Costume Not Included (31 page)

  The knock came again and a voice said, "Hello, in there. This is the First Response news team. We're looking for the son of God."

  Chesney said to the demon, "Wherever Joshua's talking about, take us there! All of us! Right now!"

  The demon took the cigar from its mouth and blew a puff of blue smoke that expanded to become a rectangle taller than Chesney. Xaphan bowed like a potentate's doorman and gestured for the three of them to step through. Joshua went first, then Chesney, holding Melda's hand and drawing her after him. The living room disappeared: they were again in the gray haze, but only for a moment. Then they were standing among some chesthigh plants, breathing pristine air laden with the scents of sweet grass and a dozen different blossoms.

  Joshua looked around and said, "Under the Tree, I suppose?"

  "Natch," said the demon.

  "Lead us there."

  He set off between the plants. Chesney followed, still holding Melda's hand. There was a faint path worn in the luxuriant grass and they followed it to a clearing. In the middle of the open space, a huge tree towered over every other plant, its branches heavily laden with ripe fruit. Beneath the lower limbs stood a table and chair, the latter occupied by a slim, dark figure who was writing with a fountain pen on a pad of paper.

  The Devil finished the line he was writing before pausing to look up. "Ah," he said, "there you are. Welcome back to Eden."

 
 

 
 
 

"I thought this was a meeting of the Twenty," Seth Baccala said, frozen in the doorway to the big conference room. He looked around the great table. All the other chairs were empty.

  "No," said Tressider, seated in his usual place. "just you and me. It's good that you showed up. I thought we should have a talk about where things stand."

  This was to be a test, the younger man knew. He could turn and run. The old lawyer would not pursue him. But between here and his car, parked in the basement garage, someone would surely intercept him. Fighting down a tremor that began at his knees and rose to trouble his lower bowel, he stepped into the room.

  The lawyer watched him take a seat, his aquiline face unreadable, his fingers interlaced over the slight bulge of his belly. The silence in the room was broken only by the measured ticking of an antique pendulum clock on the far wall. When it had first been hung there it had been brand new.

  Baccala pulled out a chair that rolled smoothly on silent casters and sat down. He summoned up the whole of his training, first as a lawyer, then as a student in one of the country's best business schools, and met Tressider's gaze. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs. Look confident, and you'll feel confident. Or so his mentors had taught him.

  "So," the lawyer said, his voice soft, "how bad is it?"

  Baccala imitated the tone. "He knows."

  "What does he know?"

  "All of it," said the younger man. "You, me, Hoople."

  "How?"

  "Remember the tale about the time traveler?"

  Tressider's answer was his raised eyebrows.

  "It's real," Baccala said. "He's real." The lawyer digested this in silence. The younger man did not trespass on the older's thought processes.

  Finally, Tresidder looked down at his interlocked fingers, pulled them apart and put them tip to tip. Staring at them, he said, "So now what?"

  "So now we give Denby what he wants."

  "And is that us?"

  "No," Baccala said. "It's in."

  The lawyer looked up. "He wants in?"

  "He's already made his move," the other man said. "Hoople's retiring, and before he goes he'll name Denby his successor. Hanshaw will rubber-stamp it."

  "He moves fast." Tressider made a thoughtful noise in his throat. "The question is, where does he move next?"

  Baccala had anticipated this question, but he said, "How do you mean?"

  "The time traveler changes the game. Denby could take down all of us."

  Baccala made a show of thinking about it, then said, "Except for one thing. The time traveler doesn't work for Denby; it's the other way around."

  "You're sure of that?"

  And now came the hard part: lying to a man who did it for a living, and who had a long lifetime's experience in judging whether others were telling him the truth. But Baccala had not only been to one of the best business schools; he had graduated with honors. "I am," he said. "I challenged him to produce a recording, anything to link me to the crime. He folded."

  Tressider studied him for a long moment. Then he slowly nodded. "You should have stayed here," he said at last. "You'd have been a first-rate lawyer. You're wasted on Paxton."

  Baccala inclined his head.

  The older man was thinking again, working it through. "The question then becomes," he said, "what does the mystery man want?"

  "That we don't know, and may never know." Baccala uncrossed his legs leaned back, studying the clock. "It might be that, even if he told us, we wouldn't understand it." When the lawyer shot him a sharp look, he explained, "Could you explain credit default swaps to a medieval baron?"

  "I could explain anything to anybody," Tressider said. "That's why I bill at a thousand dollars a half-hour. But I take your point." He rubbed his hands together as if kneading something between them. "So the time traveler has an agenda that has nothing to do with us. He needs Denby to make it work, and Denby uses that need to get what he wants."

  "That's my read on it," Baccala said.

  The clock ticked on. Tressider's eyes were unfocused for a while, then they came back to the younger man. "I never took Denby for an ambitious man."

  "Maybe he never had the opportunity. At least he never made waves."

  Tressider went back inside his head. After a while, he rubbed a fingertip down the bridge of his long, thin nose and said, "Then I think we're all right."

  "Business," said Baccala, "as usual."

  The lawyer made a noncommittal motion of his head. "But we watch him," he said. "Watch him well."

  Baccala stood. A trickle of sweat ran down his back, but it wouldn't show under the well-tailored suit. He rode the elevator back down to the garage, and was sensible enough not to let his posture show even half of the relief he felt. There would be cameras, and Tressider would be watching.

 

For a while there, Billy Lee Hardacre had been sure it had all been going wrong. First, Chesney had refused to have anything to do with the new chapter in the great divine book. Then he had brought back Joshua bar Yusuf, the historical Jesus, from a discarded draft, and the prophet had lit up
The New New Testament of the Air
with all the power of a snuffed out candle wick.

  But then it had all turned around in two minutes on Hall Bruster's show. Hardacre had taped and replayed more than once the few seconds of video of Bruster in his hospital bed, when he looked into the camera and said, "Billy Lee was absolutely right. He has brought us the Messiah!"

  Now the media were camped outside on his lawn, cameras trained on his front door, with behind them half the world waiting for his next prophetic utterance. And, more than that, beyond the closed gates of his estate – now guarded by a police phalanx – thousands of people were standing, sitting on lawn chairs they'd brought or in their cars and pickups, lying in any shade they could find, wandering around, trying to get a peek at the man who had brought them the first act in the end of the world.

  Thousands had already come; thousands more kept arriving. Billy Lee had gone up to one of the dormer windows in the mansion's roof and peered out through a slit in the curtains. The police were trying to keep the crowd off the road, but had let them spread out into the empty field across the way. The cops had even cut down the wire fence – it was either that or see the crowd tear it down with their bare hands.

  But the mood was carnival-like. People had brought instruments – mostly guitars and amplifiers – and several church choirs had come. Or maybe they had formed spontaneously. it was definitely a church-going demographic out there, the preacher thought, people who had been looking forward to the end of the world the way rock fans used to look forward to a farewell tour of their favorite groups. Now here it was, come at last, and they were determined to make the most of the experience. If Billy Lee had thought to secure the Armageddon teeshirt concession, he could soon be even richer than potboilers and TV preaching had ever made him.

  He came down the stairs and went into his study, poured himself a twelve year-old single malt and let the first sip of it dissolve in his mouth. It was all working out as the angel had led him to believe. "Mysterious ways, indeed," he said, and took another sip. It wasn't the money; he already had plenty of that, and money had never been for him what it was for so many of the rich, just a way of keeping score.

  Billy Lee had always known, deep in his core, that he was special, that he was marked out for some great purpose. When he'd had the revelation and gone to divinity school, he thought he'd found his path. Then they'd mocked and ridiculed him. But now he saw – and soon they would all be brought to see – that he was the most important man of the age, even of all the ages. The world would never be the same, and that was because of his doing.

  And now he didn't need his wife's oddball son. He didn't need the ancient Judaean. He refilled the glass and carried it over to the big desk – the same one on which he'd written
The Baudelaire Conspiracy
and
The Rimbaud Killings,
all those years ago. Instead of a typewriter, he turned on a slim-bodied laptop, leaned back in the plush recliner chair, and set the wireless keyboard on his lap. His word processing program came up automatically and he opened a new file.

  His fingers descended to the keys and he typed:
The Book of Jesus.
He centered the five words then dropped the cursor down and began to type.
As it was in the beginning, so it was at the end. God looked down upon the Earth and said, "I will choose me a messenger and raise him up above all the tumult of the world, that men and women may know that he speaks with my Voice."

  A light shone on the man at the desk and he looked up. The angel with whom he had composed the Book of
Chesney
had appeared in the corner of the study. "Be not afraid," it said.

  "I'm not," said Hardacre, "but I'm busy. What do you want?"

  "To see if you needed assistance."

  "No. I know how to do this. Especially now that it's just me."

  "As you wish," said the figure in white and disappeared.

  Hardacre paused for a moment to recapture the thread, then typed:
And God said, "To bear witness before all humanity that the chosen one speaks my truth, I will send unto him my only begotten son, and the world will see them sit down together."

  Hardacre took another sip of the good whiskey and read over what he had written. He moved the cursor up a line and put the word "inerrant" between "my" and "truth," and smiled. "The thing writes itself," he said to the empty room, and put his fingers to the keyboard again.

 

Down in the smoky bowels of Hell, in an anteroom just off Lucifer's main office, the figure in white that had just come from Hardacre's study popped into view. The Devil's first assistant, an elephant-sized demon with rank of Archduke, the general shape of a mouse, and the dentition of a Nile crocodile, looked up from a ledger in which it had been making an entry, slitted its coal-black eyes against the glare, and said, "You've been told!"

  The light dimmed, the angelic form shimmered. A moment later, in its place stood a demon with the limbs and body of a mantis and the head of a four-eyed ginger cat. It offered no apology but said, 'Where's the boss?"

  The mouse finished the entry, the quill pen scratching on the parchment. "Out."

  "Still?"

  "You question?"

  The thin fiend said nothing, that being the wisest course. The huge mouse stared at it for a while, to reinforce the slight difference in rank between them, then said, "Report."

  The mantis shoulders shrugged. "Hook, line and sinker," it said.

  "He's going for it?"

  "If the world does not end," said the insectoid fiend, "it won't be for any lack of effort on the part of Billy Lee Hardacre."

 

"Can I offer you some fruit?" said Lucifer, gesturing to the laden boughs above them.

  "That's not funny," said Joshua, "but then you never were."

  Melda reached up and touched one of the hanging orbs. It was pale yellow and smooth-skinned. "It's not an apple," she said. "I thought it was an apple."

  "So did some Renaissance painter," said the Devil, "and the image stuck."

  "What will happen if I eat it?" she said.

  Chesney answered her, drawing on his extensive store of biblical lore. "Nothing. It's the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you've already got that." He looked about. "Somewhere around here should be the Tree of Life – eat that and you live forever."

  "In retrospect," said the Devil, looking up into the great mass of wood and foliage above them, "this should have been a clue. It's what he has always been interested in, from the very beginning."

  "You're saying that Billy Lee Hardacre was right," Chesney said, "that the world is a book God's writing so he can work out the meaning of right and wrong?"

  "I don't think there can be any doubt of it. Look around you. We're standing in a previous draft."

  "Which brings us," Joshua said, "to the pertinent question: why?"

  Lucifer gave him a look of mild exasperation. "Don't play the simpleton. You know why."