The Trinity Game

Nick picked up the telephone receiver, punched a single button, and spoke to his secretary. “George, send Giuseppe in.”

As the door behind him opened, Daniel turned in his seat and nodded hello. The ODA’s top linguist, Father Giuseppe Sorvino had consulted on a handful of Daniel’s cases over the last decade. They only knew each other slightly, but he’d struck Daniel as very bright, and also deeply sad. He’d lost his left arm below the elbow five years earlier while working on something in Israel, but he never talked about it. Whatever the cause of the sadness, it was evident long before.

Giuseppe wore the left sleeve of his jacket folded, the cuff pinned to the outside of the shoulder. This always struck Daniel as strange. Why not just have the sleeve cut and cuffed at the elbow? It was as if Giuseppe were holding out hope that the forearm might suddenly grow back and sprout a new hand. Then he could just let down the sleeve and get on with life.

Father Nick gestured and Giuseppe sat in the empty chair next to Daniel.

“Tell him,” said Nick.

Father Giuseppe bobbed his head and let out an embarrassed smile. “Sometimes on my lunch breaks I like to watch the television evangelists who pretend possession by the Holy Spirit. They are very bad at it, always good for a laugh—”

Nick cut in. “Please, Giuseppe, we don’t need the lunch break. Just what you learned.”

The linguist’s face flushed a little. “Yes, sir. So I was watching Tim Trinity’s tongues act on my lunch break, and I suddenly realized his tongues had a definite linguistic structure. I recorded it and played with the tape, you know, speeding it up, slowing it down, noting patterns.” He rubbed his stump with the palm of his right hand as he spoke. It always seemed to itch more when he was nervous. “Then I remembered the rumor that went around the world when I was a kid. Remembered playing Beatles albums backward on the turntable in search of messages about Paul being dead. Backmasking, they call it. Putting those messages on records.”

Father Nick drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Yes, I’m sorry. Anyway, I played the Trinity tape backward. It sounded like English on Quaaludes. I sped it up by a quarter, then a third.” He stopped rubbing the stump and his hand swept up in a triumphant gesture. “And there it was! Trinity was speaking English backward at two-thirds normal speed. Amazing. I recorded every broadcast since. Whenever he does his tongues act, they manifest the same phenomenon.”

“Thank you, Giuseppe,” said Father Nick. “That’ll be all.”

The abrupt dismissal set Giuseppe to rubbing his stump even faster as he took his leave. Nick watched him go and didn’t look at Daniel until the door had closed behind.

Daniel shrugged. “So Trinity’s upped his game, learned a new parlor trick.”

“And he’s very good at it, which makes him dangerous,” said Nick, pulling a mini tape recorder from the case file. “Listen. This is what it sounds like.” He pressed play.

The crowd noise in the background was now strange, but Tim Trinity’s voice sounded natural. He was saying, “…on the south coast of Georgia, there will be an unexpected thunderstorm tomorrow in the late afternoon. So all you folks down by Brunswick, all the way up to Darien, be sure to pack an umbrella…”

Father Nick clicked the tape off.

“You have got to be kidding me,” said Daniel. “If this were anybody but you, I’d expect the door to fly open and the Candid Camera people to come in.”

“I told you it was gonna get weird,” said Nick.

“OK, weird. But a weather report?”

“Not exactly the kind of message you’d expect from God.”

“Not exactly. What else does he say?”

“He says a lot of trivial crap. A few bigger things too, things that are going to get him noticed. Nothing earth shattering. Thing is, he makes predictions. Sometimes he’s gonna be right—law of averages. He lucked out on that weather report, for example. We checked. And he guessed the winner of the Superbowl. He also gets things wrong, but it’s like reading your horoscope in the paper. You forget all the days it didn’t make sense and remember the times it resonated.”

“OK, so he’s got a new con,” said Daniel, “but I don’t see our interest here. We already know he’s a fake, and he’s not even Catholic.”

“Think about it, Daniel. Think about how it’ll play out if Trinity isn’t exposed as a fake. He’ll just keep going on like this, and soon he’ll have a pretty big record of correct prophecy. And when he does, he’ll reveal how to decode what he’s saying. People will go crazy. Not a few people, millions of people. Catholics, Protestants, Mormons—it won’t matter. People are hungry for miracles, and they’ll be led away from God—they’ll follow a false prophet. We need him debunked before that happens. Question is can I trust it to you? I know things ended badly between you two, and I don’t want you to take the case if you don’t think you can handle it. This can’t be personal. It isn’t about what happened between you and your uncle.”

Twenty years ago, when Daniel was just thirteen, Tim Trinity had been the closest thing to a father that Daniel had ever known. A lot of water under the proverbial bridge since then, but some wounds never fully heal.

“Personal involvement won’t be an issue,” Daniel said. “I have no problem exposing Tim Trinity as a fraud.”

Nick removed his reading glasses. “Then we may just be able to outflank Conrad after all. I can sell His Eminence on my need to assign the case to you, based on your knowledge of Trinity. And if you can nail this case shut fast, I think it’ll convince him that you’re indispensable to the ODA.”

“Thank you.”

“Just don’t make me look like an idiot for assigning it to you.” Father Nick pushed the file folder across the desk. “Transcripts are in the case file—you can read them on the flight to Atlanta.”

Daniel took the folder, stood, and walked to his boss’s four-centuries-old oak office door. Carved in the wood was Saint John, the Baptist, kneeling in the Jordan with his arms open, while Jesus instructed him to fulfill all righteousness.

And a voice came out of the heavens, “You are my beloved Son; in You I am well- pleased.”

After completing his morning prayers, Daniel skipped rope for fifteen minutes, working up a good sweat. Then he donned the gloves and worked out on the heavy bag that hung in the corner of his bedroom, enjoying the electric jolt that ran up his arm each time he landed a particularly vicious blow. The bag bucked and the chains rattled and the feeling of power spurred Daniel on. He put even more into his punches, employing his legs, his lower body, and the bag bucked harder and the chains rattled louder. He kept at it until his shoulders and wrists begged for mercy and the muscles of his arms began to twitch from fatigue.

As he pulled the gloves off, his gaze fell to the framed photo on the dresser. From the center of a boxing ring, eighteen-year-old Danny Byrne looked back at him with a prideful grin. The teenager wore silk trunks—purple and gold—and his bare chest, not yet as hairy as it was now in the mirror above the dresser, glistened with sweat. He held a Golden Gloves trophy above his head.

Sometimes it felt like yesterday. Sometimes, a hundred years ago. Daniel couldn’t decide which feeling was the sadder.

Daniel drank espresso in the first-class lounge, waiting for them to call his flight, thinking: One week, at most, and you can wash your hands of the man again.