by John Case
Obviously, it was someone’s brilliant idea to have Gus on the show as a whipping boy for the virtuous men and women from Harper’s, the Washington Post, the Times, and NPR. But it was Gus, a good-looking guy in his thirties, with a chiseled jaw and piercing blue eyes, who sucker-punched the stars. Taunted about ‘the sleaziness of tabloid journalism,’ he launched a frontal attack on the establishment.
With a mixture of measured perplexity and cool glee, he reminded his colleagues that the Enquirer earned its income in the traditional way – from the sales of newspapers, rather than from the advertisements of liquor and tobacco companies. As for the newspaper’s contents, it was true that the Enquirer had never won a Pulitzer Prize – but then, the prize itself had lost a lot of credibility as a consequence of the Janet Cooke scandal. Which raised the issue of journalistic ethics. Naming panelists and their benefactors, Gus questioned the likelihood of a journalist reporting evenhandedly on a subject – say, gun control or health care – when the same journalist had been paid $30,000 for a speech to the NRA or the American Medical Association. ‘We don’t give speeches at the Enquirer,’ Gus said. ‘In fact, we don’t even cover them.’
By the time the show ended, the audience was on its feet, and Gus had a standing ovation.
When Gus returned his call, it was almost two P.M. Lassiter started to explain who he was, but Gus cut him off.
‘I remember you. Elizabeth Goode dumped me for you when I was a sophomore and you were a senior.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I got over it,’ Gus said, and cut to the chase. ‘So what’s up? I can’t imagine.’
It was a little uncomfortable, but Lassiter said he hoped he could count on Gus’s discretion.
Gus laughed. ‘You know, I go through this about ten times a day. And the answer is: yes. You can count on it. Bulldog honor.’
‘It’s about Callista Bates.’
‘My favorite movie star. What about her?’
‘I’m looking for her.’
‘You and everyone else. We get more tips on Callista than anyone except Elvis. Though, personally, I hope she stays lost. Because if she turns up, it’s big news for a week – and then she’s just another actress looking for a deal.’
Lassiter joked that if he found her, he’d keep the news to himself. He explained something of why he was interested in the actress, that it was personal, that he couldn’t really say more, but that if the paper had any leads about Callista’s whereabouts, even leads that didn’t seem to check out . . .
‘I’m flattered. An investigator comes to me.’ He sighed. ‘But Callista Bates? To tell you the truth, I don’t think there’s been much at all since she took off from Minneapolis. A lot of “sightings,” if you know what I mean, but – it’s what, almost six years now?’
‘Well, if you hear anything –’
‘I might. Then again, we’ve got a stringer who’s made a career out of Callista –’
‘Finley?’
‘Yeah – what? You already talked to him?’
‘Not me. A guy who works for me –’
‘Well, I hope he was discreet, because Finley is a pit bull. But listen, I’ll tell you what: I’ll have someone take a look at the archive, check out the hot line, see what we’ve got. I’ll say we’re doing an update, and – I’ll put Finley in charge. That’ll keep him busy. Hell, we’ll probably run the thing, eventually. Anyway, I’ll take a look at what we get, and if I see anything interesting, I’ll be in touch.’
‘Thanks, Gus. I owe you one,’ Lassiter said.
‘Two. Don’t forget Elizabeth Goode.’
Later that afternoon an envelope arrived from the Research department, containing the credit report on Lassiter’s sister. It was six pages long, but he went directly to the end, where the other queries were listed. And there it was: 10–19–95 Allied National Products.
That sealed it. The same broker in Chicago who’d run ‘Marie Williams’ had run his sister – and he’d done it on the same day. It had to be Grimaldi.
He drummed his fingers on the desk. Now what? He thought for a moment, and called Research. ‘I want to get a birth certificate,’ he said, ‘for a woman named Marie Williams. Middle initial A, as in . . . Alabama. The DOB’s March eighth, 1962. I don’t know the place of birth, but it was somewhere in Maine. Get a sub in the state capital – I’m sure they’ve got a Bureau of Vital Statistics or something like that. Ask them to fax us whatever they can get.’
Which, at a minimum, would be her parents’ names and place of birth. And while Callista might not have gone home, she might still be in touch with her parents, or failing that, with some of the people she’d grown up with. What the hell, it was a lead.
But there wasn’t much else that he could do. He had Gary Stoykavich poking around in Minneapolis, seeing what he could learn about Callista’s two years there. He had Gus Woodburn culling leads from the Enquirer’s archive, and someone in Maine looking for Callista’s birth certificate. Deva Collins was writing a memo on Baresi’s religious studies and, if she hadn’t forgotten, looking for someone to explain what Baresi had been doing as a geneticist.
He was mulling this over when one of the kids in Research called to say that ‘a ton of stuff is on the way from Katz and Djamma –’
‘What the hell is that?’ Lassiter asked.
‘They’re the P.R. firm that handled Callista Bates.’
‘Nice of them to help,’ Lassiter remarked.
‘They’re pretty motivated. The guy I talked to said if we can locate her, it’s big bucks. Tristar wants her for a biopic on Garbo, and Nicky Katz says he can get eight figures. So I had to promise that we’d let ’em know if we found anything.’
He spent the rest of the day in staff meetings and in consultations with lawyers, going over the fine print in contracts for the company’s sale. Wherever he went, Buck remained exactly two steps behind, scanning the office as if it were Dealey Plaza. That his presence unsettled people was clear from the worried glances he inspired, and yet, Lassiter made no effort to explain him, taking perverse pleasure in the fireplug’s improbable presence.
When Deva Collins stopped by around six o’clock and, with a little flourish, set a paper on his desk, he was tired.
‘Ta-daa!’ she said.
‘What’s this?’
She looked crestfallen. ‘My brief.’
‘Your “brief”?’
Her face reddened. ‘On Ignazio Baresi – his contribution to religious scholarship.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Right. Great!’ He tried to sound enthusiastic, but his heart wasn’t in it. At the moment all he wanted to do was go home, have a drink, and watch Callista Bates movies with his new pal Buck.
He looked at the memo. Five or six pages.
The truth was, his interest in solving the mystery – which turned upon Baresi’s relevance to Umbra Domini and the murders – had begun to recede the moment that he’d started watching Fast Track. The important thing now was to find Callista Bates and her child. Dead or alive. Once that was done, he could return to his search for Grimaldi, and for the reason behind it all.
Still, the young woman in front of him had worked hard on the report, and he didn’t want to seem unenthusiastic. So he sat down with the memo and, chin in hand, started reading.
Ignazio Baresi (1927–1995):
Contributions to the Field of Biblical Scholarship
Report Prepared By: C. Deva Collins
Biographical data and list of publications.
Lassiter glanced quickly through this section. Baresi had enrolled at the Sorbonne, a thirty-seven-year-old ‘undergraduate’ taking courses in philosophy and comparative religion. After a year he’d gone on to study at the University of Münster, in Germany. Later, following a year as a visiting professor at Harvard’s School of Divinity, Baresi retired abruptly from the field, in 1980, to return to his home in Italy. Despite the brevity of his career . . . blah blah . . . Baresi’s influe
nce was still felt in the field, etc.
This was followed by a chronological list of Baresi’s published work. Lassiter skimmed through it, his eyes catching only a few titles: The Essential Humanity of Christ: Doctrine or Dictum? (1974) . . . Goddess Worship and the Virgin Mary (1977). And his single book: Relic, Totem, and Divinity (1980).
Biblical Scholarship and Christology. Deva described the nature of this discipline, which she said had been focused for the last 150 years on what she called ‘the search for the historical Jesus.’ Essentially, this was an attempt by scholars to strip away myth, hearsay, and doctrine imposed after the fact on ‘the salvation event,’ and to find out what parts of the gospels were ‘verifiably true.’ As increasingly sophisticated modern methods were brought to bear on the matter, the answer to the question, ‘What could be absolutely verified about the life and death of Jesus?’ was: hardly anything.
Baresi’s work. Baresi’s master’s thesis was in the field of doctrinal analysis and concerned the influence of exterior events on church doctrine. Baresi pointed out that the insistence of doctrine on the human, carnal, fleshly nature of Jesus was not from gospel, but to counter the belief of another Christian sect that Jesus was entirely divine. In the gospels themselves, there was little mention of Christ’s birth – Mary was barely referred to – and not much emphasis on his suffering, either. The doctrinal insistence on a Jesus who was born like a man, died like a man, and felt pain like a man could be traced also in the visual record of Christian religious art. Although there was no early Christian art – early Christians came from a Semitic tradition that forbids depiction – once it began to evolve, renditions of Christ changed rapidly: from a glowing, happy ‘solar’ youth, surrounded by radiance (fourth century), to a suffering Christ nailed to the cross and bleeding from his wounds (seventh century).
Deva pointed out that although this initial paper was within the tradition of biblical scholarship, after that, Baresi’s work veered off sharply.
Relic, Totem, and Divinity. In his only book, Baresi researched the development of the cult of martyrs and saints within Christianity, which led to the popular belief in the power of relics – and how this almost certainly had its roots in ancient totemic and animistic belief systems.
Totems and fetishes differ from relics in that although both confer power upon their possessors, totems and fetishes are symbolic, whereas relics are the actual material remains of holy persons after their death, or objects sanctified by contact with the ‘corporeal body.’
Totems and fetishes are often connected with animals – and both honor and transfer the strength of the animal to a tribe or individual. In Baresi’s opinion, ancient cave paintings were totemic in nature, both honoring the animals and in some sense ‘capturing’ their power.
Baresi related totemic beliefs and faith in relics to very primitive rites – in which the blood of the lion, for example, was ingested as a means of absorbing the animal’s strength. Cannibal ritual also often involved the ingestion of blood and organs of the vanquished enemy, a means of absorbing his strength and conquering his spirit. Baresi discussed the totemic power of ritual objects in many religions – and explored the shift of such power in some cultures from objects to the more abstract: words, incantations, and, especially in Judaism and Islam, letters and numbers.
The second half of Baresi’s book concerned relics, and especially the role of the relic in Christianity. By the fourth century the belief in the magical power of Christian relics to cast out demons, to cure illness, and so on, was well established. As a representation of power easily understood by the common man, it was not surprising that relic popularity grew. By the ninth century there was a specialized business, centered in Rome, that sold holy relics all over Europe. By the Middle Ages, nearly every tiny church had its bones, fingernail parings, teeth of various saints and martyrs, often kept in elaborate reliquaries. So avid was relic gathering, and so strong the belief in their power, that relic mongers watched over likely saints and martyrs, especially sick ones, and moved in as soon as they died, boiling the bodies down to the bones.
The most powerful relics were those of Jesus and Mary. Jesus’ foreskin was preserved in jeweled reliquaries in half a dozen churches, as was hay from the manger, hair, his umbilical cord, his milk teeth, his tears, his blood, his fingernails. Mary’s hair was here, there, and everywhere, as were vials of her breast milk and even chips of rock upon which her breast milk had fallen, turning the stone white. As for relics of the Passion, there were innumerable nails, thorns from the crown of thorns, the entire crown of thorns – at the Sainte Chapelle in Paris – three examples of the Spear of Longinus (the lance that pierced Christ’s side), and various cloths impressed with Christ’s sweat, including the vera icon and the famous Shroud of Turin. There were shards of the marble slab from Christ’s tomb, burial linens and sandals, and every imaginable artifact that had come into contact with the body of Christ. (No bones or teeth, of course – the normal relics of saints – since these had ascended into Heaven.)
Baresi listed some of the miracles attributed to these various relics and traced their lineage. Although there were obvious hoaxes – enough splinters of the True Cross to build any number of barns – the belief in the power of relics was so ancient and instinctual that it defied common sense to believe that there were no relics of Christ. If modern-day peoples, Baresi argued, easily came to believe that something as immaterial as a vision of the Virgin might pinpoint a source of curative waters – as witness the pilgrims to Lourdes – then how likely was it that none of Jesus’ many followers preserved actual relics of what was, after all, a living god?
He finished by arguing that the ritual of the Eucharist, wherein the symbolic wine and wafer are transformed into the blood and body of Christ, is a practice based on primitive animistic belief in the power of relics. Transubstantiation is nothing more than a spiritual transformation of the symbolic relic (the wine) into the actual relic (the blood).
(Note: Mr. Lassiter. Most of this information came from a Georgetown student’s doctoral thesis, written in 1989. The student’s name is Marcia A. Ingersoll, and I have her address if you want it. Deva.)
33
IN THE WEEK that followed, Lassiter’s ‘progress’ was mostly negative.
The subcontractor in Augusta reported that no one named Marie A. Williams had been born in Maine on March 8, 1962. ‘She might have had a change of name,’ the sub suggested, ‘but if she did, there’s nothing we can do about it. Change of names aren’t cross-referenced, and no, I can’t pull up all the girls who were born March eighth, ’sixty-two. What I could do – and did – was look for a Mary Williams, in case you got the first name wrong.’
‘And what did you get?’
‘I came up with seventeen since 1950, and four of them have a middle name that begins with A. But don’t get your hopes up: none of them are the one you’re looking for – the birthdates are all wrong. Wrong year, wrong everything.’
So that was that. As for Gus Woodburn at the Enquirer, and Gary Stoykavich in Minneapolis, nothing had been heard. Indeed, the only new information that he’d received was delivered to his office by a kid from Research, who walked in with a cardboard banker’s box in his arms. This was a pull-together on Callista Bates, supplemented by materials from the Katz & Djamma agency. All in all, it was a chaotic compilation of online research, newspaper and magazine clips, videos, photographs, fanzines, screenplays, and transcripts. Callista’s testimony in the stalking trial was there, verbatim, and so were copies of interviews with Rolling Stone, Premiere, and ‘60 Minutes.’
The kid was apologetic. ‘We tried a couple of different ways to organize it, but without knowing what you’re looking for . . .’ He shrugged, and added, ‘We just put it in chronological order.’
‘That’s okay,’ Lassiter replied. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I won’t until I’ve found it. So, I guess I’ll just have to do my own reading.’
And so he did. He
read everything about Callista Bates, from deconstructionist reviews in Cinema Aujourd’hui to the tabloids’ breathless (if speculative) accounts of her love life. He learned how much each of her pictures had grossed, her favorite flower (Queen Anne’s lace), favorite charity (PETA), and where she stood on organic food (she preferred it). He could recite chapter and verse of sightings that put her everywhere from a music studio in Muscle Shoals to an opium den in Chiang Mai – and most points in between. (She’s dying of a disfiguring disease in a Swiss clinic! No, she’s living as a Poor Clare on the streets of Calcutta!) In short, while there was still a great deal left to read, it seemed to him that he knew everything about Callista Bates – except where she was born, where she was living, and what she was calling herself these days.
In the evenings, he worked his way through the videos. He’d seen them all by now, watching them with Buck and Pico, stretched out on the living room floor. With the streets buried in snow and ice, running had become a virtual impossibility, and so he’d taken to doing abdominal crunches with his baby-sitters. It did not make him happy.
One thing about Callista’s acting – she was a chameleon, and that, obviously, was one of the main reasons she’d been able to disappear so successfully. Whoever she was on screen, you thought, that’s the real her, that’s what she’s actually like – no matter what she wore, or whom she was playing.
Maybe that made her a great actress, maybe not. There was a lot of hype where Callista Bates was concerned, and the truth was, her star didn’t go nova until, like so many other artists, she was suddenly gone – another brilliant flame-out in the constellation of the prematurely dead.
Or missing.
Still, Lassiter thought, in Callista’s case the hype was almost true. She had amazing authority as an actress, and that authority only became apparent when the film had ended. You never saw the wheels turn or had the sense that you were watching ‘a performance’ – until it was over, and you suddenly realized that you hadn’t taken your eyes off her for two hours. And it wasn’t just her beauty that held you. On the contrary, her attractiveness was often obscured by the roles she chose – the punked-out, junkie minstrel in Piper; the rabbity housewife in Daylily; the buttoned-down scientist in Meteor Shower.