the city.”

“They
do
want to kill me,” Swift said of the Quints, “and I’m sure they’ve been promised the opportunity by someone—maybe even Chalmers. But before that, we each had our jobs to carry out. Destabilize the populace, tear the social fabric apart, then send in the wrecking balls.”

“The morning the Damascus Towers were bombed . . .”

“A Quint warned me to get out beforehand. I did. Rockwell did. Others didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you warn them?”

“He had no need of them anymore,” said The Prophet.

I said: “I’ve seen New Beersheba. There’s nothing left.”

“Soon this city will be carpet bombed, too,” Swift told me. “Planes will lift off from Kingdom City to deliver their payload. They’ll leave a black scar behind.”

“But they’ll take The One Child first.”

“Of course,” Swift said.

I imagined it right from the beginning. Lydia Cromwell meeting The Prophet’s gaze through the dust-thickened air of a striped tent pitched in a summer field. Lydia fanning her neck with a prayer booklet; The Prophet sharing the stage with a wife who opened her legs to a dwarf who’d poke his shrunken head into a soap bubble to amuse her: a trick called the Astronaut’s Helmet, back when there were such things as astronauts and space shuttles. No more than a casual glance, random chemicals firing in a pair of brainpans. Years later, men in white suits would leave a young boy with wet britches and a knife-opened face to find his mother gone purple in a dusty shack. Now, many more years later: two cities torn apart. Thousands dead. Lives ruined.

Angela . . .

All sparked by two pairs of eyes meeting across the dusty air of a revival tent.

Rockwell removed a curious bundle from his pocket and handed it to Swift.

DET cord. A grey plunger. That red button. Oh, God.

Swift took one end of the DET cord and slipped it down the back of his pants. “I’m afraid,” he said, wincing, “there’s just no polite way to do this.”

Jesus. I saw it now. The bulged, lumpen look of Swift’s belly. How many ball bearings had he swallowed; how much plastique was plugging up his innards? He sat gingerly. The DET cord curled round his hips, plunger swaying gently between his legs.

“Before you go,” he said to me, “there is one last thing you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not the only abandoned child, Jonah.”

He didn’t have to say the name. It’d been knocking around the corners of my mind a long time now. She was adopted, too. Never knew her real parents. The anonymous letters she received every month—someone trying to expiate their guilt. The first female Acolyte—who had pulled the strings? Always saying she led a charmed life—who sprinkled that fairy dust? Stacks of uncashed checks;
Love you always
written in the memo line.

The Immaculate Mother saying to me,
You’re her friend. My daughter’s friend . . .

“Angela was my half-sister,” Swift said. “Unlike me, she wasn’t a child of adultery. They still gave her away, though.”

I said, “Why?”

But before the word cleared my mouth I knew why. She wasn’t born a freak. Angela had been born normal, and as such was worthless. So they’d secretly put her up for adoption and hid their parentage . . . almost.

“Her mother did what she could for her,” The Prophet said. “From afar.”

“She’s dead,” I said. “Your daughter is dead.”

“All my daughters are dead,” The Prophet said. “And my dearest wish is that all my sons were dead, too.”

Tom bared his teeth. “Oooh, we’re getting to that, Dad.”

Endgame

The wind blew at gale force as Rockwell and I cleared the Stadium SuperChurch. Flags adorned with the Republican insignia snapped at the end of their poles. I tugged Rockwell’s sleeve and, when he turned to me, I said, “I have to make a phone call.”

He offered me Swift’s cell phone—a shiny silver dot in his mammoth bear claw—but I shook my head, thinking the Quints might recognize the number. We got into the van. A crumpling explosion rocked the SuperChurch as we pulled out of the lot. A flaming ball of gas barrelled out of the doors, debris raining out of the torn roof and pinging dully off the van’s roof. I looked at Rockwell. He was weeping. He did so for a good ten minutes. He wept silently, like a scared child, holding his elbows and swaying.

I drove streets slicked with night perspiration, zigzagging down a switchback hill. I stopped next to a bank of payphones. I walked over and began picking up receivers: dead, dead, dead, dead . . . live. I rummaged my pockets for the second phone number—and dialled.