Heart of the Assassin

CHAPTER 15

Baby clapped along to the gospel choir as the Old One danced in the aisle of the gigantic tent, hands waving, praising the Lord along with the hundreds of other participants who had rushed from their seats to lurch and howl and talk in tongues like fucking idiots. She saw Gravenholtz watching her from one of the exits, red hair slicked back so he looked almost human. He tossed aside the white carnation he had been given at the door, barreled up to one of Crews's deacons and jabbed him with a forefinger.

In the pulpit, the minister Malcolm Crews dipped and capered, long legs flying to the beat, his image magnified by the TV cameras on the jumbo screens on the walls as well as beamed out to the rest of the Belt. She saw the Old One bump into an enormous black woman in a polka-dot dress, then grab her hand and swing her round and round, sweat rolling off both their cheeks in the Atlanta heat. Baby clapped along with the soaring vocals of the choir, grateful to be back in the Belt.

At the last minute Ibrahim had tried to talk the Old One out of leaving Nueva Florida last night, warning of crime or illness from the strange food, even suggesting that Baby planned to assassinate the Old One far from the protection of his loyal retainers. She had remained silent and when Ibrahim ran out of breath, the Old One had kissed him on both cheeks, thanked him for his concern and told him not to worry. I journeyed alone into the teeth of our enemies before your mother was born…before your mother and grandmother drew their first breath. Am I less now than I was then?

"Feel God's healing grace crackling through this temple! Feel God's power shake your bones and roil your blood!" shouted Crews as he strode back and forth, his face all sharp angles, ax blades for cheekbones, a man always in motion, strutting and capering so that the cameras could barely keep up with him. "God's lightning gonna set you up, brothers and sisters, twist you up, juice you up!"

The Old One thumped and bumped along with the crowd, arms flailing, hair plastered to his forehead as he shouted "Praise Jesus!" to the heavens. Without his beard and with his hair dyed, he looked younger, and the stylish checkerboard suit wasn't much of a Sunday-go-to-meeting outfit, but more like something a wolf on the prowl might sport to sweep a girl off her feet. Ibrahim would positively shit if he saw him now.

Daddy had been acting very weird these last couple of weeks. He had always been steady, hardly showing any emotion at all, just watching things play out behind those cold dark eyes of his, but lately…he had been positively erratic-gloomy one day, just staring into space, and the next day, heck, the next minute, he was charging around, demanding everybody jump, acting like a man whose rent was about due and he didn't have money for the landlord. Now here he was in Atlanta, banging hips with strangers, sweating up a storm and seeming to have the time of his life.

It had been a year since Baby had fled the Belt. Miami was fun, but she had quickly grown restless. Eager to impress her father, she made use of her contacts in the Belt, gathering information, waiting for an opportunity. She didn't have to wait long.

Belt president Raynaud was derided for his upper-class accent and fake populism, but his wife, Jinx, flighty and beautiful, had charmed the nation with her honest smile and her small-town ways. Every time she changed her hairstyle the beauty parlors filled. Her only son's health problems made her even more beloved. It was when Baby got word that Malcolm Crews had resurfaced as a backwoods preacher in the Carolinas that she got excited. She had an eye for men she could use, always had-that's how she'd ended up married to the Colonel, a man in his sixties when she was still a teenager. It was nice being the wife of the Colonel, but what she was aiming at now was so far beyond that she could barely fathom it.

Malcolm Crews swayed to the music, eyes half closed, voice cracking, a tall, lanky scarecrow, veins on his neck standing out in the red and purple lights. "Do you feel it?" he called, looking right at Jinx. The first lady raised her hands over her head, swayed and almost fainted. Her bodyguards helped her out the private exit, out into the cool night air. Malcolm Crews barely noticed. The Man in Black, that's what they called him, preacher man in a shiny black suit and black string tie, his hair twisted into a dozen braids like Blackbeard the pirate. "Do you feeeeeeeeeel it?" he shouted, finger pointing at the crowd, braids flying about him as he bobbled and twitched across the stage.

Baby felt it, all right. Must have been ninety degrees in that tent-her long dress clung to her, her skin spotted with perspiration. She lifted the back of her long hair, trying to cool off her neck. Not a breath of air in that tent, not a breeze in sight. Georgia in September was hotter than a pot of bubbling grits. She dabbed her forehead with a tissue and imagined having sex with that muscular young man two rows ahead of her, a big old boy with a milky white face and smooth cheeks.

If Baby had come a long way in the last year, so had Malcolm Crews. He led a ragtag army of end-times psychopaths once upon a time, an inbred mob Crews set loose to rape and pillage. They had terrorized the area for years before Crews bit off more than he could chew, gone up against the Colonel and that was that. His army annihilated, Crews and a small band of true believers melted away, and he took to preaching in the hill country, where his incandescent oratory quickly gained him a following. Wanted by the law for various atrocities, he moved constantly.

Six months ago, when Baby found out that Crews's traveling tent show had set up outside Atlanta, she talked to Janice Rae, wife of the president's chief speechwriter, and another of the Old One's daughters. Baby told Janice Rae to bring the first lady and her son, Todd, to a prayer meeting. Then Baby contacted Crews. Give the man credit, he was open to possibilities and the risk didn't bother him a bit. We're all going to hell anyway, why not enjoy the ride? That's what he told Baby.

A few days later, in the middle of the service, little Todd, always sickly, had an asthma attack. His inhaler proved useless, as did the emergency injection Jinx Raynaud gave him. The child might have died, but Malcolm Crews laid hands on him, and moments later the boy pinked up and began breathing normally. Within a week, Crews had a full pardon from the president, and his revivals, which had appeared only on local television, went national. It quickly became the most popular show on TV.

"Cornpone Christianity, that's what the eggheads call my ministry." Crews leered in the spotlight. "Well, brothers and sisters, I was once a tenured professor, a Ph. of D. in American literature at Duke University. I was considered an intellectual, an educated man, a Brahmin in the high church of bullshit, and I'm here to tell you…I love cornpone. Can't get enough of it."

The crowd screamed their agreement.

The Old One caught Baby's eye from the aisle, gave her a wink, then the black woman put her hands on his waist and twirled him like a soda straw. He shook his finger in the air as he spun to the music, dancing as if it were playing just for him.

Baby was used to having to explain things to men, to lead them to the truth, but the Old One…she had barely started talking about her idea and he just ran with it. The Old One, it was like he had some huge puzzle he was putting together, and Crews was a piece he had been looking for, a piece he hadn't even known he was missing until Baby showed him. He had kissed her on the forehead, said she was a blessing from Allah, and Baby, who hadn't cried for real since she was a child, Baby had wept until her eyes bugged out.

Baby watched the Old One making his way back to her, still shaking to the beat of the choir. He squeezed through the people who thronged the aisles, shouted "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" his face glistening with sweat. She had never seen him look so happy.

"Look where we come to," said Crews, "look where this mighty nation, this new Jerusalem has ended up. Busted into pieces, coming apart at the seams. Don't blame the Muslims, we did it, brothers and sisters, we did it to ourselves. We trusted our ministers and pastors and they let us down. These supposed men of God sketched the line between good and evil with chalk instead of India ink, so when the wind kicked up, and the troubles came, that line got blown away. While we all stumbled around not sure what to do, the Muslims said, 'This is right and this is wrong.'" Most of the crowd nodded in agreement, but there were plenty who looked shocked.

The Old One looked at Baby.

"I gave Malcolm a few suggestions for his sermon," said Baby. "Spice it up a little."

Crews leaned over the pulpit. "So why should we be surprised that millions of good Christians tossed aside their Bibles and said, 'If Pastor Jones don't know if sodomites and fornicators got a ticket to heaven or not, if Pastor Smith don't know if killing babies in the womb is a sin or not, then I'm going someplace that is sure.' And they did. And that someplace was a mosque." He lowered his voice and the crowd went silent. "Well…this is one pastor who's going back to that old time religion, a right-and-wrong religion." He cupped an ear. "Who wants to come with me?"

"AMEN!" shouted the crowd. "AMEN!" People had rushed the stage, stood there below him, arms raised, the sick and the desperate, the lonely and the lost.

The Old One beat time with the music on his knees.

"Don't hate the Muslims," said Crews, looking out at the crowd. "They at least have the decency to believe their own good book. The ones you should be hating are the shilly-shallyers, the shuck-and-jive God hustlers who can't give you a straight answer if their life depends on it."

The people in the tent swayed back and forth.

Gravenholtz pushed his way down their row, sat beside the Old One. "I talked to one of the deacons. Peckerwood over there says he's Crews's driver. He didn't want to cooperate at first…but I convinced him to pass on the message to Crews you want to talk with him."

"Shhh," said the Old One.

"Some of you folks know my history," said Malcolm Crews, "my dark pages. I've done things that only Jesus Christ Himself could forgive. Evil things. Ugly things." He looked out over the crowd. "Monstrous things." His teeth gleamed in the spotlight. "Yet…here I stand before you…pure as a newborn babe."

"Amen!" shouted a woman in the front row, and the cry was picked up and echoed across the room. "A-men!"

"I been washed clean, brothers and sisters. Washed clean as snow, clean as ice, clean as springwater." Crews capered onstage. "Washed in the blood of the lamb."

People sobbed, held their Bibles up in affirmation.

"Give me a fucking break," muttered Gravenholtz.

Black suit flapping, Crews skittered to the side of the stage where the maimed and the infirm had lined up. He jerked, slammed his right palm into the forehead of a white-haired lady-"Heal!" Knocked her backward into the waiting arms of his ushers.

If Baby didn't know better she would have believed it herself.