Costume Not Included (28 page)

  "I don't know," Letitia said. "They sent a helicopter and a jet."

  "Who did?"

  "You haven't been listening, have you? You never listen! I can't count the number of times–"

  A crash and an inarticulate bellow broke her train of denunciation and Chesney used the break to say, "I've got to go." He hung up, said, "Xa–" and was mindful enough of the circumstances to warn Melda that he was going to summon the demon.

  She pulled the sheet around herself and said, "Aw, he can probably see through brick walls if he wants to, but thanks for the thought." She leaned over and kissed him. "You're getting better."

  A moment later, the demon appeared on command, rum glass in its hand and cigar in its saber-fanged mouth. "What?"

  "Joshua," Chesney said, "where is he and who's he with?"

  "You wanna stay away from that mug," Xaphan said. "He's trouble, and that's straight from the horse's mouth."

  "I didn't ask for an opinion. Now–" Chesney checked himself. "Wait a minute. When he asked you if he'd ever cast you out, you said no."

  The fiend shrugged. "No need to make a federal case out of it."

  "That was a lie, wasn't it? And you're not supposed to lie."

  The fiend took on the look of an indignant weasel, gesturing with the Churchill. "To you," he said. "Just you. You don't mind me lying to Denby about you bein' a time traveler, do you?"

  "Never mind," said the young man, "just tell me now about you and Josh."

  "Awright, awright!" Xaphan shot its cuffs, drank half the rum and got the Havana well stoked. Then it said, "Back in those days, I was in the possession racket, see? Some guy would slip up on his prayers and sacrifices, we'd move in, take the place over, have some laughs.

  "So, we're workin' this one guy, got him dancin' around on the road, lotsa roarin and blasphemin', and along comes this bird with a bunch of mugs followin' him, and they're all sayin', 'Ooh, look, here comes a prophet!' Didn't look like much to me, I'll tell you, so me and the boys, we gave him the business, the old horse laugh."

  The fiend paused to reload on rum and nicotine. Melda was listening closely, the sheet tucked tightly around her. "So then what?" she said.

  "So then he points the finger and, wham! I'm outta the bozo – so are the rest of the boys – and next thing I know we're stuck in a bunch of pigs! And when I say stuck, I mean stuck! He'd not only cast us out, he'd jammed us in tight!

  "So we're all jumpin' around, tryin' to get loose, and the crowd starts throwin' stones. So the pigs run, and we go right over a cliff into the sea! There's no way to get outta the water, so the pigs drown!"

  The demon shook its head in grim recollection and clamped the cigar behind one of its fangs. "So then we gotta lie there in the bottom mud till the fish and the crabs eat the carcasses, before we can get unstuck from the flesh. And, that ain't the worst of it – then we gotta go back and report to the division chief, except it's worse than the worst, 'cause the boss himself has heard all about it, and he's more than a little hot under the collar, I'm tellin' ya!"

  The demon blew smoke, and only some of it was from the Havana. "So, yeah, I guess I oughta remember that mug!"

  Melda said, "You can't blame him for casting you out when you were turning some guy's head right around his shoulders. I mean, he was a prophet. It was his job!"

  "And possessing was mine! Besides, what about the poor schmoe who owned the pigs? Some Greek farmer, that herd was all he had. He couldn't pay his debts and ended up in slavery!"

  Chesney tsked. "Like you care!" he said. "Now, where is he and who's got him?"

  "He's on a jet that's just landed about four hundred miles from here. He's with some TV people who are takin' him to meet with a guy name of Bruster. Bruster's thinkin' of puttin' your guy on the air."

  "Hall Bruster?" Chesney said. He frowned.

  "That's the bird."

  "Is that bad?" said Melda.

  The young man told her about his mother's letter and the red hot poker reference. "He'll want to embarrass Hardacre."

  "Do we care about that?" Melda said.

  "Josh might get in trouble."

  "So we'll get him out of it." She looked at the demon. "Right?"

  Xaphan snorted, blowing rings from both nostrils. "Your guy might not be the one gets in trouble," it said.

  "What does that mean?" Chesney said.

  But the demon waved its pint-sized hands, the smoke from the cigar making zigzag bands in front of its face. "I already said too much."

 
 

 
 
 

Hall Bruster's Sunday afternoon program went live to air so that he could take calls from viewers. His scheduled guest was Maylene Ho, a newly elected member of the House of Representatives who was a strict constitutional originalist: she had campaigned on a platform of reverting the republic's seminal document back to its original form, before all these footling amendments had watered down its historic purity. Bruster wanted her on board because she was foursquare for the abolition of the income tax, a change he favored because it meant he would not have to employ a firm of accountants to mystify the IRS as to exactly what he took in, and where it all went. But his screeners would have to vet callers carefully to keep any of them from pointing out that one of the amendments Ho would like to repeal was the one that had given her sex the right to vote. Bruster wasn't entirely sure that she had actually read the Constitution; she might be relying solely on posts from blogs she had googled.

  But when Janet Morrissey told him that she had Hardacre's prophet on the jet, he immediately told his in-studio staff that the Congresswoman would get no more than the first half-hour and that he wanted her out of guest's seat the moment Joshua set foot across the threshold. He then sat down and, suppressing the occasional giggle, jotted down a series of questions for the alleged Jesus of Nazareth redux.

  Now he was listening with only half an ear as the Congresswoman provided her exegesis as to what the Constitution really meant: mostly plenty of church and a minimum of state, with a citizenry whose pockets remained full of their own cash while their hands never strayed too far from a loaded gun. Twenty-two minutes into her segment, the earpiece he was really listening to informed him that the helicopter bringing the new guest from the airport was landing on the roof and did he want them to take the man to make-up or bring him straight down to the studio.

  "Tap your pencil on the desk if you want him right away," said the producer in the control booth, and the lead from the pundit's HB 2 snapped off and struck the representative in the left eye.

  "Ow!" she said, reaching up to dislodge the greasy fragment, giving Bruster the perfect opportunity to say, "Let's take a break."

 

"Here's the way we'll play it," Chesney said to his assistant. The television in the living room was on and Bruster had just gone to a commercial that featured the pundit himself pitching medallions that illustrated great moments in American history. The day when Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore down the Berlin Wall was "commemorated in genuine gold plate," Bruster's taped voice was saying, "a moment all patriots will treasure. And speaking of treasure–"

  Chesney muted the sound as the screen showed a medallion showing the multitudes that had gathered for Bruster's celebration of his own exemplary rectitude on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in which the pundit appeared larger than the assassinated president's statue. "Here's the way we'll play it," the young man said again. "If it goes okay, we'll let it roll. If he's getting pushed around, we'll go and get him out of there. Go in invisible, cloud of smoke, grab him and gone. Got it?"

  "If
he
gets pushed around?" Xaphan said, followed by a wordless sound that expressed skepticism.

  "What?" said Chesney.

  "I'm not sayin' nothin'. You got any more rum?"

  "You drank it all."

  "You mind if I…?"

  "Be my guest."

  The fiend put its cigar in its mouth. A bottle of liquor, still trailing seaweed from the sunken freighter whose cargo the demon was gradually pilfering, appeared in the hand it had just emptied. Xaphan looked at the cork, which shot out and hit the ceiling, then filled the tumbler and drank half of it. A rumbling belch followed, then the television screen showed Hall Bruster back at his desk in the studio.

  "My next guest is someone you've been hearing about," he said, "if you happen to tune in Sunday mornings to a little medicine show put on by a self-proclaimed TV preacher named Billy Lee Hardacre. The Reverend Hardacre, as he likes people to call him, flunked out of a seminary after blowing a career as a slick labor lawyer and writing a few potboilers that the
New York Times
thought were just the kind of thing you and I should be reading."

  He paused there to quirk an eyebrow in his trademark
and you and I know what we think of that
expression. The thirty or so people in his studio audience, all of whom had signed loyalty oaths, reacted with raucous hoots and sundry noises of derision.

  "Well, lately, Billy Lee has been telling his dwindling following – I mean, folks, you really can't fool all of the people, all of the time – he's been telling them that a genuine," he pronounced each of the three syllables separately, "end-of-days prophet was about to appear."

  Bruster paused to let that one sink in, while the studio audience registered their lack of esteem for the preacher in question. "And, amazingly, this latter-day wonderworker would make his appearance – where else? – on Billy Lee's little one-man stage."

  The audience laughed, though not sympathetically to Hardacre's claims, and Bruster waited until the sound died before he said, "But you won't believe this, folks. Guess who this TV huckster, this hack novelist, this sleazy lawyer said his so-called prophet would be?"

  One of the audience, apparently not accustomed to rhetorical questions, could be heard saying, "Who?"

  Then Bruster lowered his chin so that he could look into the camera over his glasses and said, "Well, he said it would be a guy we all remember as Jesus of Nazareth…"

  Shouts went up from the audience, not mocking now but angry; the pundit's audience skewed markedly to the portion of the American population that believe that their Savior was as American as they were, and no more to be trifled with than any other patriotic son of liberty.

  Bruster raised his voice over the commotion. "…that's right! Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, our Lord and Savior!"

  The shouts were louder, and there was a sound of motion and moving furniture. Bruster showed the outraged studio audience a palm, then another, patting the air gently.

  "Well, folks," he said, dropping back into the purr he favored when setting up an on-air lynching, "you'll be glad to know that Billy Lee's messiah turned up today, right on time." More angry growls from off-stage, including one clear recommendation –
Shoot him!
– then Bruster swept one arm toward the place where guests usually entered the set, "and here he is now!"

  Chesney said, "We need to go there right now!"

  Xaphan said, "Give it a minute."

  "They'll tear him apart!"

  "Costume!" Instantly, he was clad in his blue and gray garment. "Go! Now!"

  "I'm tellin' ya," said the demon, "he don't want rescuin'."

  Melda said, "What's going on, Xaphan?"

  "Why'ncha watch and see? We can be there anytime you want, puff o' smoke, you name it."

  The screen showed Joshua stepping hesitantly into shot from the left, his eyes squinting and blinking against the lights. Bruster had stood up behind the desk and was reaching out a hand to the prophet. But Joshua had not been introduced to the handshake, and seemingly thinking that he was being offered a helping hand, waved away the assistance.

  The audience rumbled at the show of discourtesy to their idol, and someone shouted, "Shame!"

  The pundit gestured to the guest's seat and the prophet sat down, crossing his legs and showing his sockless, sandaled feet. The wide shot of the two men was replaced by a close-up of the prophet's hairy appendage, the toenails in need of the kind of services Melda supplied to women at Sugar 'n' Spice.

  Then the two-shot was restored as Bruster leaned back in his chair, studied the other man for a long moment, and said, "So you're Jesus of Nazareth?"

  Joshua was distracted by the growls from beyond the lights, but then he held up a hand in a
wait a minute
gesture and said, "Joshua. Jesus was the name the Greeks gave me, after I was dead."

  Harsh laughter from the audience, but Bruster patted it down again and said, "Ohhh-kay, Joshua. But you were around, back in the time of Pontius Pilate, did some miracles, got crucified, rose from the dead."

  "Uh huh," said the prophet in a tone that indicated that his mind was on something other than the question he'd just been asked. He had put both feet on the floor, his forearms on his knees, and was leaning forward to peer intently at the host.

  The audience was reacting with loud cries, and this time Bruster was making no effort to pacify them. Indeed, he was making
can you believe it?
faces at the crowd while his hand gestured in Joshua's direction.

  At that moment, the prophet stood, reached over, and seized the other man's hand in a strong grip. Bruster reacted as if he had received a jolt of electricity. He rose from his chair and tried to pull his hand free, but Joshua only shook his head and tightened his grip. Chesney could see the cords standing out in the bearded man's wrist.

  "Come out of him!" Joshua commanded, in a voice that brooked no defiance. "Both of you! Right now!"