The Trinity Game

side, they part ways with the girl and walk on in silence. About five miles down the road, the other monk says, ‘I don’t think it was right, what you did back there. You know we’re not supposed to have contact with women.’ The monk who helped the girl replies, ‘I put the girl down once we crossed the river—why are you still carrying her?’”
    His uncle smiled at the story. “Damn, son, you been carrying that girl a donkey’s age.”
    “That I have,” said Daniel as the television switched over to a commercial for prescription pills guaranteed to give you an erection whenever you want one. “Fourteen years.”
    “Danny…I never meant to bring you any harm. I never thought what I did to support us would drive us apart.”
    “No, you didn’t,” Daniel agreed. With no bitterness in his voice he added, “You were too busy thinking about the money.”
    Trinity took a pull on his beer and nodded. “That I was.”
    The commercials ended and Anderson Cooper came back on, but now there was a BREAKING NEWS banner along the bottom of the screen.
    Cooper said, “I’ve just been handed something during the break…” He shuffled through some photographs and handed them across to Julia, but the camera stayed on him “…CNN has just received pictures of Reverend Tim Trinity. They came to us anonymously and we don’t know when they were taken but they appear to be fairly recent, and I’m told by our staff that they don’t appear to be digitally altered…”
    Daniel felt a rush of vertigo as he recognized the photographs that now filled the television screen—shots of his uncle snorting cocaine in the den of his mansion. Guilt began twisting in his gut like an oversized worm.
    “Wow,” said Trinity. “Didn’t see
that
one coming. You’d think they’d start with something like this, then ramp up to killing me, not the other way around.”
    Daniel struggled to find the words. What could he say? “These pictures didn’t come from Samson’s superiors. They came from the Vatican.”
    “Oh.” Trinity lit a cigarette. “You sure?”
    “I’m sure,” said Daniel. “I took them.”
    “Oh. I see.”
    “Yeah. I came to Atlanta to debunk you, hard. I was convinced you were running a con, and then everything started happening and I didn’t delete them
in case
it turned out you were running a con, and then the billboard came down and I just forgot about them and flew back to Rome planning to convince my boss you were a miracle.”
    Trinity let out a smile. “You know what the Jews say: Man plans and God laughs.” He chuckled out a cloud of blue smoke. “Right you are, Rabbi.”
    “I’m sorry, Tim.”
    “Yeah, well, don’t sweat it, son. I messed up a couple times myself, as you so frequently feel the need to mention.” He reached sideways and clinked his bottle against Daniel’s. They both drank. Trinity picked up the remote, muted the television. “So what’s the plan now?”
    “We drive straight past New Orleans tomorrow,” said Daniel, “down into the bayou. I’ve got a friend in Dulac. Pat Whalquist. Worked with him on a case in Honduras.”
    “A priest?”
    “Not hardly,” Daniel let out a grim laugh. “Pat’s a mercenary.”
    Trinity’s eyebrows went up. “A mercenary? Oh, you have
got
to tell me that story.”
    Daniel remembered the dampness of the church basement, the fear in the eyes of the politician, the weight of the pistol as Pat pressed it into his hand. He remembered the sound of automatic gunfire above and the thundering of soldiers’ boots coming fast down the wooden stairs. He remembered not knowing if he could do it, not knowing if he
should
do it, and then doing it without hesitation when the door banged open. The bucking of the pistol in his hand, the muzzle flashes and smoke and the smell of gunpowder. The blood and gore and the smell of death.
    Daniel drank some beer. “Not much to tell,” he said. “Pat was there to protect a politician and I was there to investigate a miracle claim. We helped each other out, I guess, and we became friends. Anyway, we’ll drive to Dulac, stop with Pat one night, maybe two.See, we can’t beat them to New Orleans, so we wait ’til it becomes clear you’re a no-show and they start thinking about where else you might be headed.”
    “Then what?”
    “One step at a time,” said Daniel. “Pat’ll help plan our strategy for getting you in and out of the Quarter without getting killed.”

Piedmont Park –