Don Raimundo hunched his shoulders, stroked his neat mustache, and appeared to be sulking.
"Let us assume, because we cannot afford to overlook the possibility, that Mordaunt has taken an interest in Eden Waring," Leoncaro concluded. "He is fascinated with her Art and her nascent power, which he hopes to channel to his benefit. Further assume he may have approached her already." His Holiness tapped a forefinger on the cover of his diary, studying the Shade of Pledger Lee Skeldon as it continued to disappear from the earthly plane. "And now we know how best you may put to use your renewed lease on temporal life."
There was no response except for a long sigh.
"Good day, everyone," Leoncaro said, and returned his attention to the
Anuncio
he'd been working on.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 10
4:18 P.M. PDT
I
've always had this lucky streak," Frank Tubner said, with a modest glance at the well-tended nails of his right hand.
"There are nights when he's uncanny at bingo," Pinky Tubner affirmed, giving Frank's left hand an affectionate squeeze. "And when it comes to drawings at the church—well, that's how we happen to be on our way to Rome this very minute! I mentioned bingo, but that's small potatoes—tell Betts how much you won playing blackjack at the Bellagio, Frank, when we were down there for the convention last week."
"A tidy sum," Frank acknowledged with the unassuming smile of the blessed. "But I'm not
that
good. I mean, I've always had luck; the caveat is, know not to abuse your luck. Now Rex—he's our next-door neighbor in Santa Rosa, Rex Tarlock—Rex was in retail hardware until Home Depot came along and put him out of business—he's always after me to get in on these high-stakes poker games. But I tell him, Rex, this is my philosophy. Apart from the kind of 'luck'—quote unquote—that you make for yourself through hard effort and the stick-to-it quality that's indispensable in sales, the out-of-the-blue kind of luck is a divine mystery—as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, 'on loan from God.'"
"It's God's reward for how you conduct your life," Pinky said, nodding solemnly and touching the gold cross she wore within the cleavage of her freckled breasts. Freckles and faintly blushing skin and natural strawberry-blond hair, baby-doll-blue eyes—Pinky had looks, although her lower lip was the size of a speed bump, and she was, Betts guessed (knowing she wasn't one to be passing judgment here), a good twenty pounds overweight.
Frank Tubman leaned forward on the sofa in the smoking section of United's first-class lounge, wincing slightly as a bolt of lightning outside illuminated an airport full of motionless planes on tarmac swept by sheets of rain. A series of late-afternoon thunderstorms had been delaying traffic in and out of SF0 for the better part of an hour:
the Tubners' flight to Rome, Betts Waring's flight to Heathrow.
"I don't believe the Lord begrudges my putting a little extra jingle in my pockets from time to time or a big-screen TV in the den, such as I won at the Kiwanis picnic Fourth of July last, but—you said your field was psychology, Betts, so maybe you can understand better than most what I'm getting at here—"
Betts stubbed the last half inch of her Merit in a standing ashtray beside her armchair and resisted the urge to light another one immediately.
"The lesson, or moral, is:
don't be greedy. That's a very healthy attitude."
"Exactly!"
Pinky beamed and opened a new box of the sweet-smelling cigarillos she favored, looking idly around the lounge as she peeled cellophane. Frank was a nonsmoker, but he'd had a couple of bourbon and Cokes during their wait. Thunder caused the sandwich glass in the wall behind Betts to oscillate. Betts wished she could take her shoes off.
"So you and Pinky have an audience with the Pope," she said to Frank. "I'm not Catholic, but I assume it's a matter of some prestige."
"In our case, yes," Frank said. "There are several kinds of audiences with His Holiness. The regular Wednesday audience is held in the Papal Audience Chamber, which seats twelve thousand, and anyone can go who can get his hands on a ticket. So those audiences are not, um, that special. But an audience of key lay people from selected dioceses around the country in the Apostolic Palace is, yes, I have to say it:
very special."
"Momentous," Pinky added, lighting her small cigar and looking at the two men in dark gray business suits who sat silently nearby, where they had been for some time, not drinking or reading or tapping on laptop computers. They did talk to each other, the sort of leisurely conversation that has its share of dry spells; but for the most part they seemed discreetly to be keeping an eye on—well, it had become obvious to the observant Pinky—Betts Waring.
Pinky looked at Betts again, speculatively, holding the cigarillo near her pendulous lower lip; lighter in her other hand as if she'd forgotten about it.
"Fact of the matter is," Pinky resumed, "we've always been very active in our diocese. Confidentially"— she now took the time to get her cigarillo going—"I don't think anyone has raised more money for the new education building than Frank."
"Now, sweetie, it's just a knack I have, persuading people to participate in worthwhile things."
Pinky Tubner dragged on her cigarillo, expelled smoke, and said in a low voice to Betts, "I don't want to alarm you. But those two men over there that have this sort of
look
about them, you know, military but in civilian clothes, well—they have been paying you a lot of attention since we sat down."
"It's all right," Betts said, not looking at the two men.
"Oh, you mean you know them?"
"Slightly."
"Ohh." Pinky felt emboldened to study the pair for a few seconds. Frank frowned at her indiscretion, then cringed at another bolt from the thunderstorm that seemed to be parked directly over the airport. He smiled weakly at Betts. Frank wore a hairpiece, but he wasn't a bad-looking guy. Kind of a bumpy face. Wens. There was one below his left eye like a petrified tear. He was short and almost as round as his wife, but a fully packed roundness, as if staying in shape was just another religion for Frank. Tennis racket gold cufflinks. Sure.
"They're private detectives," Betts explained, deciding it was time for her next Merit. She was wondering how rough it was going to be, a nonsmoking hop to Heathrow Airport in London. Nine and a half hours? But two martinis before dinner, then a prescription sleeping pill and a snooze in roomy first class with her feet up should see her through a no-nicotine stretch.
"You two were in Vegas recently? Would you believe I've never been? I hear they have some great shows."
"Speaking of luck," Pinky said, revisiting a favorite theme, for the moment distracting herself, "we got tickets to see Lincoln Grayle! I mean, not only that, we
met
him." She glanced again at the professional-looking men in gray suits. Private detectives? Did that mean—bodyguards? Obviously there was more to Betts Waring than met the eye. And then Pinky got it, the last name belatedly making a connection in her memory. Wasn't that also the name of the girl who had been in the news months ago, warning a stadium full of graduates and parents that a DC-10 was about to crash just where they were sitting? Pinky felt the downy hair on her forearms standing up.
"Grayle? That name's familiar," Betts said with polite interest.
"The magician. He's done TV specials. Maybe you saw the one; he escaped from a drone airplane that was blown up in midflight?"
"Most incredible illusion I've ever seen," Frank commented. "He definitely was put aboard that plane, wrapped in chains, and handcuffed. The door was welded shut, mind you, and the camera never cut away as the plane took off, rose to two thousand feet, and blooey!
Then
the camera panned to a rescue truck racing to the scene, and the first man off the back of the truck, dressed in a fireman's coat and helmet, was Grayle."
"In
cred
ible," Pinky seconded. "But I believe his Vegas show is better than anything he's done on TV. The Lincoln Grayle Theatre is a show itself. Like a glass palace, halfway up the mountain, whatchamacallit, five hundred feet above the desert." Pinky gestured theatrically herself, in the manner of a magician about to produce a palm tree from a top hat, her rings glittering in another burst of lightning just outside the shivering window wall.
"Drawback is," Frank said, "Grayle's theatre isn't in one of those posh hotels on the Strip. It's almost a twenty-buck cab ride west if you miss one of his free buses, which we did?"
"But worth every penny," Pinky assured Betts. "When the Grayle Theatre is lit up at night and the fountains are going, they say airline pilots can see it a hundred miles away."
Pinky's gaze shifted and she smiled fitfully at a man in a United captain's uniform helping himself to coffee not far away. He also smiled and nodded as Pinky hitched herself a little closer to Betts. The lights in the lounge dimmed following a crescendo of thunder. Pinky shuddered superstitiously, glancing over one shoulder at the torrent outside, the unnatural daytime darkness between flashes.
"I've heard," Pinky confided to Betts, "that other illusionists—you know, all the big names like Copperfield, Lance Burton, Siegfried and Roy good as they are, even they can't figure out how Grayle performs some of his illusions."
"If they
are
illusions," Frank said darkly.
Pinky finger-polished her crucifix again, nibbled at her plump under lip.
Frank scoffed at her expression. "Oh, now, that's pure showbiz baloney, angel. I was just getting a rise out of you. It's all part of Grayle's mystique, his image. He doesn't have supernatural powers. You're just supposed to believe he does. Takes a lot of the old snake oil to pack the house night after night."
"On the subject of Grayle, 'fess up, Pinky. You were just a little smitten with the guy." Frank held a thumb and forefinger half an inch apart, prompting his highly colored wife to blush a shade of red that almost erased her freckles. "Don't fret, pet. I'm not jealous."
"Oh, Frank." She looked at Betts. "Did I mention that we had a chance to meet him after the show?"
"Lucky Ticket holders," Frank said, now rubbing that thumb and forefinger together. "Which entitled us to a grand tour backstage after the show, by the man himself."
"He's
nothing
like his stage persona. Very handsome, of course; but so down-to-earth."
"A more affable guy I never hope to meet" Frank agreed. "And you can imagine, the demands of doing a couple of shows a night, probably didn't feel all that much like entertaining a couple of nobodies from Santa Rosa. But you'd never have known it. He showed us his gym where he works out, all the ways he has of rejuvenating himself between shows."
"Colored light therapy" Pinky said.
"How's that?" Betts asked.
"The technical name is spectrochrome therapy," Frank explained. "'SCT' for short. But it's really very low-tech. How it works, Grayle stretches out on an ordinary massage table and for fifteen minutes he projects full-spectrum light through a set of about a dozen colored filters onto various parts of his body. The pineal gland, for instance. Or the navel or, um, his testicles. What he told me, the lights restore the proper balance in the body's complex electrical field. I tried it myself. I was feeling a little frazzled, fighting off a head cold. See, you have to be completely naked to realize the full benefit of the therapy. But doggone if I didn't feel
great
after my session. Rarin' to go."
"You sure were," Pinky said, giving Frank a sly satisfied look that implied a hot-wired libido had been one of those benefits. Frank sat back with a smug expression.
"Then I got up at five-thirty and played eighteen holes of golf. Fact is, since that little session in Grayle's gym I've had more energy than a pack of foxhounds on the scent." He gave Pinky a nudge. "By the way, you never have told me what you and Grayle talked about while I was getting my batteries recharged."
"Scuba diving, I think. He's an accomplished diver, and he's been everywhere. The Great Barrier Reef, the Caymans, Corsica. That's right. We talked about scuba diving." But Pinky appeared to be a little perplexed. Her gaze made a slow tour of the lounge. Her lips were apart, as if she'd fallen into a mild trance. But faces were vivid to her—the private detectives who apparently were there as protection for Betts (why she needed bodyguards at all was an unanswerable question); the airline captain, graying and with a brushy mustache, standing against one wall while drinking his coffee and idly playing with a gold cigarette lighter in his other hand; a Pakistani businessman and his wife; a Japanese couple, quietly but expensively dressed; and—Pinky felt no surprise, only a strange sense of melancholy and, perhaps, dread—Lincoln Grayle himself, sitting in a corner with a tropical fish tank behind him. He was looking right at her, smiling. It was true; she had developed a bit of a crush during their time alone in his quarters at the crystal palace, reflecting the lights of the universe in its dark mountain setting.
Pinky smiled shyly at what her rational mind quickly told her must be a hallucination. As was the artifact Grayle held, uncovered during one of his diving expeditions in the warm seas of Bimini. A small skull of blood-red crystal. Unique in all the world, as old as the earth itself.