The Book of Q

“You believe him.”

“Yes.”

“Do we know who they are?”

“No.”

“Excellent.” The word was laced with sarcasm. Another pause. “I want this cleared up by tomorrow. If he doesn’t have the ‘Hodoporia’ by then, find him, take the book from him, and find it yourself. No more distractions. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Eminence.”

“Good.” Von Neurath stood. “Then unless you have something else …” Kleist shook his head. “They’ll be coming around to call us for dinner soon. They’re very keen that we all eat together in silence. Given the food, I can understand why.”

Kleist wasn’t sure if he was meant to smile or not. Instead, he simply nodded and stood.

“Oh, which reminds me,” added von Neurath. “Send Mr. Harris my congratulations on his recent approval rating. Make it an egg. A hard-boiled egg. He’ll understand.” He nodded Kleist toward the tiny door.

Two minutes later, Kleist was crawling his way back through the heating duct, a constant trickle of sweat dropping from face to aluminum.

Hard-boiled egg. He wondered if he’d somehow missed something. Or maybe it was simply the cardinal’s way of putting him in his place; it wouldn’t have been the first time. Whatever he had meant, though, Kleist was sure of one thing.

The priest would be dead within the day.

At least now there was no confusion on that front.

“Nige … you’re sure we can’t get you some dessert?”

Nigel Harris smiled to the man across the table from him. “I’m fine. Thank you.” Three others sat across from him, as well. A lunch meeting engineered by Steve Grimaldi’s office, very “developmental,” high on the “no turnaround time,” given Harris’s current “breakthrough” status. The colonel was beginning to understand the advertising industry’s lingo, although he couldn’t be sure if it was the industry or Grimaldi himself, the latter more than happy to toss whatever happened to be running through his mind into the conversation. That notwithstanding, the rest of his staff seemed to understand his every word-everyone “on the same page”-especially when they took their little breaks to “detox” the details.

The lunch meeting had started at eleven. It was now nearly one.

While the plates were being cleared, Harris glanced out the window. He’d never gotten his LA geography down, not sure if he was actually in what they considered downtown. From the thirty-eighth floor, it certainly looked like a downtown, though with conspicuously few people on the streets. Maybe the trendy restaurants weren’t in this neck of the woods, he mused. Or maybe in-house catering had just become too good across the board. From what he’d just had to suffer through-something “blackened” beyond hope-he was guessing the former.

“I think you’re going to like what we’ve put together, Nige. It’s very early-”

“Developmental.” Harris nodded.

“Exactly. So we’re not sure just exactly how we need to play with it. But we want to get them out there quick.” Grimaldi nodded to one of his associates; she pressed a button at the center of the table and a large TV screen lowered from the ceiling at the far end of the room. A second button, and the shades began to close. Harris turned to Grimaldi and raised his eyebrows as if duly impressed. The adman seemed to preen. The lights dimmed. “Your group’s getting a lot of press right now, Nige, and we thought it might be nice to pick up on that newsy quality. An election kind of thing. Get people in your camp. This is one possibility. And don’t be afraid to tell me exactly how it makes you feel.”

Grimaldi pressed yet one more button, and the screen came to life, black at first, a counter running in white numbers along the bottom edge, the words “Nigel Harris Promo 1” next to it. When the counter reached ten seconds, the center of the screen filled with one of the quotes from a recent article on the alliance. The now- familiar voice from every movie preview produced in the last five years began to read the text in slow, sonorous tones.

“Its vision is for our future…. Its message is clear…. It’s time we put our faith back into something we believe in….”

A classroom of children filled the screen, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, a perfect hodgepodge of ethnic and racial backgrounds, all smiling faces, the word Tolerance written in large letters on the board, the children clearly in the midst of a discussion. The screen darkened, another quote. The voice returned.

“Our children need to understand what ties them together, not what separates them. And faith is that answer.”

Next, an equally Stepfordesque scene appeared, people on a generic Main Street, again ample ethnic diversity, ideal families strolling along, stopping to chat with one another, three separate churches in the background-one seemingly a synagogue, the lines, though, too blurred to make it out with any detail. In some sort of high-tech special effect, the three buildings began to grow into one another, the happy little community watching the transformation. No quote this time. Just the voice.

“It’s time to build an alliance of faith, where religious differences fade in favor of a wider spiritual commitment.”

Images of Harris, several other notable members of the alliance, and an American flag peppered the screen, the final image that of a field somewhere in the Midwest.

“The Faith Alliance. It’s our bridge to the next millennium.”

The screen went black, the lights came up. Harris turned to Grimaldi, who was standing by the far window. Grimaldi was staring directly at him, a birthday-morning grin lining his face.

“I see,” said Harris, trying to find the words. “I’m not exactly sure that’s what we talked about. It was all rather … over-the-top.”

The smile dipped momentarily. “Sure it was. But there’s good over-the- top, and there’s bad over-the-top. Which one do you mean, Nige?”

“The one that says that that advertisement won’t be seen by anyone outside this office.” Harris sensed a slight elevation in the tension of the room. “Exactly how I feel, Mr. Grimaldi? What I just saw was insipid, mawkish, and says nothing about the alliance.”

“Don’t underestimate insipid and mawkish,” said Grimaldi, the first hint of something savvier beneath the veneer of the hip salesman. “They sell well.”

“I’m sure they do, but I don’t believe we’re selling anything. We want to inspire. There’s a considerable difference there. Might I ask what happened to the segments I filmed? I thought they made my position quite clear.”

“Fair enough.” Grimaldi nodded to one of his associates. “Let’s call that a first stab.” Again the lights dimmed. The second promo.

The image on the screen this time was far less polished, the angle of the camera slightly skewed. A young man, maybe in his mid-thirties, sat on a park bench, elbows on knees, chin propped on his hands. The camera shifted around him several times, close-up, then back, more odd angles, before it stopped on a medium shot. The man seemed to be looking at something in the distance, but the camera stayed on him. The voice-over began, this one without the husky pomp.

“Time was when I wasn’t sure what to expect for his future.”

A quick cut to a group of boys playing in the park, again choppy angles, long and short shots interspersed in rapid sequence.

“I thought about the usual stuff, high school, college. Get himself a job. And that one day he’d be out here, watching his boy, wondering the same things. The same endless cycle. And I had to ask myself, Is that all I can give him?”

The man stood and began to walk toward the boys. He stopped by a tree and watched as his son tore around with the ball, the other boys giving chase. The man smiled.

“Not by a long shot.”

The man moved out from under the tree, his son catching sight of him, tossing the ball back into the melee before racing up to his father’s side. As the man knelt down to straighten his son’s jacket, the voice-over