He now lingered in front of her desk, tapping its edge with his fingers. “You’re all set, then?” he asked her. “Shaved your legs, put on clean panty hose, told your roommate not to wait up?” He winked. “Metaphorically speaking.”
Unfortunately, she had to tolerate his condescension, his smiling misogyny, his barely disguised insinuations. The Colonel had charged him with keeping an eye on the “day-to-day” (this a rather artful phrase by the standards of corporate argot, in her opinion) at the Downtown Las Vegas Development Group, the real estate company where she was now technically employed.
“I don’t anticipate any problems,” she said.
“Look, Judy, I’m not gonna lie,” he said, clasping his hands ceremoniously behind his back. “We all know the Colonel likes to keep himself amused, but you aren’t picking out paintings for the high-roller suite at the Golden Goose in Jackson, Mississippi, anymore. It’s a big mystery to a lot of us how you ended up here.” To be fair, it was an abiding question for her, too, why the Colonel had selected her for this particular project. She wanted very badly to believe it was not merely because he thought the manner of her parents’ death gave her some sort of moral credibility that would be useful in dealing with the head of a church. “You understand this is a multi-billion-with-a-b-dollar business, don’t you? And that nobody wants to see that get hung up on a fucking church?”
“He’s already agreed to sign,” she replied.
“Oh, well, that and a piece of toilet paper and you can take a shit,” he laughed. “The signature maketh the deal, sweetheart. I guess you didn’t learn that taking art classes at Yale.” All the people in the Colonel’s circle knew the details of her background; it was even possible that Jerry Steadman had been the one who’d compiled the dossier covering her entire life.
She now stood up from her desk. “Thank you for the contracts. The car’s waiting for me downstairs.”
He sighed dramatically—resigned to her fate. “Have it your way,” he said. “But from one kike to another, you don’t want to blow this. I’d hate to see Judy Brooks, vice president of the Downtown Las Vegas Development Group, turn back into plain old Judith Klein Bulbrook.” He smiled at her with stark insincerity—because that, of course, was exactly what he wanted to see. Some of her disdain must have worked its way into her face, because he said, “That’s a girl. Now you’re starting to look like someone who works in Las Vegas real estate.”
When he’d left, she put on her coat, took her purse and the contracts to the elevator, walked outside the anonymous office park in Henderson where the group had its offices. The first touch of afternoon cool had entered the air. She buttoned her trench coat and fastened the belt around it—though not entirely because she felt cold.
The driver of the waiting town car opened the door for her—she got in, put her purse on the seat beside her, the contracts on her lap. The business aspects of the real estate industry, the gaming (never gambling) industry, had turned out to be relatively easy for her to pick up; indeed, to her surprise, she found the subjects fascinating. There was an almost Talmudic attention to detail in the way the Colonel built his casinos, she’d learned. He researched the precise number of feet from guest elevators to table games that maximized revenue, the average time to the minute a player would sit at a slot machine based on demographics and the specific tactics (a visit from a casino host, a five-dollar coupon for a buffet) that were most effective in lengthening that average. What she was finding harder to master, though, were the social dimensions of the working world in which she’d been placed: the politics, the maneuvering, the daily score-settling. She didn’t know how to turn Jerry Steadman’s saccharine menace, or the Colonel’s assistant’s unrelenting disdain, to her advantage—and this seemed in many ways more important than whether or not she had any idea how a casino was built.
She rested her hands on the plastic folder as the town car merged onto I-515, heading north toward downtown. Yes, she had come late to the working world—but she had always been a quick study. That there were so many people rooting for her failure today was motivating. Her success would prove something.
The car exited on North Las Vegas Boulevard, and from there it was only a few blocks to the church. For every lot the car passed occupied by a forbiddingly armored liquor store, a stark industrial storage facility, there were two others with only a boarded-up building or else vacant altogether. Most of the people she saw on the sidewalks were homeless—stood on the corners in an attitude of waiting—though Judith did not pretend to have any idea for what. Much of the area had now officially been classified as blighted, and the Colonel would soon gain the rights to develop it via eminent domain. Achieving this designation of blight had been a massive legal undertaking—one in which she’d had no part—but it seemed clear enough, just looking through the window at it, that something in this neighborhood had failed. She’d asked the Colonel once whether the community here would try to stop the construction of the Babylon Center. He’d answered contentedly, “What community?”
The car came to the gates of the church. The driver got out, rang the buzzer, then drove them inside. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be,” she told the driver as she got out.
“Is no problem, Ms. Brooks,” the driver answered, in a thick Russian accent.
She walked across the few feet of parking lot to the church’s entrance, carrying the contracts against her chest. The church’s head, Pastor Keith D. Tolson, had legal authority to sign over ownership of this church and its land—Jerry Steadman and his cohort had made sure of it. The church’s leadership committee hadn’t met in a decade, and in such circumstance, the pastor had full rights of disposal, according to the church’s governance documents. Just to be sure, though, they’d quietly gotten signatures from the surviving members of the leadership committee, now living as far away as Delray Beach, Florida, and Hackensack, New Jersey. The Downtown Las Vegas Development Group had the resources to be thorough. She pushed open the door, stepped over the cinder block in the doorway, and went inside the Greater Love Hath No Man Church.
She’d been here half a dozen times by now, and as always, her first impression of it was of a staggering emptiness—emptiness that seemed to reverberate against every bare white surface. She sat down in the first row of folding chairs, and waited. The pastor had an office in the basement of the building, but he didn’t deem it appropriate for them to be alone together there. “Perhaps when you’re married,” he’d told her once—his a far milder form of sexism than Jerry Steadman’s, but sexism all the same, she thought.
She felt nervous as she waited—but she liked that, she told herself. Jerry Steadman was reprehensible, but he wasn’t wrong: There was a lot at stake—for her, and for the Babylon Center. While this was only one small piece in the vast project of acquisition—involving the eminent domain takeover of some properties, the outright purchase of others, the surreptitious purchase of still more by the Downtown Las Vegas Development Group and puppet organizations like it—the church had its significance. It had taken time for the pastor to come around to the idea of selling—and time was becoming short. Already a few journalists, a few local politicians, had begun to notice that real estate in the area was being snatched up, though they’d yet to put together how much and by whom. Any further delays, though, and the Colonel’s intentions might become widely known—and if that happened before he’d secured all the land he’d targeted, the whole process would become more difficult, and vastly more expensive. The Colonel wanted the church and every other holdout crossed off the list by the end of the year. So she had her part to play—in building a city.
She ran her eyes over the slats making up the metal cross on the wall. As a girl, she’d always liked churches—to the point that she worried there might be something sacrilegious in it, given how strongly she identified then as a Jew. Her mother had reassured her: She could admire the peacefulness of a place, even share in the hushed reverence it impressed on those who entered it, withou
t betraying her religion. Her mother had been a very accepting woman—tolerant of any thought, any emotion Judith expressed. But then, she was a poet, Judith reflected.
She had found lately she could think about her parents this way: cleanly, at a distance—even with irony. Ever since she’d returned from Amsterdam, she’d been doing this. It did not make her feel proud, exactly—strong, though, perhaps. She was involved in a multi-billion-with-a-b-dollar business, her colleagues were vicious and aligned against her. But she was a match for all of it. She could reduce this cross on the wall, this church—which didn’t inspire much of any feeling in her anymore, one way or the other—to nothing. Here was another change she’d noticed in herself since her return from Amsterdam. She felt at times a passion for revenge. This revenge didn’t have any specific object she could identify. But it seemed to take hold of her, or she could harness it, in working toward her goals.
“I see you’re admiring that cross, Miss Brooks,” the pastor, standing in the doorway in the front, said in his raspy voice. He always wore one of three sweater vests—wore them with surprising dignity, she felt. (The Colonel had found this idea uproarious when she’d tried to explain it.) “You’re welcome here,” the pastor greeted her as he shook her hand.
“I’m very happy to be here,” she answered—not wholly untrue, she reflected.
He sat down beside her in the first row of chairs. “‘To all who are thirsty I will give freely of the springs of the water of life.’ So says the Lord, Miss Brooks.”
“I’ve explained to you that I’m an atheist.”
“I didn’t forget what you said,” he replied, sighing through his nose. She had to give him credit: She never budged, but he always tried. He patted absently the half ring of stubbly black hair that remained around the back of his head. It would have surprised him to know how similar their hair had once been.
“I have the contracts,” she told him, lifting the plastic folder from her lap. “It will take some time to go through them, so perhaps we ought to get started?” He didn’t answer, adjusted his glasses. He was prone to thoughtful silences; she’d learned it was best just to wait for him to reach the end of them for himself.
Though he did know a few facts about her by now, in this case, she was the one with the dossier on him. He was born in North Carolina, the son of a Baptist minister, had given his first sermons as a child, and by the time he was twenty was the head of his own church, in Fayetteville. He’d gotten married, had two children, but there was a falling out of some sort—the private detectives hadn’t been able to uncover the details; alcohol or adultery, they speculated—and he and his wife had gotten divorced, and he no longer spoke to her or to his children. He’d come to Las Vegas after his marriage ended to lead the Greater Love Hath No Man Church, and had been here for over thirty years. He lived in a house around the corner, didn’t have a second wife or a girlfriend, was sober now if he ever hadn’t been, spent his time in his church and among his dwindling flock of parishioners: visiting the housebound, comforting the grieving, helping mothers write letters to their sons’ parole boards. He’d even learned Spanish so he could teach a weekly ESL class, held for the few attendees in the church’s basement. “He’s a true believer,” the Colonel had said as he’d handed her the dossier. “The last of the Mohicans,” he added with a sneer.
But Judith had grown to like him. He was thoughtful, gracious, even when she rebuffed his proselytizing: He was decent, in the best sense of the word. And she had moments of feeling pity for him, that he would no longer have this church, which constituted so much of his life. But this pity did not extend to guilt for what she was doing. The facts simply did not warrant it. The truth was the Greater Love Hath No Man Church was dying. Attendance had declined steadily for more than a decade, the building itself was overleveraged even by Las Vegas standards, and what assets there were were steadily being drained away by the soup kitchen, which operated at a heavy loss. Barring some preternatural change of fortune on the order of a parishioner winning the lottery, the church simply couldn’t last more than a year—likely wouldn’t make it that long. Profiting from its sale was the best outcome the pastor could reasonably hope for at this point—as she’d explained to him, as delicately as she could, many times. He’d said he intended to donate the money from the sale to various other churches and charities in the area, but the contract would also provide him a pension (the Colonel had insisted on this, for some reason). The income would not be much—but it would be sufficient. The pastor had once mentioned the possibility of moving to Virginia, where he had some cousins. You could even say it would be a happy ending for him, if you wanted to look at it that way; or if not happy, then again—sufficient.
“We used to have a wonderful music program here,” the pastor now said. She’d also gotten used to him breaking his silences with comments that lacked any apparent context.
“Is that right?” she answered.
“Time was we were very well known for it. It’s quite a thing, Miss Brooks, when a whole congregation is praising together.”
“I can imagine,” she responded—though the musical aspects of Judaism had never been her favorite.
He pushed his glasses up his nose, smiled a little. “You’re a well-mannered young lady,” he said. “I understand you’ve got other things to do today besides listen to me hold forth on the good old days. Times change and they keep on changing, isn’t that right, Miss Brooks?”
“Yes, it is.” She shifted the folder on her lap again, felt her stomach tighten—with eagerness, she told herself.
“I want you to know I’ve prayed over what happened to your parents,” the pastor said. “I’ve prayed over it many times.” The thrill, or whatever it had been in her stomach, promptly vanished; she replaced the contracts on her knees. So she would have to endure this again. “Your face tells me you don’t want to talk about it,” she heard him say. “Your face says that about a lot of things. But I’ve been in the church a long time. I know you told me what you did for a reason.” Yes, she thought—because she had been instructed to, in order to win his trust. And it had worked. The Colonel had been at this a long time, too. Still, she couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something terrible in trading this information in this way. And if her face had shown unhappiness when the pastor brought it up, that was the reason: Here, she did feel guilty. “The Lord has a plan,” the pastor told her. She nodded neutrally. “It isn’t for us to know the whys or the wherefores.”
“Yes, I’ve heard people say things like that.”
“But every now and then the Lord reveals a small piece of his plan to us. And after a great deal of prayer, I’ve come to believe He shared something of his plans for you with me this morning.” He reached into the breast pocket of his sweater vest, produced a folded piece of paper and handed it to her. She took it with sudden anxiousness: Was this a letter from a reporter? From another real estate company? Someone outing her—ruining everything? She was relieved as she began reading to find it was only a page from a sermon: “of Daniel’s strength in the lion’s den. How many of us walk daily with lions? They don’t look like lions, brothers and sisters. They wear the clothing of—”
“The other side, Miss Brooks,” he told her patiently.
She turned over the page—shook her head with confusion. “I don’t know who…” The comprehension of it seemed to work its way backward from her pupils: she could feel it prick at the corners of her eyes, clench her jaw, send what felt like a wave of blood toward the back of her skull. How was this possible? How was this possible?
“Then you do know this young man,” the pastor said.
“Very little,” she said curtly. And yet, as little as she had known him, he had managed to hurt her so deeply that she could feel the rage of it crawling over her skin even now. He had abandoned her, and in the moment she had allowed herself to be most vulnerable to abandonment.
“I can see that you’re angry,” the pastor was saying. “I’m not
going to ask why. But I can tell you he’s sincerely sorry for whatever he’s done to you.”
How long had she sat on that bench?—hopeful, then still hopeful—that someone was coming to put his arm around her—like a dumb, expectant child. “Oh,” she answered.
“He’s trying very hard to—” She had lifted the paper and was on the point of ripping it to pieces when she heard him say sharply, “You want me to sign your papers?” She looked at him: Something hard—steely—had entered his face. “Then don’t you tear that page in my church.” She folded the paper and put it in her purse. “I’d hate to see you give in to despair, Miss Brooks,” he said, more gently now. She’d underestimated him—or she’d underestimated something.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he assured her. “And I want you to know I kept your secret about what we’re doing. I had to bend my word to do it, but I know some women are better off not getting found.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose. “I’m no fool, Miss Brooks. I didn’t ask that your people keep going with the meal service, or preserve any of our other works in this community. Business is business, and I know that’s why you’re here. The desert’s coming in, and there’s nothing I or anybody else can do about it. But I also know there’s nobody comes through that door that’s not in need. And the fact is, I’ve come to care about you, Miss Brooks. I’m going to ask you to try to forgive this young man. I’m going to ask you to hear him out. I’m asking you to try to put more love in your heart than you think you’re capable of and forgive him, even if he doesn’t deserve it. If you promise me you’ll do that, then I can sign your papers in peace.”
The Book of Jonah: A Novel Page 35