Forrey said, “Oh. I see. Okay, then, Charlie. It’s like this—we want you to . . . do a little damage. Fix things up so that folks won’t be so eager to put that highfalutin Reverend on such a pedestal.”
I looked at him blandly, said, “You want me to stab him in the back. You want me to set him up.”
Ishy said, “Well, to call a turd a turd, that’s just what I want you to do.”
“And if I do, you’ll pay me fifty thousand dollars.”
“Yep. And I’ll also tear up this info I have about your less-than-illustrious past, and you can go on with your free-wheeling, Garrity-banging life.”
I started. “What did you just say?”
“Oh, come on, Charlie. Don’t act so surprised. Half the folks in town know you and Elise Garrity are carrying on. Ain’t nothing to it. You aren’t committing any crimes, at least none that I know of. It’s not very nice for Elise’s reputation, but there again, her reputation was already in tatters before you came on the scene, wasn’t it?”
“You—”
“Don’t get worked up,” Ishy said. “Let me finish. If you do this little job for me, I’ll deposit that fifty K in your brand-new bank account, and I’ll dispose of these nasty papers I have right here in front of me.”
Cold anger had slowly replaced my panic, and now it seethed around in my stomach like lava.
I’d worked so hard. I’d tried with everything I had to make a place for myself in this little world. And now, all the things I’d tried to put behind me, all the crimes and madnesses I’d carried around, were back. Just because some pompous little man with a head full of prescription drugs felt threatened.
I said, “What if I refuse this offer of yours, Mr. Mayor? Is that when you send me back to the Institute?”
Forrey answered. “No. We believe in giving a man a sporting chance. We’d wire them up there in Washington, tell them you were here, and let them come and get you.”
“But I’d be gone before they were anywhere near here.”
“You wouldn’t get far without any money.”
“I have money. I have an account.”
Ishy chuckled, slapped the table. Forrey shook with silent laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well,” Ishy guffawed, “it’s just that what you said is so charmingly naive, it makes me just wanna hug ya. Charlie, you don’t have any money. All that cash you put in the bank? Well, that belongs to me now.”
My mouth opened, but nothing came out, only a series of sounds that aped human speech. “How . . . what . . . how can you . . .”
“I’m the mayor, Charlie, I can do anything I want. The total in your bank account right now is exactly zero dollars and zero cents. Seems you made a very substantial donation to my campaign . . . and don’t think it ain’t appreciated.”
He stared at me for a long moment while I digested what he’d said. I glanced at Oldfield. The officer only gazed out at the swimming pool.
After a few seconds, I said, “I’ve traveled without money before, Ishy.”
Forrey said, “I reckon you have. But you won’t get far when you got the federal law right on your ass. They’ll pick you up as soon as you settle for longer than a day.”
Ishy said, “Aw, look, Charlie. I didn’t want things to get this nasty. I don’t wanna have to ruin your life. Do you think I take any sort of joy out of that? But business is business, and you’d be making things easier on both of us if you just did this one little thing for me. What do you say?”
Next to me, Forrey shifted in his seat, and I saw the gun in his holster. I said, “Will you . . . will you allow me some time to think about it, Mr. Mayor?”
“Well, sure, Charlie! I’m not an unreasonable man. Why don’t you just go on home and think it over, get back with me tomorrow morning, how does that sound?”
Forrey and Oldfield moved to get up, but Ishy stopped them. “But just one thing, Charlie. You think this over, you go on and do that. But if you start blabbing . . . well, if you start waving your tongue around about our little meeting . . .” He leaned in closer to me, just so I wouldn’t misunderstand, “You’re gonna wish to God you’d never escaped the nuthouse. Am I clear on that?”
Forrey touched the gun in his holster, and I nodded. He was perfectly clear.
Elise took it with a strange calm. Of course, I left out quite a bit, and changed some facts around. I didn’t want her to know I’d been in a mental hospital, so as far as she knew Ishy was blackmailing me simply because I’d killed someone years ago and escaped justice.
She pressed me on just who I’d killed, and why, but I sidestepped. “None of that is important right now,” I said. “The only thing that matters is that Ishy has confiscated all my money. He’s holding my entire life in his hands.”
“And he’s offering you fifty thousand dollars to smear Reverend Childe’s reputation,” she added.
We were in her sitting room, surrounded by Jathod’s impressive library, with the windows thrown open to the sticky afternoon heat. I lay on the sofa, a drink balanced on my chest, and Elise perched on the cushion beside me. For long moments after I told her what had happened at the mayor’s house, she only sat there staring at me. Her gaze grew so intense that I finally had to look away. Then she stood up, made herself a drink that matched my own, and resumed her place on the edge of the sofa.
She said, “Well. You seem to have quite a history, Charlie. I mean, I always figured you’d done your share of walking on the wild side, but I . . . I never would have guessed.”
I said, “I’m not that same person anymore, El. You have to believe that.”
She shook her head. “I know you, Charlie. I know you’re no killer. But there’s just so much I don’t know about what you do when we aren’t together. When you started telling me about this, the first thing I thought of was that night . . . that night I waited for you at the church and you showed up all bruised and bloody.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Hell, maybe I was the same person, maybe I always would be. Maybe this whole mess had come up as a sort of little cosmic reminder that, despite all the progress I’d made in Cuba Landing, I was still a reprobate and a petty criminal. Maybe this was God’s way of telling me that I couldn’t change that.
I said, “All that is behind me,” with more conviction than I felt.
“Well,” Elise said. “That’s not exactly true. Maybe you’d like it all to be behind you, but it seems to me that it’s all right here. Right in front of you. And you’re going to have to think of some way to get around it.”
I took a sip of my drink, set the half-empty glass on the coffee table. “There isn’t any way around it. I can either do what he says, make a break for it, or go back to Washington in chains.”
“The last two choices are really the same thing, Charlie. If you try to run, you know they’ll catch you. Without any money—” She paused, a sudden thought occurring to her. I’d been wondering how long it would take her to get around it.
But before she could voice it, I said, “No. I know what you’re going to say, and the answer is no.”
“But, Charlie, I can afford it! I have the money. It would be so simple. I could give you, I don’t know, a thousand dollars or so, and you could take off for some place safe. And then I could sell the house and join you. We could be together. You wouldn’t have to go back to jail.”
I shook my head. “No. You don’t have any idea what it’s like. It’s no kind of life. Besides, Ishy would make sure they came after us with a vengeance. I have no intention of dragging you into that.”
Gripping my hand forcefully, she said, “Are you just going to run? Are you just going to leave me here by myself? We could both go, don’t you see? If I waited, waited a month or two or three after you left, they’d never even guess that we were together!”
I sighed, rubbed a hand over my face. “El, they’ve already guessed. They know all about you and me.”
“What? How can that be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we aren’t as discreet as we thought. Maybe someone saw us together. I don’t know. The point is, if I ran the first thing they would do is start monitoring you. And if you tried to join me, it would be all over. Not only would I be sent back to Washington, you’d be arrested for . . . what do you call it? Aiding and abetting.”
“Aiding and abetting,” she said. “Jesus.” Her hand slipped away from mine, and a sudden coldness came over her features. She took a long pull from her drink. Then, not looking at me, she said, “What are you getting at then, Charlie? Are you just going to run? Are you just going to leave me here high and dry?”
“El, you have to understand. It’s not like I have a choice.”
“No? You don’t have a choice? It seems to me that you do. And it seems like a simple and obvious choice. You can either comply with Bishop, or you can kiss your entire life goodbye. You want to run, Charlie? Well, where are you going to run to? You know how it’s all going to end. You said it yourself. You won’t get far.”
She stood up, moved away from me, to the window. Her face was hard. With her drink in her hand, she cast her icy gaze out over the front lawn.
It took a moment for the full weight of her words to sink in, but when they did I could only stare.
I said, “You want me to do it. You want me to screw the Reverend over.”
She spun around, glared at me. “No, Charlie, I don’t want you to do that. But I also don’t want you to just run off, knowing full well you’ll get caught. You have to choose the lesser of two evils. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what to say.”
“But he’s my friend.”
“Is he?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Maybe we should talk about that. This whole town adores him, don’t they? No one would ever dare say a bad word about him. But they don’t know the real Reverend Childe, do they, Charlie? They don’t know him like you do. Most people can’t see beyond the surface image of things, they can’t get past the masks. But you know the truth. And you know what? I know the truth as well.”
“What are you talking about?”
She softened a bit, walked away from the window. “It’s like this—the Reverend controls how close folks get to him. He holds them at exactly the right distance, so that they see an image of him that he’s carefully constructed. They see a man, touched by grace. Driven by his faith and trust in God. A slightly eccentric figure—an eccentricity he’s cultivated, because he knows people enjoy that—but a sturdy and reliable man of God. But all of these things depend heavily on him holding his audience at the exact right distance.”
“That’s not really—”
“Please, let me finish. He holds folks at that proper distance, so that they see just what he wants them to see. But you, Charlie, you’ve gotten closer, and you’ve seen aspects of him that other people can’t see. Are you going to tell me that’s not true?”
I started to argue the point, but fizzled out. Nodding, I muttered, “It’s true.”
“I thought so. But a person doesn’t have to be close to see him. I’m able to see some of his other aspects too, because I’m farther away than the rest of his audience. I can see the strings and mirrors from my vantage point. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded, looking at the ceiling.
Winding down a bit, she said, “Look, I’m sorry. I know you think of Reverend Childe as your friend, but do you really think for a second that, if it was him in your shoes, he would think twice about it?”
What she said was probably true, I knew. The Reverend was fond of me, without a doubt, but his fondness wouldn’t have stood in the way of his own personal gain. That was just something I knew about him, an unspoken fact.
But it still didn’t make it right. I said, “What he would do in my situation is beside the point. I owe him, do you understand? He brought me here. He gave me a chance. I can’t forget that.”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. Never mind the fact that you just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong time, depending on your point of view. What was it you told me about how the two of you met? It was in a laundromat?”
“Yeah.”
“And he just showed up there, didn’t he? No clothes to wash, no business to tend to. He just showed up at the laundromat and started talking to you.”
“That’s right,” I said. I’d told her all about my first encounter with Reverend Childe only a few days earlier, told her how odd it seemed. Now, I wished I’d never mentioned it.
“Charlie,” she said, gently. “There’s more to Reverend Childe than meets the eye. He’s up to something. I don’t know what, but I’ve sensed it since the first day we met. He’s got plans for this town, and everybody—including you, I think—is a pawn.”
An image flashed through my mind, an image of the Aarons brothers, sitting in jail. There because Reverend Childe had betrayed them. He’d masterfully gained their confidence, made them believe he was their friend. And then, for his own gain, he sacrificed them.
Then all the images came flooding into my mind, all the secret fears I’d had about him but didn’t want to acknowledge. The black church on Lamar, where he’d worked them into a frenzy with a single, powerful little word. Officer Ernie Oldfield, who took the Reverend for a kindred soul, a God-fearing good ol’ boy, ultimately slapped in the face for his faith. And me, of course—probably the biggest and most gullible fish he’d reeled in.
What had he been doing there in the laundromat? Why had he chosen me, out of all the folks available? Why had he been so good to me, giving me money, a job, booze, companionship?
Elise was right. He was up to something. Something big and bad. And, without even knowing it, I’d been one of his primary players.
I stood up.
Elise said, “Charlie.”
All of the doubts and misgivings whirled around in my head. I felt weak and dizzy. A fugue. I could feel it, creeping into my head, coming on stealthily and quietly. I had to get myself together, get a hold on the sudden rush of emotions before they overtook me. Now was not the time to lose it.
After a minute, I said, “I think you’re probably right, El. You’re right about him. But it’s just not that easy. I know that he’s not the moral creature he pretends to be, but . . . but, I can’t just stab him in the back like that.”
She looked at me, her eyes suddenly tender and warm. Taking my hands in hers, she said, “You’re a good man. Do you know that? You’re loyal and honest and brave.”