Eye Contact (25 page)

“What?” asks David. He, too, rubs the rim of his glass, more earnestly than Manning, and manages to make it chime—an eerie sound that rings out over the hushed bay. Manning gives him a look that tells him to stop horsing around.

Roxanne continues her story: “After lunch, we spent some quiet time in the cabin. I lay down, resting, though of course my brain was in a spin, wondering what the hell was happening. Carl unpacked his laptop and booted it up on a desk there in the bedroom. It was only a few feet from the bed, but he was sitting at an angle that made it impossible for me to see the computer screen.

“He seemed engrossed in what he was doing and worked at it for nearly an hour, typing away at the keyboard. I was lying still, and he may have thought I was asleep. Eventually, he got up and went to the bathroom. There’s a turn in the hall, and you can’t see the bedroom from there.”

Manning grins. “Your big break.”

“Yup. I tiptoed over to the desk to get a look at his screen, and guess what I found.” She pauses for effect. “Solitaire.”

“Huh?” David flops back in his seat.

“There was a
card game
on the screen. That struck me as fishy—he’d been typing too much. So I moused up to the button that minimizes the solitaire program, wondering if something else was open in the window underneath. And sure enough, there was a page of a document in WordPerfect.”

“Aha!” David leans forward again.

“But it was just a memo updating a personnel issue at the office—a tedious matter, but by no means clandestine, involving nothing that Carl would bother to conceal from me. I heard the toilet flush, and assuming I’d struck out, was about to call up the solitaire window. But I knew I had a few more seconds—Carl
always
washes his hands—so I decided to check beneath the WordPerfect window to see if anything else was open. And there it was, his day planner: Tuesday, June twenty-ninth.”

She sits back, looks at her watch, then asks, “Do you know where Carl will
be
this afternoon at three o’clock?”

“Where?” the guys ask together.

“To quote Carl’s own notation: ‘Gethsemane—CFC Board—Zarnik.’”

“What?”
Manning’s mouth gapes.

“You heard it.” Roxanne crosses her arms.

“Sorry,” says David, “I don’t understand.”

Manning tells him, “The Gethsemane Arms is that new hotel built to profit the work of the Christian Family Crusade. It’s their temporary headquarters while they try to save Chicago—and the nation—from the forces of perversion.”

Roxanne adds, “Carl Creighton, the man whom I’ve recently decided I love, is obviously a legal advisor to their board, or maybe he’s even
on
their board. And the whole movement is somehow tied to Zarnik, whom you’ve determined to be a fraud.”

Manning sounds a cautionary note. “There are a couple of leaps in your logic, Roxanne, but I admit that you’ve drawn some compelling assumptions.”

“It’s the best theory we’ve heard yet,” David says. “In fact, it’s the
only
theory.”

David has a point, Manning knows. So far, his investigation of Zarnik has only raised questions. Roxanne has at least pieced together the beginnings of a plausible answer. “Has Carl ever mentioned contacts within the CFC?”

“Never,” Roxanne answers.

Their discussion of the CFC reminds Manning of Cliff Nolan’s neighbor, Dora Lee Fields, who watches the Christian Family Network day and night. Manning asks Roxanne, “Can you recall if Carl has ever spoken of the CFC, even in passing?”

“No, I can’t recall. I’d surely remember if he ever indicated that he was a sympathizer. I mean, he’s a conservative guy fiscally, but I’ve always found him surprisingly open-minded on social issues—he readily accepted you and Neil as friends, for instance. Or so I presumed.”

All along, Manning has suspected some connection between Zarnik’s ruse and Nolan’s murder; then on Sunday afternoon, he discovered a dossier linking Nolan and Carl Creighton; and now Roxanne has revealed some apparent connection between Creighton, the CFC, and Zarnik. It suddenly seems that the common thread in this mystery may be none other than Carl Creighton.

Out of the blue, Manning asks Roxanne, “Do you happen to know if Carl was ever a student at the University of Chicago?”

Though puzzled by the question, she answers, “Yes, as a matter of fact, he was an undergrad there. It’s the ‘Harvard of the Midwest,’ you know—nothing but the best for Carl.” With her empty glass, she toasts Carl’s alma mater.

As Manning ponders all this, the conversation lapses. The boat has been drifting for some time now, and they are closer to the far shore than to the lodge, though still well out of earshot. Thinking, peering vacantly over the water, Manning notices a glint of chrome through the woods. He hadn’t realized there’s a back road that circles the bay, veering toward the shore here and there. Near one of the old piers, there’s a van parked among the trees. Its driver, a fisherman, has hauled his gear onto the pier, where he sits lazily in the early-afternoon sun, rod and reel in hand, line dangling in the water. Arrayed around him on the pier are a couple of tackle boxes, maybe a lunch basket, and an open umbrella.

David breaks the lull. He asks whoever will answer, “Let’s suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Carl does play ball with the Crusade. I can understand how that might alarm Roxanne—they’re so totally bogus—but how does that involve Zarnik?”

Roxanne tells him, “I never claimed to have any answers, but I’m certain that something weird is in the works, and I thought that Mark would appreciate the tip.”

“Indeed I do,” Manning assures her, mustering a smile to mask his deeper concerns, one of which is his growing hunger. “Before taking on the mysteries of the cosmos, why don’t we have lunch?”

Roxanne and David need no convincing. It’s nearly one-thirty, not only time to eat, but time to lighten their discussion and enjoy each other’s company. As they set about unpacking their meal and arranging it on the center table, they exchange idle pleasantries about the food, the boat, their plans for the holiday weekend. Roxanne must have truly charmed the caterer—the table is crowded with salads, pastas, huge chilled shrimp, a platter of sliced chicken breasts. They pick and scoop from the serving dishes at will, assembling plates to their own liking, drizzling them with an assortment of sauces.

Roxanne refills her glass of iced tea from a carafe within reach of her chaise. The bottle of Far Niente is chilling in an ice bucket at Manning’s side, where David cannot reach it. As a not-so-subtle hint that the wineglasses are empty, David wets his fingertip and rubs it around the rim of his glass, causing it to chime again, far more loudly than before—he’s perfected his technique. So reverberant is the piercing, harmonic sound, Roxanne quits her fork and applauds with shouts of “Bravo!” Laughing, Manning turns to reach for the wine, and as he does so, his peripheral vision detects movement on the shore. He glimpses sideways just in time to see the fisherman drop his rod into the bay, grabbing at his ears with both hands.

Manning leans over the table, signaling with a wag of his fingers that Roxanne and David should do likewise. With their faces only inches apart, he says to them in a voice that is barely a whisper, “You see that fisherman over there with the umbrella? He’s no fisherman, and that’s no umbrella—it’s some sort of listening device. He’s heard every word we’ve said.”

Sweating and panting, jacket draped over his arm, Arlen Farber ducks into the shade of the canopy stretching taut from the polished new facade of the Gethsemane Arms Hotel. A glance at his watch tells him that it’s not quite three—thank God, he has a couple of minutes to put himself together.

Shrugging into his jacket, he passes between two doormen who stand at attention with tacky foil-tipped spears. They wear centurion guard outfits, complete with sandals, skirts, breastplates, and brushy-topped helmets. One of the guys is really buffed and fits the role to a tee (he looks like Ben-Hur), but the other guard, who’s short and black with skinny legs, doesn’t quite fill the bill (in fact, he’s a dead ringer for Marvin the Martian in those Bugs Bunny cartoons). They’re both ridiculous, of course, but Arlen Farber has neither the time to notice nor the inclination to sneer. They’re actors doing a job, drawing a check, just as he is.

Inside the doors, a cavernous lobby yawns before him, with huge tiers of marble stairs descending from the street level to the main reception room. The new air-conditioning system is not yet fully tweaked, and Farber is momentarily stunned by a chill that convulses his body. Strains of harp music waft through the space and echo from the stone walls. He needs to find a men’s room.

Walking through a door marked
Brethren
(he didn’t see the ladies’ room and can’t imagine what they’d call it), he’s relieved that there’s no attendant. He’s never liked the idea of having someone wait for you, running water while you pee. Besides, he needs to be alone for a minute. He stands before the urinal, urinating, studying his face in the gold-framed mirror that hangs there. His eyes don’t look so great—he should have gone a tad easier on the Jack Daniel’s, but it’s easy to get carried away with Bette Davis. Zipping up, he crosses to the sink, splashes water on his face, and studies his face again. He musses his hair, looking instantly more absentminded. He chortles at the transformation, then calms himself, breathing deeply, and closes his eyes. Focusing inward, he thinks the thoughts of an Eastern European astrophysicist, entering the mind of a fusty genius. Arlen Farber opens his eyes. The man staring back from the mirror
is
Pavo Zarnik.

Leaving the men’s room, Professor Zarnik crosses the lobby toward a bank of elevators, where there’s an enshrined reproduction of a Raphael painting in which a spaced-out John the Baptist (he looks like he’s high on something other than religion) points up. Zarnik gets into the first elevator, marked
Chariot One,
and presses the top button, marked
Golgotha Suite.
When his chariot arrives at Golgotha, the doors open, not with the expected
ding,
but with a tinny, digitized harp flourish. All this hokum would be laughable if Zarnik were to ponder it, but his mind is occupied instead with the uncertainties of the meeting to which he has been summoned.

A nicely dressed young lady awaits him in the hall. “Good afternoon, Professor Zarnik.” She has a charming southern twang. “So nice of you to come see us on such a dreadful hot day. Can I getcha lemonade to take into your meetin’ with the board?”

He’d prefer a julep. “Thank you, my dear. So kind of you to offer.”

She fetches the lemonade, then leads him into the conference room, which is actually the dining room of the hotel’s finest suite. Around a big oval mahogany table sit perhaps a dozen men, no women. This is the governing board of the Christian Family Crusade, the organization’s Council of Elders. They stand as Zarnik enters, and one of the board members, a portly man in a slick black suit, introduces himself as Elder Burlington Buchman (though he’s not very old—fifty, tops), instructing Zarnik to be seated in the empty chair at one end of the table. His tone is humorless. His manner and accent lack the charm of the lady with the lemonade, whom he dismisses as soon as Zarnik sits.

Buchman seems to be in charge of the meeting. He brusquely introduces the others at the table, who nod and grunt as their names are called. Most have titles of “Elder” or “Deacon.” There’s an archdeacon in the bunch, and Zarnik thinks he caught a subdeacon. But one of the men, sitting across from Zarnik at the opposite end of the oval, has no title; he is simply Mr. Creighton.

Zarnik doesn’t know that the man is a lawyer, aged forty-nine. He doesn’t know that Carl Creighton has an aggressive edge that he often vents on racquetball courts as well as in courtrooms—today Carl Creighton gives no hint of that vitality and drive, watching the proceedings with a fixed, empty expression. Though seated, he is obviously an inch or two taller than six feet. His body looks ten years younger than his years, but his hair has the opposite effect. Prematurely gray even in college, it is now pure white, and Zarnik wonders if it has been bleached.

“Well,” Buchman drawls, “enough of the niceties. Do y’understand why we’ve had to call you here, Professor?”

“Actually, no,” Zarnik answers. He removes his fingers from the glass of lemonade and dabs the cold condensation on his cheeks. “I would be grateful for some explanation.”

Buchman defers to another board member, Elder Phipps, a shrunken old figure in a bad suit. Phipps doesn’t mince words. “You’ve been dabblin’ in some queer science, Professor. You’ve been preachin’ heresy. You’ve been raisin’ hackles.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Dr. Smarty-Pants. God created the universe in six days. On the seventh day, He rested. And now
you
come alone preachin’ this poo about a so-called ‘tenth planet.’ What the hell is
that,
Professor?”

Zarnik is stunned. The man questioning him is such a ludicrous caricature, he wants to laugh. He wants to ask, Is this a joke or what? But he remembers his instruction—Play along and don’t rile them. He explains, “The tenets of modern astronomy were established by Copernicus nearly five hundred years ago. The theory of a solar system was convincingly argued—”

Elder Phipps interrupts. “Can you show me any of that hooey in the Bah-ble?”

“Of course not,” Zarnik tells him. “The Bible is an ancient book. Even the New Testament is two thousand years old.”

“I rest my case,” Phipps says smugly, crossing his arms.

“Do you suggest that the Bible was written as the culmination, the end-all, of human discovery and learning?”

“I don’t ‘suggest’ anything, sir—I
know
it.”

A murmur rises from around the table. Phrases like “You tell’m” and “Praise Jesus” and “Amen, brother” pop like balloons over the heads of the faithful.

Zarnik says, “Clearly, then, we disagree. What do you expect me to tell you? One cannot contradict
fact,
can one?”

“What arrogance!” says Phipps, puffing up his chest. “Facts be damned. ‘I am the way,’ our Lord Himself told us. ‘I am the way, the truth, and the light.’” Phipps grabs a pile of newspapers from the center of the table, poking with an arthritic finger at Zarnik’s front-page stories, at the congratulatory ads from the mayor’s office. “We have no need for your heathen, foreign science, riling up good, wholesome Americans with your blasphemous tales of godless worlds.” Seething, he flings the papers in disgust. They glide across the waxed mahogany table, coming to rest in a disarrayed heap in front of Elder Buchman.