24

George F. Mallon had had a hard day of campaigning in the upper Bronx, standing in the freezing rain as his motorcade swept past absolutely nobody, past DeWitt Clinton High School along Mosholu Parkway to the upper Grand Concourse then down to the most miserably attended rally he had ever seen at the Yankee Stadium. The same hardcore congregations of the Electronic Evangelical Church that had been swept up in all five of the boroughs, in New Jersey, and in Connecticut, had been bused there to hear him make the same speech again. There were no television cameras. It had been decided that there would be no radio because they were saving what was left of the appropriation for the last driving week of the campaign after he had arrested Charley Partanna and the real church music would begin to roll out of the mighty organs.

He was weary when he got home to his simple duplex on Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum—which, although he had never had time to enter it, underscored his hunger for art and culture.

Luigi, his perfect Sicilian butler, took his coat, scarf, hat, and gloves and handed him a tall whiskey with some water and ice in a large glass. “Mr. Marvin is in the study, sir.” Marvin was Mallon’s thirty-one-year-old son. Mallon took several sips of his drink before going in to face Marvin because, fact be known, a few hours with Marvin was like several months alone in a spaceship roaming Alpha Centauri. Marvin should have been a clergyman, a spiritual clone of the holy man, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who had instructed his people thusly: “One day Jesus is going to come and strike down all the Supreme Court rulings in one fell swoop,” but Marvin’s dad had barred the way. Marvin was his executive assistant, carrying out the innumerable duties of the tabernacle complex construction around the country, while his dad gave everything he had to become the mayor of the City of New York, the second biggest elective job in the United States of America. Mallon finished half the highball standing alone in the foyer, then he squared his shoulders and marched into the study to join Marvin.

Marvin was built more like his mother than like Sean Connery’s James Bond. He was short and round. He had butter-colored hair and a mouth full of butter-colored teeth. He sang when he talked and, no matter what he said, he worked laboriously at smiling after he said it, while he was saying it, and before he said it, in the orthodox manner of the Electronic Evangelical Clergy. What payess were to orthodox Jews, what a zucchetto was to a Catholic cardinal, the shit eater’s smile was to the high tech evangelical ministry.

George F. Mallon allowed his son to have access to every level of his business except the money side. There was something in Marvin’s manner which hinted that he might have run off with all the money; an illusion, Mallon knew, but Marvin had wanted dearly to be one with the Electronic Evangelical Church, whose only sacrament was money.

Mallon sighed. Money was all Marvin would ever run off with. He would be the safest man in the world to leave with a woman. He might attempt to pray over her in a lewd sacerdotal way but he would never run off with her. Marvin was a eunuch, Mallon was sure of that, and the time had come to get him out of town again before the really heavy campaign action started after Partanna’s arrest, because Marvin was excited by activity and action and he would only screw up at some crucial moment.

Mallon entered the cathedral-like study with its facing lecterns for joint prayer and Bible study. It wasn’t a cozy room because of its six-foot-by-twelve-foot snooker table, its War Room maps from AEF headquarters in Bosnia in World War I that the decorator had off-loaded on the decor, and the enormous carved Florentine desk holding the day’s New York Times crossword puzzle precisely at its centerpoint. Mallon shook his son’s hand in greeting and accepted a kiss on the cheek. He lighted a cigar. Luigi, the perfect butler, slipped another tall drink into his hand.

“Aren’t you drinking a bit too much, Dad?” Marvin asked, saying the name as he always pronounced it: Dod.

“No, Marvin.”

“Alcohol is a narcotic, Dad.”

“Are you keeping busy, Marvin?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“The National Electronic Evangelical Convention and Exhibition begins Saturday next in New Orleans, Marvin. I will be otherwise engaged—rather heavily, as you know—so you must represent the firm in our booth and, I hope, on the platform.”

“It’s all arranged, Dad. I will be the fourth speaker, after Edgar Henshaw Dove. I will leave for New Orleans Sunday morning and I’ll be there just in time for the big Monday conferences.”

“What shall your text be?”

“‘She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.’ Joshua 1:9.”

“I would have thought, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ Matthew.”

Luigi, the perfect butler, tidied up unobtrusively in the room. He refilled Marvin’s cup of Ovaltine.

“You will have a selling job to do, Marvin,” George F. Mallon said. “You’ll need a hard-sell text either from the scriptures or from Will Shakespeare to put across the new Audience-Parishioner’s Retirement Plan in your talk. It’s such a new wrinkle in church activity and such an opportunity that it will go like hot cakes. It pays a large clergy participation—three percent—for each individual audience-parishioner policy sold, so it should go over sensationally with the conventioneers.”

“Dad, let me say this—I think it will be bigger than your concept for the first Christian Resort Complex in America, or even bigger than your new, more aggressive concept for Identity and the Klan.” He grinned greasily in his butter-colored way. “I prophesy a thirty-million-dollar gross in the very first year with that one.”

“Prophesy, Marvin?”

“As a business forecast, Dad. Not in the biblical or political sense. I’m really going to zing it to them in New Orleans.”