 
# The Coming  
of  
Josephson

## A novel by

### Jack Markowitz
Copyright 2000

By Jack Markowitz, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781493614660

Smashwords Edition

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# Contents

Part One-THE RALLY

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Part Two-THE FARM

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Part Three-THE ROAD

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Part Four-THE STREET

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About the Author

# Part One - THE RALLY
# 1.

One morning in late winter an advertisement appeared in New York's largest newspaper. It spread across a full page in the gaudy typefaces of a circus poster. This was the text:

**ON THE LEVEL**

**I will pay you Twenty Dollars**

**- $20.00 Cash -**

**(In an envelope placed in your hand)**

**To Come Out and Hear Me**

**SPEAK**

**Briefly - Say, 20 Minutes -**

**At New Manhattan DiaDome**

**Lexington Ave. Gate**

**Sunday, March 9**

**8 P.M.**

**-**

**Of course you will ask: Why would anybody do this? I 'll tell you. I want an audience. Enough to pay for your time. It is that important. When I have said my piece, you get a $20 bill. Then good-bye. No strings. No names or addresses. If 20,000 people come out, it will cost me $400,000. Plus the hiring of the hall. Plus this ad. But it will be worth it.**

**-Jess Josephson**

**Repeat: THIS IS ON THE LEVEL.**

"My idea!" said Mary Mulcahy at the door of M. L. Silverman. They were neighbors in a faded high-rise off Riverside Drive. Flushed of cheek and much too fat (a "tub filler," as she said), the woman was all but breathless. "Can you imagine, Meyer... dreaming up a stunt twenty years ago - at least twenty - then one day there it is! A full-pager. Just what you'd have ordered. It's... vindication!" The newspaper hung from her fingers like a ship's sails ready to fill.

"Don't tell me yet," said Silverman, a widower of an age when suspense is either intolerable or one of the last tingles. "Come in, you'll have coffee."

"I never found the right account," Mary said while her host rattled about with cups, spoons, and senior citizen instant. "Imagine the daring of the fellow. All his chips on the table, up front." With a pair of half-lens glasses on her nose she read the text aloud, rolling it on her palate like an amusing wine. "Repeat," she ended, waggling a finger at all skeptics and holdbacks, "this is on the level!" Then she laughed, which caused her neighbor to hack in mild contagion, though he failed to see the humor.

"There's bound to be a catch," said the man of experience..

"Of course, Meyer. But he's _paying_ people to hear him. My idea! Asleep these twenty years behind the magic fire, waiting for a Siegfried."

A blank stare told her the retired schoolmaster had missed the operatic reference or was focused too hard on the catch. "What's he after, do you think?"

"You tell me," said the Mulcahy (when professionally aroused she thought of herself that way, ready to do Irish battle). "Come, Meyer, react. Be the voice of the people. What does this rogue want of us?"

The other stroked his chin. "Something..." He was thinking aloud. Then his rheumy eyes brightened. "... That will bring him in a hundred for every twenty."

"Ah, you're in the right direction. But make it a thousand."

"So much?"

"I'll tell you the first thing he's selling. Curiosity. Word of mouth. He has us talking about it. That's the beauty of this stunt, although the bait I had in mind years ago, would you believe, was only two dollars."

"Inflation," said Silverman so solemnly his guest had to laugh. Tonal sounds arose from her. She seemed to contain, for a woman past the bloom, a lingering music. His eyes wandered to a gap in her blouse buttons, strained by a voluminous bosom. She projected an absurd girlishness. Her red hair, streaked with gray and hard to brush, expressed as she sometimes fancied unquenchable youthful fires.

"You loved the advertising game," said the old man.

"Public relations," she corrected him. "I was in the P.R. end. Know what I'd be doing this minute? Phoning city desks, TV and radio editors. 'Who is this guy?' I'd ask like any member of the public. 'What's his racket?' Get 'em investigating. News is what you want. The free stuff is worth ten times more than advertising. This Josephson, I bet, has someone stirring the pot right now."

As the day proceeded, however, the P.R. lady was surprised to find the pot not stirring. Surprised and also gratified. It showed instincts like hers were still needed out there. The other newspapers contained not a word; she ran out to a kiosk on Broadway to check. Nor could she catch a mention on radio or television.

But next morning was better: ten paragraphs on an inside page of the _Times_. And no repeat of the ad, which was correct, classic, the budget blown on a single placement, an elephant thrown in the town pond, and let all the ripples spread. The news story was straightforward and humorless, but the Mulcahy treasured every word with her neighbor, this time over real coffee, and sweet rolls, in her place.

After many inquiries (and how about _that_ for first-day response?) DiaDome management had required a $400,000 performance bond to insure the advertised $20 per head would indeed be paid. This may have been a first. No one could recall a New York speaker "buying" an audience. Described by a staff person as "friendly and businesslike," the advertiser had paid one visit to the hall and reserved its first open Sunday. The rent, amount undisclosed, was advanced by cashier's check. Mr. Josephson gave no clue to what he would speak about. But he did leave an address, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and an affiliation. He was a home builder.

"Uh-huh, a real estate deal," said Silverman, confirmed in one of his surmises.

"No," said Mary. "I'm still betting it's something... transcendent (possibly a first-time use of that word in her life). Didn't he make a point of calling it important?" She had memorized the ad.

"And you believe him?"

With a blush straight out of high school she smiled. "I do, kind of."

At last, and in a pack, TV and radio discovered the elephant in the pond. By evening the networks were giving it prime time. One made it the text for its anchor's all-important closing comment:

"Amid the cacophony of the age, in our failure to touch even as we reach out; amid the drumbeat of ceaseless communication, it is fun - yet sobering, too - to find someone who wants attention so much he'll pay for it. 'Lend me your ears,' cried Marc Antony. Not good enough today. 'Sell me them!' says a guy named Jess."

WHO IS MONEYBAGS SPEAKER? the _Post_ headlined next morning. "On Hook for $400 G's ('Cause He Wantsa Be Heard Sooo Bad) - See Page 3." The story was datelined Pittsburgh. Two staff members had been sent out there. But Jess Josephson could not be found, either at his apartment in town or what the report called his "gentleman's farm in bosky western Pennsylvania." The "mystery man," as it said, was on leave from his privately-owned company ("annual salesguess: $150 million"). "We're not building anything around New York," a puzzled aide was quoted. Two photographs ran with the story, one of a glassy corporate headquarters: JB Construction, Inc. The other, unprofessionally shot, fuzzy in sunshine, was of a grinning young man in T shirt, jeans, and boots; and at his side, with an arm around his shoulder, an elder in business suit. The caption: "Jess Josephson, before his promotion to company president six years ago, with his late father, millionaire builder Morris Josephson."

"Nice-looking boy," said Silverman. "And from the names, Jewish."

"And don't think it hurts," Mary said, "to get the tabloids calling you a 'mystery man.'"

Friday brought more news, this time of a $20,000 rental surcharge for added security. "All this publicity about the cash he's handing out," said a DiaDome spokesman. "We don't want to give ideas to crooks." Evening television caught Mr. Mystery in Manhattan, emerging from a bank in trench coat and dark glasses. With a grin he held up a twenty-dollar bill. _Tacky,_ Mary thought. She would not have let a cameraman put him up to that. He dodged gracefully, though, when asked what he planned to talk about. "I don't want to scoop myself," he said. "Come hear." _But take off the shades. Don 't look like you're hiding something,_ the Mulcahy mentally advised.

At age sixty-two the P.R. lady declined to consider herself put to pasture. In fact an insurance company still employed her part-time. With an earlier start she believed she might have had her own agency; if she hadn't spent so many years as a nurse; not to mention a nun. (She still sometimes thought about the handsome patient, an injured cop, who had shamelessly flirted, calling her "Virgin Mary.") Her leap over the wall, then so-called, didn't happen till years later, when it proved easier than she had imagined to quit the sisters and join an agency that specialized in fund-raising for health causes. In thirty years "outside," helped by clients in Wall Street and an inheritance from an uncle who never approved of pretty girls taking the veil in the first place, she had put aside a nest egg and was under no real pressure to keep working. Even her late-blooming relationships with men hadn't turned out all that badly. One was headed straight for matrimony, had her lover, a Jewish radiologist, not died of a heart attack in the midst of a nasty divorce. She still wore the ring poor Bernie gave her; still found it comforting, too, despite a battered faith, to shed a tear now and then at a Latin Mass.

A final pre-event angle turned up in the Sunday papers. A welfare rights group planned a "march of the needy" to the DiaDome. "If anybody is handing out money," said a spokeswoman, "it belongs to folks who can't keep food on the table."

Mary gave her neighbor Silverman first refusal rights to accompany her, but she understood his reluctance to venture out after dark and in truth her preference was to attend alone. The promo might prove irresistible, and what if she saw a chance to slip a business card in this Josephson's hand? She also wanted to arrive early, to watch the place fill. This was her idea on trial. She had proprietary feelings.

She climbed up out of the subway at 6:30. The air was raw and windy. A remnant of dusk faded down the canyon towards Jersey. The avenue in front of the arena was lighted white as day but with none of the warmth. Two television trucks were parked by the curb, a positive sign of coverage. A cameraman in a parka stood on one of the truck roofs shifting from side to side in the cold, waiting for a crowd to shoot. Block letters on the marquee said: JESS SPEAKS 8 PM.

In the lobby Mary braced for a horde of derelicts baited by the twenty dollars. Yet the fraternity of the extended hand was mixed with people of respectable enough appearance, a rare integration. Passing through a turnstile, she entered the hall itself and thought _, oh, a lot to fill._ The light was dim, the space vast in the familiar surprise of great interiors. Empty seats stretched to black distances. The speaker's platform looked dwarfed, despite a row of flags extending it down one side of the hall. Red, white, and blue bunting hung on the dais, left over perhaps from a veterans or union convention. The stage was bare except for a single standing microphone, its shaft glistening.

Mary's impulse was to sit towards the back. The speaker might prove a letdown, or the audience so skimpy she would stick out in a front seat, the fat lady eccentric. Yet she also felt a need to read her man's face and hoped by example to encourage others all the way in. The back pew syndrome was deadly, she felt; whenever she had authority she would shoo people forward. The result of these deliberations was a center seat on an aisle, third row, farther forward than anyone else yet present. She unbuttoned her coat and threw it off her shoulders. She felt hot and tense, as if the obligation to fill the house were somehow hers. A big four-sided clock overhead read 6:38, still plenty of time. But early arrivals who straggled in under the red EXITs showed no signs of festivity, subdued by the immensity of the place, as if assembling for a cathedral funeral.

Just before 7:00 came stirrings of life. A gang of young people, students in headgear and jackets, entered with noise and horseplay. _Come closer, kids,_ Mary willed them forward. They filed into her section but rows back, keeping an escape route open, nevertheless forming a potential cheering (or jeering) section. Soon after came the welfare army, hundreds strong, glad to be out of the cold. Marching two and three abreast, many carrying placards, and feeling entitled, they made for the front rows of the center, right center, and left center sections, filling every seat till they ran out of bodies. "Glad to have you," Mary said, rising to admit a row full. A huge black woman glared down at her, inspecting for sarcasm. But her greeting was real. "I'd love to fill this place," she said.

Now came cameras. Lights played over heads and waving arms, silhouetting people, raising the level of cheer. Microphones approached persons never before asked for an opinion. "Think you'll get your money?" "What if the twenty bucks is only good against a purchase?" Entire sections stood and "did the wave" as light beams swept them.

By 7:40 the Mulcahy had grown comforted. The arena was at least half full. A hurrah went up when two hundred-odd shabby types marched in. They raised a crude banner: "Bronx Homeless." Some shook signs for the cameras. One said, "Warmer Here Than Where I Sleep." Another: "Twenty bucks? I've Done It For Less, Kiddo."

A hush fell when a man walked onto the dais, but he was in janitor's uniform. He tapped the microphone: "Testing, one, two." Wiseacres applauded and he hurried off. "Great speech, whereza money?" someone yelled. "Short but to the point," cracked another. At 7:45 an unseen organist struck up a tune. Someone near Mary recognized it, "The Man I Love." She recalled the line, "Someday he'll come along..." The next tune drew a laugh: "Send in the Clowns." When the organ played, "I Got Plenty o' Nothin'," the homeless and welfare groups stood and hurrahed as if acknowledged. "That's right!" "That's us!"

At last the overhead clock came to the hour. The organ sounded three chords. House lights dimmed, brightening by contrast the spot on the standing microphone. The air felt thick with noise, body heat, and anticipation. Mary craned about for a final estimate: at least three-quarters filled... more. Not bad.

A door opened at one side of the dais. A man strode to the microphone. The crowd buzzed. There had been no introduction but this was unmistakably he. He had on a white suit, blue shirt, striped necktie. The image of riverboat gambler came to mind; cruise director; male model. "A dude," Mary heard a black woman say near her. Her own thought was: a charmer. But the suit was wrong: too flashy. Here was a fellow who needed a certain amount of touching up. Yet who else but he had saddled up her bronc and taken it to ride? She was disposed to like him very much.

Tall and trim, he took a moment to shield his eyes against the spotlight glare, as if as curious about the audience as they were about him. He looked to be thirty or so, his face of good color but not ideally chiseled, the nose a trifle deviated, possibly reshaped in some previous adventure. His hair was dark, the brow wide and unlined, with a vein at the temple that suggested, reliably or not, sensitivity. His jaw was square but at ease; and the glance he cast over the crowd - _his_ crowd, sought, bought, and paid for - looked shrewd and assessing. He leaned into the microphone, all but kissing it like a cabaret singer, his words taking flight without strain, birds of sound to dark and distant reaches.

"Okay," he said, "I'm the crazy guy."

Chuckles lapped through the hall. _Just the note,_ thought Mary Mulcahy. _You 've got us, what will you do with us?_

"Now let me tell you what it's all about," said Jess Josephson.

# 2.

_Here it comes,_ the Rev. Peter Winslow thought. _Do we live another minute?_

"I believe," the speaker said, "the religions of this world have grown obsolete and have got to go. They are not doing a good job for God, and they're not doing a job for us."

His voice boomed from loudspeakers. To Winslow, who stood at the head of an aisle, the sound seemed huge, rolling over the crowd like a thunder of prophecy, more than could have come from a little mouth on a distant stage.

"Look around you, people," said the thunderer. "Some very bad news for the human race is coming - already here in fact. And not from God, don't blame Him. From us. Cultural breakdown and moral rot, just for starters. And suicide bombers, too - driven by a faith gone crazy! Religions that ought to give us a sensible belief, the grounding to live decently and well, aren't up to it anymore. We need something better..."

_Letdown!_ Winslow felt it like the listing of a ship. The moment "religion" gets mentioned, the deadliest of subjects. Someone near voiced an obscenity, echoing the minister's own thought. And after such sweet buildup.... _But give him a minute. Give him a chance to surprise you._

"We need a better idea of God," the voice boomed, reverberating from walls, floors, and balconies. "A common sense idea that stops dividing people. That makes people smarter, not dumber."

A rumble of resistance arose. The speaker let it pass like a surfer on a swell. "A goddamn atheist we hadda come hear," someone said within earshot of the Rev. Mr. Winslow, who now made a decision to move towards the stage.

"I won't try to tell you religions don't do any good," the loudspeakers boomed. "Sure they do, in a charitable way. But I say this. Today their idea of God does more harm than good. It's time to put an end to them."

The dam burst. Jeering broke out. The stage looked a hell of a distance away to Peter Winslow, who was on leave from a Presbyterian church with a mostly white congregation in Pittsburgh and for the first time wished to be back there. He moved faster and it would not have been well to get in his way. He stood a solid two hundred and ten pounds, once a college tackle, and his crewcut of steel-gray hair hinted at a nostalgia for his twenty years as a Marine. And not chaplaining either but in combat units, the Gulf War and Iraq. _Put an end to them, Jess? Is that all? Enough for one night 's work?_

"Siddown!" the jawbone of an ass brayed across the arena.

The crowd-pleaser raised a hand. "You might think I'm here to talk atheism. No, sir," he said. "I wouldn't try to sell you something so empty. I've got something better, a lot better." He paused for them to want it, like a teacher in a noisy class. "But it can't be baloney," he said. "Religion has got to get off the baloney diet. It can't promise illusions like heaven, much less the Muslim seventy-two virgins. It can't... "

"This stiff wantsa get killed," someone said as Winslow strode past. The minister-on-leave blamed himself. He had wanted to circulate for feedback; to learn what worked and what didn't. But had he overestimated Jess? He should have stayed backstage - onstage even, in a two-man front. Why wave these red flags? _Give 'em the good stuff!_

Instead the builder excavated a deeper hole for himself. "It can't promise," he said into the noise, "that after we die..." _Die, die, die,_ Winslow heard multi-speaker echoes. "Our souls will go on living in endless bliss. That's what I call baloney." The word began grating on the ex-marine. _Just say bullshit,_ he thought, _you 're in New York now._ He reached the bottom of the aisle and stared up at his accomplice. To the natives Jess must have looked like a wee bird on a red, white, and blue nest, chirping some damned un-American stuff, too. Arms folded, he stood like a laborer paid by the hour; no skin off his back that the job was held up. He didn't even look surprised. He had come to tack his theses on the world's door, and some would gag on it; all right then. _Maybe he gets his kicks this way,_ Winslow thought; _stirring up the animals, acting out lion-tamer fantasies. Who am I hooked up with here?_ He could not truthfully say he knew his heretic very well. Three months before, they had not met.

Now, belatedly, the crowd-buyer had to acknowledge a degree of public displeasure. "Hey, folks, I thought we had a deal here," he said. "I pay you twenty bucks, you give me twenty minutes. I'm keeping up my end." A spatter of applause greeted this display of brass.

To his left Winslow passed a section packed with the poor. Hip to hip under the eyes of the speaker, they were better behaved than most, yet without enthusiasm, as if the shame of being bought (like their ancestors!) had dawned on them. It meant seeing stones thrown at the Lord. The few whites among them looked misplaced. One was a fat redhead, a surprising ally. She shouted through cupped hands, "Talk, Jess, we'll listen," and caught the rascal's eye. He threw her a wink.

"I said heaven is baloney," he said into the din. "But there's no hell either." _That_ surprised them. "Hell, now. There's real nonsense for you," he said, feeding into it. "Terrorizing the good people more than the bad, what's the sense of that? And there's nothing to it. Want to know why?" He raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of sweet willingness to elucidate. The noise retreated a decibel or two.

Winslow's face felt as if on fire. Not one but a bank of lights around the balcony beamed at the stage. Squinting into the glare, he saw the audience as Jess above him must have seen it, in dense dark haze, a formless body steaming with breath, heat, and odors, massively alive, a creature of one life and many lives. To win such a beast to your cause! The pensioned marine sensed something of the desire that drives demagogues (and maybe his friend up there).

"Take the worst guy you can imagine," said Jess Josephson and wasted no time offering Hitler. He thrust a fist over the dais rail as if plunging the dictator in Dante's inferno. Five seconds, ten seconds, his hand flailed in mimed agony. "We're talking lots of degrees here, folks. We're talking blast furnaces," he said. And in no time the sinner seemed to have experienced correction. "Oh, he's burnt bad, folks," Jess said, inspecting his hand. Yet he plunged it back. People laughed. He exhibited a knack for comic timing. It pleased the elder accomplice. "But what is God supposed to do if you listen to the religions? Keep him there for eternity! After he's learned his lesson. What's the good of punishing endlessly? Are you going to reform this guy, or do one bit of good for anybody he's harmed? Sadism without limit is all it is. Sorry, folks, I think better of God. I don't buy that."

_Damn right,_ Winslow nodded on the floor below _._ And a true applause broke out, though not from everyone. _Some people don 't even want hell debunked,_ he thought. Walkouts moved up the aisles. _But forget unanimity,_ the Presbyterian told himself. That's where faith always gets in trouble, going for a hundred percent, even if it has to kill you. _Why does God have to be the only hundred percent question?_ He jammed his hands in the pockets of his blazer (a habit his wife had quit trying to break; "Instant Baggywear," she called him.) But this was more like it. First hit of the game.

The extinguisher of hellfire now claimed that heaven makes no better sense. "Want to know why?" he said, repeating the hands-up gesture. "Same reason. Eternity! What are we supposed to do for a billion years, play golf? With no clubs, no holes, no balls?" The double entendres drew laughter. _Don 't cheapen it,_ Winslow thought. _Try out lines like that on me._

"But the worst thing about heaven, the _worst_ thing..." He let the sentence hang in air, and curiosity brought the noise down. "... Is that there's no work to do. Just sitting around. Forever. That's absurd, folks! God wouldn't have done that to us. He's a worker himself, right? A creator? He wouldn't make _doing nothing_ the ideal. Just what we all need, an eternity of boredom. We'd be screaming to get out of there. Heaven would be as bad as hell. They count on people not thinking it through, that's all."

He seemed to welcome the jeers mixed with laughter. It made Peter Winslow wonder. Would he welcome a dozen faithfuls charging up on stage to break his bones, too? Couldn't beat the publicity. For all his personal charm ("a thoroughly nice guy, that's the wonder of it," the churchman had more than once assured his wife) Jess behind a microphone seemed capable of, if not intent on, inciting riot. _I am going to get my head beat in with this guy,_ the senior troublemaker intuited.

Having disposed of the afterlife, the crowd-baiter turned to this life. He asked if God could be shown reliably to answer prayers on earth. He paused, as if not wanting to rush anyone. Then he gave his own answer: that after centuries of failed performance, religion falls back on a non-answer. "The ways of the Lord are inscrutable. So just believe. And when something really awful happens, believe more. He's testing you, Joe, loves you better for all the misery piled on. Sorry, folks, I don't buy that either."

"Go to hell then!" someone shouted. "Yeah!" cried others. "About time!" There were people for whom Jess Josephson was undercutting all hopes of straightening accounts. Not in this life, and none afterwards? No justice at all? Winslow passed a cripple with stumps for legs, maybe a war vet, in a wheelchair, who had come in out of the cold or for the wretched twenty bucks. Was it worth it to learn he'd never stand again, even in the gates of heaven? "Fuckin' atheist!" the man shouted.

"Okay, try it another way," the incorrigible one bore on. He posed the idea of praying and indeed getting cured of cancer. "But if God lends a hand, why did he spare me and not the guy in the next bed, with six kids, all praying better than I do? Or six thousand killed the same day in an earthquake? Or six _million_ in the Nazi holocaust? Why me? What's so wonderful about me?" He turned to another section of the hall. "I'm sorry, folks, I have to be blunt about this." (Winslow smiled. _And till now you 've been so tactful!)_ "It's offensive, downright offensive, to think God singled me out. Where is His sense of proportion? This is a big world, awful things happening every moment. Children starving, women raped, prisoners tortured, all begging for help. Yet God reaches down in my gut to cure one cancer but lets a ship full of people sink a thousand miles away? His eye is on the sparrow, we're told. But a mother crying over a dead child: 'Look at _this_ sparrow, how could You miss this sparrow here?'"

Hairs rose on the back of Peter Winslow's neck. This was the Josephson he had counted on, eloquent, angry. "A God who answers _some_ prayers is less trustworthy than a God who answers none," said Jess. "If no prayers are answered, okay, we can live with that. We know we've got to help ourselves. But a God who advertises prayer answers and then does and doesn't, is like a referee who changes the rules in the middle of the game. Then changes them back again. _Keeps_ changing them, so you never know where you stand. You play wondering when he'll turn on you. And deep down, I'm afraid, you hate Him."

"Boo!" a man yelled, close enough to make Winslow's ears ring. "Keep your fuckin' money!" The foulmouth kicked past someone in an aisle seat. Others stood, shouted, waved fists, but Jess seemed to learn something from the growls of the mob-beast. He folded his arms. He listened like an officer to a bombardment, waiting for his moment to advance. Winslow doubted he could have stood up to it. No one had ever jeered his sermons. Better maybe if they had. God was maddening enough, what if rage in the pews were not as spiritually valid, as respectful of the truths underlying the universe as hymns, candles, and bowed heads?

"I do not want to hate God," Jess Josephson said. "But in the old religions this is the God we get. A distortion. A monster."

"Siddown, siddown, siddown!" The shout took on numbers and a rhythm. Soon the hall was shuddering with it. The speaker was forced to pause. A rain of torn paper fluttered down. But an opposing chant also sounded: "Let him talk! Let him talk! LET HIM TALK!" It came from a section of young people, students, offended perhaps by free speech under attack. Others joined the beat of encouragement, rhythmically applauding. Soon this racket overcame the other. On the dais Josephson waved and grinned. Everyone wasn't against him, for sure.

"This is why..." he raised both hands, "hear me out, folks... this is why the old religions can't hold anymore. We need a realistic belief, something that makes sense. People may still go to church and synagogue, but there's no nourishment for the mind there. Myth and mummery. Intellectual junk-food..."

"Shuddup! Siddown!"

"Let him talk! Let him talk!"

"Religion has become habit. Going through the motions. There's no more thought to it than changing a tire."

"Shuddup, ya creep!"

"Get the hell back to Pittsburgh!"

"... Or else a desperate piety, performing exact rituals and observing tabus to keep the monster happy. And this is a tragedy. Because... because there is a real God!" Taken aback, the noise-beast hesitated. "And I do not hate Him or fear Him."

_Ah._ Winslow sensed a collective sigh. _How we want that God should be,_ he thought. _Any definition of God, any amount of God - something! Not nothing._

"Do you want a believable God?" said Jess Josephson. "I say, start with the world. Something set it here. Or else the atoms always were, and swam together by chance. But then, how did the atoms get here? I don't care how far back you go, how finely you divide the dust of the universe, there had to be a spark. Logic demands it." Jess was being nothing but conventional here, reasoning from a First Cause. The dullest seminarian would know the drill by heart.

"You might ask, what's so new about that?" said Josephson. "I say, nothing. It's the oldest proof of God there is, but still I think a pretty good one. All right then, what kind of God? A father figure, mother figure? Or some unpicturable Power, beyond form or personality? I confess to you, I don't know. At that point my imagination, such as it is, runs out." Another sigh, this of disappointment, as Winslow gauged it. _They 'd like more, a personal encounter, a new Moses on Sinai. Too bad. Not this century._

"But this much is clear to me," the speaker went on. "Where work is accomplished there is purpose. The creation was not for nothing. It had a purpose. And what was God's purpose?" He floated the question and was rewarded with a pause in the noise. "I can only guess."

_And not be hooted down?_ thought Winslow. _Will we turn the world over on a guess?_ Yet the audience allowed it. Something in Jess Josephson's manner held them, maybe nothing more than a naive candor: puzzling it out in public, claiming not one inch more of truth than could be grasped in full view of thousands. "My guess," he said, "is that the purpose of the universe was -- the act of creation itself."

He gave this the interval of a breath. "God Who existed before us -- before everything -- must have needed purpose in _His_ existence, as we do in ours. Eternity wasn't enough for Him. Endless enjoyment of His own perfect thought? Not enough. He had to get doing, had to get His hands dirty. To make something. This." A sweep of the hand took in the hall, the world. "And why? Why invent a universe? Only to exert power? To have petty creatures like us to push around? Surely not. How wrong of the religions to tell us that. They belittle God!"

To a chorus of gasps he insisted on this. "They force the Architect of the universe into our miserable pattern of kings, dictators, ordinary power seekers. No way! It's too trivial. God is above all that, He has to be. His will was to make out of nothing _everything._ And right there, it seems to me, is our clue to a truer relationship with Him. We should take our purpose from _His_ purpose -- from God's own example. And create."

"Unitarianism in a fresh suit of clothes," Winslow heard someone near him say and he had to smile. _Oh no,_ he thought, _not one more "ism," not that!_ A moment of quiet settled on the crowd. _Attention or mystification?_ he wondered. _Do they think he 's telling them to write books, paint pictures?_ And just then, taking advantage of the lull, a loudmouth bellowed: "Your twenty minutes are up, Bub!"

Winslow glanced at the clock overhead and cursed. It showed 8:22. Rhythmic clapping began. _Just when he 's getting hot..._

"What we can all create is our lives," Josephson pushed on. "Life is the material put in our hands to work. _We are what we must create! "_

Whether it was the conviction in his voice or the oddity of the idea, for a moment he had them again. "What a turn-on for the mind it would be," he said, "for ordinary people whose view of life is stunted by the scare-God when the real God is there all the time." Someone in the student section shouted, "Yeah, yeah!" as if it really were an igniting idea. Winslow strode down an aisle clapping, hoping to keep enthusiasm alive. "A better idea of God wouldn't need official keepers of truth. No sacred dogmas you'd better believe or go to hell," Josephson said.

He was batting ideas out in the dark now, hoping they landed for hits. But seats were creaking. Thousands had got up. They wanted their twenty dollars. Many might not have listened to a word. Yet some were hushing for quiet. Here and there scuffles broke out. _People will get physical over this,_ Winslow thought. _Don 't kid yourself. This crowd may be our best behaved._

"A proper religion wouldn't ask for your money. That's a dead giveaway," said Josephson. "They're selling you God the doer of favors, to support their organizations. But God is free! Send no checks or money orders!" Bursts of cheers and laughter took on a rhythm, which he tried to feed into. "No more church, no more synagogue!" But this was talking too loosely. There were boos. "I don't advocate anything violent," he had to backtrack. "Absolutely not. No violence, no damage. Just quit going. They'll fall of their own weight."

The loudspeakers had less effect. Too many were on their feet, some standing on seats, waving arms, hats and scarves. People were with him or against him, already into their roles as public chorus. "I don't know... " he said, holding up a hand, trying to retain the beast by eye contact with thousands. "Shh!" his partisans pleaded. Finding a gap in the noise, he threw some final words into it. "I can't truthfully say where this is going, but I hope we have made" - miraculously in the strain to hear came one more hush - "a beginning." The word echoed: "beginning... beginning."

His hand went up. A photo flash caught it. "Thanks, everybody." And he stepped back.

A cheer exploded. It seemed to surprise him. He stood grinning in bursts of light. Torn paper fluttered down. _Still alive!_ thought Winslow. His shirt was soaked. He caught sight of the fat redhead down front. There were tears on her cheeks. "Terrific, terrific!" she was saying. The minister-on-leave looked at the high clock: 8:26. _Not bad; a lot covered. Rework it... stir up less anger..._ But damned if people weren't coming forward, applauding towards the dais. Above Winslow's head Jess Josephson leaned into the microphone. "Hey, folks, I forgot. The cash is all there." Cheers sounded. "Guards will hand out envelopes as you leave. Don't rush. Safe trip home."

Enthusiasts eddied below him. Somebody called out something about a "talk show." Reporters held up microphones. He bent over the rail, shook hands, cupped his other hand around an ear to catch questions. "Seven days? No, billions of years. Didn't I make that clear?..."

Then Winslow was astonished to hear the redhead, in a sweat beside him, trumpeting upward like a mare elephant - and _who the hell was she anyway?_ "They've got enough story for now, Jess. Call a press conference tomorrow. I can help."

# 3.

It was a cold gray morning in New York's Union Square, and a gawky, underfed-looking man was asked: "Excuse me, sir, are you a rabbi?"

Judah Iskaritz turned, cringing to be so accosted. His untrimmed beard, his black hat and coat were indeed stereotypes, but couldn't a Jew look like a Jew without being a rabbi? Should he be asked if he loaned money at usury, too? His eyes widened to find himself addressed by a Gentile clergyman, short, gray, and fierce-looking, the man's chin thrust out above a neck too scrawny for his Roman collar.

"Rabbi... yes," Iskaritz said, flustered to be explaining. "But without congregation. A journalist of sorts. _Jewish Weekly Views_."

"Ah, welcome to the club,' said the other, extending a hand. "Jeremy Kirk. Hate to be called 'Reverend.' Editor of _Christians All_ , an ecumenical newsletter - also weekly -- from the Protestant side. Didn't see you at yesterday's press conference, did I?"

"Unfortunately, a prior commitment..."

"Should've been there," the inquisitor snapped. "He'll give us a lot of trouble."

"Us?"

"Christians and Jews both. We're in this together - talk about ecumenical! I suspect this Josephson will be worse for you folks than for us, though, and I say it in friendly spirit. He's one of yours, y'know. A fresh source of anti-Semitism, which, Lord knows, we don't need." Iskaritz frowned at the admonition, yet had to admit a certain validity. "If I were Jewish," the _goy_ persisted, "I would go all-out to dissuade him. Have one of your people break his legs - joke!" A mirthless smile flashed. "What he's talking is pure rot, of course. Not the point. But the mischief, the damage." He clicked his tongue. "A co-religionist might talk sense to him. He wouldn't hear it from me yesterday."

"No?"

"You didn't catch the wise-ass reply he gave me? The _Times_ had it verbatim... Blast, I should've worn another sweater." The Rev. Mr. Kirk glared up at the throne of heaven, which promised more discomforts. The air was damp and wintry, with a chill that knifed equally into the coats of Christian and Jew. Clouds hung low and dirty in the sky, as if the Almighty, weary of the stupidities below, wished them out of sight for one morning at least. The churchman said, "I asked if his own faith, Judaism, didn't satisfy him, had he considered mine, Christianity? A fair question, wouldn't you agree?"

The rabbi-journalist shrugged a minimal affirmative but felt guilty at entertaining even a thought of apostasy.

"He said he _respected_ Christianity, thank you very much, but ticked off two or three ways he differed. I asked his qualifications for 'differing.' Is he a theologian perhaps? 'What were Jesus' qualifications?' he comes back at me. 'The Bible calls him a carpenter. Well, I also do that kind of work. Plus plumbing and electrical.'"

The rabbi squeezed his eyes shut in shame. In fact he had read the tasteless exchange in the morning's _Post_ under a painful headline, "Pay-to-Listen Builder Claims Experience Better Than J.C.'s." The Rev. Mr. Kirk said, "Joke of the century, eh? He'll do wonders for interfaith relations with cracks like that. Not that our media colleagues didn't lap it up. You should have heard the heehaws among the 'first draftsmen of history!' And in their reports fell all over themselves to advertise today's appearance. Tah!"

"The press likes him, do you think?"

"Loves him! How well he fits the bill. Young, rich, 'cool.' Spent over a half-million on the other night's caper and hinted there's more where that came from. Oh, he'll make wonderful copy. Will he buy more audiences, he was asked. No, that was a 'stunt,' he says. Once in a lifetime. Just to draw attention. _Admits_ it to the very dolts eating out of his hand. Now he'll speak wherever he can get a crowd - today, Union Square, exact time and place - and they all report it! I'm glad you're here, Rabbi. Someone's got to sound the alarm. Just what the new millennium needs, eh? Even less religion than the scraps we've still got." Shaking his head, the angry one moved a few steps off and moodily eyed the accretion of audience.

Judah Iskaritz wondered if the editor of _Christians All_ would have addressed him, would even have noticed him, but for the satisfaction (and threat?) that this Josephson _momzer,_ this bastard, could be blamed on the Jews. Let one Jew make an ass of himself and "that's the Jews for you," plural. And now Union Square! All his twenty-nine years the rabbi-journalist had lived in New York, and he could not remember his last visit to this tourist "point of interest," honored in folklore only. When had the mutilated parklet ceased to offer "soapbox oratory" on anything above the crackpot level? Before the Second World War, the First even? Maybe Josephson didn't know what had become of the myth, the sort of out-of-towner who no doubt gave his regards to Broadway, too. _So good luck stopping people, Mr. Modernizer._

Pedestrians hurried past, hunched in their collars. The square's chief function nowadays was that of a dog walk and a short-cut between avenues. Partly paved-over years ago (to reduce sleepout space for the homeless) what remained was an arc of concrete along Fourteenth Street and, farther back, trees, benches, ungrassed earth, and dark paths. Gusts of wind shook branches that as yet showed not the palest green. A scattering of street characters loitered about, with low business to transact. Couldn't miss going to their office in the worst weather; such a work ethic! At their feet lay crumpled cigarette packs and sandwich wraps, dog droppings, and old vomit.

If Judah Iskaritz had one wish for today, it was that no one would show up, certainly no media. Yet who else but the media had created Mr. "Moneybags Messiah"? (Such was his blasphemous christening in the _Daily News_.) Even the _Times_ had given his speech of Sunday night and Monday press conference respectful coverage. Nauseating, the uses to which a free press could be put. But there was no way to ignore a "story" once rolling. Must every stupidity be repeated through the ages, the rabbi wondered, revived like Broadway musicals to entertain new dunderheads?

The Rev. Jeremy Kirk was glad he had spoken to the Jew. _Put them on notice: this could eventually mean window-breaking, swastikas on synagogues;_ _it was a good deed._ He observed that scarcely two dozen idlers had assembled along the Fourteenth Street perimeter before a van arrived with a television reporter and cameraman. Then the audience-jelling effect was magical. An "event" must be under way. Like gravity it sucked in free-floating particles of humanity. The almighty tube! Every civilization has its instrument of self-destruction, Kirk mused. The past was corrupt enough, he had editorialized, but at least it screened the mentally deficient out of public affairs by the simple filter of literacy. Today any idiot, or millions of idiots, by the light of their screens and phonepads could claim to be "informed."

Judah Iskaritz watched morosely as a corpulent woman played warm-up to the main act. "Jess will be here in a few moments, folks; he's always on time," she announced to the hoboes, tourists, and news-junkies, whoever was near. "You're in for a treat." She beckoned with her arms, smiled with a mouth heavily lipsticked: a clownish, red-haired, overly jolly person. A derelict dragging a shopping cart of plastic bags followed her like a dog, soliciting payment for his precious listening. She shook her head but promised "a hell of a speech." _Get used to it, lady,_ Iskaritz said to himself. _See how much your millionaire loves the dregs, the sociopaths, their breath, their rags, their stink. Please God he 'll tire of this mischief and go back to his girlfriends and golf courses._ Why in fact should he, a rabbi, waste time here, tracing the flight of a theological mosquito when life was not long enough for a tenth part of the study required of a man? An anti-journalistic revulsion seized him. He might have walked away at that moment but then heard shouts, saw spasms of movement. "He looks just like on television!" cried a woman in fur, as if witness to the parting of the Red Sea.

The star! _The second coming!_ Jeremy Kirk involuntarily, sacrilegiously thought. Hatless, buttoned and belted in a trench coat over a suit, shirt, and tie, the mischief maker from Pittsburgh might have been an executive en route to a deal-making. Except that instead of a briefcase he carried a bullhorn.

"Hi, folks," he spoke into it, grinning like a boy with a plaything. "First, thanks for coming out. Gorgeous day, isn't it?" A joke this. He flashed photogenic teeth, his breath misting. The crowd, which the Christian editor now judged at a hundred or more, fanned about on the concrete area extending towards an equestrian statue of George Washington at the edge of the trees. Kirk stood several rows back; not that there were rows but masses of standing people. _Bomb!_ he cursed to himself in the show-business, not explosive, sense. _Fall on your face, atheist!_

"Maybe you know why I'm here," the celebrity began. "To ask you to consider" - ( _modest request!)_ - "a better idea of God." The bullhorn crackled; he fought his voice down, trying to coax warmth out of the thing. "We're taking a risk here, folks. If the scare-religions are right, I am going to roast in hell forever. Yet here I am, asking you to take the same risk. Forever, wow! If I am wrong, we are going to spend a lot of time together. We are going to get to be pals!" Chuckles in the crowd. His style was ingratiating, his syntax straight from the street: Everyman's buddy, a born demagogue. "So I ask myself, what am I bringing you any better that what you have now?" (Looking about, Kirk thought, _what do they have now?_ )

The speaker said the "scare-religions," by which he seemed to mean all religions, had it wrong. He did not expect to go any place when he died, he expected "to _quit_ going places," and was rewarded with a cheap laugh. "Death as oblivion," he said, "unconsciousness. Sleep. Is that so bad?" He paused as if awaiting reply. "Of course it's bad! It's dying!" he said. "I'm not going to kid you that it's a treat. Any way you look at it, death is no fun."

"It sucks, man," a black man in the crowd contributed in perfect timing. People laughed, including the star.

The day had grown a trifle brighter. Clouds moved overhead but the sun tried to break through the gray veils. Judah Iskaritz squirmed as the speaker pried away at the afterlife, always an easy target. At times the rabbi powerfully believed in the Messiah, whose coming could never be anticipated scientifically, being beyond and outside of nature. But _Moshiach_ was a moral necessity, proof in the flesh that Creation was seriously meant and God a reality, despite the suffering of so many of His creatures. _Moshiach_ would bring a grand reconciliation of the faithful of all times with _Ha-Shem,_ the Most Holy Name. But would this tying together of the strands of history endure for ten lifetimes, one shining instant, or forever? Impossible to know, _so leave it to God!_ Meanwhile stand firm in the faith. Yet this thief, the _goniff_ with his crowbar, pried away.

"Should we have to go on for a trillion years because we're afraid of dying once?" said Jess Josephson. "What would there be to think about all that time? No job to go to. No meals to fix... _no elections to hold! "_ Iskaritz smiled despite himself, and across the crowd he saw a beautiful woman's lips part in appreciation of the jest. A tall man stood behind her, husband or lover, whispering in her ear. She raised a hand to smooth her hair ruffled by the wind and held up a tape recorder; a reporter probably: pretty enough, anyway, for television. Bystanders who had hung back, not wishing to join the circle of a cultist or a kook, moseyed closer. If the fellow was going to be entertaining...

Looking about, Maggie Deland, staff writer for _DayLight,_ an Internet news service, saw a prostitute, obviously a prostitute, young, black, terribly thin, with lips and eyelids painted white, earrings large as bracelets. But how she seemed to listen, this ten-dollar trick, with an attention she must never have brought to school. Deland whispered a note into her tape: "Attentive whore." Similarly a derelict in two weeks' stubble, resident of benches and subway grates, stared as if transfixed, straining to decode a message through blears of corrupted brain tissue. Did the world seem clearer to such people in this speaker's formulation, the mist momentarily lifted, a ray of light from the ends of the universe? They would go back to what they were, surely they would. Yet this Jew seemed able to give them a moment, to slow the collapse of their lives, holding them astonished in their listening. Maggie lifted her recorder to catch his words. So far she could not detect what she had expected, the cant of the con man. He seemed naive, certainly. Quixotic. If nothing else, simply square. There had to be a neurosis to explain this exhibitionism. Or else he was an extraordinary dissembler, a challenge to expose, the more so for coming across as a "nice guy." Bren Hazelwood's verdict was quick enough. "Old bullshit in a new barrow," he said in her ear.

The speaker confessed how easy it was for him to talk. He had been lucky all his life, he said, blessed with parents, health, education, a job. He could not put himself in their place. "But it still comes down to God giving us one life. This life. The only one we're going to get," he said.

"No! That's just what Satan wants us to believe!" Jeremy Kirk shouted from among the listeners. He hoped other believers in the crowd, including a sprinkling of clergy, might take his lead. _Don 't be so polite,_ he thought. _Refuse the poison, spit it out!_

Josephson glanced his way and recognized him from the previous day's press conference. He smiled. "Morning, Mister Kirk. You'll get your chance." The cleric reddened. How flattering this recognition by name - the scamp!

The man with the bullhorn continued, missing not a beat of his argument. People with "real problems," he said - alcoholics, prostitutes, offenders with criminal records - might think there was no way out. Personally he could take a drink or leave it alone. But that was no entitlement to moral credit. "I've never had to fight anything as tough as alcoholism," he said. "But maybe you do. And who knows but that beating the booze might not be as great an act of creation as a painting, a symphony, a universe."

Judah Iskaritz heard sympathetic murmurs, saw people nod. It was a commonplace but an educated man's commonplace. "And if you're a drug addict, well, I'm lucky in that respect, too," Jess Josephson went on. "I've never been curious about drugs, never understood why anybody is. The world has so many natural kicks, why mess with artificial? But okay, I'm not hooked and you are. All I know is, we live once. To make a life you've got to get off that stuff. I wish I could make it easier. I can't."

"Fuckin' right, man," someone muttered behind Judah Iskaritz, who was startled by a sense of responsive prayer: profane, yes, but wrung from the heart of the communicant, not printed in a prayer book for public recital, by rote, without genuine avowal. And this was not the first such response he had heard. Could such a congregation of the corrupt be religiously valid, he wondered? Not a respectful _minyan_ of Jewish men, rising in the prescribed order to worship and sanctify, but a spontaneous quarrel about God, _with_ God, engaging Jew and Gentile alike, bystander, hobo, and whore? He felt suddenly off-balance, as if a path he had walked lifelong were dividing into a tangle of paths, his but one among many.

"Or maybe you're a prostitute... " Josephson continued, and Jeremy Kirk's neck stiffened. He glanced neither right nor left. There were females who sold themselves here; he sensed this and had a horror of meeting their gaze, as if they might read his imaginings of unspeakable acts. "... A prostitute... and will say, ah, it's over for me; too many awful things, too much degradation. Your pimp will beat you up if you quit; kill you." The speaker looked around as he spoke but seemed also to avoid focusing on any particular woman, refraining, as Kirk judged, by an instinctive tact, a desire to inflict no hurt. _He 's too damned likable._ "I say start creating. Throw some clothes in a bag. Get over to the Port Authority. Take a bus to Philadelphia, Atlanta..."

Maggie Deland observed that his audience had grown as he spoke. The effect of the fitful sun was cheering. Highlights shone on skeletal trees and the damp facades of buildings beyond. Sounds of traffic floated in from the streets. Video crews, accustomed to getting their footage and packing up, lingered. It was the siren song of redemption. Redemption now, in this degraded life and body -- no waiting for the soul's release. Say no to drugs, ye addicts! Embrace the minimum wage, whores! Was anyone so lost as to have used up life's last chance? This hip Jew made the miracle seem within reach. An old woman with cataracts sighed; a tourist in a tartan cap looked beatific. Maggie herself, "hardened" journalist, felt the draw of a dream of innocence restored, a new virginity, never mind that all must awaken. Under touches of sunglow on wet trees, in the range of a persuasive male voice, what did not seem possible?

"I don't believe anybody is trapped," Jess Josephson said.

"Oh tell it, man!" a woman cried out at the back of the crowd. Her voice thrilled Judah Iskaritz. This was fervor, the shout of belief. The speaker himself seemed startled to have struck such a nerve. "No one is trapped in a bad life," he said, glancing in the direction of the cry.

"No one, no one!" came another cry torn from the heart of a woman. Many turned to look, but Jeremy Kirk stared forward; public displays of emotion embarrassed him.

"If we're still alive after all our mistakes, treat it as a gift. Make use of it. Everything we've done to others, and been done to" - _(strange, dissonant playback of the Golden Rule)_ - "this is the material put in our hands to work. Make a new life of it."

"A new life!" someone shouted, and others repeated.

"Then we're not going to regret the lack of heaven," said Jess Josephson. "We'll have got our best out of this life, and when the time comes, not plead with God for more life, another life, but be content to sleep."

The last words, voiced matter-of-factly, with no hint of the morbid, gave another involuntary thrill to Judah Iskaritz. Freedom from fear of death! With no illusions of anything after? All fantasy swept away, the disappearance of all that we are, yet faced with courage? Could this be the next, and a higher, acceptance of _Ha-Shem 's_ plan?

"One clattering cliche after another, a train of empty cars," Bren Hazelwood said, perhaps rehearsing his column, his lips almost touching Maggie Deland's ear.

"Shh," she said, not in the mood for cynicism just then. She rather liked the feeling of being caught in the speaker's spell, ephemeral though it must be. What if people really did matter with this ego-tripper, worth jumping in the water to save? _I 'm not buying it,_ she thought. _But for the moment I allow you to move me._

"How many lives does God have to give us?" Josephson said. "All we know is, he gave us this one. Let's take it and be grateful. We honor God best when we honor this life."

His color was high; he had spoken with more feeling than Judah Iskaritz expected. The rabbi wondered if Union Square had not surprised Mr. Moneybags. He had counted on pulling off another stunt, yet found himself standing among the wounded and valuing the shreds of possibility that clung to them. Could he esteem them more than they did themselves? This was unexpected, disarming criticism. It connected people if only for a moment in a fabric of shared hope, a longing for the sweetness to continue.

"If we could do that - to honor this life," Josephson said, "what will it matter if we don't achieve 'success,' as people falsely count success. We may not be able to save the world, but I'll tell you this: the little part of the world around each of us, we'll save that."

"Damn right, Jess!" someone called encouragement.

"Yes, if we could do that, for a little piece of the world..." The speaker glanced over the crowd, seeking everyone's eye, and momentarily caught Jeremy Kirk's. The minister-editor felt awkward. _He means it,_ he thought; _wrong, yes, but he reaches these platitudes by a decent effort, a personal exploration, and gives the illusion of discovery._ "If we could do that..." the speaker repeated, and Kirk had the feeling he did not know how to get off, or could grasp at nothing but terminal triteness. Clumsily then, in mid-sentence, as if deciding that if they didn't have it now... he shrugged. His hand went up in a wave. "Thanks, folks." He stepped back.

Applause broke out. From reflex the Christian barely kept himself from joining in. The crowd's response was more than polite, it was enthusiastic. Cameras came alive again. Kirk had expected, if not a pitch for funds (unrealistic in this setting) some inkling of the man's game, to provide a grip for counter-attack. But Satan's apostle had given nothing away.

Maggie Deland pressed her shoulder-purse to her side and headed towards Jess Josephson, who was being lionized. Reporters and devotees surrounded him. Goaded by cameras, microphones, shouted questions, the frenzy of a news occasion, people seemed frantic for a touch, a glance. "You're a wonderful, marvelous speaker!" said a woman in a fake-fur coat. "I'll tell everyone!" Through intervening shoulders and heads Maggie saw a grin like a high school boy's after a touchdown; people slapped high-fives with him. A prostitute said something in his ear; he nodded. A fat red-haired woman in his entourage wept like a mother at a son's graduation. At his other shoulder, fending off coat-pulling, stood a black bodyguard with a crewcut. "Yes, you can do it," Maggie heard him tell the whore; then, to a reporter with a notebook: "Next time? We're going to try it on college students... morning... Columbia U."

Maggie decided to get back to him later, meanwhile to circulate for crowd reactions. A woman in dark glasses told her Jess Josephson was a "doll;" he ought to be in the movies. A derelict with foul breath mumbled something unintelligible and asked for a handout. Three prostitutes in mini-skirts were smoking by the Washington statue. One seemed furious. The speaker was "full o' shit... he ain't gonna change nothin'," she said.

A sister in sin said she "kinda like how he talked, though. He respeck people."

"Respeck, shit!" said the first. "All he wants is money."

"Whaddaya mean? He din't ask fer money."

"He a Jew cocksuckuh, ain't he?"

Maggie left them quarreling. It was disappointing how fast the afterglow seemed to fade. A middle-aged white couple invited interview by eye-contact. They were from Cleveland on a theater tour. "This was like getting an extra show free," said the wife.

Her mate, sporting a red plaid tam, said, "Some o' these Jew-boys, y'know, they have the gift of gab, which explains their success in show biz." Belatedly aware he might be speaking to a co-religionist, he added, "I say it as a compliment, y' understand."

Maggie lowered her voice. "What do you think he's really after?"

The Ohioan winked. "You got that feeling too, did you, Honey? Exactly what I've been trying to tell her" - his gullible spouse - "this guy has a hell of a payoff in mind. I couldn't say what it is yet, but you can be sure" - he rubbed a thumb and fingers together - "there'll be something in it for old Yehudi."

A moment later Maggie felt a touch on her neck and turned, annoyed. "I thought we had a rule. On the job I don't touch you, you don't touch me."

Bren Hazelwood's hands went up. "I merely wish to express admiration. For how you gather the views of this one and that one. Your faith in the wisdom of the common people is... Lincolnesque."

"It wouldn't hurt you to collect a few opinions beside your own."

"What, and dilute my theme? It's already composed, up here." He tapped his brow. "I shall expose his excruciating ordinariness. And his faggotry."

"Go on, he doesn't come across like that at all."

Hazelwood batted his eyelashes. "My subliminal sense is never fooled."

"Look, we'll bullshit later," she said, moving away. "I need more reactions." Her lover bowed her past. At least they didn't _look_ as if they spent so much time skin to skin. He was still tanned from the weekend at Stowe; she was fair enough, having slathered on sunscreen and worn a long-visored cap under her ski hood. Columnist for an "alternative" newspaper, lovable Bren sampled public opinion, she noticed, not by asking people directly but by listening to the blather they exchanged with each other; which had a certain validity after all and made for devilish copy. She, less economical of effort, headed straight for one of the few identifiable believers in what was left of the crowd, a stooped, skinny Orthodox Jew.

Judah Iskaritz was unable to fend her off by denying eye-contact. With such a glamorous Gentile woman he had never engaged in anything that could be called conversation. And now, near enough to touch, he felt an alarming impulse to touch. Her hair was a glossy chestnut, windblown at the moment but styled to surround her beautiful face in parentheses. "My opinion?" he shrugged. "I'm trying to form one."

"But from a Jewish point of view this was very heretical, wasn't it?"

"Heretical? Hmm." He was reluctant to criticize a Jew, even a bad Jew, to a non-Jew. He kept his eyes off her face, yet felt uncomfortably conscious of the form in her well-fitted coat. "He said some things no observant person could object to... Changing destructive habits and so forth. But..."

"Yes?"

Suddenly angry to be cornered, and by a forbidden woman whose beauty in her nakedness he could not help guessing at, he met her eyes for a glittering instant. "His way is too easy! The notion that the Almighty is... some sort of good-natured onlooker. No trouble at all getting along. Just be kind, do good works. No."

"I'm not sure I... "

"Nice isn't enough! It's the oldest trap, the secular fallacy, nice-guyism. But God lays down _law_ - duty, observance, study. Otherwise society has nothing to hold it. No cement. Everything is live and let live, moral neutrality, and in another generation what do you get? Horrors, abominations." He threw up his hands. "Forgive me," he said and moved away, in despair of expressing anything meaningful to instant journalism.

She returned to the knot of people around the morning's star, in time to hear a TV newsman ask, "But what is there here to _join?_ What are you asking people to do?"

"Join nothing," said Jess Josephson. "Another church isn't the idea. Anything but. I say go home, think about it, see if it makes sense, talk it over with family and friends. That's where ninety percent of the good in the world happens anyway."

_A decent, modest answer,_ thought Maggie Deland. But not the editor of _Christians All._ "No, no!" Jeremy Kirk exploded. "Ninety percent of people will be damned that way. Salvation is by one path alone - faith in redemption through Jesus Christ. To suggest otherwise is not being kind and understanding, sir. It is boundless mischief. A great disservice."

"I guess we have to agree to disagree on that, Mr. Kirk," said Josephson.

"No again! I tell you for your own good. Christianity, and I daresay Islam and Judaism, will _not_ agree to disagree. You will infuriate them to no purpose, and I warrant get no help from your fellow agnostics either. Do you think this... this _circus_ can save the soul of a single drunk, thief, or whore?" There were gasps at such a word in a clerical collar.

"The religious right will fry him fast enough," Bren Hazelwood said to Maggie. "Just what they need to discharge their sexual repressions. A target, and a circumcised one at that."

Josephson replied to Kirk: "I would doubt a quick conversion anyway. Don't hurry it."

The bodyguard, a powerfully-built black man, stepped forward and identified himself as a minister on leave from a church in Pittsburgh. "Jess is too modest," he said. "I heard a woman of, uh... well, I don't want to say, but he had given her an idea to change her life - now. And she was going to do it. And there may have been others." The fat press agent, a Mary Something, threw in a confirming contribution, claiming to have heard the exchange as well.

Another reporter asked where Josephson would speak next, but Maggie Deland missed it. Hazelwood was whispering in her ear: "Enough of this. Come to my place. A toddy, a caress..."

"Damn it, I'm working," she said, mortified at that moment to catch the Rev. Mr. Kirk staring at them. Her cheeks warmed like a schoolgirl's. Several uniformed members of clergy had listened to the speech and she wanted "official" views, but all except Kirk had escaped. She braced to address him. "Reverend Kirk, I think I heard you introduced? Maggie Deland, from _DayLight._ Would you elaborate on the obligation to save people, that point you were just making?"

The cleric scowled up at her; in heels she stood taller. "I am ruminating on it now," he said. "Wondering if I should encourage you. By giving you anything for a story at all."

She smiled coolly. "I think you should encourage me." He was making not eye, but eyelid, contact - staring at her cosmetic daubs, associated in his mind perhaps with the arts of biblical harlotry.

He said, "The attention of media people like yourself is giving this clown a prominence he does not deserve."

"Ignoring the news won't make it go away," she said.

"This is not news! This is olds, to coin a phrase. If people of your generation had any sense of history, you would realize the trash this man is spouting."

"Trash?"

"Theological garbage! Warmed-over deism. Cliches that have been around for centuries and don't work. Not for individuals, nor for societies. Never have, never will."

"Then there's nothing to worry about, right?"

"Not right, _Ms_. Deland." A sarcastic stress fell on the "z" sound in Ms. "There is civilization to worry about - in constant deconstruction, if you please, by half-baked minds like this. And souls to worry about, remember them? Souls that will be lost in the days or weeks before you and your kind decide there really is nothing here, and turn elsewhere to fill your computer screens. I suggest you get about it!"

The editor for Christ stalked away from her.

_My kind,_ Maggie thought; _are we a disease?_ Yet the grouch had given her usable quotes: "theological garbage... warmed-over deism." Returning to the lion of the moment, whose circle was dwindling, she called out: "Any second thoughts, Mr. Josephson, on how worthwhile this is, or isn't?"

"Second thoughts? I'm still working on first thoughts." People around him laughed. "We've only begun to fight. And call me Jess."

"But when does the bullshit end and the payoff begin, _Jess? "_ said Bren Hazelwood, not bothering to hide contempt. "When do you rich and famous cash in and clean up on us rubes?"

Studying him, the man from Pittsburgh appeared to calculate whether offense should be taken and decided not to. "Cash in, in a financial sense? Never," he said. "We're out to break that mold, friend. If you ever hear me ask for money, you'll know I've sold out. I invite you to blacken my name."

Maggie Deland heard respectful murmurs. So unequivocal a commitment? "Did I hear you say something about speaking to college students next?" she asked, throwing him a bonbon, another chance to advertise his next appearance.

The fat lady moved in like a troop carrier, to close off the questioning on a positive note. "Columbia University, ten o'oclock tomorrow morning," she said. "The steps of Low Library, they call it. Everybody's invited."

Maggie observed a look of exasperation on the Rev. Jeremy Kirk's face and felt pleased. Bren Hazelwood smiled at her and raised a brow: _Ready for that nooner?_

# 4.

_Station KSBS takes you now, live, to the campus of Boston College, where there is a standoff at this moment between Jess Josephson, the anti-religion activist, and the security force at this famed Catholic institution._

_Eight minutes ago, at precisely ten a.m., Josephson and a small entourage tried to enter a college gate on foot and were barred by uniformed guards. And there the situation sits. Intense discussion is under way this April morning, with the first hint of spring, and perhaps of student rebellion, in the air._

_This could mark a new phase of the Josephson crusade. "Jessism," as some call it, has stirred up antagonisms that many had hoped were gone from American life. The man himself has become a lightning rod to hate groups that blame national problems, real or imagined, on minorities: Jews, Muslims, blacks, immigrants, gays, whatever. And such groups are making footholds, it's feared, not only among the uneducated but on some of the nation's leading campuses._

_Jess Josephson has been arrested at least once before in his self-financed campaign for a "better idea of God." He spent the night in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, lockup only last week. The charges, disorderly conduct and inciting to riot, were dropped the next morning. But so far he has not been kept physically out of a speaking venue in advance, anywhere._

_Nor would he have been here, a B.C. spokesman told us a moment ago. He might have entered at any number of open locations. Instead he chose a guarded gate. Has he gone out of his way to force a confrontation? That 's how the school sees it. But no, says his press aide, Mary Mulcahy. Jess just was showing the college a courtesy - quote unquote._

_The thirty-two-year-old Pittsburgh home builder burst on the public scene less than a month ago with the sensational "buying" of an audience in New York, a stunt that reportedly cost him upward of a half-million dollars. His momentum has been gaining ever since. The man has a knack for publicity. Critics call it simply ego-tripping. He has popped up with his bullhorn in parks and shopping centers, but mostly on campuses, wherever he can draw a crowd. He often speaks two and three times a day, not to mention radio and TV talk shows before or after._

_An engaging personality - charisma, if you will - plus a willingness to debate the idea of God toe-to-toe with clergy of all faiths (which is what got him in trouble in Milwaukee) have given him star status with the student generation equivalent to a headliner on the pop music circuit. Some of his crowds have numbered in thousands._

_But Boston College seems determined to deny him a platform today. His entry is still barred, despite hundreds of students, possibly a thousand by now - can you hear them in the background? - chanting, "Let him in, let him in!" No fewer than six police vehicles are on the scene._

_B.C. wants no repeat of what happened at another Catholic institution, Milwaukee 's Marquette University, last Wednesday. According to press aide Mulcahy, there was heckling but no violence during a very spirited debate Josephson was having with younger members of clergy, who, by the way, afterwards claimed to get the best of him. Nevertheless, police moved in and took the home builder in custody when he refused to leave. He was locked up after declining to post nominal bond of fifty dollars, which at his income level is small change. A magistrate released him next morning._

_The jailing made news worldwide - and that, critics charge, was the intent all along. But it did expose Josephson to a night's lodging with the population of a big city slammer. Still, the following morning, unshaven and uncombed, his suit scuffed and rumpled, he had that now-familiar smile for the cameras. According to reports, he even "converted" some fellow prisoners. A newspaper headline said, "Jess beats odds again."_

_But wait... something is afoot here at the gate of Boston College. Jess Josephson has turned around. He's coming across the street. And here comes a crowd! They're shouting and chanting right after him, festively you'd have to say. The Pied Piper image comes to mind. Uh-oh, there's a lot of horn-honking. Traffic is being blocked, and that just might do it. Yes, police officers are shouldering forward. Jess's student followers are absolutely filling this busy street, sidewalks, and front steps of buildings here opposite the campus. I guess he could be arrested. It's a misdemeanor, isn't it, to wantonly block traffic? But... but no, I see a senior police official... can't quite make out who it is... shaking his head, waving other officers aside. Evidently they don't want a First Amendment martyr. Now Jess is raising his bullhorn._

"No wall, no gate, no guards can keep out an idea..."

_That 's the voice of Jess Josephson, on the sidewalk here in Boston with a crowd all around..._

"For a church to claim that if you think about God the way it tells you, you go to heaven, and if you think some other way, you go to hell, for all time - all those tons of consequence piled on a single test question, well, I ask you, students, what kind of final exam is that?"

_Hear them laughing? He knows his audience._

"What kind of a pass-flunk course did we get into here?"

_He 's not an awful lot older than they are, of course. Rebellious young people identify to some extent..._

"Not that the other test questions make any better sense. Take the one about adultery. Now you know, fellows, that's a sin right up there with murder and playing golf on the Sabbath. It's mentioned very specifically. We're told the punishment is hell, especially if you're a repeat offender, with more than one girl, and it doesn't matter if she's more than willing - well, you math majors, can the sentence for an offense like that be _infinity_?"

_Listen to the laughing. He 's not making them mad with that sermon..._

"Of course it's an absurdity. Forgive the levity. But I'm trying to demonstrate how wrong it is when you go from God the creative force behind the universe -- a believable concept that scientists and mathematicians could agree on -- to God the punisher and rewarder. God is not an easy question, my friends. And He surely realizes that. He is smart enough to know how hard it is - not easy, but _hard_ - to be sure whether He exists or not. To imagine then that He will torture a soul for all time for just failing to get it, for being unable to believe in Him - a mere intellectual failing! - no way. The Creator could not have set such a trap for the fallible human mind."

"Y're tellin' damned lies, sir!"

_A priest is shouting in Jess Josephson 's face..._

"Hold on, Father. You kept me out here; let me talk out here."

"But you're misleadin' these young people."

"Then you straighten 'em out later, on your side of the street."

_Uh-oh, this could turn physical. Students, clergy, onlookers... some are rhythmically clapping. There's always a minority that seems to want violence, some with shaven heads. Josephson has put his bullhorn up several times, trying to resume._

"But I'll tell you this, students... Hear me out another minute... There is a human institution, all too human, that does put God in that box, the dispenser of reward and punishment. And that is the institution of organized, sectarian religion. Not just yours, the one I was born into, too. And all the others. And not because they're run by bad men necessarily. By conscientious men, who believe in what they are doing. But they feel duty bound to bring you in the door, see? 'Come in,' they say. 'We teach you the right answers on the final exam, better answers than any other church gives. God appointed us to do that. Even sent His son, let Him get crucified, to make that point. He'll pass you if you answer just the way we say'..."

"You damned liar!"

"Atheist!"

"Get the hell back where you came from!"

"All the religions do it, as if they have God's answer sheet in front of them."

"Let him talk... let him talk... LET HIM TALK!"

_A chant has begun..._

"And how handy to have this catch-all answer called faith."

"Don't you see the damage you're doin', fella?"

"Any time you're stumped, just give the faith answer. You couldn't run a business that way -- I take it some of you are business majors -- but nothing works better in the religion market. Just let the customer believe, and he'll get to heaven. It's the promise every religion makes and none has to deliver on. The perfect product! General Motors would love that, Procter and Gamble. 'Buy from us.' "

_The priest, an elderly man, waving a fist..._

"Y've said enough, ya ignorant...!"

"Go get 'im, Father!"

_Students egging him on, enjoying this..._

"Shut up! Shut up, I'm tellin' ya!"

"Hold on, Father, this isn't your show. He's well-meaning, I'm sure, folks. He doesn't have to listen, my feelings aren't hurt, but he won't let you..."

"Taagh!"

_Oh my, the priest just hurled himself at Jess Josephson, and now the police are moving in. Things are being thrown... sirens... pandemonium..._

# 5.

"No flying objects today," Mary Mulcahy reflected. It was five minutes before ten and she hoped the _DayLight_ people would be late. A mug of coffee was in her hand and she wanted to enjoy it, as she told Peter Winslow, "down to the mud." The two were sitting in wicker chairs on the front porch of Jess Josephson's farmhouse. It was a fine April morning. Birds were singing and a fragrance of cut grass arose from the yard that sloped down past shade trees to a dirt road. On the hillside opposite, cows grazed, as motionless as on the canvases of the masters.

In Mary's opinion a gate might have been a useful idea at the road. A locked gate. In a chain-link fence. Better yet, barbed wire. Something more, anyway, than two plain wooden posts at the foot of a graveled drive. Security there was none.

And yet hadn't Jess been forced to close his city apartment - and announce the fact publicly - to halt bomb threats that terrified his neighbors? His new safety arrangements, as far as she could see, consisted entirely of an unmarked rural road, an unlisted phone, and a post office box at the county seat for the hate mail.

The previous night was the first that Mary had spent at the farm, only the two of them. (Winslow had stayed with his family in Pittsburgh and driven down an hour before.) Under two blankets in one of the "new" rooms on the second floor, the P.R. lady had lain awake long, unused to the chill of country nights and the creak of ancient timbers. The original house, which Jess was remodeling (a lifelong project at the pace he was getting it done) was 140 years old, "a real find," he said. In the morning she asked how he had slept. Terrific, he said, once the snake was out of his room. Funny! Up long before she was, shaved and showered, in jeans, boots, and sport shirt, he was already brandishing tools and looking wonderfully fit.

The poor guy was "on" too much. Always in crowds, in hostile situations against his own amiable nature. Struggling to answer questions, the same questions in city after city; enduring the unwashed, the ill-mannered, the hysterical and, most painfully, the genuinely pious, who seemed hurt, even shattered, by his undercutting of prayer and paradise.

Some in his audiences were out-and-out hateful: bigots and hooligans in phony army gear, and some very disturbing kids with shaved heads and closed minds, not to mention the crazies who screamed "Satan!" and "Anti-Christ!" waving crucifixes in his face. For upsetting the upsettable he had been arrested, scratched, bruised, kissed - yes, that too - and practically mugged. The new vogue was to throw things at him.

And he was not a public man, never mind the media mantra, reiterated ad nauseum, of his "ego trip." He _had_ no ego; or rather, his was a private man's, not at all what the world saw. He was in this battle for others, at least ninety percent for others, Mary felt sure. (Which, however, allowed ten percent that she sensed did enjoy the struggle and the attention. Maybe more than ten percent.) But it was no accident that he was a builder. He formed audiences from the scraps he found, shaped them to his thought, and left them in a sense finished. But at a cost. It showed in his eyes at the end of days, nights too - those damned talk shows and their angry callers (and, never referred to, but impossible to rule out: the potential of a radical Islamic bomb.) Jess Josephson was eating into capital in more ways than one. Yet here at a place he loved, tools in hand, away from the mobs, he seemed able to renew his account. At least until the day (which she privately dreaded) when he might wake up thinking: "What the hell am I doing here? This is crazy. Let somebody else save the world."

"Sorry we scheduled this?" Mary asked.

"No," he said, "one-on-one will be a pleasure for a change. And she's pretty, if I remember."

"You remember. But don't notice her looks. With career women these days it's irrelevant, even an insult, don't ask me why."

At a quarter past ten a car raised dust in the road and turned in at the gateless posts. "They're here, Jess," Pete Winslow called into the house and Mary Mulcahy walked down the porch steps to welcome the eyes and ears of the World Wide Web.

"Well, you've lost a few," reporter Maggie Deland remarked.

The P.R. lady beamed. "Without trying," she said. "Crowds burn calories, did you know that?"

Accompanying the writer was a photographer whose name Mary would have forgotten at once had she not trained to repeat a new name as she shook hands, a trick a politician had once taught her. "Len Baker, how do you do, Len?" she said. He was about fifty, mustached, and had a Yankees cap on. Two Nikons swung from straps around his neck.

Jess Josephson joined them at the foot of the steps and seemed pleased to stand in the sun for a moment with the beauteous Deland, who was rigged out for a day in the country: designer jeans, walking shoes, a light sweater around the shoulders, and sunglasses parked out of the way atop her hair. She looked about twenty-five but Mary guessed older; too much poise.

For the host the rites of hospitality began with a tour. He led the way around the house, past shade trees and a barn (in the fading paint of an old "Chew Mail Pouch" promotion) to a pasture where a pair of saddle horses ambled over to the fence, a black and a spotted gray. There was an interval of nose patting. A neighboring farmer worked the land free in exchange for care of the horses, Jess said. The photographer snapped away and Maggie Deland crooned equine pleasantries. She had loved riding as a girl in Virginia, she remarked, and her host proposed a ride later if time permitted. Then having shown his steeds, he must show his manor.

The house was a rambling white frame pile, which by additions over the decades had acquired an L-shape and a perceptible list. He was trying to correct that with a series of heavy-duty jacks under the cellar joists. There were five bedrooms on the second level (six, but one was being carved into two new baths) and three attic rooms, for which he also was roughing-in a bath. "You must be planning a big family," said Maggie Deland.

In a space converted to an office - drawing board, computer, wall maps - her eye was caught by memorabilia: a chrome-plated shovel for groundbreakings; a Remington cowboy in bronze; photos and sports trophies; and in a glass frame, press clippings. One showed a mud-spattered high school boy holding up two fingers in a "V" under a headline that said, "Jess's Passes Bury Perry, 13-0." She said she had seen that smile before: "In Union Square. A touchdown smile. Were you good?"

"Peaked early," he confessed sheepishly. "Broke my nose and my mother said that's it with the football."

Later, seated on the porch around a wicker table with coffee and rolls, the interviewer opened by asking if "we can blacken your name yet." He looked puzzled. She reminded him of his Union Square challenge, to denounce him if ever caught soliciting funds.

"Did I say that? Well, not so far anyway."

"But one of these days, eh?" she winked. "Nobody will be surprised if there's a hell of a payoff for you down the road.

He at once got serious, straightening in his chair. "I see we have some misconceptions here," he said. "No payoff, ever, Maggie. I mean not ever. That's bedrock." But since she had asked, he explained that expenses had in fact been "very manageable" since the kickoff. Refusing donations "made life easier," he said. No tax consequences, audits, or too much organization.

"You understand that?" Peter Winslow interjected. "Jess doesn't just not solicit. He turns money down. People try to put checks in his hand every day. We've seen it." The reporter looked annoyed at the coaching. The right-hand man told himself to shut up.

"I'd rather keep it simple," the host said with a nod at his accomplices. "You're looking at the whole bureaucracy."

"This has been a wonderful lark for you, hasn't it, Jess?" the reporter asked.

Mary Mulcahy shot a glance at Winslow, who rolled his eyes. He guessed it would be a long day at this rate. News people could not quit _investigating._ They came in fixed on the scent of a swindler, or a kook, at best a glory-seeking playboy (and subliminally, the right-hand man suspected, the stereotype of a "Jewish troublemaker"). But leave it to Jess the ever-patient. He proceeded to state - for at least the thousandth time! - the major ways in which the "old religions" failed modern society.

"People still kill over religion; look at any day's news," he said. "Do you want to stop suicide bombers? Well, start with the crazy idea of God that sends them out. We shy from criticizing Islam because it's a _religion!_ Respect it by all means, even though in the radical form - and undisputed by the big experts in Mecca -- it's blood-thirsty idiocy. Unfortunately it's also too close to our own God the Judge. And yet the world can't do without God the real article. Otherwise there's a terrible void in people's lives, a craving that nothing else satisfies."

Winslow stood up and went over to the porch rail. He gazed moodily down the yard. _Does she give a damn about this?_ he thought. _Get on to the garbage she came for: your secret motives, bank accounts, love affairs, the deep-down priceless you._ Sometimes Peter Winslow could not believe the gall of the media. Damned if he didn't detect a note of doubt in this reporter's voice over the death of Jess's parents years before. In a plane crash, for heaven's sake! _These side shows!_ The ex-marine (now an ex-pastor, too) had an intuition that ideas have lost force in modern times in exact inverse ratio to the media's fascination with "people."

"Pete." Jess's voice broke into his ruminations. "Maggie is asking how we got started. Why don't you tell it?" And he had to repeat for the hundredth time - journalists never tired of the tale nor ever seemed fully to buy it - that Jess had turned up at his church one evening for a jazz concert. ("What else?" the Rev. Jeremy Kirk exploded in his newsletter upon learning of this scandal. "Fill the pews with anything but Christianity!") Having struck up a conversation in the social hall at intermission, the minister, himself a skidding Presbyterian struggling to hold on to a white flock, impulsively invited the builder to deliver a lay sermon. The result was a sensation and, to many in the pews, an outrage. Later the two talked about bringing Jess's views to a wider audience. Not a church, certainly. A public meeting, perhaps, at a hotel. "Jess was dubious. 'We'd have to pay people to come out,' he said, and in the next breath, 'Why don't we pay them?'" The women laughed. "After that it just escalated. And that's how you wind up hiring a New York sports arena and fourteen thousand eight hundred and seven listeners, I'll never forget the attendance."

"Mm," the reporter nodded, raising one brow independently of the other in an expression at once skeptical and seductive. Winslow wondered how many men must have wanted to plant a kiss on that brow. And how many had succeeded. Personally he found her resistible. Too much the careerist; enticing enough in face and figure but with a professional don't-touch sign. The sort who'd want a man to read the _Times_ and order the wine but never to risk his neck for anything as uncool as God. _You are not going to be any help,_ he thought, _nor the bright emptysouls you write for, absorbed in their 'lifestyles' and not worth a damn in a fight._ She worked with a steno pad on her knee and a tape recorder on the table, rarely taking a note, only a word or two to index the tape, meanwhile intent on Jess Josephson's body language, but wary of anything that might be construed as approval or, bless her china heart, belief. _A finely-crafted whore,_ the right-hand man thought, _the modern media variety, going through the motions with today 's John, acting interested... on to another tomorrow._

"How about the absence of any known girlfriends, Jess?" she asked. "Everyone is curious about that."

"Ah, straight to the heart of the matter," he replied with the gentlest of digs, never mind that he got the message: _Would you happen to be queer, sir? The public 's right to know, y' understand._ "You mean no girlfriends now," he said. "You realize, I'm sort of trapped in straight lace here. I've even given up using bad language. I don't want to be seen as trashing God because I prefer the old eat-drink-and-be-merry."

"Therefore an interval of hypocrisy?"

"Some might call it that. I don't. What I'd really hate is to be viewed as a cheerleader for moral decline. 'Live it up, everybody! God doesn't care.' I don't think the world needs any more of that."

"So you're trying to set an example?"

He squirmed. "Sounds goody-goody. Let's just say I've got to be focused. I can't be running around. This is more _important_ than girls." Again the others laughed. _But does she believe it?_ thought Winslow.

The Yankees fan with the cameras reached in past a potted plant for a sweet roll on the table. "Lousy breakfast on the plane," said Len Baker and disappeared again.

The reporter from _DayLight_ changed tack. "Your critics claim these outbreaks of violence - egg-throwing, wasn't it, at Rutgers the other day? - that you go out of your way to provoke these things. To incite riots, for the publicity."

"Wrong way round," he said. "If anything, I pull punches. I know how it upsets people to have their faith attacked. It upsets me to do it! But the case could be put much stronger. You ought to look up some speeches a popular orator named Ingersoll was making a century and more ago. Talk about tough. And outright atheists give speeches, you know."

"Yet when disorder happens, it builds the story, doesn't it?"

"Yes, but that's their doing. I take all the help I can get."

"But this dredging up of group hatreds, these ugly passions - why not let sleeping dogs lie?"

"No, ma'am. I can't. Won't. And they're not sleeping. Look at the hate groups. And Islamic jihad. Antagonisms are boiling. I say reasonable people have to stand up and say, 'Hold it. Something's cockeyed with these religious differences.' Otherwise...."

"But why start with you, Jess? Why does it have to be your fight?"

Winslow and Mary exchanged glances again. They had a phrase for this, "the Y question," and regretted not counting how many times it had been asked. "What's really driving you?" the reporter pressed. "You don't add up, you know."

"I do add up."

"Oh, look at this." She waved at property. "You're a man of wealth... this farm, horses... You walk away from a successful business - and by the way, don't forget, I mean to see some houses you've built."

"I haven't forgotten." He looked at his watch. "We have an appointment twenty miles from here in less than an hour."

"Fine. You give up all this... "

"I haven't given it up."

"Well, put it aside then... "

"That's how I knew you were a good reporter."

"Pardon?"

"Checking me out as a builder. You're the first who's thought of that."

"Well... thank you." She blushed at the compliment, or, as likely, at the hint of patronization. "But there's much more about your background I need. People who know you. Friends, enemies..." this softened by a smile. "But the key thing is... "

"Why," he supplied the word. "Yes, the big Y." He glanced away, frustrated by it, as if his motivation was the one mystery he could not clear up, even to himself; with the added nuisance that this baggage, his irrelevant psyche, got in the way of what counted: the ideas. _And they call it ego-tripping,_ thought Winslow.

"Look," said Jess Josephson, "if crowds of people were trying to cross a bridge, and the bridge kept falling down, shouldn't someone come along and say, 'Let's replace that bridge? That bridge is dangerous?' The moral foundation of the world is crumbling. People are basing fundamental ideas of how to live on a myth, a celestial cop. This is cheating, never mind the good intentions. Eventually people catch on and lose their faith in God. So you end up spreading _un-_ belief. Rejection of the whole package, the moral grounding, too."

Restlessly he got to his feet. "It's maddening," he said. "There is a believable God in the universe, I feel that to be true." He looked down at the journalist, perhaps gauging her atheism. "Yet we've got this shopworn ghost story. 'But that's all ordinary minds can cope with,' the scare-religions say. 'People are evil and stupid. Original sin! The only way they'll behave is if you give them hope of heaven and fear of hell. So the human race is kept in the dark, generation after generation. Worse, they're turned against each other - even murderously -- over petty differences in doctrine, which these great institutions say are so all-important. And we wonder why the world keeps tearing apart. Now the fanatics have nuclear bombs yet! I say the roof's going to fall in."

"And so you feel especially appointed to... "

"Appointed! No. But feeling strongly about this, what should I do? Lie down till it goes away? Think happy thoughts? No, when I add it up, nothing is more important. Not business, not girlfriends - this."

"And that's how we get a prophet, eh?" said the reporter.

He put up a hand. "My favorite word," he said. "I here and now deny all power to foretell the future."

"Oh? I thought I just heard you predict the roof's going to fall in."

He laughed. "Touche. Only please, not a cultist. I am getting called everything, including a billionaire, which is really a joke. But cults now, they're a disease. And aren't the religions themselves to blame?"

"How so?"

"Well, who else fills the air with angels and spirits, second comings, anti-Christs and judgment days? All the ghostly stuff to scare simple minds? Not me. I tell people God is nothing to be afraid of. A First Cause of the universe makes sense, provides a foundation for living, in a way that atheism absolutely doesn't. And for saying this I don't want your money. Is that being a cultist, claiming to be a prophet? But come on, I get tired of hearing a certain person talk. Let's look at some houses."

Peter Winslow had a moment with the reporter while Josephson brushed out his pickup truck for the expedition. He told Maggie Deland he had not been paid a cent of salary and he guessed as much about Mary Mulcahy, although Jess picked up every expense. "It's all out of his pocket. He's refused some large contributions, I mean _very_ large. So how the hell can we expect to be paid?"

"How do you support yourselves then?" the reporter asked.

"I have a pension from the service - twenty-year man - and my wife works, fortunately. I believe Mary also has some income."

Later the reporter was grateful to have "the non-prophet institution" to herself. (Her editor would say "ouch" at the pun but let it pass.) The two were alone in her subject's pickup while the mother hen rode in the rental car with the photographer and Winslow, unneeded, and in a sour mood anyway, had gone off on private business.

Jess Josephson confessed the hardest thing for him was the "anguish" - his word - that he was giving to devout people of all faiths. A saintly nun had written him from Asia. He recalled two of her lines: "I pray for you, dear young man in America, that you will discover your error and find the light of Jesus. Your face on television tells me you have a good heart.' And you should see some letters I get from fellow Jews. It's no picnic being called an enemy of your own people."

"But in a sense, aren't you?"

"No way. I'm as Jewish as... as any rabbi. Except he'd say I'm a bad Jew, a good for nothing Jew. But what I am is secular, as the majority probably are. Israel is full of them. They built the place." He praised Jewish achievement through the ages, springing from embrace of the new, _discovery_ of the new, in science, medicine, the arts. "Yet we're stuck with this ancient fix on God. As if we'd also believe in Galen's medicine, or Ptolemy's astronomy. It's a fishhook. No way to get rid of it" - he gestured beside his mouth - "except to pull it out, quit being Jewish."

"Which would be easy for you, Jess." A compliment, to her mind..

"But I hate that idea. I'm a Jew. Jewish survival means something to me."

"I'd say you have a problem there," she said.

He grunted. "Figured that out, did you?"

He brought her to a housing development along contoured hillsides. Valleyview, road signs called it. To her it looked ordinary: the boxy suburban cliche: split-levels interspersed by "colonials" and "ranches," with children's swing sets in rear yards, basketball hoops over driveways. "Very nice," she said but didn't mean it and guessed he detected that. Which was just as well. It made him speak defensively, loading more details into her tape than she had expected as they drove towards the Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh where he had grown up.

"We sell a lot of house for the money," he said. "Higher ceilings. Storage space. Quality plumbing and electrical systems, stuff you don't see. 'Buy a JB home,' we say - stands for Josephson Builders - 'for generations of value.'" He said older workers told him his father had come out of the Navy "with a hammer in one hand and a saw in the other" and a sure instinct for the housing boom. His other parent was a "great mother," the predictably loving full-time housekeeper of pre-feminist times, but Morris Josephson was a definite go-getter and ex-Seabee (that is, of the C.B., Construction Battalions). A lot of Seabees did well in civilian life, he said, mentioning one who had "made it big in shopping centers in the East" and was still a friend. "He used to tell my dad: 'Moish, charge more for a house.' But he took pride in giving value at the low-priced end, and so do I. Unfortunately, the low-priced end ain't so low anymore."

"Very profitable, though," the reporter goaded him.

"It's profitable," he allowed, "if you design right and manage your costs. And the economy cooperates."

"What would your dad say to how you're throwing money around now?"

He chuckled. "'Back to business, _boychik, '_ although I bet he'd agree with the concept _._ 'But leave it to the rabbis. What do you need this aggravation for?'"

Maggie Deland smiled at the Jewish inflections. She felt a pang of conscience at turning on a certain amount of charm, showing an interest personal as well as professional. Like his father, and his before him in the "old country" somewhere in eastern Europe, her subject had worked on housing tracts from boyhood, learning the fundamentals from carpenters and bricklayers, earning pocket money Saturdays and vacations; yet still having time at school for decent grades, piano lessons, lettering in sports, and pursuing the social life of a popular boy. He had gone on to a university degree in civil engineering.

"I knew it," said the reporter. "Anyone could tell you're not just a homebuilder."

"That depends on what 'just a homebuilder' means."

"What do you think it means?"

"Oh, that I've been to college - I'm entitled to think large thoughts."

She laughed. "After you, Jess, I will never again say 'just a homebuilder.'"

She probed his religious memories, seeking the roots of his heresy, but more, of his commitment to it, which puzzled her in a man apparently "normal." The sort of man that she, Maggie Deland, admired would not - _would not -_ be into a cause like religion, much less with a potential of getting killed at it. She gathered that at college he had been no more than conventionally free-thinking, the cliche sophomore atheist. Only afterwards had he rejected a Godless world as "too bleak, joyless." And unnecessarily so; because the arguments in favor of a First Cause were at least as persuasive as those against. And this blinding light, such as it was, had come to him while sawing boards or fitting pipes. It amused her. "Working with your hands helps you think," was the artless way he put it. Farther back, in childhood, he seemed to have been genuinely, though immaturely, observant. He spoke of Passover seders, aromas of feast and wine, and of his Bar Mitzvah, the rite of coming of age religiously, surrounded by father, rabbi, and other elders in their hats and prayer shawls, including one with the gift of chanting directly from the sacred scroll, keeping place with a silver pointer shaped like a tiny hand.

"But you _like_ being a Jew!" it dawned on Maggie Deland.

"Have I kept it a secret?"

She shook her head, called him a "walking paradox." But no, on this point he insisted. How ordinary, how commonplace his views actually were. "There are authors and intellectuals saying basically what I'm saying, dues-collecting _organizations_ ," he said, "just in a boring, classroom-type way." Which was why sophisticates sneered at him, although perhaps agreeing. "Scratch ninety percent of Jews," he said, "ninety percent of Christians, or Muslims for all I know, and everything I've said is what most people believe. They know prayers aren't answered, except by the law of averages, and when we die we die. I bet I have a silent majority out there. This emperor has no clothes. Sectarian religion is as obsolete as Zeus on Olympus. Today it does more harm than good. Why else are we in moral decline, Maggie, _despite_ all these precious religions? They can't hold. I say let's move on to sensible belief in a sensible Creator. If I kept this psychotic notion to myself, or among friends, it would be cool enough."

"True," she had to agree.

"But look what we're admitting now." The truck had entered a tunnel. He raised his voice against the boom of traffic. "Keep the truth to myself, fine. The same truth, spoken out to persuade others - watch it, pal, you're public enemy number one." They emerged in a sunlight that momentarily dazzled. The ramps of an interchange were ahead; he slowed. "Even I think it's nuts sometimes," he said. "I wake up thinking: Jess, get real. Quit asking for trouble. Get back to business."

"Why don't you then?

He followed the off-ramp. "Can't," he said. "Not yet. Not until..." He broke off. _Until what?_ "A little voice keeps saying hang in there, old horse. You've got 'em on the run."

"A voice?"

"Not literally. Don't put _that_ down. I mean conscience. Or whatever. If I thought I heard voices..."

"Yet something mysterious keeps you at this."

"I wouldn't call it mysterious."

"Well, conscience, you said."

"A sense of obligation. Somebody's got to do it. It's the biggest issue in the world. I seem to be the one with the time and the money - and the stupidity!" He made a face. "But others will come along to say it better. Don't make a big mystical thing out of it."

"But it could fucking well get your head blown off!" she burst out. It was pent-up frustration at the danger he was exposed to with this schoolboy world-saving impulse.

He raised his brow at the verbal explosion but otherwise let it go. "We're here," he said. "My roots."

"No, goddamn it, you're going to answer this." She had no right to take that tone, but intuitively expected him to allow it. He liked her; she sensed that, but also felt that he might be one of those rare men in public life who welcomed criticism (versus the many who claimed they did) and retained a trace of humor about himself. The expressway ramp ended in a city street. With a mock sigh he pulled to the curb and waved a hand out the window for the other car to wait behind. "What if someone takes a fucking shot at you?" Maggie Deland kept at him.

"Well, what if?"

"Would it be worth it to get killed?"

"I don't comment on stuff like that. Let's not give anybody the idea."

"Oh!" She snapped off the recorder.

"In fact, let's quit talking about me. Let's talk about another guy for a change. Someone who's lived a good life, a fortunate life..."

"You're thirty-two years old, for Christ sake."

"Thirty-three. Had a birthday last week. Missed that, didn't you? Anyway, this guy is probably older than most soldiers killed in battle..."

"I don't believe this. Are you telling me you've lived a long life?"

"We're not talking about me. This other peculiar gentleman. Yes, he'd like to be full of years someday, eighty, ninety, why not? But he has this idea, which he flatters himself the world could benefit by considering. Now, if everybody would just pipe down, he'd lay this idea out in front of people, let it stand or fall on its own merits, and walk away."

"So you _would_ like to walk away?"

"Of course. This guy's got other things to do, and no 'martyr complex,' as the media keep telling him he has."

"Not that he's aware of," she said,

"But also realizes that if something happened to him... well, it would at least advance an idea."

"Disgusting!" she said. "Martyrdom!"

"It would call attention..."

"That's sick, you know, the first sick thing you've said. I'd hate to think a guy who seems to have his head screwed on reasonably straight..."

"I don't say it's the preferred result," he said.

"No idea is worth dying for - none!"

Now it was his turn to look offended. "You're putting down everyone killed fighting the Nazis, the Civil War, the..."

"Well, this isn't a war."

"No? The fact is, I'm surer of my own war aims than I might be of the country's. And what if this idea helps head off future wars?"

"Let me tell you something frankly, though I probably shouldn't," she said. "I'm supposed to be an objective reporter. Do you want to hear?"

His brow went up. "Wait, let me brace myself."

"As sure as we are sitting here, Mr. Moneybags Messiah, you're a dead man walking. Somebody is going to blow your brains out and will be called a hero for doing it. There, I've said it. And _inviting_ such a fate, I'm afraid, doesn't make you seem very right in the head. You're either a fool, a subtle charlatan, or a compulsive exhibitionist, up to your eyeballs in ego."

He looked at her with such frank attention, such respect for her opinion, and not anger but a curious mildness, that she felt guilty under his gaze and dropped her eyes. "And no option for 'none of the above'?" he said. "An ordinary guy without secret agendas or psychological baggage, just an idea that might help the world a little bit? You're a tough lady."

"I'm sorry to be so blunt. I'd hate to see you pay such a heavy price for what your fellow Pittsburgher Andy Warhol called everybody's fifteen minutes of fame."

"But I can't let it go, you see. Not yet. Wouldn't be right."

A thought came to her. _How to recruit a prophet in a scientific age? Just let him have an idea he "can't let go." Nice adjustment, Lord, to the times we live in!_ Her expression must have turned gloomy, because the next moment he was trying to console _her._ "There's an easier way to get me off the stage," he said.

"And what would that be?"

"Ignore me. If people quit coming out, if I thought I was talking to myself, I'd feel like an idiot. And slink back to well-deserved obscurity."

She had to smile. "Maybe I will suggest that."

"On the other hand, it is my solemn duty not to allow you to ignore me. By continuing to make irresistible news." He chuckled. "And now, miss, relax. Enjoy a guided tour to a great old neighborhood."

***

"I'm dead!" Mary Mulcahy said later in the farmhouse yard. Stiffly she got out of the car driven by photographer Baker. "The bones cry out, and the throat says, 'Vodka! Tonic!'" She took Maggie Deland's arm and mounted the porch steps as the two men walked the other way, down the yard, where Len Baker wanted shots of Jess Josephson in the mellow light of late afternoon, with trees, house, and sky in the background.

Later, glasses in hand (soft drinks in deference to the guests' long drive to the Pittsburgh airport) they stood looking for news in front of a television set and heard a familiar name. "...This mischief maker Josephson," an evangelist was saying on screen. A choral group with potted plants and American flags were massed behind him on risers. The preacher had a strong, pitted face and sweaty hair. He appeared very angry. "Graffiti theology, that's what this man is talkin'," he said. "We all know what graffiti is. Them dirty scrawls all over the slums. When Jo-seph-son talks theology, land sakes, he don't get any closer to God than them poor saps who do graffiti get to Rembrandt." The studio audience whistled and applauded.

"Not a bad line," the accused said, arms folded, in front of the television set.

"But the worst thing about graffiti is how hard it is to clean off," the evangelist went on. "It sticks. You can scrape it, buff it, scrub it and sand it, overhand and underhand it, and it sticks. Josephson's lies are stickin' to clean young Christian minds."

"Tell 'em, Johnny!" someone in the audience shouted.

The preacher roared back, "Dontcha worry! I ain't gonna have this weirdo spreadin' graffiti on the minds of real Americans. An' you heard me, I said _real_ Americans! Smiths an' Joneses an' McCoys, Mister Jo-seph-son." He gave a foreign-sounding inflection to the name. The crowd cheered.

The accused began to comprehend. "Who is this guy?" he said.

"I was just flipping channels," Mary said.

"I say to you," the man on screen bore on, "all across this great country which is under unremitting attack, I say to you that a Jo-seph-son might be what we need today..." He paused to allow the audience to cry, "No! No!" But he insisted. "Yes! Yes, to remind us who the enemy is! I mean the permanent enemy, folks. Not the temp'rary enemies. Not the poor clucks fightin' me in 'Nam or my Daddy in World War Two, nor any misguided sucker who comes up agin us in an _earthly_ war. Hell's bells, we all know how to make it up with them afterwards. What I'm talkin' about now is Mr. Moneybags, who rep'asents the permanent enemy." Many jeered the word "enemy" now. The control booth switched cameras from face to face. An elderly woman raised a crutch over her head.

"The permanent enemy rejected Jesus when He walked amongst 'em, having sprung in the very midst of the moneybagses."

"Boo!"

"The permanent enemy has rejected Jesus ever' single day o' the two mill-enn-ia since His death on the cross - for us! - and His resurrection..."

"Boo!"

"And rejects the Savior to this day. And why?"

Dead silence. "This is unbelievable," said Maggie Deland.

"Because sweet Jesus din't like what the Josephsons o' Jerusalem did with their money then, an' He don't like it now!"

A cheer started up but the preacher pointed to his watch. "If Josephson don't have the sense... hold it, friends... if he don't have the common sense to cease and desist - an' graffiti artists rarely do, have you noticed? - we'll have more to say in the future. But let this suffice..." He glared into the camera, his angry face in a sweat, a lock of hair falling over his brow. "Quit it!" he demanded. "Quit obscurin' and confusin' so our children never find their way home to Christ. It's one thing to take people's money, o ye millionaires..." He paused for an oceanic wave of booing.

"Pure damn anti-Semitism," said Mary Mulcahy.

"Listen," said Jess Josephson.

"... But it's a whole 'nother thing to steal people's minds. We won't let you do it, Mr. Josephson!" Cheers. "By God, sir - and I never take His name in vain - have the decency to forbear for a Christian nation, and _let our children go!_ "

He raised both arms but stood solid and grim as the cheering swelled. "Forgive me, friends," he cried, "I've used up the time of all those burning to witness for Jesus. Come up, folks! We're here doing the Lord's work long after we're off the air... Glory be!" He fell to his knees, the camera zooming in on his face, eyes shut, lips moving in prayer. The control room used split screens to highlight faces in the crowd, tears, exalted laughter. The chorus sang, "My Legs Grow Light When I Walk in His Way." Many in the hall moved up the aisle, some on crutches or in wheelchairs. Lines of white lettering floated up the screen. They bore the legend, "House of the Almighty," with a post office box in Opa-Locka, Florida. An off-camera voice announced that for a transcript of the afternoon's message by the Rev. Johnny Deus a check or money order for five dollars should be mailed to the Opa-Locka address.

"Opa-Locka," said Jess Josephson. "That's near Miami, isn't it?"

A week later, at her desk, Maggie Deland found a voice-mail: "Hi, Maggie. Jess Josephson. Sorry you're not in. I liked your story on the Net. It didn't leave me too bloody. It's Friday, nine a.m. I'm at the airport in Pittsburgh, en route to Florida. Remember that preacher on the air last week? Graffiti theology? If you're near a TV between five and six this afternoon, try to catch what channel he's on in New York. Don't tell anyone who told you. Mary would skin me alive if I tipped off one reporter, playing favorites... Well, I guess that's all. I hope things are well with you. I'd look forward to another chat sometime. Good-bye."

# 6.

The rental car was parked out of the sun in the shadow of a ten-story building. Even with the windows down Mary Mulcahy felt hot and sticky, and it was not yet May. _Never let me be tempted to retire to Florida,_ she thought. Would it make sense to start the engine and get the air-conditioning on? She regretted not making one last bathroom stop. Alone in the car, she held a small portable television on her lap. Its screen was barely five inches across but gave a clear image.

The Rev. Johnny Deus was addressing the issue of "Josephsonism." He said no other spiritual sickness had brought in such a quantity of mail, offerings, and positive signs from the Lord. But he didn't need the mail; he could sense "in this House and along the airwaves" that Christians were with him and "mighty darned angry," which was good. "Scripture itself praises the uses of wrath in a righteous cause," he reminded folks. "What is worth fightin' for, after all?" He pounded a fist in his hand. "The so-called rights o' perverts to engage in sexsh'l abominations and narcotics?"

"No!" the audience shouted in the big white hall, a converted movie theater, a half-block from Mary's car. Pennants along the roof drooped in the breezeless air. Atop a marble shaft high in the sky stood a cross of stainless steel.

"Or do real Americans mean the right to worship the Lord? An' teach our children to worship Him without havin' their young minds warped an' besmirched."

"Yes! Oh, yes!" the crowd shouted. "Praise the Lord!"

"What is worth fightin' for? More millions for the Mammonites o' Hollywood?"

"No!"

"Or tellin' the millionaires, keep your gold and graffiti, your cocaine sniffin' and gay marriages..."

"Boo! Boo!"

"Keep all them abominations an' non-Christian ways... keep 'em away from our sweet Christian kids!"

Mary checked the clock on the dashboard: 5:50. Where the hell were Jess and Pete?

"Yes... yes!" the crowd shouted as the producer in the broadcast booth, catching the rhythm, switched from shot to shot, flashing impassioned faces, the well and the beautiful, but also the blind, the halt and aged, eyes glittering, fists shaking.

"... Kids whose souls," the evangelist cried, "deservin' eternal bliss in the sunlight o' Jesus, like young plants growin'..." In his fervor he wept; a camera zoomed in to witness the wetness on his cheeks. "...Like young plants growing - needin' and cravin' the light - are bein' _denied_ that light by the graffiti of the vandals against Christ, the..."

"How dare you, sir!" a new voice boomed. The Rev. Mr. Deus jerked his head sharply left, in the direction of something outside camera range. His jaw fell. _" How dare you_ stir up Christians against other people!" shouted the off-camera voice. "That's nothing but promoting hatred for the Jews!"

The image on Mary's set jumped to a long shot of the full stage. The evangelist shrank to the lower left of the screen, in front of the massed chorus, flags, and florals. A figure strode towards him from screen right, clad in a white suit like the host himself. There were noises of confusion. Then Jess Josephson stood beside the Rev. Mr. Deus, pointing a finger in his face. "Quit attacking me as a Jew, Preacher! Quit stirring up hate because you can't answer honest arguments about God!"

The evangelist gasped, "Still on the air?" The shock of the other's approach - here - on stage - at first mystified, then enraged him, while the crowd held its breath, perhaps thinking it all part of the show. "Who letcha in here?" said Deus, who was heavier but of similar height, his face to the left of Josephson's on screen. The control room, "following the action" reflexively (but ill-advisedly), switched to a close-up of the two. For this the producer would be fired within the half-hour. Her clear duty, and could anybody but a "pinhead" not see it, as the Rev. Mr. Deus put it later, holding an icepack to his face, was to cut the live telecast "clean as the nuts off a gelding." A "technical difficulties" card might have been segued by a film clip of the evangelist's inspiring life story, and "what the fuck could be simpler than that?" as he said.

For a moment the antagonists faced each other in rage, mingling breath like dragons, joined in a pose that would be used the next day on newspaper front pages in two-, three-, and four-column layouts. "Who letcha in here?" the Rev. Mr. Deus again inquired, pulling his head back as from a pollution.

"Someone's got to answer this house of hate!" Josephson shouted, pushing forward, keeping his face in the picture. Mary Mulcahy, paralyzed in the car, unable to breathe, had never seen him so furious. Only twenty minutes earlier he had seemed cool, even playful, before Pete and he had walked up the street.

"Ushers and deacons!" the evangelist cried, wildly looking about.

"You hate-spreading fraud! You bigot!" Josephson bunched a fist under the other's nose. "Hypocrite! False Christian!" Every word came through with uncanny clarity, picked up by the preacher's own lapel microphone, despite background noise.

"Fuckin' ushers 'n deacons!" Deus screamed. The audience gasped. Did he realize what he had said? "Get this cocksucker outta here!" Turning away, he headed off-screen to the left.

"Jesus!" Mary moaned and pressed her knees together.

"Get the camera off 'im!" Deus cried again, spotting a monitor. "Turn the goddamn cameras off!" Again a gasp of disbelief, followed by noises of rage, frustration, rising panic. Women screamed. Floral offerings toppled as someone tried to climb on the stage from the audience. The control room switched images but perversely showed a scuffle backstage. A powerfully-built black man - Mary was sure it was Peter Winslow - seemed to be trying to hold back others who struggled with him. Then the screen went blank. Two, three, four seconds... nothing.

"Stand by." It was an announcer's voice. Mary trembled. The TV set shook in her lap. Were they clubbing poor Jess and Pete to death? Then an image came up, exploding from a single point of light in mid-screen. The Rev. Johnny Deus was kneeling on stage, weeping. "Forgive me, Father! Tear out my tongue if it offend."

"Where's your shame, you foul-mouthed hypocrite!" Jess's voice off-camera. Incredibly they hadn't silenced him. Next moment he was back in the picture, standing behind the preacher. He shook a finger and shouted, "Hypocrite, hate monger!" Then organ music sounded. The white lettering of the closing credits floated up from the bottom of the screen. Cameras caught images of horrified faces, a travesty of the usual concluding moments. The chorus stood dumb; sopranos and altos normally projecting joy sobbed or stared in disbelief, their eye shadow running.

Now the Rev. Johnny Deus had risen to his feet and was shaking a fist in Jess Josephson's face. He looked determined to exact the biblical eye for an eye, and more. Jess shouted back, but neither could now be heard, nor anything from the audience. The audio was off. Only the white lettering of closing credits floated up, offering a transcript of the program for a check or money order to a P.O. Box in Opa-Locka, Florida, while the two men in white raged behind the rising message. In the final instant before the program left the air, one of the two - no telling which; the action was obscured - threw a punch. The other reeled back. The screen went blank.

"Jesus," Mary said. "Oh, Jesus." Trembling, she craned about to look up the street toward the House of the Almighty. Should she call the police on her cell phone? Would 911 arrive in time to do any good? The TV in her lap - she had forgotten how to turn it off - absurdly began playing calypso. A young couple bicycled past palms and a surf; a native voice crooned, "Dis is de season, mon. Jamaica callin' you."

The car doors opened. Every muscle in Mary's body tensed. She expected violence, handcuffs. Peter Winslow slid into the driver's seat, breathing hard. In one motion he turned the key, put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. Mary could not bring herself to turn around. Then a familiar voice, winded from sprinting, said from the rear seat, "He shouldn't have called me a Jew bastard."

# 7.

"Hi, Jess. Harry Kaufhoffer."

"Harry! Long time. How've you been?"

"Fine, fine. But first let me thank you on behalf of us anti-anti-Semites."

"What for?"

"For busting that so-called man of God in the teeth yesterday."

"You know why, don't you? He called me a Jew bastard."

"I figured something like that. But get ready to be sued, my friend."

"I doubt it."

"Then let me have a dollar for every shyster who's already been on the phone with that son of a bitch trying to get the case. You've also treated him to the greatest ratings in TV history next time he's on the air."

"I suppose so."

"By which time he'll have worked up a hell of a lie to explain what happened."

"Well, I'll be listening."

"Unless you know a good trial lawyer, I've got a recommendation for you. Leo T. Rothman would do it as a favor to me. Ever hear of him? The best. When the time comes, just ask. And now, how'd you like to speak at my new mall tomorrow?"

"Wow, you switch gears fast."

"I have to. I'm up against an advertising deadline."

"What's the hurry?"

"Hey, have you lost all market sense? I want you first. Your first appearance since bopping that son of a bitch."

"Harry, that's so commercial!"

"Exactly. The fact is I've been open a month and the traffic's not up to par yet. An offbeat attraction like you might do it."

"Well, that's flattering."

"Go ahead, laugh. But I have less than an hour to get on the phone and order a page in the Sunday papers."

"But what if you put off more shoppers than you attract? A lot of people hate me, you know. I get hit with things."

"I'm already planning extra security. But think of it, a full-pager. 'Come hear Jess Josephson, sensational speaker, Sunday noon, Classe de la Concorde Mall, Airport Freeway...'"

"Wait. You call this place _Classe_ de la Concorde?"

"Terrific, huh? Jets, Paris, all those great images. I've got three levels, a central court eighty feet up from the StarLaunch Stage to the Skydome. Gorgeous. You might have a couple of thousand listeners."

"All right, let's do it."

"Terrific."

"I hope you're not sorry."

"You put that TV preacher on the map, you're going to put my mall on the map."

"It would be a very good deed."

"Cost me nearly four hundred million, would you believe. I'm trying to make it _the_ place for happenings around Philadelphia. News events, presidential campaigns - the place!"

"But how would you like your customers getting hit with rotten fruit? And maybe injured. You can still back out."

"No, it's too sensational. But I'll _really_ beef up security. Just don't rouse them up too much. Go easy a little."

"I'll try to figure out how to do that."

"And get here early. We'll have brunch on the boat. I'm not getting enough use of it as a deduction."

"Maybe after, if anyone still has an appetite."

"Let me send the plane for you."

"No, we'll drive. No plane, no yacht. No gorgeous models. I've got to fight these playboy images. People are calling me a billionaire. They're confusing me with you."

"Ha ha. But Jess, is everything okay with you? I'm serious now. Don't bullshit old Harry."

"Fine, fine."

"I don't have to tell you how much I thought of your dad and mother. They'd expect me to talk sense to you."

"They loved you too, Harry. And Aunt Swanna."

"I miss them all, Jess. Girlfriends... well, they can't compare. You should get married, kiddo."

"I will, Harry, some day. No more catting around."

"A good wife would be keeping you out of all this trouble."

"Too late now, Harry."

"Just listen to me, Buster. I don't want you getting hurt, understand?"

"I couldn't agree more."

"This speech now, it's not _that_ important to me."

"Understood. Now will you get on the phone and call the papers? Time's wasting. Classe de la Concorde, here we come! I can't get over that name."

***

This is terrific - a microphone!" Jess Josephson said. "Usually I'm yelling into a bullhorn. Hello up there. Am I carrying?" He waved to people on the upper shopping levels. Many answered with applause. Unmistakable in his white suit, he stood at a microphone in the middle of a hardwood stage. Behind him rose the glass panels of a see-through elevator shaft - and the elevator was in use; customers were not about to interrupt their Sunday shopping. They pushed baby strollers on and off the transparent cars and peered down at the man on stage, who fell away as they ascended toward the vaulted skylight or soared with the architecture as they plunged into the well of the central court.

Peter Winslow stood back, hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket. He estimated the crowd at more than a thousand. Some were seated around three sides of the stage on step-like risers that gave the effect of bleachers. Others lined the waist-high walls of the upper levels. They had applauded as Jess walked on. It was a good sign; they might have jeered or thrown things. Mary Mulcahy, at stage left, nodded and smiled. Approval for her boy always made her happy. Standing by her side, pink-cheeked and beaming at his customers, was a white-haired, barrel-chested Pennsylvania Dutchman (not Jewish, Winslow was surprised to learn) who had been a buddy of Jess's late father's in the Navy and now owned shopping malls.

Below the stage, at the foot of three short flights of steps, stood six private security guards. More were posted on the second and third levels. This was overkill, Winslow thought, a sign that trouble was expected. Which was true enough. He could not remember Jess's last appearance without trouble. It seemed a miracle that less than forty-eight hours earlier they had escaped Florida alive, having left the Rev. Johnny Deus in a heap onstage. The preacher's minions must have been torn between a desire to assist him and reluctance to challenge the punch that laid him low. Only two people in the place had a clear idea of what to do - get the hell out of there. It was the best example yet (or worst) of "Jess luck," a phrase the media had begun using, which only waved another red flag.

The scene around him did not please the right-hand man: Jess alone at center stage; a flock of Keystone Kops; and the flaunting of a public appearance within two days of setting a Christian minister on his rear end. Like any mall this one attracted teen-aged goof-offs and potential troublemakers; Winslow had already spotted a sprinkling of skinheads.

Today everyone expected the star attraction to defend the "punch seen round the world," another incendiary phrase. But this was one subject the "trinity" (more media wit) had decided not to touch; to ignore; to refrain from rubbing noses in it. Today Jess's angle could not have been less controversial: children. He saw many children in the crowd and was glad to see them. He hoped to get married himself one day and have a family, he said. "Want my phone number?" a woman called out and everyone laughed, including Jess. Sunlight poured down, broken to slivers of rainbow under the prismatic dome. The assemblage thickened on the shopping levels.

Too many people nowadays, the speaker said - successful people, too, which was sad - seemed to have decided not to have children. There was all this talk about "kids costing so much money." But each child, he said, extends what God did in the first place by creating the universe. This was disarming. Audiences expected an atheist; hearing him in person was a surprise. He believed in God.

A child on the second level, a pretty blonde with a ribbon in her hair, blew a kiss as his glance passed her, and he waved back, having a knack for gestures like that without losing a train of thought. He said he had no argument with the churches and synagogues for encouraging marriage and children. On the contrary, the family as an institution needed more defenders than ever, he said. Yet he could think of two ways, "two big ways" - he held up the appropriate fingers - in which conventional faiths did not promote the happiness of children. There was a shuffling of feet, but he had conceded a virtue to religion; it was only fair to let him state a limitation.

First, he said, dividing babies into groups opposed to each other at birth, on the basis of their parents' religion, which they also had been born into, struck him as "social mischief repeating mindlessly through the generations." Second, he doubted if married couples would bring kids into the world at all if they thought through the idea of eternal punishment. "With all the bad influences nowadays," he said, "drugs, drink, dirty movies, junk TV," he guessed there'd be a sizable chance, maybe fifty percent, of any new soul eventually going to hell. And all because infants are born into this life of temptations. "Hey, folks," he said, "if we really believed that, I bet we'd say forget it. Better not to have any kids. Billions of years of hell to the child you love, for seventy or eighty chancy years on earth. Not a good deal..."

A tomato landed on the stage.

It struck with a _splat_ six feet in front of him. A wet red star spread on the hardwood. The crowd gasped. Peter Winslow pulled his hands from his pockets bunched into fists. Jess Josephson looked at the floor. "Hmm, I see," he said. "Well, that's a point of view." The crowd let out a breath and laughed; his timing and irony were so right. But Winslow swore to himself. Mary Mulcahy had a hand to her mouth, the other clutching the arm of Harry the mall man. "People should throw ideas, not vegetables," the speaker said with a tight smile and tried to resume.

But then came a hail of tomatoes. They arced down from the second shopping level. Most landed on the stage but one struck him in the chest and another the leg, splattering his jacket and trousers. The audience groaned. There were screams. Security guards charged up the stage steps. "Hold on, folks," Jess's voice sounded over the loudspeakers. "It's just a cleaning bill." But a scuffle had broken out on the second floor. Winslow joined Harry Kaufhoffer below the point of disorder. Angrily pointing upward, the magnate bellowed something to his security people.

"Wait, wait, don't leave, everybody," Jess said. The disturbance upstairs continued but nothing more was thrown and his tone was reassuring. "You know... wait, everybody... you know when people throw things at me..." The noise abated to catch what he had to say. "... It always gets more attention in the news." There was a sprinkle of applause and murmurs of assent. "You'll see, we'll be on television tonight." A burst of camera clicks seemed to confirm that news was indeed being made. Except for the scuffle above - were guards arresting anyone? - most of the crowd grew quiet, but also craned to see what was going on. What had the speaker been talking about? Who remembered, who cared?

Jess Josephson looked up, pointing from the microphone. "Hey, up there - tomato people," he called out, although he could not have seen anyone from his angle on the stage below. "Hey, come on, no hard feelings."

A youth in a leather jacket appeared at the waist-high wall. His hair grew high, stiffened with grease along the middle of his head like a rooster's comb. A cross dangled from one of his ears. He shook a fist. He shouted, "Get the fuck outta here, Christ-killer!" Others of similar appearance, black-jacketed but varied in their patterns of massing and coloring the hair, joined him at the rail, four males and two females. Guards tried to restrain them. "Kike!" they shouted. "Cocksucker!" "Jew go home!"

The audience groaned. Peter Winslow's stomach contracted, the scene was so vile. He sensed outrage in the crowd, yet a perverse fascination. People seemed furious but intimidated as well, stymied by a spewing of obscenities normally suppressed in public, a verbal emptying of toilets. Winslow could not read Josephson's face, which was turned from him. The aborted orator stood mid-stage in a now clownish costume. He looked up, motionless but as if mainly surprised, waiting for the noise to stop. The crowd took his cue. The louts did their shouting alone, unresisted, until they sounded foolish in the high spaces of the mall and fell silent, like churchgoers who realize that others are staring.

"Come down here," said Jess Josephson. He made a circular, beckoning motion with his hand. "Really, come on." This could not be a challenge to a fight. His voice was too gentle. It seemed an invitation to talk it over: a father bringing children before him with assurance in advance of no punishment.

Peter Winslow turned to admonish. "Jess," he said.

But the spattered one was looking up and making the come-down motion. He repeated the invitation. "I'm willing to hear what's on your mind. The microphone is yours."

"Jess," said Harry Kaufhoffer and Mary Mulcahy at once. He shook his head with a smile that said not to worry.

"Let 'em go, guards," he said.

The vegetable-throwers looked at each other. One circled a finger at his temple, diagnosing the Anti-Christ as crazy. Caught off-guard, they reasoned together. "Hey man, why not? Fuckin' right!" Pushing past people, they moved toward the elevator. "Comin' right down, man! Wait right there, don't go 'way!"

Winslow took Josephson by the elbow. "This is taking an awful chance," he said.

"What, kids like this? If I can't deal with them in fair argument..."

"But it won't be fair. Look at you."

"These are ugly kids, Jess," said Mary.

"Sewer rats" was Harry Kaufhoffer's assessment.

"They're playing my game," said Jess Josephson.

Someone upstairs pushed a button and the glass elevator descended from the third level to the second, where, incredibly, shoppers got off and on. The six youths crowded into the car and rode down like caged beetles in their black leathers. A moment later they trooped onstage under a loud buzz of anticipation. Winslow clenched fists in his pockets. These awful kids: slack jaws, swagger, and stupid pride; the imbecile satisfaction they took in having the spotlight in their fake-guerrilla get-up; the girls as bad as the boys - worse - in tight jeans, caked makeup, and rainbow hair, blatantly sexual.

The gaze that Josephson gave this crew Winslow could only marvel at. Media people (not always friendly) had remarked it on other occasions. They called it his "mild" look. But the word connoted softness, passivity. It did not convey what Winslow saw there: a strange regard for the person before him, however repellent. _He respects people more than I do,_ the ex-Presbyterian said to himself.

Around the stage, cameras clicked. Radio reporters whispered into hand-held mikes, apparently broadcasting live. Shoulder-mounted video equipment moved in closer, straining against the backs of security guards - and Jess Josephson had again managed to turn a routine appearance into a media frenzy. He gestured at the microphone as the ringleader approached. "Here, have your say. We'll listen."

The boy shuffled forward with a laugh. The amplified sound of it delighted his friends. He slouched and performed tic-like, rhythmic movements as if seeking a beat to get into. "Unaccustom's I am to public speakin'," he began, and many in the audience laughed. His cohort guffawed and slapped backs. Then he grew fierce, his features arranged in a scowl. "All's we're sayin' is we don't want this guy - or no guy - talkin' down the church. What right's he got? This ain't his country. That's all's we're sayin'."

The crowd was silent. Arms folded, Josephson nodded, implying: all right, we hear you, anything more?

Emboldened, the boy went on in a stronger voice. "We don't want anybody talkin' down Christ. What right's a Jew got? They killed Christ! Now they wanna kill 'im again!" The audience groaned, but his companions yelled for him to "go fer it, man, yeah!"

"The Hebes don't like what kinda country we got? No problem!" the prosecutor continued. "Let 'em bug off!" His myrmidons loved it, chorusing, "Yeah! Yeah!" The boy said, "They got their own country now, Izreel. Let 'em go there! An' git the fuck outta our face!" The gang applauded and cheered as if the speaker had stated the case to perfection. There was even a scattering of applause on the shopping levels. The boy took this as a sign of success and that he could with dignity yield. "All yours, Monsoor," he said with a mock bow.

Josephson stepped forward. His face registered surprise. What - abuse, cliches, no more? When he had expected serious argument?

"First, he said, "what's all this blame against the Jews? I happen to be Jewish, yes. But it's not the Jews speaking here. It's me. One guy. If I am wrong, I'm wrong as an individual. It's as unfair to blame my ideas on the Jews as it would be to blame your behavior on the Christians."

A burst of cheers, applause, and laughter greeted this. "Tell 'em, Jess," someone shouted.

Another of the black jackets moved forward as if personally insulted, entitled to a parliamentary right of reply. A hulking boy with a week's growth of beard, he had a tangled mop of hair on one side of his head, a shaved scalp on the other. Josephson, who was not small, faced him like a terrier a husky. "Let me finish," he said. "You'll get your turn." Something in his tone gave pause to the larger dog.

"And this business of killing Christ," he resumed. "No, sir. Not guilty. And isn't it time we declared a statute of limitations on that anyway? Enough already with this 'Christ-killer' nonsense. Anybody born in the last two thousand years is acquitted." Applause greeted this proposal. "Besides," he said, "a lot of what Jesus said I approve of. Where I _disagree_ with him..." He paused for quiet. "... Is mainly on two points. His claim to be the biological son of God, if he made that claim. And second, that the only way to God is through him, Jesus, if he made _that_ claim. Exclusive franchise. No one else permitted. Sorry, I think the door is open wider."

Again there was applause, but more subdued. These were attacks on Christian doctrine, after all. One of the skinhead girls stormed: "And who the fuck are you to say?"

He looked at her. "If you disagree, that's okay. You have a right. Jesus is a tough call. Honest people can come down on either side."

Winslow marveled at his calm. There was nothing in it of fear or abasement. His self-possession was an animal trainer's, confident of superiority in will and intelligence, determined not to compete snarl for snarl. Verbal crudities seemed to slide off him. He reached to the underlying argument, treating it as if seriously stated.

"But it's a Christian country, ain't it?" the hulking boy barked in the microphone. "Ain't it, fer Christ sake? What the fuck right do you have to go fuckin' with it?"

"It _is_ a Christian country," Josephson unexpectedly conceded, "in its moral tradition. I share that tradition and honor it." He put up a hand. "But not because any religion is more legal than any other. Just look at the Constitution."

The oaf looked affronted. "You sayin' the Consatootion don't make this a Christian country?"

"It doesn't," Josephson said. "Just read it." (Which was a laugh.) "You'll see."

"Well fuck it, then!" the lout spat and stepped away as if the dispute were too foolish to engage a man of serious views.

"But it does..." Jess insisted, "the Constitution does make this a country where everybody can speak his piece. And that's all I'm..."

"Aw, speak a piece o' this!" screeched the second girl, obese and ludicrously painted, with a vulgar gesture.

Appalled murmurs were heard in the crowd but Jess was imperturbable. Winslow thought he must be building points with every abuse, as he came back to the underlying argument. "You folks believe in God or you wouldn't be here," he said without visible irony. "I think there's an idea of God that could put you and me on the same side."

They made noises of contempt. He was frustrating them. Should they get it over with and bash his head in before all these witnesses? He would be defended at once, they would be in jail and bruised and bloodied to boot. This they hadn't foreseen: the son of a bitch insisting on being _nice._

"An' what if I don't believe in God?" said a new boy at the mike, stoop-shouldered, undersized, with earrings in his tongue and lower lip and a rat-like cunning in his eyes. "What if I believe in Satan, huh? What then?"

"The devil?" said Jess. "Then I'd feel bad for you. You're wasting your belief on second-best, man."

The rodent was just curious enough to ask, "Whatcha mean by that?"

"If you think Satan exists, that means you believe in a supernatural being, right?"

Suspicious of a trap, the youth said, "Yeah? So?"

"But that's a terrific leap of faith," Jess said in apparent admiration, as if the wretch had thought through the implications of his idiocy. "A lot of people can't make that leap. But if you can - that is, accept the idea of a greater being than ourselves - then you ought to make it God. There's better evidence for God. You don't think Satan created the universe, do you?"

"Yeah, I do." But this was reflex; the boy hadn't expected his "belief" to receive the dignity of an arguable principle.

"Then all you're saying is that the Creator is the devil," Jess said. "Satan is God, one and the same. You believe in God, but an evil God. Well, it's a point of view. I don't happen to share it, but some might. I don't see the creation of the universe as an act of evil. I don't think it adds up."

There was a murmur of assent in the crowd, and the rat-faced boy, who may also have agreed, nevertheless said, "Shit, man, then ya don't," and seemed glad enough to back away.

But the first girl moved forward again, she who had attacked Jess for daring to oppose Jesus. "Are you sayin'," she said, as if the point were absurd, yet realized as she spoke that it might not be, "that if you're going to believe in anything... it might as well be... God?"

He smiled. "Well put. Wish I'd said that."

Caught by surprise, she half smiled back. This was not an ugly girl under the makeup. Winslow had the impression Jess had reached something in her. She met his gaze with a stare in which the habitual flaunting of sexuality mingled with shame, confusion, and an unexpected awe. _" Shee-it,"_ one of the boys said, trying to revive the vulgar spirit, but the spark seemed to have gone out of it.

The girl in front of Josephson raised her eyes again. He returned her gaze. A moment of recognition passed between them, a surprise, as if under other circumstances, another time, another life... "You got a lot o' class, mister," she suddenly blurted, and _blushed._

"Thank you," he said.

"I... I'm sorry I threw stuff at you."

"It's all right," he said and reached out and patted her shoulder.

There was an awkward silence. And then applause, hesitantly at first, not quite in full belief, but gathering volume. The girl's lips moved; she said something that only Jess must have heard. The boy who had been the ringleader and who a moment before had worn a sneer, now looked exposed and worried. He made a move to leave but wrenched about and, intruding between the girl and Josephson, impulsively thrust out a hand. "No hard feelin's," he said. Jess accepted the hand. Applause and cheers redoubled.

_Goddamn,_ Winslow said to himself, grinning though his eyes smarted. _No, damn it, you don 't win over kids like this._ But there they were. All the blackjackets now gathered around red-stained Jess in a spasm of forgiveness. He shook hands and patted backs. Television and radio people swarmed. "What's your name? Where ya from?" reporters asked. Jess had not finished his speech, had barely begun it. But there was no way to top the moment. He said no more into the microphone. The cheering continued. _Let it flow,_ thought Winslow, _let the tide of the miracle flow..._

Presently guards had to clear the way. People would not let the wonder-worker leave. Faces were wet with tears. Harry Kaufhoffer put an arm around Mary Mulcahy's shoulder. Josephson gave Peter Winslow a high-five. The hero was sweating, clothes drenched, smelling of ripe tomato. The Presbyterian shook his head, unable to quit grinning, and he said to no one in particular, "Jess luck."

# 8.

"I prayed hard this week. I hungered for a sign from God. 'Lord,' I cried, 'should I give up this mission?'"

"No, no! Don't do it, Johnny!" members of the audience shouted. Television showed a woman covering her face with her hands, another apparently fainting and having to be assisted. But the Rev. Mr. Deus was relentless in condemnation of himself. "Never mind that the network p'rdicts the largest audience in Christian television history tuning in on us today, I am unworthy, Lord!"

"No, Johnny!" many cried out. "Oh, no!"

The evangelist's eyes were shut tight against such consolation. Kneeling at center stage, he raised his hands in supplication. "I heard myself take Thy Name in vain, Lord. Can't tell Saint Peter at the gates, 'I never said it, musta been misquoted.' It's on the tape. That gutter language I used before the light o' Jesus entered my soul. I reverted, Lord!"

"No, Johnny."

"Reverted! In a moment o' trial, not seein' the banana peel Satan threw in my path." The protests became a tempest. Men shook their fists. "Instead o'... instead o' just recognizing him for what he was, Lord. I failed that simple test, and let him bring them vile words to my mouth like vomit. I puked all over this great teevee network. Know what I did this week, Lord? Just what my Momma wouldda done. Washed out my mouth with soap! And I'm o' do it again, Lord..."

"Don't, Johnny!" people called out, distressed at the pain that conscience would inflict on the man.

"And I'm not wearin' the white suit no more, Lord, notice that? White signifies purity. That's why I'm out here in the jeans and boots and sport shirt I wear when I'm workin' in the garden around the backyard o' Betty's and my little cottage. So you won't see the white suit no more, Lord, _unless..._" He paused. "And _until..._" He paused. "... The people tell me by their words, an' prayers, an' e-mails..."

Cheers swamped his words, augmented by stamping of feet, whistles, and cowbells, so that the drummer in the studio orchestra could not resist tapping for joy on his snares, and the chorus hummed chords, applauded and sang out, "Praise the Lord, Amen!" till the Rev. Johnny Deus, though his eyes were shut, had to smile, however hard he concentrated on his cleansing guilt. The camera zoomed in and caught how heartened the folks had made him.

He rose to his feet and put up a hand. "But there's a more practical way to atone," he said with utmost gravity. "I will be..." he caught himself before reverting again. "I will be _dadblasted_ if I stop my fight against Josephsonism!" The crowd stood and roared. "Yessir! The end o' Josephsonism is near. We are going to cost that feller where it hurts. Yessir! Exhibit A! Mr. Wylie Bedford. Git your legs out here, Wylie, let's see ya."

A Negro in his seventies, with a fringe of woolly white hair, walked on stage with a willing but stiff-jointed gait. He wore a uniform of pressed khaki trousers, a short-sleeved shirt, and black bow tie. He smiled at the crowd's greeting. "You have something to say, do ya, Wylie?"

"'Deed ah does, Rev'n Johnny, or ah'll just burst." The camera zoomed in. "Ah's the guard at the stage door back there. Rev'n Johnny gave me the job seven years ago when I retired from Flo'da Pow 'n Light. I was there forty-seven year. Las' Friday, week ago today, these two fellers showed up. I never seen 'em 'afore in my life. The younger guy, in a white suit like Rev'n Johnny's, say he a preacher too. An' how he'd sure like to meet the best in the business." There was a scattering of appreciative laughter and a flash of Deus's smiling face on camera. "Ah tol' them fellers nothin's easier. Jus' go round the main door like evvabody else. After the service, go up and shake Rev'n Johnny's hand. But the feller in white say yeah, but he got somethin' _special_ to ask. An' bein' a preacher hisself, he like to ask it backstage an' not hafta wait in line. Sorry, I said, nothin' I can do. Then the other guy, this heavy guy, pulls out a big fat wallet. Look, here's fifty dolluhs, he say, we got a _really_ 'portant question to ask. But I say rules is rules. Then the young guy gives me this smile. What's it worth to ya? he say. Come on, fifty each? A hunnerd each?" The audience growled in sympathetic outrage. "An'... an' I..." The old man's voice faltered. A teardrop rolled down his nose.

The camera zoomed back: the Rev. Mr. Deus's consoling hand was on his shoulder. "It's okay, Wylie, it's okay." The guard looked up, eyes brimming. He tried to speak but was unable. The audience began to applaud. He shook his head in wonderment at how good folks were, then shambled offstage.

"I guess Satan came into this House last week with more than one banana peel," said the Rev. Mr. Deus. "And what Mr. Bedford was gonna tell you, if he hadn't choked up, is that he never took that money home. He put it right in the offering plate... where it's gonna do Christian work!" The hall rocked with cheers. "And now another feller will pick up the story from there. Carrick Crafton, git on over here!"

A tall white man with a moon-shaped face and an earphone set introduced himself contritely as "the general order-keeper backstage, if you folks can believe that." He said he had noticed the two strangers back there, but choir members will sometimes invite a friend or relative without notice to observe the making of a television production. "So I thought no more about it till they lit out past me on stage."

Then a handsome young man from the choir testified that Jess Josephson's accomplice, "the bigger guy, an African-American individual, stopped in front of us and had his hands jammed in his pockets like this, like he mightta been carrying guns." The crowd gasped. "For a moment we were just sorta paralyzed."

A bearded baritone added this: "I couldn't imagine we were still _broadcasting._ I figured nine-one-one was on the way with straitjackets. Me and other fellows ran over when the guy clipped Reverend Johnny out of a clear blue sky."

Deus demanded, "Did you hear me say anything insulting to that man, anything that couldda provoked him?"

"No, sir. It seemed to me like you were trying to calm him down."

"I want you to search your memory, boy. Did you hear me say one solitary word insultin' to that fella's Israelite heritage?"

"I did not, Reverend Johnny."

"An' you'd be prepared to take an oath on that in a court o' law?"

"Whenever and wherever, lemme at 'im!"

The crowd applauded and cheered, and the evangelist turned towards them. "I could stretch this out, folks. I could call two more fellas who were right there when that hombre sucker-punched me. That's exactly what it was, folks. A mean, lowdown sucker punch, looking for a nationwide sensation on this network _supported by Christian offerings!_ Now, I'd have been justified sayin' some pretty harsh things, like ya would to a burglar in your house, but there's my hand raised on it, I... I..." The Rev. Mr. Deus sobbed. "I never said one insultin' word..." As in a single voice the crowd voiced its belief in him. "An' he's gonna get a chance to stand up before a judge and take an oath on all the lies he's been tellin'. Because you and I are going to see each other in court, fella!" People stamped their feet, whistled, and rapped their canes and walkers on the floor. "Yessir! An' my legal adviser tells me it don't matter how much li'bility 'surance you got, Mr. Moneybags. Ain't no 'surance company on earth gonna pay off a claim you brung on yourself by willful trespass and assault and battery. This is gonna cost _you,_ fella!"

The evangelist stood in midstage and allowed the wave of approval to roll and swell and become a tempest. Only after a quarter-minute did he put out both hands as the lights in the hall dimmed on cue to illuminate him by contrast. He said, "Let us pray..."

# 9.

**From** **_NewsNow America_**

**Rising Tide of Violence**

**Mars Josephson Crusade**

*******

**Campuses Act to Bar Him**

**While TVangelist Sues;**

**Bodyguards Join His Retinue**

PITTSBURGH - Jess Josephson, home builder turned anti-religion activist, first won notoriety last March by paying a Manhattan arena audience $20 per capita to hear him. More recently, with less cash outlay but a knack for what critics call "measured violence," he has been drawing crowds and media attention rivaling those of a presidential campaign

His fame - but also his potential for economic liability - skyrocketed on April 28. In full view of a Christian television audience he floored the Rev. Johnny Deus, Florida evangelist, with a punch to the jaw. For that he faces a lawsuit seeking damages in the millions. Seemingly unworried, but newly protected by a cadre of muscular bodyguards, Mr. Josephson, bullhorn in hand, has gone on to harangue throngs numbering up to 7,000.

Heralded by a well-honed blitz of advance publicity, he has virtually taken over college campuses and snarled traffic, cut into store sales, and left trails of minor injuries at shopping centers. His appearances cause switchboards to ring at police stations and, on one occasion, a state national guard unit to be called out. "The only people who detest him more than religious leaders are retailers," says a reporter assigned for the past month (not happily, he confesses) to "the Jess beat."

In mid-flight oratorically Mr. Josephson has been arrested, pelted by flying vegetables, fists, and plastic bags filled with colored liquids. "He brings skinheads out of the woodwork," said Norma Trust, Detroit correspondent of _Time_ , one day last week, nursing a forehead scratched by an off-target missile. For nativists and anti-Semitic fringe groups (Mr. Josephson is of Jewish parentage) his attacks on religion appear targeted especially at Christianity, although he has called militant Islam "a global danger as far as the eye can see." He rarely can complete a speech without a breakout of violence. The number of persons booked on disorderly charges at his appearances (and discharged almost invariably after he leaves town) has crossed 500.

Not surprisingly, colleges and shopping centers, his preferred venues, have brought suit to keep him away. Last week he was barred by a federal court injunction from the Fayette Campus of Penn State University, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, less than an hour's drive from his farm in the hinterland of this industrial center where his late father launched the family fortune as a home builder in the boomer era.

Mr. Josephson did not contest the injunction plea. "I don't have time or money to be tied up in court," he said between sips of a vodka-and-tonic one late afternoon. Mellow sunlight slanted across the porch of the 140-year-old farmhouse that serves as his headquarters near a Westmoreland County hamlet ironically called Pleasant Unity.

Tall and personable at age 33, Mr. Josephson claims "absolutely no concern" that he will lose a civil suit for trespass and assault and battery brought against him in Florida by Mr. Deus, who excoriates him for having "the publicity appetite of a dung beetle." Some on the Jess Beat consider the air of insouciance overdone. "He's a hell of an actor, but underneath my bet is that he's scared he finally overstepped," says Philadelphia Daily News veteran Sig Hagen.

Mr. Josephson's new staff of "crowd assistants" - cynics on the beat call them "disciples" - are unarmed volunteers, mostly students who approach the speaker at his campus appearances, offering to help control potential violence. "Jess accepts their help for a week or two each on an unpaid basis, just room and board," said the Rev. Peter Winslow, Mr. Josephson's chief aide. "A squad of young fellows who can take care of themselves is a calming influence in a crowd."

Just such an influence has become a troubling priority. Where Mr. Josephson is involved, the most civilized occasions for discourse have ignited. On May 3 he appeared with theologians of the major faiths on the public television program, Boiling Point, hosted by publisher-columnist William B. Grandword, Jr. Accounts differ as to what occurred after the show left the air. A widely circulated version is that Mr. Josephson was assaulted by an enraged fellow panelist. Rabbi Arnold Lautisczher of New York's Yeshiva University, a child of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, refused to shake hands, calling Mr. Josephson a "detestable apostate." The rabbi was heard to shout backstage, "You would complete Hitler's work for him!"

Press aide Mary Mulcahy later said, "Jess looked as if he had been slapped in the face." She thinks her remark was taken literally and "since then there's been no stopping it." For his part Mr. Josephson denies the rabbi laid hands on him, and Rabbi Lautisczher has declined comment.

Tensions boiled over on May 11 at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, while Mr. Josephson was addressing an al fresco throng estimated at 4,500 students and faculty. A flying wedge of off-campus youths rampaged through the crowd, raising rebel yells. Scores of persons required treatment for minor injuries and Mr. Josephson finished his remarks with a welt on his cheek and his white suit drenched, the results respectively of a punch and a plastic bag of yellowish substance, both wildly thrown. Later the university was stung by criticism for "permitting" a renowned venue of the Catholic faith to be misused. Notre Dame issued a statement condemning the "blitzkrieg." It said the campus was "invaded with just a few minutes' warning," and that only by radio report.

Press aide Mulcahy, 62, herself a former nun, admits she relies on "basic press agentry" to attract audiences. "I put an announcement on the Internet to every radio and TV station and newspaper in a twenty-mile radius and tell them Jess will speak, giving time and place. Their own news judgment takes it from there." As to seeking permission in advance, she gestured impatiently, almost spilling a half-consumed Bloody Mary. "We used to do that, and they'd say keep away, we don't want you. Which raises trespass and liability issues. By _not_ forewarning them, we take them off the hook."

"The administrators never want us; the kids always do," interjected Mr. Winslow, 53. He said Mr. Josephson has invitations from student groups around the country, "a stack this high."

"There's no way we'd have him here," said the president of a state university in the Midwest, declining quotation by name. "It's not a free speech issue. We welcome all stripes of opinion. It's the threat to public safety. Our insurers say they'd cancel us."

Mr. Josephson's severest critics accuse him of employing the sauce of violence to flavor a lack of nutriment in his underlying message. He contends that "scare-religions" and "fairy-tale faiths" stunt the intellectual development of millions and make a "racket" of humankind's relationship with God. This in turn calls into question religion's moral content, with which he generally claims to agree. "I know Calvinists who aren't as straight-laced as Jess is," said reporter Hagen. "Queen Victoria would find him very well behaved."

But the homebuilder's personal propriety is irrelevant to religious leaders. They view him as a clear and present danger to salvation of souls. Says Jesuit theologian Carroll X. M. O'Boyle: "The man is a fountain of atheistic cliches, many times refuted. Yet because a crowd might get its heads bloodied, press and television keep treating this commonplace stuff as a revelation - and spreading it like germs."

"Jess brings us the latest news of the eighteenth century," the Rev. Jeremy Kirk acidly observes. He is editor of _Christians All,_ a Protestant ecumenical newsletter published in New York. "Voltaire and Tom Paine are yawning in their graves. But leave it to the news media. They dote on his willingness to put his head through the hole in a carnival booth, tempting people to throw pies at him."

Notwithstanding such criticism, the Josephson movement to date has received respectful treatment on television's "60 Minutes" as well as major articles in _Time, New York_ and _The Economist._ Television crews from Italy, Scotland, and Japan were filming over the weekend at the Pleasant Unity farm; they chortled in delight as Mr. Josephson, in what they saw as "typical American cowboy" garb, galloped a saddle horse for the cameras on his rolling 113-acre property.

Mr. Josephson stirs resentment on the secular as well as religious front. He has been often ridiculed in liberal, mainstream publications as "a prig, a square, a spoilsport." Brendan Hazelwood, acerbic columnist for NYContrarian, wrote that the homebuilder "answers the cries of the spiritually starving, like myself, with intellectual hors d'oeuvres, theological cheese on crackers." Ms. Trust, the magazine correspondent, said Mr. Josephson "brought the students of Wayne State University the Bible's stern Jehovah in the image of a celestial Dr. Spock; He never spanks."

Even in a generally sympathetic assessment on the Internet news service _DayLight_ , writer Maggie Deland tartly observed: "It may be too tempting to Jess Josephson to perceive God not as a Demanding Judge but as a Happy Builder whistling while he works, for Mr. Josephson is one himself. To what degree does this charmer of multitudes create the Lord in his own image, deducing from his own health, wealth, and profitable business a conveniently benign plan for the cosmos?"

To all of which Mr. Josephson replies: "The more criticism the better. I want controversy. I don't claim to have the last word. By speaking up, my hope is that better minds will come along to deal with these issues. The world is in big trouble with what we've got."

While the movement is in residence at his farm, some 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, days begin early and run late. (But not for agricultural reasons. Half the land remains in woods, the remainder tilled by a neighboring dairyman, rent-free.) Promptly at 7:30 a.m., press aide Mulcahy appears on the front porch to brief the media on "what Jess is doing today." By then, veterans of the Jess Beat, often augmented by journalists on special assignment ("day campers," the older hands call them) will have assembled in the farmyard, sipping coffee from disposable cups. The crusade is generous with wake-up caffeine but takes on no other expenses for the media. After late-night interviews, however, if one or more rooms should be free in his house, it is not uncommon for Mr. Josephson to invite a media person or two to sleep over rather than drive dark country roads to commercial lodgings. Says the _Nashville Tennessean 's_ Earl Corbin: "It's a subtle way to advertise - see, no wild parties. Jess has a fear that he's viewed as a cheerleader for godless hedonism."

(He may have cause. A tabloid circulated at supermarket counters has begun advance advertising for its June 15 edition, purportedly containing an expose of Mr. Josephson's sex life. His wry reaction: "What sex life?")

In the communities around Pleasant Unity, whatever mixed feelings are stirred by Mr. Josephson's theological perspective, there is grudging pride at the attention he brings. "We've had a Japanese television crew, a German magazine team, and reporters from thirty-eight states in just the past week," said a desk clerk at Mountain View Inn, near Greensburg, the county seat. "You should hear all the languages spoken in the bar at night."

As to the crusader's ultimate goals, Jess Beat veterans are divided. Some expect him to become politically active; others to parlay his face, fame, and persona into a movie or television career. He scoffs at such speculations. But few expect charismatic Jess Josephson to return to the role of a regional home builder, or to remain long at the head of a crusade that exposes him to lawsuits and mounting violence.

"I give him another three months," says Mort George of _The Los Angeles Times._ "Either he'll get bored doing variations on the same message or he'll get hit with one too many tomatoes - or something harder."

"But how many casualties of the soul will occur in the meantime?" ask fretful believers like the Rev. Jeremy Kirk. "Oh, the powers of mischief in an idea-spouting millionaire!"

# 10.

On an evening in May, after the weekly meeting of a volunteer fire department in a small Pennsylvania town, a group of men lingered in the twilight of the parking area. Behind them, glistening in semi-darkness inside the high glass doors, stood the VFD's pride, a new yellow, black, and chrome pumper.

"I think it's time somebody had a few words with this Josephson kike," said Ned Crombie, a husky, dark man whose eyebrows joined above his nose. He ran an automobile repair shop.

"Excuse me, Ned," said C. Waldron Tilbury. "Ease up on the language. One of my partners happens to be Jewish, as fine a gentleman as you'd want to meet. I know how offensive that particular word can be." A lawyer of sixty with a practice at the county seat, Wally Tilbury was an anomaly in the VFD, intellectually and physically. In his younger days he had been a tireless networker, who would troll for clients anywhere; now he had grown too fat to be worth much when an alarm sounded, but he liked the low-stakes poker games and the public service image didn't hurt.

"Nobody has to tell me there are some good Jews, far and few between," Crombie replied. "But this son of a bitch is a hundred percent kike and that's that." The attorney shrugged; there was only so much you could do with an oaf like Crombie and it was not an issue over which he cared to draw a line in the sand. "I don't have to tell you fellows the bad news this Josephson is for Christians," the mechanic said. "Back me up here, Chaplain."

The Rev. Sherbrook Alderson stood between Sam Maeburn, a real estate broker, and Roy Caton, a crew dispatcher for the electric utility. "I would say yes, on the whole, bad news," the VFD's spiritual adviser nodded.

Crombie continued, "You can't turn on the television without seeing this fucker... sorry, Pastor. But I come home every night, tired out, like I guess you fellows are, and what do I see on teevee? This... this guy, maybe in Chicago, maybe in Baltimore, always spoutin' the same stuff against Christianity."

"Against all faiths," Alderson put in. "It's not just a Christian issue, Ned."

"Okay, but let the others take o' theirselves. I'm proposin' we worry about Christianity. The church is the on'y line o' defense we got left in this country. What right's he got to tear it down?"

"Well, the right of free speech, I guess you could say," lawyer Tilbury replied too lightly.

The auto repairman turned on him. "Free speech, free shit! That's your fuckin' Supreme Court for you! They had free speech a hunnerd years ago and guys couldn't do this kind o' damage. He'd've talked to a few people and somebody would've took him behind a barn and beat hell out of him."

"What Ned says is right," said Roy Caton. "I heard a woman cryin' on a talk show - _crying tears -_ about how her son, a good church-going kid, come home an _atheist_ after listening to this guy at his college somewheres, Cincinnati, I think. It just ain't right."

"It's ass backwards is what it is!" said Crombie. "I can't pour a quart o' oil down a drain, but poison gets dumped in every Christian home in this country, because some Jew-boy is shooting his mouth off in Cincinnati, Boston, or wherever the hell."

"My kids asked me at supper," said Caton, an intense man whose nose had been broken in a fight after a Steelers game. "Daddy, is it true what that guy on teevee said: that God don't answer prayers, and there's no heaven?"

Sam Maeburn shook his head. "Lois and me often say how glad we are our kids are grown and gone. I wouldn't want to raise 'em today. Not with all these influences."

"I say we should all get rid of the teevee," said Harry Nichols, a teacher of welding at the vo-tech. "Throw it the hell out in the yard. It's destroying the younger generation."

"That's a whole nuther story," said Crombie. "Why should I have to quit watchin' the programs I like to keep this guy's poison out of my house? This kike is lyin' about God, lyin' about the Christian faith, and freedom of speech protects him but freedom _from_ speech don't protect us!"

The others nodded and laughed, and even Crombie had to smile; the phrase had come to him at that moment, and he believed it might be original. "But there's more to it than that," he went on. "I been givin' this a lot of thought. What if this Jew-boy convinces fifty percent of Christians, I'm not sayin' a hunnerd percent, let's say just ten percent, that there's no heaven, no Christ the Savior, are you telling me anybody's going to want the expense of Christian burial?" He looked squarely at Murray Forbes, an undertaker, who frowned, not having considered that angle before. "What for?" the garageman pursued. "What's left for Pastor here or even a Jew rabbi to say over the dead? Where's this corpse going? Nowheres! Might as well be a dog run over in the road. Why spend big bucks on a casket? Better to cremate everybody. Or send us to the landfill."

"Watch it, Ned, that's sickening," said Herman Phillips, a pharmacist whose teenage children were starting to give him a lot of trouble. He had not spoken before but found himself getting upset at the problems one smart-ass could stir up and not even a real American at that. "There's no way the country would stand still."

"Don't be so sure, Herm," Crombie said, shaking a finger. "This is just where this fucker is taking us... sorry, Pastor. But what do you think? I been talkin' too much."

The minister, a gray-haired man with a long, kindly face, replied, "I might object to a word or two you used in heat, Ned..." He smiled, and the others chuckled. "But in the main, I agree with your basic point. Once give up the idea of the Lord as Supreme Judge, and Jesus the Author of salvation, once give that up, I say, and it doesn't much matter except esthetically what you do with dead bodies. Or not quite dead bodies, I'm afraid. Or not quite alive either, as we see with abortion. 'Assisted suicide,' killing of the feeble-minded, all of that comes into the picture if there's no Almighty God commanding, Thou shalt not!" The minister sucked on his pipe as he lighted it. "However... that being said," he said, (suck, suck), "I don't think this fucker, as you put it" - he paused while the others laughed to hear a man of God use that word - "will lead anything like (suck) fifty, or ten, or even one percent of committed Christians astray. Faith has strong bulwarks, Ned. Church membership is up, not down. This fellow's message is unsatisfying to the heart and soul. Empty. A zero. He'll talk himself out."

"Maybe, Chaplain, maybe," said Crombie. "But they said that about a lot o' guys who did a lot o' damage before they shut up - or somebody shut them up."

"Let's stay on track here," said Roy Caton, who did not think talk was worth much if it did not lead to action. "Even if we're saying one percent of Christians, that's millions o' souls."

"I don't minimize that, Roy," the chaplain said quickly.

"But wait, lemme finish," said Crombie. "It ain't just souls, it's business, too." He started pacing before the engine house door. "What does this kike care about Forbes's Funeral Home or Ebdy's Floral Shop? How'd you like a one percent drop in business, Murray, although I bet it'd be more? And if funerals stop making sense, what about weddings, what about that? And all the fancy clothes and catering that go with it. Why get married at all? God don't give a..." He stifled an obscenity. "... What I'm sayin' is, the whole business community has a stake - and I don't want to sound disrespectful, because it isn't - _an economic stake_ in Christianity."

"And why the hell not?" exclaimed Caton, pounding a fist in his hand. "Let's quit pussyfooting about it! It's a Christian country, always has been! Johnny Come Latelies who get here when all the pioneering is done, they gotta realize it's the white Christians that made this country. And behave according."

Attorney Tilbury cleared his throat. "Gentlemen, I have to be in court in the morning," he said, edging away.

"Now wait, guys, this should only take another minute," said Crombie. "We can't stop this Josephson when he spouts off in Boston or _Jew_ York, but we oughtta be able to have a few words with the cocksucker right here in our backyard."

"Where the hell _is_ this farm of his anyway?" asked Herm Phillips, who had grown tired of seeing "southeast of Pittsburgh" or "south of Latrobe" in his paper, when you could be damned sure they'd give the exact address if _he_ made trouble.

"No more than a mile the other side o' Pleasant Unity," Crombie said. "A _gentleman 's_ farm, no less. Like some damn Mellon or Rockefeller."

"Fact is," said Sam Maeburn, "my brother Paul is next door and works it for him. They're neighbors. The old Crawford place."

Murray Forbes brightened. "You mean Nettie Crawford, who kept it going for twenty years after her man died?"

"The same."

"I buried her," said the mortician. "I bet that property goes back in the Crawfords a hundred and fifty years."

"And look who owns it now," Crombie said. "How the hell did he get it?"

"Payin' good money, same as anybody else," said Maeburn, reddening. At age sixty-eight he was a millionaire several times over and only an honorary member of the VFD now, getting too old, but he would be damned if he'd be browbeaten by a grease-monkey who didn't have two nickels to rub together. "The estate had it up for auction and this fellow bought it. Anybody else could've bought it. I handled the transfer."

"Good commission, I hope," Crombie muttered.

"Fact is, my brother farmed it for Nettie Crawford in her last years and was hoping this Josephson would keep him on," Maeburn said. "Which he has. I understand he mainly wants the weeds kept down, plus help from Paul's boys with his horses when he's not there."

"Keeps horses, too? Do you know what that costs?"

"Where is all this getting to, Ned?" Tilbury asked.

"Horses! I bet he's the son of a bitch!" Harry Nichols interjected. All eyes turned. "My wife and her bird club - they're bird-watchers - they were trompin' over by Pleasant Unity last summer or fall... yeah, it was near the Crawford place, she told me. They got on top of a hill where the power line goes over and saw these horses tied to a tree, and all of a sudden they heard this groaning and moaning. And not ten yards away, on a pile of leaves, this fellow and girl, absolutely balls-ass, goin' at it like no tomorrow."

Everyone laughed, even the Rev. Mr. Alderson, who hid his mouth with a hand. "Took the ladies' concentration offa sparrows, did it?" said Herm Phillips to further glee.

Nichols said, "I tell you, my wife said her and her friends like to choked to avoid laughing out loud. They high-tailed it right out of there."

Roy Caton said, "Too bad the ladies didn't walk straight on through an' stepped on his ass with their high heels. He wouldn'a been able to get it up very quick after that. He'd of had to go to India or someplace and become a swami."

"Very funny," said Ned Crombie, who had laughed with the rest. "But just think if it hadn't been lady bird-watchers but a Girl Scout troop coming on a scene like that. Very nice, huh? Not to mention what he's going to do with this property some day. A housing development, surer than shit."

"Not with that zoning," said Sam Maeburn.

" _Shee-it._ Jew-boy'll spread some money in the right places and walk away with another ten million while real farmers, all legally zoned, will still be kickin' cow patties."

Wally Tilbury began to say something but Roy Caton forestalled him. "We're just kickin' cow patties too unless you got a proposition to make, Ned."

"Just this then," said Crombie. "If our friend had his horse farm in Iowa or Alabama, I'd expect the people there to have a few words with him. I'd expect them to say hey, fella, the poison you're spreading in New York and Chicago backs up in our sewers right here, and we're thinkin' you ought to know your Christian neighbors don't like it one little bit."

"So, what are you proposing, Ned?" Tilbury asked.

"I damn well know what I'd propose," Roy Caton said. "Ten good men walking up to his front door and saying, cut out the anti-Christian bullshit! Cut it out or else!"

"Or else what, Roy?" the lawyer asked.

"Just 'or else.' That might be enough."

"You do that, Roy," Tilbury said sternly, "and you'll find yourself in front of a judge faster than you can shake a stick. It's called uttering threats."

"You mean he's got all kinds of freedom to degrade Christianity, and we can't... not even threaten, just advise, just _plead_ with the son of a bitch to quit?"

"Advise and plead would be okay. If it would stop there. But how likely do you think it'd stop there?"

"So somebody's got to _kill_ the son of a bitch to make him shut up?" said Crombie with a scowl.

"I didn't say that!" Tilbury shot back. He held up both hands. "Nobody here heard me say any such thing."

"Nobody said nothing about killing," Roy Caton said, taking the hint. He shot an angry look at the garageman. "Nothing about killing! Let's get that clearer than babypiss."

Crombie frowned and folded his arms, accepting the rebuke.

"Just to make it super-clear," said Tilbury, "what I said was, if anything goes beyond a calm, businesslike discussion; if it takes on the slightest tone of threat or menace, along the lines of 'something bad might happen to you or your property if you don't cease and desist,' you're into criminal activity. And if he's the kind of fellow he seems to be, a stubborn bastard..." The lawyer gave a smile to avoid putting too much moral distance between himself and the others. "...Then it's going to be next to impossible in a moment of heat to avoid crossing that line. And if he is in fact a shameless attention-seeker, which is certainly the impression that comes through the news, he'll have no hesitation bringing a lawsuit against every man who appears at his door - and every last person _they_ talk to - _for every red cent they 're worth!"_

The others shifted their feet. Uneasy now that he had gotten trapped in such a discussion, mortician Forbes said, "I think we've just heard some darn useful advice. I wouldn't..."

"Let us have faith," the Rev. Alderson put in, "that the wisdom of the centuries will prevail, and people will turn away from the dead-end this man would lead them into."

Crombie shook his head. "It just goes to show. Real Americans always have their hands tied, while the Jews and niggers and fags..."

"Oh, have a little patience, Ned," counseled Alderson. "We should remind ourselves: every battle isn't Armageddon. This man will fall of his own weight. Or his fellow Jews will find a way to dissuade him. Keep in mind, if you think he's bad news for Christians, he's a disaster for them. Aren't we hearing about anti-Semitic incidents? Swastikas on synagogue doors and so forth?"

"Exactly," said Waldron Tilbury. "My law partner makes the same point. He said this fellow single-handedly could destroy all the good relations built up between Christians and Jews since World War Two."

"Come to think of it," Harry Nichols said, "any time the Hebes want somebody out, he's out. That quick."

"Yeah, but what if they don't want him out?" Crombie said. "What if they want Christianity out?"

Lawyer Tilbury shook his head and smiled in the gathering gloom. "And now I've really got to be on my way," he said.

Sam Maeburn the real estate agent also was a busy man. "Early appointment," he said, "but a mighty interesting discussion."

"But what've we settled?" asked Roy Caton.

No one felt entitled to answer. When the others had gone, Caton admonished Crombie. "What got into you to bring it up with that group? Not _that_ group, you meathead!"

# 11.

It was morning at Josephson's farm. The dining room was crowded with reporters and cameramen. Others stood in the yard outside to listen by amplifier. A speaker-phone stood on the table in a slant of sunlight from a window. Jess Josephson said, "I hope Mr. Secretary has had his coffee by now and is in a positive frame of mind."

"Let's make the call," Peter Winslow said and began pushing buttons.

There was a ring at the other end. A woman answered. Josephson introduced himself and asked if his letter had been received. Yes, but the Secretary was "unavailable this morning." The call would be transferred to his deputy for park operations. Reporters in the room made cynical comments about buck-passing. The speaker-phone emitted clicking noises, then a man's voice came on in a drawl: "Mmmyes, Williams here."

After an exchange of introductions Josephson said, "Hold on a moment. You don't mind if I have this on 'speaker,' do you? There are some media people here."

"Wait, wait," said Deputy Secretary Williams. "I'm talkin' to you, not to a lot o' press, I hope."

"What's the difference? They'll ask me anyway. Let them hear it from the horse's mouth. You're either going to tell me I may or may not speak on Sunday at Keystone State Park."

"Well, the answer is you may not, sir, and I'm about to hang up on you."

"But maybe first you'd like to state a reason why I may not," said Jess.

"I think the Constitution of the United States is a pretty good reason. Ever hear o' separation of church and state?"

"I've heard of it."

"Well, in this case it means the Commonwealth cannot allow public property to be used for the advancement of religion. You'll have to set up your stand somewheres else, my friend."

"But I'm not going to 'advance religion.'" Reporters guffawed in the background. "I mean to give a plain non-sectarian speech on the _subject_ of religion."

"Quit smart-assing me, Buster!" The deputy secretary suddenly lost patience. "You're not fooling anybody here! You're looking for a media circus, aren't you? This department has a responsibility for public safety. All you reporters listening - quit following this guy around and he'll quit making trouble, it's as simple as that."

"Now you hold on, Mr. Secretary. I do not 'make trouble.' I'm engaged in free speech. Is that forbidden because your department is worried about trouble?"

Reporters scribbled. Many held out microphones. Could they be sending this exchange onto the airwaves "live," the deputy's language and all? _Who knows what the rules are these days,_ thought Mary Mulcahy, standing by the kitchen door.

"What I'm telling you is that you've got no permission - none, sir! - to disrupt the primary function of a state park, which is safe, healthful, outdoors recreation for the citizenship. We've got Memorial Day weekend coming..."

"I understand that."

"No you don't! The beach will be open... thousands of people. Should I let little kids get trampled?"

"I won't go near the beach. Just some vacant field area."

"No! There's no sense arguin' about it."

"Then I'm putting you on notice, sir. I am speaking at Keystone this Sunday and no bureaucrat is going to stop me. Talk about unconstitutional."

"Uh-oh, now you're out of my bailiwick, Mr. Josephsteen," the deputy secretary said, getting the name wrong. "Now you're talkin' Attorney-General. I've stated the department's position as best I could. Our first priority is safe outdoors recreation. I doubt very much if you're gonna be allowed to disrupt that."

"I don't want to disrupt anything. I'm pledging..."

"Yeah, yeah, you ain't fooling anybody. I know your kind. A park's a park - it's not to advance some damn atheistic cause..."

"If you'd listen a minute..."

"All you want is to make trouble, embarrass the Commonwealth, and get people hurt - for publicity. Wise up, you reporters! This guy is playin' you for suckers."

"Now wait, calm down and let's make a reasonable deal here."

"No deals! People have been throwing stuff at you. In a park there are rocks and stones."

"Hold on, I want it to be as orderly as you do. If I wanted trouble, would I give you five days' notice?"

"For more publicity." ( _True_ , the Mulcahy confessed to herself.)

"Wouldn't I have turned up at the beach and just started speaking. I'm playing fair with you; play fair with me."

"None o' this is fair, mister, none of it. I think the Commonwealth is about to get kicked in the keester pretty good."

"Not at all. I see some real positives for the state. You'll be proving that free speech is protected and promoted in Pennsylvania."

"Thanks a million."

"The state park system will come out positively. Keystone is a very beautiful park; I know it well."

"It _was_ beautiful. Some people just gotta foul their own nest, I guess. The answer is still no, Mr. Josephsteen. And now you'll have to excuse me, I'm pretty busy."

"Give it some more thought. Let's talk again."

"Sorry. The answer'll be the same. G'bye." The deputy secretary hung up.

Reporters laughed and immediately threw questions. Mary Mulcahy felt a twinge of sympathy for the man on the other end, possibly a decent public servant. _We 're begging for retribution,_ she thought. Then a video light came on, a microphone was in front of her, and she smiled.

# 12.

**VICTORY OF VIOLENCE; or**

**Adventures in Ego-Tripping in Rural Pennsylvania**

by Brendan Hazelwood

First, a confession. I am not charmed by the Household Name of the season. To call Jess Josephson a religious reformer, as some mainstream media do, is to debase both words. In my book he is a religious three-dollar bill. If this prejudice offend, give me no more time today. Turn, why don't you, to _Time_ itself, or to _Today._ Or any other medium that whipped itself into a First Amendment froth over the violence last weekend in a Pennsylvania state park. None of it had to happen, save for our hero's Lucullan gluttony for the richer sauces of publicity. I must own that the way guys like Jess get their kicks makes my flesh crawl. And believe me, this flesh has been around; it don't crawl easy.

As a rule I practice kindness towards godly people. In their most intimate moments it seems to me they must play host to an unbidden Guest in the chambers of the mind: a Presence that watches, listens, judges, and takes all the kick out. Jess's brand of faith, however, fails to elicit this compassion. My sense is that he no more believes in God, practically speaking, than I do. His theology is a 30-second hand job. Having thrown a nod of recognition to the First Cause, he bids it get lost. The universe, obviously existent, musta been caused. Ergo the Butler done it. But once this gap is filled in his sense of the neatness of things, the Doer is shown the door. The Workman takes no further hand in the enterprise set afoot. He is no more to be prayed to, hymned at, or be-candled than the grease monkey who has put your car to rights once you've left the garage.

But I hear objections. Why, gentle Bren, should this so piss you off? Do you not also believe in a deity who forswears participation in human affairs, for the even better reason that He, She, or It doesn't exist? And I reply, yes. But if we are going to be atheists, let us come right goddamn out and be atheists. Let's not disarm people with assurances that there is a Creator who wants us to be happy with His stars n' planets n' things and then slip them the no-heaven clause. Because if that is the deal, if God is not hovering near, caring, watching, and butting in, does it not become the sheerest masochism to abstain from rampant eating, drinking, fighting, and fucking? I yield to no man in my zeal for these Basic Four. But I am just a vulgar, fleshly, life-engaged sort of fellow and don't pretend to anything higher. You will not catch me on the hustings pecking away at the slender foundations of bourgeois society. Call-Me-Jess takes the road less traveled. Here is an average intellect (no more than that, as he proves in every pedestrian utterance) strangely moved to gather the rubes around him and shock them with the naughty things he's gonna let 'em in on. Move in closer, folks; and then he slips them the no-heavenly-judge routine. It has its cruel side when you think of it.

The morning of the Keystone Park riot, finding the prophet ruminating in a meadow, I approached, genuflected, and asked if he'd ever read any of religion's heavy hitters. I mean the big boys: Aquinas, Augustine, in that league. If he was going to tell people their souls go nowhere after death, no heaven, no hell, a major amendment to the contract, had he not some minimal obligation to check sources? He cast upon me his famous "mild" look and confessed to having read "a little Spinoza, a little C. S. Lewis, the Bible" - both testaments, by golly! - but declared that "most of the other stuff doesn't say much to me." Allowing for a certain aw shucks modesty here (I suspect the knave is better schooled than he lets on), is it any wonder that genuine scholars take fits at his ignorance? Working-stiff theologians, the real pros, hold that his mushy deism has been refuted time and again over the centuries. From any historic perspective the man is recycling some very stale stuff.

But why, you ask, should an atheist give a fig? And I reply that for an unbeliever to put any soul at hazard except his own is simply bad form. It isn't done. I am constrained from kicking the props out from someone else's faith by a sort of gentleman's agreement (though it helps to be a gentleman in the first place). If I err in respect of ultimate reality, bitter is the cup that awaits me across River Styx, yet I row alone. But not the God-flasher of the campuses. He loads a boatful of passengers with him to the fog-shrouded shore. Between us is the loathing of a gambler for a cheat. I pitch my coin recklessly perhaps, but it is my own. He dices with the life savings of others. I will hoot, holler, and whore in my God-denial. He must always be nice. (His speech in fact is artificially "clean," excessive in its avoidance of offense. Our four-letter staples of self-expression are foreign to him. He says "hell" only to disparage its fires. And were he to utter "damn," you would search his context in bewilderment for a Glen Canyon or Grand Coulee.)

The Josephson crusade is also so remarkably devoid of women that an observer cannot fail to, well, notice it. A post-menopausal press agent clucks about, yes, but no one of nubility, apart from female editorialists, who, with a single exception I can think of, are not to be mentioned in the same breath with pussy. One hears that in the past the guru had a certain rep as a cocksman; that he has only lately sworn off the track of the cat, not wishing to soil his enterprise with imputations of fucky-wucky. All right, I can handle that; hypocrisy has its place. Even I perhaps could hold out for a fortnight in extremis. But for an hombre who attracts gash galore in his crowds, and is always giving the media the slip anyway, for such a guy to be turning it down every day surpasseth understanding. He's either got the itch-resistance of a bomb disarmer or something is amiss with his sending and receiving equipment. But enough. For aught I know, he is as hetero as I or thou. See, hear, and speak no evil is my iron rule, as any fair-minded reader will attest.

Let me proceed to his orchestration of public events, the Memorial Day riot at Keystone State Park in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Here was manufactured news if ever there was. I was not on the scene for most of the week of foreplay. I cite the now familiar technique of feeling out public servants by speaker-phone, the media all ears; and Jess's "disappearance" all day Friday, with suspenseful bulletins on the networks, while state officials sweated grapeshot to reach him, to avoid having to file for an injunction, which in the end they had to do. From my aerie in Manhattan, I did what I could to ignore these remote happenings. I drank heavily. I tried again to read "Ulysses." I jogged in Central Park and engaged in novel postures of sexual intercourse. To no avail. The rural farce drew my pen like a lodestone, though my traveling companion of choice was unavailable, having promised her parents a holiday visit.

I arrived Saturday night, well after that day's rain of ersatz news. First: the announcement that Josephson would obey the injunction; because second, he had rented a property just outside the park to make his spiel; which explained where he had "disappeared" the day before, looking for a sucker landlord. Third: that the state under those circumstances would not try to prevent him. Prevent him? They _advertised_ him, the aim of his entire minuet. Fourth: how to get to the speaking ground. Pittsburgh area TV stations and Sunday papers ran _maps,_ would you believe; radio reports incessantly advised "turn right on State Route 981, etc." So there it was. Bureaucrats, media, and a public hooked on sensationalized trivia: we all did our part to set up lighting, scenery, and cast for this rustic masque.

I arose early and alone in a wretched motel some dozen miles from the prophet's fields and manger. To kill time journalistically I drove off with a TV crew that did some background filming of Sunday folks at places of worship. I saw reporters suck up to churchmen-in-the-street for interviews. All that footage of faces and steeples against the sky which the networks ran at eventide: now you know how they got it.

The main park entrance was 11.3 miles by odometer from Josephson's gate. We went on up there to see what mischief the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania might be up to. There must have been a dozen trooper vehicles, ambulances, even a hose company (in case of what? forest fire?) parked along the blacktop. Afterwards, as the hero spoke, not one but two helicopters roared overhead, the wind of their rotors mussing hair and knocking caps in the dust. Great little way to calm a crowd, eh?

The park itself is a pretty place. Its central feature is an artificial lake of some thirty elongated acres, bordered by low, wooded hills and natives in loincloths. A beach of sand and grass extends along one side. Rowboats ply the brownish water, while on the banks picnickers fish, stroll, cook at grills, and throw breadballs to ducks. Pittsburgh is 35 miles to the west, with many suburbs in between. A recreational oasis like this can draw thousands of a summer Sunday. And in crowds of that size all it takes is a few, right? So back to Sunnybrook Farm we drove, confident that we would in due course enjoy bucolic scenes of head-clubbing and ass-kicking.

And now the fateful caravan! Think sunlight streaming through trees; think breezes to flutter sunhats as gentlemen start their engines; think high noon, a sky so bright that trumpets must be blaring in heaven. Up front in his pickup was the Man, bullhorn in hand, speech phrases in head, and a half-dozen "crowd assistants" in the truckbed behind him, followed by a column of media snaking over hill and dale, past every Middlesex village and farm, by the still waters and green pastures. Cows and horses, farmers on tractors, people leaving church turned heads to witness our passage. This was festivity American-style, putting on the costume of First Amendment heroes, dancing a few yards off the edge of an injunction, taking just enough risk to give a tingle as we goaded some moron into heaving a tomato; but not a real risk, y'understand, not a life-threatener, just a prime time made-for-TV holiday risk. You could see the anticipatory pleasure suffusing the visages of the info-whores among whom I have cast my lot, certain of their payoffs on this trick. "This is Jess Josephson country," I heard a newsface intone over the TV that night, "the rich soil of western Pennsylvania in which he has his own deep roots." Huh? Roots, did he say? The one with the roots had them torn up, a chilblained Methodist who milked cows from childhood to arthritis and had to sell out after eight generations to the parvenu from the city, because this rich soil cannot make anybody a decent living any more, that was the bozo with the roots.

Anon the vainglory of the coming of the Lord passed through the small industrial city of Latrobe: frame houses, empty, sunswept streets. Then beneath a railroad overpass with weeds growing on top of it, then into more countryside on a winding two-lane. A rustic sign leaned by the roadside. It said, "Keystone State Park, 3 mi." with an arrow pointing thataway.

At last the crossroads of destiny: a junction of two rural blacktops. On one corner sat a dinky country store of a sort commonly seen near campgrounds, about the size of a diner, the name of its owner printed in a white space on a Pepsi sign above the door. A gravel parking area had room for maybe twelve cars and trucks. This was the private property that Moneybags had rented for his speechifying (for $2,000 on the barrelhead, we later learned). One suspects he picked the spot for spatial inadequacy. Pack a crowd tightly enough and it looks like more of a crowd than it is, and jammed together, the likelihood of a flare-up is enhanced. Great: more news.

Josephson's boys had already jumped down to wave cars away and try to round up the owners of three vehicles still in the parking lot to get them the hell out of there. Because here came the people!

Some hiked over a hill from the park proper, some along the two crossroads, and some through a slummy camping area by a sliver of creek. Our truck got no closer than a hundred yards. We were ordered - by a state trooper, no less; now they were directing traffic for him - to pull off onto the berm. Our driver, a TV cameraman from Johnstown, Pa., was in a panic to get to the center of the action. With him running interference, his bazooka-like gear on his shoulder, we pushed on down through a thickening current of humanity.

Virginally clad in white, Josephson was already trapped in a minimal open space on the gravel lot. His minions, hands joined, tried to keep a little turning-around room for him. There must have been close to a thousand people crowded around. I never got within six yards. Some children had climbed the roof of the little store for better seeing. I felt sorry for the owner of the last car stuck in the parking area before the mob swept in, like a water buffalo clutched in quicksand; the klutz was probably a camper sent out to get burger buns; his hood and roof were covered with spectators like flies on roadkill.

By the time I got within earshot Jess was into the process of improving us. He talked into a bullhorn and kept turning for eye contact to different parts of the crowd. A blare when he faced you, his voice faded as he rotated. It was an irritating way to have to listen. I doubt if many listeners could keep up, which didn't help tempers, especially considering the sun beating down and ceaseless squalling from the kind of baby you'd like to strangle, except that the tyke showed more sense than his parents for bringing an infant into this madness.

The orator had chosen Memorial Day itself as his text: logical enough, but a miscalculation as events turned out. I guess he felt some obligation to justify the ruckus he had kicked up to speak on a national holiday. But our hero has a tin ear, I suspect, for the overtones of his own egoism. It is never altogether fitting and proper for one who hasn't personally had to keep a tight asshole in battle to invoke the boys who didn't come back. And to imply that these honored dead fell in defense of such values as his freedom of speech, anti-Christian speech at that, well now, this was trying the patience of the native-born.

Typical of the narcissist, too, he did not seem to register, or else ignored, how motley a gang his listeners were. No college campus this, a haven of IQs north of 120. This was America by the slice, the cross-section, in heat and humidity: people frustrated at hearing only every other word; people boiling at his Jesus-bashing; celebrity-seeking people; sweating, itching people; some who'd already had a beer too many; and some who didn't know why they were there except that everybody else was there. Jostlers tried to push in closer or hoist little kids on their shoulders as if to watch a parade; and no doubt there were a few sports raring to kick ass. We also were interspersed with state troopers on the curious theory that there is reassurance in badges, boots, and holsters, whereas the clear message they give me is that the shit's about to fly.

Standing in the vortex, Josephson might not have been able to sense how close to boiling this stew was, which is giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because from a publicity point of view the more trouble he could cause, the more headlines and TV time would magnify his name. Focused on friendly faces near him (where they _would_ be friendly; nobody lights up like your average Yankee Doodle in the glow of a celebrity) he may have had illusions of being adored, especially as he threw in enough references to God to keep us Christians off balance. But then he came to the guts of the holiday itself: the meaning of death in wartime and, by extension, the willingness of ordinary mortals to sacrifice life in any great cause, even, according to his curious construction, with no hope of Valhalla.

I began feeling uncomfortable for him. He had to hear the grumbling and foot-shuffling. This was a guy opening his own trap-door and jumping in. Certain editorial pages the next day hailed his "intellectual courage" for pushing the idea of a hands-off God to the logical conclusion. But I was there. I remember thinking, don't do this to people. Not on Memorial Day. Let Momma believe her soldier boy a-mouldering in the grave might really be with the angels.

But a world-saver never knows when to ease off. Even as he praised the war dead he erased them, and praised them the more for being scratched out. Because, dontcha see, that was what was so noble about what they did, giving up the only life they were going to get. As if the average doughface ever sees it in such terms, the foxholes being, in his novel formulation, chuckfull of atheists. Men and women of courage would always be able to make this sacrifice, our unblooded speaker felt qualified to prophesy. Because it's not the quantity of life that counts, it's the... oh, you fill in the rest. The man's bullshit was so embarrassing I had to avert my gaze. I blushed, I scuffed gravel, I looked at my watch.

Somebody in the crowd couldn't take it no more. "And none of 'em went to heaven!" he bawled. The effect was like 1,000 volts to the gonads. Hairs stood up in your shorts. People recoiled. I saw a state trooper's head swivel towards the sufferer, who had telltale hands cupped at his mouth, a beer-bellied guy who eyebrows met apelike above his nose.

Josephson, absorbed in his yakking, with his horn projecting sound away from him into the heat and glare, possibly hadn't heard. Or else meant to ignore the interruption. He was turned somewhat away, trying to get on with his spiel. But Ape-Face would not be denied. "All the Christians who died for this country - not one is in heaven?" he yelled, and this time everybody heard. The man had lungs like a tractor-trailer. He stood maybe fifteen feet from Freethinking's Designated Hitter and the people around him opened like lily petals, giving him space as anybody sensible would, while troopers began moving in that direction.

Then someone else hollered, "Where in Christ are they then - hell?"

"Not in heaven or hell," Josephson was practically forced to answer, because this was true audience response, although in general mixing it up with hecklers is not recommended; it gives away the initiative. "Just let me tell you," he said. "Forget heaven and hell. Make this life better. Stop wars here!"

"Whadda _you_ know about it? _You_ never been there!" shouted The Brow, with the scorn of the blooded veteran for the academically exempt.

"And we don't need you _here,_ fuckin' Commie atheist!" brayed another.

At this point, you might say, discussion was thrown open to the floor. There is nothing like the verb "fuck" in the Voice Bellicose to incite the participation of democracy.

"You sayin' my dead buddies in Eye-raq couldn't even get into heaven?" a mean-looking guy yelled out, tramping through the press of people towards Josephson, and, sure enough, he had combat fatigues on. "You eat shit, atheist!"

Shouts came from all directions. "Commie! Atheist!" I had a feeling the disruption was pre-planned, yet it might have been spontaneous. "Christ-killer!" "Anti-Christ!" Yes indeedy, cutting a little closer to the Jew-hating bone now, confoozled perhaps by the sight of an _Orthodox rabbi_ in the press around Josephson, don't ask me why.

The lads guarding Jess, normally friendly and self-effacing, mewled back, "Let him speak! Hear what he has to say!" A few in the audience picked up this cry, but the shouts of Commie! and Christ-killer! were louder and more organized. They seemed determined to bust up the show. Someone roughly brushed past me and I was ready to kick ass myself, but it was a TV camerawoman. Don't forget the media; they also were pushing forward, in a panic to miss no part of the gore. And if my ears did not mistake me, I heard yells of "kike!" unless you can persuade me that "hike" or "bike" fit the context better.

From along the roads where too many state troopers were still strung out, in mourning for their lost traffic pattern, they now came marching in, too energetically (as they will) with the aim of reaching Josephson before the Pissed-Off Veterans of America did. The crowd started coming apart like a pie dropped on the floor. Police helicopters zoomed overhead. What for, to drop napalm? Then, truly infuriating, vegetable matter began flying. This redoubled the screaming and I remember thinking that if a table scrap smacked me, I might run amok, being by this time fairly tightly wired. One of the troopers started laying about with his club.

I caught sight of Josephson take a direct hit in the chest from a gooshy banana. It impressed me: one of the rare moments in a journalistic career when you are witness to an impact. Instead of his own feckless prescription for ending wars, why didn't it occur to our prophet to suggest they be fought with rotten fruit? The losing side would get the aggressions whipped out of them (they'd stink), nobody would get killed, and the country with the largest crop of natural resources would win, which is how it works anyway. The garbage collector looked down at his lapels. His gaze was momentarily not mild. I liked that. I could identify.

Then the festivities moved to a new phase: rocks and stones. Jess got hit. His hand went to his forehead as if he remembered an appointment. He tried to say something into the horn, I presume a call to order, but it did no good. Troopers were blowing whistles. Mothers and fathers grabbed their kids and (one hopes) later kicked themselves for bringing the bairns into such a mess. Two of Josephson's boys were wrestling with a Pissed-Off Vet. White Suit himself, bullhorn still in hand, had reached out to embrace some women who now buried their heads in his shoulders to shelter from the hard and soft artillery. One real goony bird among his hecklers, the discoverer of his secret communism perhaps, got within punching distance but maladroitly landed short, bopping one of the women. Swift retribution was his. A state trooper came, saw, and clubbed, though with scarcely better accuracy. The truncheon landed on the ox's elbow. Warmed by now, perhaps enjoying the thunk of nightstick on flesh and bone, the same trooper began pounding on others, who scattered as chaff before the wind. For one supremely mad moment he had his shillelagh raised over the orator himself. You might have seen the news photo that went out over the AP. There is Mild Gaze with a rivulet of blood on his brow, horn in hand, about to get his cranium reshaped; he is looking the trooper in the eye, if not in fright, at least with highly concentrated attention. His mission might have ended right there, but with a spasm that surely uprooted every neuron in his body Smokey turned and plunged anew into the general melee.

Later, back at the motel, in my milk-bath I found many a mark of fang and claw on me; but I had been impervious to knees, elbows, and fingernails as TV cameras and I along with other buzzards of the media descended on the picturesquely bleeding Josephson. The attack was over; one volley had done it. The Christian host had shot their load and I guess preferred not to be found with any ammo still in hand.

The casualty count at hospitals subsequently numbered a dozen-odd, mostly nicked by stones. The hero's wound was a band-aider, although it had flowed long enough for the picture to make the front pages. He apparently had been struck by a rock the size of a lentil. Traces of tomato, egg, and other omelet fixin's dripped from the heads and clothes of others. Here and there some had taken a kick or had their feet stepped on, but there was nothing as serious as a groiner.

It occurred to me, surveying the Brueghel-like scene, with nobody really injured, that this could hardly have worked out better for Jess Josephson and his symbiotic media. The latter needed a holiday story other than the usual ho-hum about hundreds killed on the nation's highways and he, as always, craved the publicity. The whole thing might have been staged. The thought bemused me... but no, the conspiracy would have had to involve too many people, wouldn't it? Or are you all laughing at old Bren today, the only one not in on the joke?

To clear my head in the limpid waters of Josephsonian thought, I leaned into the thicket of microphones as the man was getting interviewed - _interviewed,_ what else? - while frankincense and myrrh were applied to his scratch. He said something about "not minding the objectors," about really, really wanting to answer their questions. Someone asked what he'd do "if the violence escalates."

And do you know what? All of a sudden I didn't give a flying jump what he'd do. I turned away. But not before hearing, "They aren't going to shut me up."

Righto. Sort of figured that. Makes you glad, doesn't it?

# Part Two - THE FARM
# 1.

June 3

Dear Sis:

A lot's been happening. First, I've phoned Mother, assuring her I'm in one piece, so don't worry about that. Second, as you've learned from TV if you're in touch with the world at all and have any concern for the health and welfare of your IYB (Irresponsible Younger Brother, remember?) the crusade has redeployed. We're no longer taking our riots off-premises. They're being held right here at Jess's Newsworthy Acres.

I elucidate. The morning after the Memorial Day fruit-throw, the Great One said enough o' these cleaning bills, he'll speechify in his own yard. His reasoning: it's private property, therefore hecklers and hooligans will fear to tread. (Others of us ain't so sure about that.) Second, he's already got a "critical mass" of media attention, so all he needs is a respectable-size live audience. Third, it's high summer; America is on wheels. Any tourist crossing western Pennsylvania is invited to the speakin', every day at 11 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. He gambled that he could draw a few hundred. Cautious heads caviled. What if people don't come? And how will they find this place, along unmarked county roads? No prob. We, the crowd assistants, could tack up signs on trees and poles.

And so it has befallen. Damn-the-torpedoes prevailed as usual over the counsels of timidity. And the peerless one has a new sensation on his hands - and on his lands. I can testify that it is now day three of the New Pacification Policy, and we had at least 1,000 in the morning and might draw 2,000 in the afternoon if yesterday is any guide. The phenom is building. At the moment the crowd is gone. We have completed the "police-up" and I have a half-hour before what is politely called lunch. The grass is trampled to dust. Cars were parked at least a mile along the road. The cops are having fits over it. The movement's press agent (the callow among us call her The Old Red Hen) says she doesn't know where it's going to end - "the world just loves him." And in fact the oohs and ahs when he comes out are movie starrish in intensity.

Most assistants, I discover, have served more than one hitch, a week or two at a time. Jess and Pete Winslow, his RHM (right-hand man, but you guessed that, didn't you?) tell us we are crazier than they are. We should be getting paying jobs for the summer, don't I know? But what's to compare with taking part in the greatest story in the world?

So far I have filled eight reels of tape, recording Jess's speeches and inserting my mike in the midst of impromptu Q-and-A's he has with people who come crowding afterwards. He basically sells one idea - God created the universe; now go out and behave yourself - but usually seems to find a new hook. I compare his talks to how a jazz musician tickles a theme, seeing how he can vary it. This morning, for instance, he ups and declares that God _had_ to create death as well as life, for the practical reason of avoiding overcrowding on earth, or for that matter in heaven. Yet, he asks, did you ever meet anybody who'd rather never have been born because life doesn't go on forever? Even one life is a gift beyond price, says he, so what the hell is the human race complaining about? (Although he didn't use that li'l old swearword; he never does; lots of self-control in that department.) In short, he sends them away with a fresh slant to think about.

A rabid environmentalist like you would appreciate the morning and afternoon "police-ups." a phrase from Pete Winslow's marine days. That's when all of us, Jess included, walk down the yard in a stretched-out line picking up litter left by the crowd. In fact, there's hardly any litter, but the Advance of the Tidy is a polite way to shoo the hoi polloi off the premises.

Yesterday, when the press wasn't around, we got Jess's two saddle horses out of here. Led them a furlong down the dirt road to a pasture belonging to his share-cropper (joke!) whose sons feed and water the nags when he's not here. Everybody suspects he's worried somebody will set fire to his barn. Which expresses huge confidence in us, his guardians of life and property, doesn't it? It's to prevent such mischief that we stand sentry from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., then another shift from 2 to 6. But you can't blame him. What are we armed with? Flashlights. There's not a respectable _weapon_ on the property. Personally I'd have a shotgun around if I were the Anti-Christ du jour.

We were talking about it the other night on guard. Someone remarked that there were parts of this country not many years ago when a guy like Jess might have had 20 strangers in sheets come to his door and escort him to a tree. Especially since his RHM and one of our crowd assistants are Negro fellers. You never know when those days will come again, I said, and then realized I meant it! "They'd have to hang me, too," said an assistant from Philadelphia named Mitch Swartz. "They'd be glad to oblige," I said in my best hillbilly drawl, "you bein' another Jew-boy." With a smile, of course.

Speaking of Jews, let me intro the rarest bird in our flock, straight from ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn: Rabbi Judah Iskaritz, fanatical Semite, small-circulation journalist, lifelong abstainer from pork, and observant pietist: he prays in full regalia three times a day. Imagine a pencil of a man six feet tall and four inches thick. Another assistant, Ed Jensen, says a chiropractor could examine Judah's spine from the front. He has a bushy beard and coal black eyes, close-set and haunted-looking, wears a skull cap on his head and fringes hanging over his pants tops. "Hey Jude, your underwear's showing," somebody is sure to tell him daily. Now you might ask, we've all asked, what the hell is he doing here? He turned up at the park riot to cover it as a journalist, hung around afterward at the farm and, discovering that he didn't have a motel, Jess invited him to stay the night, then another night, etc. So now we've got this ultra-Jew, beard and all, not as a bodyguard for sure, and yet he's more or less in the circle we form around the central target. I know Pete Winslow doesn't like it and Jess thinks a lot of the RHM's judgment. Pete told Mel Markowitz, one of the older guys and also an Israelite, hoping he'd pass the hint to Jess, that Judah looks _too_ Jewish. Just too too. Couldn't he tone it down a bit? It gives the movement a wrong image, as if it's a Jewish thing rather than what it is, universal. Some lowlife reporter (this is almost unbelievable) pulled one of the assistants aside the other day and offered him $100 if he'd say he thought Jess and Judah were queer for each other. Our guy was too flabbergasted to do anything but ignore it. But if he'd asked Swartz or me something like that, he'd have walked away carrying his head under his arm. Bob Morse, the black assistant, says the spiritual transformation that occurs in the Josephson movement is that you learn to believe in God but lose all faith in freedom of the press.

I have my own theory about Judah. It's that he's a secret agent to bring Jess back to observant Judaism, while on his side Jess doesn't object to being challenged like that. He prefers opponents with grit, hates sycophants. There's an Evangelical pamphleteer, Jeremy Kirk, who has organized a "truth squad" of clergy, who regularly heckle in crowds, trying to refute him on this or that. Fine, he says, if there's a hole in his reasoning, he wants to know it. And if the hole is being enough, I think he'd shut the whole project down.

I should close now. It's lunchtime (I say with a shudder). Someone's waving from the porch. Can I stomach it one more day? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Or for variety, bologna and cheese. Whoever happens to be around is invited into the semi-remodeled kitchen to fix his own, even the media; but after one session the reporters on expense accounts go off in their cars to do lunch elsewhere. Jess himself usually skips it, working on his afternoon speech (he's also up at all hours of the night rehearsing, we think; he doesn't seem to need much sleep). Or else he strolls around with some journalist, often from a foreign country, giving an interview.

On one of these walk-arounds yesterday, another of his twists on the basic idea came out. I was tagging along by permission with my tape running. Jess told a correspondent from _Der Spiegel,_ the German mag, that he thought it was insane over the centuries to encourage well-behaved, intelligent people to refrain from procreation - e.g., Catholic priests and nuns, Buddhist monks etc. He said the result was immeasurable loss to the human gene pool. How so? Because of the anti-sexual obsession of some higher religions. They made celibacy a virtue. He said he doubted if that's what William James meant by the "moral equivalent of war," but the genetic effect was as lethal as machine-gunning generations of healthy young men. "So don't tell me religion does no harm," he said. "It does a lot of harm. I could name ten ways without even starting on Islam. The church's rigid opposition to birth control pills and condoms. In a world with a population problem! And many more." Don't miss your next _Spiegel._

My eyes just landed on one of the hoses. I haven't mentioned them. At the four corners of the house are 200-foot coils of garden hose. Jess had some of the guys help him connect them from water pipes last week. For fire protection. We're in volunteer fire company territory, and he doesn't seem confident the township amateurs would get here in time (or with the enthusiasm, given his views) to save anything. So these skimpy hoses are rigged up, for whatever good they'll do.

Hey, some guys are leaving in a car for a real lunch. More another time. Love to hubby and the kids. Tell Mother again not to worry. I'm safe, I'm strong, I'm

Your IYB,

Si

# 2.

**HOLY HECK! JESS A SEX MACHINE** said a front-page headline on a stand by the food market checkout. There was a photo of Josephson in his white speechmaking suit alongside a woman in chorus line costume. But the body stances were wrong; it was apparent the pictures had been taken separately and mortised. A sub-headline said, "Cultist Beds Showgal Matinee & Night (On Good Day 3 Times!!)" And beneath that: "Dancer He Loved & Left Tells All, Page 3." The name on the paper's masthead was _PayDirt._

At her apartment Maggie Deland unbagged her groceries, glanced at the mail, none of it important, and took the paper to a chair by a lamp, where she kicked off her shoes to read.

The pictured woman was voluptuous. She smiled from the front page, eyes languorous, saucer-like under false lashes and waxed brows, the face stupid - no, vacuous, as if she had never had a serious thought, never needed one, since puberty. Three ostrich feathers stood from a rhinestone band around her head, part of a chorus costume. Her shoulders were bare except for the straps of a sequined bra. The Page 3 headline read, "Hunk Me$$iah a Stage-Door John."

The chorine's name was Terri Traycee. She was dancing at a casino-hotel in Las Vegas. Her "steamy affair" with Jess Josephson had occurred two years before. "A faraway look deepened the jade-green pools of Terri's eyes as she leaned back on a divan in the dressing room, her scantily-clad body stretching in remembrance of his caresses; nights and days of lovemaking and free-spending adventure, from leaf-dappled bridal paths in the horse country of Pennsylvania..." _Horse country, what horse country?_ thought Maggie, who knew something about horse countries. "... To trysts on a Caribbean beach where, _au naturel_ beneath a voodoo moon, he hungrily possessed her." _Is it possible I am reading this garbage?_ thought the staff member of _DayLight_ (whose own article about him had been sexless and therefore, she now considered, perhaps misleading.)

The affair was doomed, of course. "Jade-eyed Terri always knew they were from different worlds." Their paths had crossed when she danced in Pittsburgh in a summer series of Broadway-type musicals. She was in the chorus, he a member of the board. It was a repertory company, one week doing "West Side Story," the next "Kismet," and so forth. After the finale on Saturdays there would be a party for the cast and "friends of the opera," contributors who got a charge out of mingling with show biz people. Terri always felt "hungry as hell" after a performance; it was a struggle to keep her "busty five-foot-eight frame - 39-25-38 - under 120 pounds." She was nibbling hors d'oeuvres when a sexy voice addressed her. "Great shrimp," he said. ( _Did she have the orgasm right then?_ Maggie thought.) "I looked up into the eyes of this hunk." His rugged face was "tanned from long days on the building sites," but the black tie and dinner jacket belied working class origins. At first she thought he was a waiter or security guard, being shocked to see such a stud at a party that generally attracted older men, men with wives attached, or men likelier to commend the shrimp to chorus boys than girls. He said he was on the board of directors. "Sure!" she said, incredulous. "They recruit us young," he laughed, "so we'll still give money when we're old." He said he had noticed her as the one girl in line who "stuck out." "You have that extra snap in your hands and feet," he said, "the one everybody's eyes come back to." She parried, "You just know that's what every dancer likes to hear."

They did not "jump in the sheets" that night. She was sharing a hotel suite with three other girls. He suggested his place. Still no. "Terri is a strict believer in the commandment: Thou Shalt Not on The First Date." But on Monday to the dressing room came roses and a card: "Remember, every eye is on you. Jess." He telephoned twice during the week but he was working 14-hour days ("the busy season for builders") and did not meet Ms. 39-25-38 again until the next Saturday party, after which she did go to his place, "a bachelor apartment with books, paintings, a piano, and a Jacuzzi for two, in the city's artsy Shadyside neighborhood," where, _PayDirt_ dutifully reported, "the inevitable" happened.

At this point the interviewer, and no doubt all readers, had to know: "Did you come?"

Maggie Deland threw the tabloid across the room. She was furious at herself for reading such trash. But furious at him, too, for letting it happen. _Sucking up to empty-headed chorus girls, in your artsy apartment with its two-ass Jacuzzi. Serves you right!_ The pages lay strewn on the floor. She realized she still had an itch to read on, a lascivious curiosity as to whether Terri Traycee or Traci Terree or whatever the hell her name was, had scaled the heights with Never-Say-Fuck. _This is where we are today,_ she thought, groveling on the rug. Sufficiently degraded, she gathered up the paper, found the place where she had stopped reading, and learned to her disgust that the initial raptures had indeed failed to reach the earth-mover stage. "Not the first time; too nervous," reported the couple's lower half. "But after that, well, it got pretty damned faultless."

One Sunday the stage-door John took her to his farm in the "horse country of Pennsylvania." By a leafy path, as their mounts grazed nearby, the two made love on a grassy hilltop," and she realized she "wasn't the first he had brought there." _Son of a bitch,_ thought Maggie, _he made a point of showing off his goddamn horses and asking if I 'd like to ride!_

At the end of the Pittsburgh season Terri was due to begin rehearsals for a show in Atlanta in a week. "But the two of them, like Bogart and Bergman in 'Casablanca,' her fave flick, 'will always have that week,' she said." Although there was still some summer left, the peak building season, "he said the hell with business" and flew her to St. John, where they had a cottage far from the nearest neighbor, at $750 a night, on a beach of white sand. They bicycled, snorkeled and shopped by day (he bought her things), danced to a shore orchestra by moonlight, and made love, love, love, once at the surf's edge, otherwise under their own thatched roof. "'For him it's a wasted day if you're not doing it two or three times,' Terri merrily recounted."

_You air-headed bitch,_ thought Maggie. _What did they pay you for this? Ten thousand? To take away the oaf 's chance to think he's doing something for the world. Nice work!_

"Oh, I forgot to ask," _PayDirt 's_ interviewer remembered, fortunately in time, "How's he hung?"

"No!" Maggie cried and not only threw the paper but got out of her chair and ripped it in pieces on the floor. Lest she relent, and try to refit the pages, she stuffed them in the kitchen compactor and turned it on. _Better to run a goddamn sewing machine than be in this business,_ she thought. _Better to wash floors!_

Next morning she felt a revulsion at going to the office. Fortunately there were matters to absorb her - not the Josephson story, thank heaven. Since the park violence his notoriety had cooled. He was preaching in his farmyard, and there was no great interest to _DayLight_ in that. Which was as well. For Maggie the _PayDirt_ revelations had brought him down. "An ordinary guy on the make," she told Bren Hazelwood in bed the next night.

"Has it occurred to you the whole thing could be a plant?" her lover said.

"What do you mean?" She was resting her face on his bare chest "between rounds," as he liked to put it.

"A planted story - 'Jess the prodigious lover.' What could be easier? Bribe a showgirl to say, 'Ooh, what a stud. He keeps doing it and doing it.' She gets a few thou and her picture in the tabloids. He gets some of the heat off him for preferring boys."

"Why do you keep coming back to that? It's such nonsense."

"Au contraire, I just made it up but now realize it's so plausible I believe it's how it really happened. My intuition astounds me. Sex with a bouncy Christian woman helps, of course. Clears the mind, as Kierkegaard pointed out."

"Kierkegaard said that?"

"Between the lines, yes."

"You're a very subtle reader."

"The aphrodisiac powers of Scandinavian theology are much underrated," he said.

Two days later she received a phone call at her desk in the news office. "Hi. This is Jess Josephson."

"Oh... hello." She was off balance. "This is a surprise."

"I haven't spoken to you for awhile," he said. "And look... something's been printed about me that maybe you haven't seen. One of these scandal sheets they sell at checkout counters."

"Yes?"

"Well, if you haven't seen it, I hope you don't. Which is ridiculous, I guess."

"I've seen it. What's the big deal?" she said.

He clicked his tongue in disappointment. "This may sound funny... but the one person in the world I felt bad about reading that thing... was you."

"Oh?"

"That startled you. I'm sorry, I had no right..."

"No, no... but this article..." She felt some alarm. _Why the hell does every man I write about...? Do I have to wear a badge that says I'm taken?_ She cleared her throat. "This article, was it very false?"

"No. True. That's what's so... True enough, anyway, on the facts. It was me. It happened."

"Are you saying you're ashamed of what happened?"

"Ashamed? No. Not of the thing itself. I'm a man. I've had my times."

"Well then?"

"But to see all your stupid... all the dumb things you say and do... even your behavior in bed... as if I'm just an ordinary... Worse, a hypocrite. Especially knowing that people whose opinion I value..."

"There's no goddamn reason to value mine, Jess," she interrupted bluntly, desperate to forestall a boyish confession. "Hey, I'm a media whore myself."

"No, you are not," he said. "Your piece about me came closer to who I think I am than this... this stuff. I didn't mislead you, or you me. But there was no way I'd give you, or anybody, this sort of kiss-and-tell"

_Was that all? He hadn 't "told all" and felt guilty about it?_ "Oh, come now," she said. "You have a way with chorus girls. It's not exactly like being called a child molester."

"Yes, there's that comfort."

"You must hate her, though. This Terri Whatshername."

"Hate her? No, I don't hate her. She's in show biz. They go by different rules. Maybe it'll help her. Mary thinks she probably got paid."

"You're a forgiving fellow, Jess."

"It's not that. In fact, Mary thinks this sort of publicity is building the crowds, in a twisted sort of way. It adds to my - quote unquote - fame."

"Exposed as a stud!" said Maggie. "Now I'm wondering what might have happened to little ol' me in a ride to your hilltop that's seen so much action."

Sputterings of denial came over the line. She knew the insinuation was unfair. But anything to keep a distance between them! He was a news source, that's all; and she a professional, with a private life in which she had given him no justification to expect a role. A certain decorum was in order. How clumsy if he were to suggest, or even hint at something nearer. Should she have to _confess_ to having a lover? But he picked up the negative signals if any such thought was in his mind, and there was a fallback excuse for the call. "My trial in Florida starts Monday," he said. "This Deus hypocrite."

"How do you feel about it?"

"The good guys will win. But come down and cover. We can use an improvement in the general tone of journalism around here."

She laughed. "Sorry, we're well staffed in Florida. But I promise to read about it. Best of luck."

He fell silent. The rest, if any, was up to him. "Well, nice to talk to you again," he said lamely, although she sensed it had not really been. At least there would be no more references to the one person on earth whose opinion he truly valued.

"Thank you," she said. "Same here. And oh yes, Jess, good luck again."

# 3.

"Mm, you smell nice," said Mrs. Peter Winslow. She was waking her husband in their home in Pittsburgh, kissing his face, and was in an aromatic condition herself, dabbed with cologne.

"Kids gone?" he said. He had shaved and showered earlier and dozed off by her side.

"Just," said Olive Winslow. "And probably wondering why I'm still in my nightie." He put his hand under her gown and ran it over her belly, which never failed to surprise him with its smoothness, a young woman's belly, but which seriously embarrassed her when she stood up: it sagged. She had grown ashamed of letting him see this; theirs was the only room in the house with blackout blinds.

"Miss me as much as I do you, Pete?" In the midst of intimacy she required assurance on a non-physical level. The perfect Christian wife, he had often called her.

Her face, barely visible in the darkness, seemed uncannily pretty, reshaped, subtly swollen in desire. "How adorable you are."

"Don't shit me," she said. In youth she had been called "cute," never more than that.

"Where'd you get this vile language?" he said.

"The frustration of having hubby out of town all the time, and not bringing in any money." Four weeks earlier, the Rev. Mr. Winslow's leave from his church had become a resignation. And none too soon. A letter informing him of termination was being drafted.

He might have indulged hurt feelings but knew that his wife stood behind him. Yet her sacrifice called for a certain amount of praise and cuddling. "There's no way we could manage if you weren't a breadwinner, sweetheart," he said. She was a nurse supervisor at a hospital and had switched days-off to spend this one with him. Fortunately their older son had an athletic scholarship at college, and the twins, still in high school, a boy and a girl, worked at fast-food counters. (He was proud that all were good students and seemed able to withstand - so far - the corrosive pressures from schoolmates to quit "actin' white.")

Olive Winslow raised herself on an elbow. "Forgive the nagging, Daddy Bear, but couldn't Moneybags afford a teensy salary?"

"I can't bring myself to ask. You realize, it's no income for him either. And the expenses he picks up! Sometimes I feel I ought to reach for at least a lunch check."

"Don't you dare." She tugged at his ear. "You are sacrificing more to his damn cause than he is. He gets all the glory and can decide to quit whenever. And what will you have, a black preacher without a church?"

"I'll have you," he said, nuzzling her breast.

"What happens when he just walks away? Or gets shot!"

"God forbid."

"But He won't forbid, remember? Jess himself says so. _(Did he need the reminder?)_ He's going to piss off enough people that someone will pop him. And you alongside!"

"Pleasant thought."

"I mean it! He's a time bomb and my husband is standing there. Damn it, you're in danger near that guy."

"No, no. C'mon, be nice."

"I am not going to be nice. The fact that he's a Jew just gives the crazies more reason."

"True," he had to admit. He laid his cheek between her breasts. "I can hear your heart. Thump, thump, thump." She sighed comfortably. "Maybe it takes a Jew," he said.

"Hmm?" She sounded distant, ready to let the matter rest.

"The chronic outsider," he said. "Deep in the Jewish soul, even one as secular as Jess's, may be a fear that never goes away, of the dispersion and slaughter of the people."

Olive Winslow shifted impatiently. "But he's hardly Jewish at all, everyone says. Never goes to their church, or performs their little rituals."

"That's not the point. What may be specifically Jewish in Jess is the need to wrestle with the idea of God. Can't leave it alone, don't you see? Because he's a Jew."

"Oh screw him and his Jewishness!"

But now the naked clergyman in her bed was convinced the idea mattered. "On the one hand, outsiderness would lead to a rigid orthodoxy," he said. "Yes, I can see that. Group fear. Follow every rule, God is angry with us, don't deviate an inch. But on the other, every so often you'd have a revolutionary breakout. As with Jesus."

"You're not comparing him to Jesus?"

"The parallels are there, don't you see? How the Pharisees love to call him an ignoramus, a threat to morality and decency. While on the other side, hedonists and nihilists hate precisely his decency, reminding them there's a God, such a bore. Amateur psychologists speculate on hidden guilts that make him speak out when 'normal' people don't do that. Who does this _carpenter_ think he is!"

"Yeah, a millionaire carpenter."

"While we clergy demand to see his doctoral thesis, refuting Aquinas point by point. That'll keep him busy. Want to argue God? Into the library with you, troublemaker! Bury your nose in texts! Write books in philosophical jargon that no one will ever read. Or at least pipe down like a good citizen; don't you know that if you undercut religion, the social order is doomed? So shut up. But don't ever, Jew-boy, take your simple truth about God outdoors, away from Talmuds, altars, and pulpits, and make sense to real people in the street."

"You really admire this Jess," his wife said in some surprise.

"He's a once-in-a-lifetime. I can see now that it takes someone like him. Not an insider, not a member of clergy, nor even an original thinker really. The truth about God doesn't require originality. No, just a man from the working world, with common sense, leadership, guts."

"Just your everyday millionaire."

"Well, don't expect a Ph.D. to do it. Or a licensed theologian, heaven help us. But if I left the service to get into the God business in the first place, how can I hold back when the true voice comes along.?"

Olive Winslow gave a wry smile. "Which means I will never be able to quit that fucking hospital."

"Can I confess something to you?"

Her hand stopped on his shoulder. "Whew, sounds serious."

"I mean a confession with the understanding that you will let me make up my own mind, alone, in good time, without pressure."

She cocked her head to one side. As long as the confession was not about another woman, she could handle it; and this did not sound like that. "Wait," she said. "Would you believe, I'm dying for a coffee."

"Me, too."

"Back in a jif. Look the other way." She twirled on a robe to hide the scandalous belly and a moment later he heard her bare feet down the stairs. He got out of bed and put on his own robe, a faded terrycloth the children had given him once for Father's Day. There was a small round table with two chairs in a corner of the room under a pink fixture that his wife called the "whorehouse lamp." An intimate snack could be taken there. She returned with a tray bearing mugs of coffee.

"Cozy," he said, and took a sip. She sat on the chair opposite, her robe parting midway across her plump, crossed thighs. "What I haven't told you till now," he said, "is that, in fact, a living could be made from the movement."

"Now it gets interesting!" She slipped out of her chair and sat on the carpet at his feet, resting her head on his knee. He stroked her cheek.

"There is a man," he said, "and I suspect there might others, who would single-handedly solve our financial problems."

"All ears!"

"The evening of the day Jess spoke at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, he got a call at the hotel. Mary and I were there, having a drink with him. We heard him make pleasantries, then 'yes, all right, thanks, very kind of you but he couldn't,' stuff like that."

"Who was it?"

"He handed the phone to me and said, 'Here, you explain.' It was an old man, upset at him for turning down a donation; he couldn't understand how any man of sense would. That was the phrase he used, 'any man of sense.'"

"What kind of donation?"

"A million dollars."

"A million dollars!"

"For hotels, travel, don't give a damn what you use it for, he said. He liked what Jess has been saying and wanted to do something to promote it. Probably a lot more useful, he said, than all the other fool things he's given money to."

"Who was he?"

"Somebody named Nicholson, a retired manufacturer. Pharmaceuticals, I think he said. He had more money than he'd ever need and was giving it away by the bucketful anyway, he said."

"Off his rocker?"

"Didn't sound like it to Mary or me. Just damned annoyed to be turned down - and yet, I had the feeling, grudgingly impressed too. As if the only way we might be worth a million is if it were turned down."

"How did you answer?"

"I backed Jess, of course."

"Of course! Then put Mary on to back you!"

"I tried to explain how we're keeping the expenses down, which isn't hard with all the free publicity. It only made him madder. He swore up and down the gift would be in trust, nobody would have to know, and ended up calling me - all of us - damned fools."

"And that's how you left it?"

"No. He gave me his number and said, 'When you idiots change your minds, call me.' I took the number down and now I can't get it out of my head. That's temptation for you."

"As if you're so corruptible."

"But it never starts that way. Did Jesus on the Mount foresee a Vatican? A National Council of Churches?"

"Jess is not Jesus."

"And yet, Olive, believe me, I've thought about this. If Jesus himself came back, the Second Coming, there's this assumption that beyond the glorious chaos of it all, the world would magically accept the Christian model. But what if history doesn't work that way? What if a new Jesus made as much trouble as the old, not confirming the ancient idea but with revolutionary ideas today? Just when Christians want to be told they've been right all the time, along comes another Jewish carpenter! No wonder he enrages all sides. I tell you, Olive, shaking up established religions, then or now, is making about as much trouble as anybody can. Don't expect thanks."

"The trustees of any church, anywhere, should hear you now."

"At this point I can't imagine ever going back," said the Rev. Winslow.

"No," his wife said, "I've been expecting that."

"Which is why a million-dollar gift is not an obvious case to reject out of hand. Even the most selfless cause needs _some_ funding. It's not as if we've come this far penniless, just that the collection plate was filled in advance, by Jess's father and Jess himself. What makes their money okay and Nicholson's money not okay?"

"So where does that leave you, Pete?"

"Wavering," he said. "My usual state of mind."

She chuckled and rubbed her cheek against his thigh but said nothing, and he knew she would not rush his decision. The top of her robe gaped open and she did not adjust it. He lowered his hand within the folds and leaned over and kissed her. She stirred. "Poor darling," he said. "Had to listen to all this when you expected to make love."

She giggled. "Expected?" And reaching up, she pulled the chain of the whorehouse lamp, plunging the room in acceptable darkness as the robe came off her shoulders.

# 4.

"The others hate me," said Judah Iskaritz.

"Not true. They're all fine fellows."

"They hate me. And resent you for not kicking me out."

"You're imagining," said Jess Josephson. He straightened up and dropped a chewing gum wrapper in a plastic trash bag. "Or else projecting. Maybe you don't like _them_ enough."

The rabbi grunted noncommittally. The two were picking up litter at the bottom of the yard after the crowd had gone. It was five-thirty of a beautiful June day. On the porch Mary Mulcahy was chatting with reporters, the few who remained after her promises that today's news was over; Jess was staying home; no more interviews; none. Still, they clung, to glean a paragraph of "color," perhaps about how the famous man spruced his yard like any hired hand.

Judah said, "At bottom the _goyim_ always resent the separation we make. What's so good about your beliefs, you Jews, that you should stand apart?"

"Now you're confusing me," said Josephson. "I thought your complaint about me was that I'm too much the assimilationist."

"And so you are."

The other laughed. "Which is it then?"

"Both. They distrust you for how easy it is to cross the line and me for my open Jewishness, as plain as the nose on my face."

"No sir. As plain as the chip on your shoulder."

"My _yarmulke_ and black garments accuse them. Here now, what's this? A Jew claiming a special relationship with God, why should he look so different? His very appearance declares that I, a _goy,_ may not after all be saved by Jesus, am not in the right clothes, the right lifestyle."

"Maybe all they think is that you look hot and overdressed."

"Go ahead, laugh. Make light. But I know what I'm talking about. A Jew is _supposed_ to look different. So we won't mix as easily as you do, won't join the foolish majority."

"But hey, the majority is right about some things. Lincoln was a member of it, I believe. Shakespeare. Beethoven."

"Go ahead, admire! Admire everyone but your own people. The majority has never been right about God. No wonder they flock to you. They want an easygoing God, who allows you on base even though you've struck out, and struck out repeatedly. Desecrate the Sabbath? No problem, take a base. Commit adultery with this one and that? Don't worry your head about it." Judah studied the other's face. _God only knew how many women the handsome dog must have had._ "So don't tell me how right the majority is. The majority is full of shit."

"Which is why I'm trying to bring them a better idea."

"Better? Yours is a thousand times worse."

"That much?" He was smiling, taking it too lightly.

"Are you blind? Don't you see the hate you're stirring up?"

Josephson folded his arms and allowed himself to be berated. For all Judah knew, a television camera on the porch might have a directional microphone pointed at them, yet he would not shut up. "Thanks to you, the _goyim_ have new reasons to hate us," he said. "For undercutting Christianity. Can't leave it alone, can you, Jews? You're giving ammunition to all kinds of bigots and terrorists."

"I don't let them get away with it, do I? Blaming the Jews as a whole."

"Oh yes, and they listen to you, don't they?"

This was not the first time they had had this discussion. It went to the heart of the rabbi's case against Jess Josephson and, he was sure, of the latter's unadmitted guilt towards his people. This was why Judah Iskaritz, who had no business being kept as an overnight guest, sensed that he could berate freely and the other would tolerate it. Everyone else stood too much in awe of him, even Mary Mulcahy, twice his age and very fond of him; even Peter Winslow. But they were Gentiles, constrained by niceties of tact and reserve; whereas he and Jess were bonded before a word had passed between them, sharing resonances of blood, experience, and expression that not a million words could define.

"And when you're gone?" said Judah. "Come, give me that fucking thing, the yard is clean enough!" He threw down both their litter bags. "When you're gone, what then?"

"Gone?"

"When someone shoots you or sets off a bomb, God forbid! Or even if you live to a hundred. What will those poor Jews have left who were foolish enough to follow you?"

"Follow me? Follow the idea, you mean. What am I?"

"They won't have God." the rabbi said gloomily.

"They will. A truer, more believable..."

"Ach, you overestimate! The ordinary run of people can never be satisfied with your Big Bang, you and the astronomers, compared to God the Father." He poked a finger towards him. "The universe was set off like a firecracker, but after that _Ha-Shem_ resigned? Went on strike? Shot Himself? Beautiful! Go build a life on such sand!"

"I never said God is dead."

"Where is He then? Where, where?"

"I don't know."

"Then why do you speak? If you don't know, shut up!"

This was over the line and he knew it, but Josephson smiled. _He lets me get away with it,_ Judah thought; _but he knows it is a legitimate point, and suffers in his conscience._

"God exists and will always exist," said Jess.

"Exists? Only as a spectator? Laughing as we jerk about on our strings. Are we nothing but entertainment for Him?"

"I don't believe that."

"Then He must take a hand in our affairs. One or the other."

"I'm not sure. Maybe He's not bound by these limitations."

"You're evading! If He's not a spectator, He is active, a participant."

"But look at the _way_ He participates. At least show some distinction between important and unimportant," Josephson said, falling into the Jewish inflection he unconsciously employed with the rabbi-journalist from Brooklyn. "Keeping hands off the Holocaust of six million, but caring whether I eat shrimp or not!"

Judah sighed and leaned his elbow on the front gate-post. The sun, now behind them, shone on the hillside pasture across the road, where an hour before a crowd had stood. "I have sometimes thought the Almighty chose these few centuries as a demonstration," he said. "To keep hands off no matter the provocations... wars, atomic bombs, Holocaust, the debasement of all hope and decency, just to demonstrate how mad and unbearable is a world in which He does _not_ participate. So that we will come back to Him. And beg Him once again to take a hand."

"Is that an Orthodox thought, Judah?"

The rabbi had to smile. "For your ears only."

"I don't think we're so far apart."

"We are oceans apart! You are counting on ordinary people, the average human mind, to _reason_ a way toward goodness."

"It's the best thing to count on."

"Then explain the Germans! Such good educations - and Hitler."

"But this is what happens when educated people lack the guts - that's needed too - to stand up to thugs and dictators. Don't blame the death camps on education, my friend. Blame them on ignorance and gangsterism. The schooling of the average Auschwitz guard, I bet you, was abysmal."

"This gets nowhere," said Judah, though he found the argument a trifle cheering. "Counting on goodness to be learned by millions, billions. It's the oldest illusion of pagan philosophers."

"Oh? I take the opposite view. I hold it against religion for continually downgrading the possibility. For insisting that humanity is hopelessly bad material; that only God's hand can save us. While God Himself, by action and inaction shows what the rules are: that we've got to use our own brains and guts. Would any Arab blow himself up, kill innocent people and expect paradise for it, if not for the idiocy put in his head by religion? And where did organized Christianity itself stand during the Holocaust? Individuals, yes, but the church - very bad."

His face had taken on more color and his gaze a sharper intensity. Judah was impressed. Flattered as well. _The man puts as much effort into convincing me as a crowd. Is it because I 'm a committed Jew and his conscience torments him for rejecting his own?_ How else explain Jess's friendship for him? Three times a day he blatantly _davened_ his prayers. What was this but a flaunting of the very basis of Jessism, that the Almighty doesn't give a damn for worship. Judah could tell by the banter of the assistants that he was tolerated as a hair shirt, a grindstone for the boss's ideas, apart from the man's personal liking for him, which simply mystified them. The rabbi looked toward the porch. Happy hour! A half-dozen people were up there with drinks in their hands. What must they be thinking about the unassimilable friend of the regular guy who never "acted Jewish" at all?

"Just tell me to leave and I'll leave," he said.

A look of surprise. "You're free to go whenever you like," said Jess.

"I should be on the outside, attacking hell out of you."

"But what's the hurry? The religions won't throw in the towel tomorrow. Meanwhile you have this opportunity to dig up the inside dope on me, the real dirt."

Judah had to smile. That was the joke: there was no dirt. The closer you got, the more you admired. Some material for an expose! Why should it be, he thought, that with all the sermons and study, the candles lighted, the scrolls and icons venerated by Jew or Christian, Muslim and Hindu, that amidst all this the Almighty becomes obscured in rote and ritual; while to blow the dust away, to reveal the glowing ember of God, requires from time to time the breath of heresy? And from just such an outsider. So what should a committed Jew do? Go home? Cover Zionist dinners? With a sigh Judah Iskaritz said, "Maybe tomorrow I will find a way to persuade that thick head of yours."

Josephson slapped him on the back. "Come on, Judah," he said, "take a drive with me. I'll buy you a Coke." It had the sound of an excuse to get away, to leave for awhile and disperse the clinging media.

"There are Cokes in the kitchen," Iskaritz said.

"Come, I need help inspecting my acres. You'll advise me what to plant next spring." Another laugh. Jess's role as a "farmer" was a standing joke. The rabbi glanced at him sidelong as they walked up toward the porch: his physique and stride, the mixture of strength and kindness, intelligence untainted with cynicism. _Dovvid Ha-Melech_ must have looked like this. Could it be, Judah mused, that the seed of David, warrior and psalmist, had come down through centuries of dispersion, across deserts and seas, to materialize in this place and person, this bad Jew who deserved a _klop_ on the head and who yet seemed to quicken the idea of the Almighty in everyone who came near?

"Throw me the keys, somebody," Jess called to the people on the porch. A radio idiot was still speaking into a microphone, perhaps broadcasting live; didn't they ever quit? "Judah will tell me how to increase my crop in the south forty." They laughed.

Jess took the smaller car, not the pickup, and it was not till hours later, as he painfully reconstructed events, that Judah Iskaritz realized the idiot on the porch must have indeed been broadcasting, telling the world the notorious God-basher was driving away in his white Chevy, and why not giving the license number, too?

They drove past Pleasant Unity to the next village, the name of which escaped the rabbi. It was little more than a scattering of buildings at a crossroads. One corner of the intersection was occupied by a garage. A sign over the door carried an old Royal Crown logo; it said, "Crombie CARepair Free Estimates." Josephson pulled up before a soft drink vending machine by the door. A car was being worked on inside, its engine lifted and suspended on chains. Jess waved into the inner dimness. "Hi, fellas," Judah heard him say. He inserted coins for two cans of soda pop, took a swallow of his, and drove away as three men came out in the sunlight. They must have recognized him and wanted a better look.

"I like this stretch," he said a half-mile out of the village. He had turned onto a two-lane gravel road that dived beneath a canopy of chestnuts lining both sides. "Someone planted these a hundred years ago for the shade today. That's foresight," he said.

"You love living out here with the trees, the bees, and the _goyim,_ don't you? And fit in like a glove. Tell me," said Judah, "why do you bother remaining a Jew?"

"But that's obvious."

The rabbi had to laugh. "No, my friend. Obvious I wouldn't call it."

He received no answer. The driver was distracted by something in the rear-view mirror. "Somebody believes in following close. Go around me, buddy!" Josephson said.

Judah craned about. The front grille of a truck filled the back window; it could not have been four feet away. Jess, who had not been driving fast, slowed even more, but the tailgater made no move to pass. "Playing games," Jess said. He cut back to a deliberate creep, and then the tailing truck did move out and draw abreast. It was a four-wheel drive on high tires. Judah had to lean over to get a steep enough angle to look up into the other vehicle.

What he saw alarmed him: four enraged-looking men, the two on the nearer side shouting and shaking fists. Jess's face was turned towards them. The rabbi glanced about. It was a lonely piece of road, unpaved, and barely wide enough to pass. A weedy field lay on the left, a creek on the right, with trees leaning over its banks. The field must have had an owner; it was wire-fenced but contained only discarded tires and construction waste in high weeds; not a house, an animal, or person in sight.

The truck kept abreast of them, its tires spitting dust; and now all its occupants had caught the fist-shaking fever. Josephson touched a hand to his brow in mock salute and stepped on the gas. "I get the picture," he said. Judah Iskaritz wished to be moving a hundred miles an hour. He braced a hand on the dashboard. He felt weak in the stomach; a crawly sensation in his beard told him he had turned pale.

Josephson glanced in the mirror and muttered. The rabbi looked back. In the dust kicked up by their own tires the grille of the four-wheeler bore down. "I don't think I can outrun 'em," said Jess. There was sweat on his face. The rabbi's hands were trembling; he pressed them against the dash. With a roar the pursuer swerved out and again drew abreast. The occupants looked crazed with unexplainable rage. Both vehicles were doing more than fifty on a narrow dirt road. Jess braked.

"Don't stop," Judah said.

"Going to have to."

The four-wheeler slowed as well, to hold position alongside. The men inside motioned for them to halt. "What are you going to do?" Judah's voice sounded hollow even to himself, a terrified choking. His fear was so powerful he had no shame of it; all he wanted was to be away from there.

"Better see what they want," said Jess. His voice was steady but his face had lost color. He stopped as far to the right as he could without slipping off the creek bank. The other vehicle angled tightly in, wedging the Chevy to bar its going forward. Three men, all but the driver, jumped down, slamming their doors as if infuriated by an accident no fault of theirs. They crunched on the gravel toward Jess's side of the car. All looked tough and malevolent and wore sunglasses _- so as not to be identified?_ Judah shrank in his seat.

Josephson managed a smile. "What's up, fellows?"

The one in front, a two-hundred-pounder in a greasy undershirt with suspenders holding up a pair of oily work pants, put two hands on the window opening. "Shutcher motor off," he said.

"You fellows state troopers?"

Not funny. "Shutcher motor, cocksucker!" Josephson turned the ignition and pocketed the keys. "Now getcher asses out o' there, the pair o' yunz!"

As he reached for his door handle Jess leaned toward his terrified companion. "Do as they say. This isn't your fight. Stay behind me."

The rabbi had difficulty opening his door. His right hand shook and he had to brace it with his left. He felt sick, acutely loose in the bowels, so that he consciously had to tighten. An intuition came to him that he soon would be dead, or else beaten worse than ever in his life, broken in bones and organs, oozing blood. He thought of cupping his hands over his groin and letting them do their worst to the rest of him. He thought of praying the _Shema_ but could not concentrate. What made it worse was that one of the thugs in dark glasses screamed as he moved too slowly: "Git the fuck over here, kike!" He hoped they would ignore him. Jess was their grievance. What had he to do with this rage of Neanderthals? "I'm coming," he barely whispered, "coming."

Jess Josephson was already out, his arms characteristically folded. The rabbi could not see his face; his entire inclination was to hang back. Jess stood in the middle of the road. _And where the hell is other traffic?_ Judah thought, longing, yearning for the sound of a single approaching engine, one other automobile in the universe! The hoodlums formed a semi-circle in front of Jess, ignoring the wretch behind him. Now the driver got down from the truck and approached. He carried what appeared to be a black stick - _Gott,_ Judah realized, _a gun!_ There was not a sound other than the man's boots crunching gravel. It was six-thirty of a June day bright and warm, one of the longest of the year. The sun stood high over a distant slope. How could it be that not one bird sang, not a tractor groaned in a field, not one sound of traffic anywhere on earth, just the splashing of the brook at the right, where their bodies would be found, face down in the water. How could a road in the United States of America be so deserted?

The man with the shotgun walked towards them. _This is death,_ thought the rabbi. _So stupid, so anonymous, so mistaken. He doesn 't even know me, has no conception of Judah Iskaritz as a human being. I am a roach under his shoe, and this stupid indifference is what death is..._Above his dark glasses the man wore a soiled baseball cap with a black and yellow logo over the visor: "Pirates." He had on faded jeans, a red shirt, and the steel-toed shoes of a mill hand. The others made room for him in the semi-circle. "You don't take hints easy, do ya, Jew-boy?" he said to Jess Josephson.

"Hints?"

"To shut the fuck up with your anti-Christian bullshit!"

"I'm not anti-Christian. I think all the religions..." Jess began to say but was shoved in the chest. He stumbled back a step, and the semi-circle advanced.

"We're thinkin' you need some kind o' lesson to keep your Jew mouth shut," said the leader.

"Yeah, yeah," the others voted in favor. "Tell 'im, Ned," one prompted, receiving a warning glance. _Doesn 't want to be identified,_ thought Judah. _No names!_

"Maybe it's somethin' they don't teach kikes anymore, to keep their mouths shut in a Christian country. You'd think that'd be easy enough for a kike to understand. I thought Jews were supposed to have brains."

The committee agreed: "Yeah! Fuckin' right!"

Josephson, still with arms folded, impervious to insult, raised a hand. "You want to discuss it?" he said. "I'm willing. But this religious man here" - a motion of his head indicated the wretch behind him - "he has no responsibility for me. Let him be on his way and we'll talk."

_A reprieve?_ Judah could hardly believe it. _They 're going to let me go!_ But he had no time for more than a hope (the shame came later) before "Ned" with the shotgun crushed it. "What, and have 'im call the cops the first phone he finds?" he said. "Nothin' doing."

"Two kikes is better than one," another ape calculated.

What happened next happened so fast that Judah had to reconstruct it afterwards in part by surmise. He never saw the expression on his friend's face, which was turned from him. One moment Jess Josephson's arms were crossed; the next, with only a grunt to mark the effort, his hands lashed out, flat, and chopped into the throats of the two men beside him. In the same motion, like a football punter, arms out for balance, he brought to toe of his shoe up into the gunman's groin. The weapon fell, the stock down on the road, where (the rabbi later realized) it might have discharged and blown any of their heads off. The fourth man, untouched, recoiled, popping back in shock. He had not braced for the violence to commence, and certainly not from the victim's side. Jess lunged at him with a roar, hands clutched as if to tear his head off. The fellow let out a squeal, twisted around, and broke into a run.

Judah was frozen. Men were writhing on the road, tearing at weeds, kicking gravel. One mutely clawed at his neck; another hacked and gasped. The gunman, apparently caught directly in the testicles, doubled up in agony. Josephson's first impulse was to take charge of the gun. He picked it up gingerly, as if it might yet fire. Pointing it down the road after the fleeing man, but at a safe angle, higher than necessary to miss, he triggered off both rounds. His shoulder jerked with the recoils. Then he heaved the weapon into the creek. To Judah, who stood rooted, the expression on his face looked _businesslike._ With a glance at the three struggling on the ground, apparently satisfied they were occupied, he strode to their truck, reached inside to release the brake, and began pushing against the door frame. The weight resisted; his shoes scuffed gravel. Then the tires began to turn. The right front wheel slipped over the bank, the point of balance passed, and gravity took over. The truck rolled at an angle, teetered, and collapsed on its side in the creek with a splash. "Let's get out of here," said Jess Josephson.

Judah's relief was intense; his gratitude overflowed; it was abject, servile; he would have fallen at the other's feet. Still alive? Saved? As miraculously as if the Almighty had lowered a finger to flick him from the grip of his enemies, now strewn about the field. But it had not required _Ha-Shem_. Only Jess. Jess of the cool head, positioning hands and feet just so, as the Jew-haters heaped abuse on him, while he, gauging distances and vulnerabilities, summoned to the moment of maximum risk the maximum will. Was ever since _Dovvid Ha-Melech_ such a hero?

"Should we leave them?" Judah asked, vaguely wary of legal consequences. One of the men who had been struck in the Adam's apple still clutched helplessly at weeds by the roadside; another half sat up, gasping, coughing; the third lay on his side, legs drawn up fetally, groaning. Jess decided that all would survive. He was already opening his car door. Judah hurried inside. His friend looked out the window as he started up, taking care that his wheels should not pass over arms or legs.

For several moments nothing was said. Every foot, every yard that the horrible incident could be put behind them relieved some of Judah's terror. Looking back, he saw the dust raised by their car obscuring the scene - _good, good, hide it!_ He glanced at his rescuer, who stared straight ahead, jaws tight, intent on speed. The rabbi's admiration and gratitude were warped now by thought of how fecklessly he himself had behaved. Worse than worthless! Because when Jess had suggested he be allowed to leave...

"That... that was like an Israeli pre-emptive strike," Judah said, in an agony that the warrior might not speak to him. "I'm sorry I wasn't any help."

"You were a help. You stood back. I'd hate to think if you'd got in the way."

He seemed to mean it. The rabbi felt a trifle better. Maybe there was some value in doing nothing. And his friend of course could not look in his head, to see his shameful thought when offered a chance to run. Yet confession was called for. "I was scared shitless back there," he said.

"Me too."

"No, not you."

They had gone several hundred yards, the road rising along a slope that curved left, leaving the creek below, when Judah caught sight of the man running away, still running! Hearing the car behind him, the lout turned, saw, and scurried into the brush. Rabbi Iskaritz felt no moral superiority towards him. "What should we tell the others?" he said.

"Why tell them anything?"

"They'll hear. The hospitals... no?"

"Forget it," said Jess. "Those guys aren't reporting anything. If they do, I'll see them in court. I got a witness." He managed a smile.

"Just say nothing then?" said Judah, miserable that David the King would treat him decently, unaware what a worm, what a cockroach he was.

"Why stir it up? Better not to rub their noses in it."

"I'm a reporter, remember," Judah said. "Insignificant little _Jewish Views_ could beat the _Times._ An exclusive."

"I couldn't call you a liar."

"One Jew against four and beat hell out of them! Don't I have a responsibility?"

"Suppress it. Next time it'll be one Jew against six, and you won't be there to witness."

True. And yet Iskaritz knew he would have written it, no power on earth could have kept him from writing it, if he had so much as raised a finger instead of cringing behind a real man. He had lost the right to tell the story. Only Jess had the right, and if he chose to keep it quiet, case closed. It was a point of honor, the only scrap of honor left to the correspondent of _Jewish Weekly Views._

He sank back in his seat as Josephson drove towards home. This was going to be bad. Really bad. He could not remember such shame. As a boy he had stood up to them, had punched and kicked on the ground with Jew-baiting _schkutzim._ He hadn't won many, but there was honor in the willingness to do battle. But this... this had unmanned him. To have neo-Nazis screaming "kike" at him, shaking their fists, wanting to kill him for nothing but being a Jew, no way to talk sense to them, leaving him with only the single unspeakable thought: don't hurt me, _he 's_ the one you want... While Jess on the other hand, such a contrast. Do what you will with me, spare my friend!

"What were you thinking," Judah said, unable to leave it alone, "when you asked them to let me go?"

Jess frowned as if trying to reconstruct a thought process. "I didn't see any reason for you to get hurt on my account..." _knife, knife twisting in coward guts..._ "and also that behind the first tree you'd be able to call the cops on your cell."

When they pulled into the farmyard, only Mary Mulcahy and two assistants were chatting on the porch. The media were gone. Nothing in Josephson's manner as he walked up the steps betrayed anything out of the ordinary.

Judah escaped upstairs. He shared a room with one of the assistants, fortunately not present. He flung himself on his bed. The horror of what he had discovered about himself was a torment. He thought of a daydream he had often had... _in a cattle car of the Holocaust, unloaded at Auschwitz. The guards with their horrible dogs barking beside them scream, "Out, kikes! Schnell, schnell! Into the showers, Jews!" That is when he, Judah Iskaritz, knowing it must be the final act of his life, hurls himself at one of the SS and with his thumbs gouges the bastard's eyes out, even as fangs tear at him, bayonets thrust, boots kick..._ Yet today, put to the test... "Out of the car, kike!"... how meekly...

He punched at his pillow. Now that the danger was past he felt no gratitude to be alive. Better to have bled there on the road. It was almost sundown, time for afternoon prayer, but the thought of _davening_ revolted him. For what should be pray - courage?

Later that night, with only a note to Jess Josephson saying he had "learned enough and do not feel that I belong here," Judah Iskaritz packed his bag, drove off in his rented car, and ceased to be a correspondent on the Jess Beat.

# 5.

"Jess... I'm going to call you Jess. May I!"

"Sure," said the witness.

His lawyer stood several yards from him, near the center of the area between the bar of the court, counsel tables, and the jury box. Attorney Leo Tolstoy Rothman was a tall man of sixty, bald, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain across his belly. His preferred stance in mid-floor, except when intent on bullying a witness, capitalized on his well-projected voice, for which jurors, especially elderly ones, tended to be grateful.

"Now, Jess," he said, "you have heard yourself described here as an atheist who bribed your way into the TV studio..."

"Objection, Your Honor," said Melvin Beeler, rising. "This is not the first time counsel has referred to my client's church, the House o' the Almighty, as a TV studio, in a denigratin' tone of voice. It is a church, sir, a place of Christian worship."

"Are services held in this 'house' other than when broadcasting for money?" Rothman asked.

"Object again, Your Honor. This snide tone is most offensive."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," Judge Margaret Walleck put up a hand. "Objections sustained, both of them. If it's a church to its members, Mr. Rothman, it's a church to us. Re-phrase."

"Very well, Your Honor. Jess, you've heard the accusations against you. I would like you, therefore, to describe where you stand religiously - in your own mind."

"Objection," said Beeler, once more rising beside his client, the Rev. Johnny Deus. "I'm sure Defendant would welcome the chance to propagate his views in this court with the eyes o' the world on it. But we're tryin' a trespass n' assault 'n battery here, not the defendant's atheism."

"His views, which are _not_ atheist," said Rothman in an angry voice, "go to his credibility and that of his accusers."

"With the news media o' the world watchin'?" said Beeler, displaying skepticism. He was a short, plump man of forty-seven, attired in a rumpled suit and striped shirt that suggested a humble country lawyer (though he kept a yacht on Biscayne Bay), "I don't think the propagation of deviant cults, hostile to Christian tradition..."

"That will do, Mr. Beeler," the judge said. "A statement of the witness's creed is in order. Overruled."

The witness turned towards the jury box. "I am certainly not an atheist," he said. "I believe in God. And I don't consider myself hostile to Christianity or any non-violent religion. Hostility to me sounds like animosity, hate. I don't feel that at all." He looked at each juror as he spoke.

Peter Winslow, in the spectator section, heard a reporter behind him whisper: "Rothman never should have accepted a jury of churchgoers - or a jury at all."

"Well, what would you do with a media freak for a client?"

_They still don 't know him,_ the ex-Presbyterian thought. Glancing about, he caught the eye of Harry Kaufhoffer, Jess's shopping mall friend from Philadelphia. He had flown his jet down for the trial and taken the defense team to dinner the previous night; in fact, had cut a figure on the dance floor with, of all people, Mary Mulcahy. But Harry was worried. Could Jess possibly win a case in the back yard of Southern evangelism, a case that depended on his unsupported word against many?

"Now, Jess," said Rothman. "You've heard several witnesses, Preacher Deus and two of his assistants, testify here under oath - _to God_ - that you assaulted Mr. Deus with no provocation at all. That you 'sucker punched' him was the term used. What about it?"

"Mr. Deus either forgets what he said to me or he's lying. And his people either didn't hear or they also are lying."

Rothman allowed the word 'lying' to resound through the room, which was the largest in the courthouse, and filled. There were seats for two hundred public spectators and news media. By agreement of both sides the judge had allowed live television coverage. A single "pool" camera for all media worked from a far corner. Despite air-conditioning and ceiling fans the place was hot; outside it was ninety-six degrees.

Defense counsel tucked his thumbs in his belt, to look less like the millionaire lawyer from Philadelphia that he was. "All right, Jess, why were you there and what did you do?"

The defendant began by relating that he had heard Deus's previous telecast. He said the evangelist "seemed to be blaming the Jewish people as a whole for my views."

Objection. Sustained. But a new phrasing of the question permitted him to testify as to conclusions he drew from the preacher's statements. "I wanted to answer him on his own program," Josephson said. He described the flight to Miami and the rental of a "getaway car." The phrase drew laughter. "I thought we might have a hall full of people chasing us down the street," he said.

Peter Winslow felt relieved as Jess confirmed almost word for word his own testimony: that the stage door guard had demanded a bribe rather than yielded to one, as Wylie Bedford, a crowd favorite, had tearfully stated. Told to point out his corrupters, the tragic African had said, "Them gennulmens," shaking his head in sadness at the frailties of men. _You sweet old lying son of a bitch,_ thought Winslow.

Once on stage, Josephson's worst fear, he said, was that he would be overpowered and hustled off as an idiot exhibitionist. He also worried that the evangelist might win some advantage in fair argument. "I expected him to stand toe-to-toe. If I lasted just thirty seconds, I wanted to make a point, so it wouldn't be all futility. He surprised me by running. I realized he was desperate to get out of the same camera shot, so I ran after him to stay in the picture." Chuckles rippled through court. "I figured nobody would give me a bloody head right there."

"Objection," said Beeler. "Nobody was menacing _him._ He was the trespasser."

"He's testifying as to his state of mind," said Rothman.

"Overruled," said the judge, a widow in her sixties with mournful eyes and dark-dyed hair.

"I just figured the safest place was next to him," the witness said, pointing to Deus. "So the more he ran the more I stuck with him." ( _Laughter.)_ "He shocked me at one point by cutting loose with some terrific profanity. I was stunned, as the audience was..."

"Objection! How can he speak for the audience?"

"Sustained. Strike it."

"I also didn't know what the people backstage might be doing to poor Pete..."

"Objection. Now he's testifying to what he _didn 't_ know."

"Sustained."

"I just kept after Mr. Deus, making my points as loud as I could. Then he quit running and went down on his knees. I thought, that's nothing but a phony act and..."

"Objection! Christian prayer, sir, for your information, is not a phony act."

"Objection!" said Rothman. "He's debating with the witness!"

"Mr. Rothman, kindly let me respond to Mr. Beeler's objection before you voice your objection."

"Sorry, Your Honor."

"I am going to overrule you, Mr. Beeler. Save it for cross-examination. Proceed."

Defendant continued, "So I stuck with Mr. Deus while he was kneeling, to try to stay in the same picture. Then all this loud music came on. I thought the program must be over. Mr. Deus got to his feet. I thought, uh-oh, here is where I get beaten up..."

"Jess," Rothman interrupted. "Back up for a moment. I believe you said it seemed to you the program must be over?"

The judge said, "Let's hear that last testimony."

The stenographer, a woman in shell-rimmed glasses, looked over a fold of tape from her shorthand machine and read aloud in an expressionless voice: "Then all this loud music came on. I thought the program must be over."

Rothman: "Why did you think the program was over, Jess?"

"I knew we had to be close from a time standpoint. Then all this music sounded, and a sort of general hubbub. I thought that's it; we're off the air."

"Very well, continue."

"Well, Mr. Deus walked over to me. And instead of taking a swing at me, which in a certain sense I wouldn't have blamed him for..." Laughter in the court; the witness paused to allow it. "Instead of that, he made this very offensive anti-Semitic remark. Which really steamed me. So I took a sock at him."

"Meaning you punched him?"

"I did."

"What remark did he make?"

"He called me a 'Jew bastard.'"

"He lies!" cried the Rev. Mr. Deus, rising from his seat.

Rothman looked around in disgust. The judge rapped her gavel. "Mr. Beeler, admonish your client."

Plaintiff's counsel apologized and appeared to scold his client in a sharp whisper. Despite the heat of the afternoon the evangelist was attired in clerical black with a Roman collar, an attire he never used on camera, surveys having indicated that it hurt ratings.

"He called you a _Jew bastard,_ " Leo Rothman repeated in a relentless voice. "Is that all he called you, Jess?"

The defendant hesitated. "Not quite all."

"There was more?"

"It was pretty vulgar. I'm not sure it'd be proper..." He looked up at the bench.

"Just tell us what you heard him to say, Mr. Josephson," said the judge.

"He said, 'You cocksuckin' Jew bastard.'"

In the eruption of gasps and laughter the Rev. Mr. Deus exclaimed audibly and would have stood again but for the restraining hands of counsel. Leo Rothman folded his arms and scowled. Attorney Beeler, mopping his brow, said, "Your Honor, under these trying circumstances, the heat in the courtroom and so forth, could we have a recess, perhaps, to cool all our heads?"

"Our heads are cool!" Rothman shouted. "My client stands besmirched in reputation and financially at risk, falsely accused of sneak punches, atheism, anti-Christianity - and in the very heart of his defense his accusers cry, time out!"

"Calm yourself, Mr. Rothman," the judge said. "I am not calling time out. But I am calling on you, Mr. Beeler, and your client... Be careful. Don't make me tell you again."

"Thank you, Your Honor," said Beeler.

Rothman resumed. "What did you do, Jess, after the plaintiff called you... may we have the stenographer repeat that testimony?"

"You cocksuckin' Jew bastard," the woman in the owlish spectacles read from her tape in a professionally toneless voice. The audience snickered to hear such words from a middle-aged female of maternal appearance.

"What did you do, Jess, when this remark was made to you?"

"I socked... punched him in the face."

"In the face! He was not turned away from you, as the term 'sucker-punched' implies?"

"Objection! He's leadin' the witness."

"Sustained."

"We were face to face, standing right next to each other."

"Why did you punch him, Jess? Couldn't you talk it over?"

"I got mad, lost my temper. I thought, nobody's going to say something like that to me and get away with it."

"Are you especially quick to resort to violence, Jess?"

"I don't think so. No."

"Haven't you been called vile names in public? From people yelling obscenities in crowds?'

"That's different. I upset people, I know that. I challenge their beliefs and they get overwrought. It's understandable. But this man was right in front of me, and a minister who ought to know better."

"Have you ever, Jess," said Rothman, advancing on him sternly, " _ever in your life,_ done violence to a member of clergy of any faith, or advocated such violence?"

"No, sir. Absolutely not."

"Did you, that day, enter the House of the Almighty Dollar with any..."

"Objection!" shouted Beeler as the audience erupted in laughter. "That is absolutely unconscionable!"

Leo Tolstoy Rothman looked blank, as if unaware his tongue had slipped (though Peter Winslow in the audience suspected no slip).

Objection sustained, the phrase was stricken. Order returned and questioning resumed. Defendant firmly denied assaulting Plaintiff "for the publicity."

"Yet you wanted the television coverage, Jess, you admit that," his lawyer reminded him.

"I wanted to tell him off on his own network, yes, for sure. I figured that would be plenty of news coverage for one day."

"Yet you struck him, in front of millions of viewers."

"For what he said to me, which I never expected."

"Well, Jess," said Rothman, "right over there sits Mr. Deus, who testified from this very witness stand, under oath, that you attacked him 'unprovoked' - his word. And the jury heard from two of his assistants that they stood not more than a few feet away and _they_ heard no verbal abuse from Mr. Deus. Three to one, Jess! Can you give the court any reason why it should believe you and not them?" ( _Here it comes,_ thought Peter Winslow, squeezing his eyes shut.)

"Yes, I think I can."

"Well, let's hear it, Jess."

The defendant reached in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. He brought out an object the size of a cell phone or a pack of cigarettes and laid it on the rail of the witness box. "I made a recording," he said.

***

"It's all over TV! I'm so excited," said Olive Winslow.

"Unbelievable!" her husband said by phone. "I thought they were going to carry him out on their shoulders."

"You never told me a word about any recording."

"We didn't tell anybody. No leaks. Just kept it to the three of us and Rothman. It's why we never lost much sleep."

"But why didn't you just let the other side know you had the recording and be done with it?"

"Jess was going to do that. He kept giving Deus the message: withdraw the damned lawsuit. But when he realized a Christian minister planned to lie under oath, and had lined up others to lie, he figured okay, let the son of a bitch hang himself."

"I can't wait for him to confess on TV. Tell me what happened when Jess pulled out the recorder."

"A sensation. First, he played back a few minutes of his testimony, to prove the thing worked from inside his pocket. Deus and his lawyer went pale. They blanched. Like peanuts."

"And then?"

"Jess pulled out a mini-tape and said it was the one he made that day. Deus's lawyer jumped up with ten objections. The tape could've been doctored; he wanted a postponement to have it examined by experts, and so forth. The judge wasn't having any. 'We'll hear it,' she said."

"But how was it that he made the tape in the first place?"

"Because we didn't know we'd get out of Almighty House in one piece. What if we got roughed up? Jess thought: better make a tape. And of course it fit in his pocket."

"Well, it's a damn good thing. So go on."

"Why? I've got to catch a plane. I'll tell you at home."

"No, I'm in too much suspense. Tell me now."

"Well, the first thing on the tape was our sweet old guard at the stage door. You should have seen the crowd eat it up when he testified how the devil got into him when 'them gennulmens' tempted him with two hundred bucks. Boy, did he get nailed. You could hear my voice saying we'd like to ask the Reverend a question backstage, how much we admired him and so forth. And there was old Wylie answering, "You n' evvabody else. Git your asses 'round the front door!" I asked him to make an exception, and he said, 'Two exceptions! What's it worth to ya, boys?' 'Okay, twenty bucks,' I said. 'Shee-it!' he said. 'A hunnerd apiece or no sense talkin'."

Olive Winslow laughed. "Just that ol' devil temptation."

"He looked as if he'd sink through the floor. At that point Deus, pretty pale himself, whispered to his lawyer Beeler. Who then said in a pathetic voice: 'Your Honor, plaintiff requests a conference in chambers.' And now, sweetheart, I've really got to shake a leg."

"No, tell me quick. What happened next?"

"The settlement offer."

"They didn't even want to hear the rest of the tape?"

"Deus knew. But Rothman thinks Beeler didn't know. He's a reputable lawyer and seemed genuinely stunned. Why shouldn't he believe three men of God? It never occurred to anybody there might be a recording."

"What was the settlement again?"

"First, the public apology from Deus in court, which we already heard before adjournment, then again on his next broadcast Friday. Plus all expenses, court costs, and lawyer fees."

"The commentators are already saying he got off easy, just admitting that he forgot what he said in shock and anger."

"Jess's attitude was, don't rub his nose in it, which might've stirred a backlash in his favor. As it is, we came out roses. The judge was really steaming. I'm sure she would have insisted on perjury if Rothman and Beeler - Jess too - hadn't calmed her down."

"All's well that ends well."

"That's what I say. But Mary Mulcahy, with Harry Kaufhoffer backing her up, jumped all over me afterwards."

"Why you?"

"When the judge's clerks asked me as 'chief of staff' - Rothman's fancy title for me - to estimate expenses, hotel, air fares, meals, all that, I said thirty-five thousand. In fact, it was only about thirty, I threw in five for good measure. But Mary said I should've said fifty, seventy-five. Like Leo Tolstoy Rothman."

"What do you mean?"

"When they asked his fee, he didn't just say two hundred thousand, which is what he and Jess had agreed on. Without batting an eye he said five! A half-million. And they bought it without a murmur."

"How did Jess react?"

"He gazed up at the ceiling with his 'mild' look. And never let himself smile till we got the hell out of there, except once at the old widow judge. Which I think made her day. Now Harry's plane's going to leave without me!"

"Should I pick you up at the airport?"

"Don't. Mary called a press conference when we get there."

"Another freaking press conference?"

"Why not? She says, 'Get it while it's hot.'"

"Good advice for you too, mister. But I'll be asleep."

"I'll kiss you awake. Gotta run. 'Bye."

# 6.

**From the** **_Pittsburgh (Pa.) Tribune-Review:_**

**CROSS BURNED AT JJ 'S FARM;**

**HE TAKES GARDEN HOSE TO IT**

GREENSBURG. - Hooded and robed like Ku Klux Klan members, a gang of marauders numbering eight to ten burned a cross last night at the Westmoreland County farm of Jess Josephson.

No sooner were the flames alight, however, than the millionaire homebuilder-turned-religious-activist loped down his front yard hauling a length of garden hose. Eye-witnesses said he trained a jet of water on the fiery, profaned symbol of Christianity. The gasoline-soaked timbers continued to flicker and smolder, but Josephson succeeded in reducing the fire to a smoking, sodden char. Standing about seven feet high, the cross never was entirely consumed by flames.

After the intruders left, chased by photo flashes and the sirens of approaching state police, Josephson's assistants, who had watched the confrontation from the porch of his farmhouse, tore the cross down and broke it up. The incendiaries had massed along a gate at the lower end of the property. They made no attempt to stop the 33-year-old cultist's dousing act, though they greatly outnumbered him.

Witnesses included several journalists staying at the house as guests. They said Josephson, garden hose in hand, refused to retreat in the face of jeers, epithets, and threats. His followers kept out of the fray on specific orders, according to Mary Mulcahy, his press aide.

"Anybody who was there will never forget it," she said. "It was the bravest thing I ever saw. One man - a real man - against a gang of thugs."

State Police Capt. Dick Freeland said Josephson used a 200-foot length of water hose, one of several coiled alongside his house as a precaution against fires. The 113-acre farm near Pleasant Unity has been the scene of outdoor sermons, which have drawn large crowds and media attention since the nonconformist Pittsburgher sparked a near riot at Keystone State Park on Memorial Day weekend.

"He apparently assumed the cross-burners would not be so foolish as to come with guns," said Freedland. "I don't know if I would have had that confidence."

His face streaked with sweat and grime, but otherwise showing no strain, Josephson minimized his hero role. He told an impromptu press conference in the farmyard that if he had been physically attacked, "ten guys would have been down here off the porch in seconds. It wasn't that much of a risk."

Josephson said the intruders' hoods and robes resembled KKK costumes but he "couldn't say for sure." The group fled in four cars and pickups with lights off, he said. It was impossible to read license plates.

By 1 a.m. today press time no one had claimed responsibility. But area radio stations reported anonymous calls denying KKK involvement. "If we'd have done it, that hose would have been around the (expletive's) neck," a male voice was recorded at KQV Radio in Pittsburgh.

"This man is becoming the stuff of legend," said Tom Cooney, correspondent of _The Guardian,_ a British newspaper, who was staying overnight at the farm. He said a group of guests and Josephson assistants were chatting at approximately 10 p.m., when vehicles were heard on the gravel road that fronts the property. A moment later two unarmed bodyguards ran up from the main gate shouting an alarm. Within seconds more than a half-dozen hooded figures hauled a cross of lashed two-by-fours inside the gate, 30 to 40 yards down the sloping yard. The base of the cross had been pre-sharpened like a pencil. It was worked back and forth into the turf softened by an afternoon shower, till the lashed lumber stood erect. The cross was then doused from a gasoline can and ignited.

Press aide Mulcahy said Josephson was alone in an upstairs room working on a speech. "He flew downstairs. Everybody else was already out in the yard raring to go after them. Jess said, 'No, stay put, I don't want a war.' Those were his words. People don't give him enough credit for trying to avoid trouble."

Edward Jensen, a crowd assistant from Harmarville, said Josephson brought a bullhorn out on the porch. "He said, 'Get out of here, you fellows. You're on private property.' That was before the cross flared up. They yelled things at him you couldn't print. Jess tried to answer, but when he saw the flames shoot up, he went livid. I heard him say, 'No sir!' That's all. Then he jumped down, grabbed a hose from a coil at one corner of the house and yelled at me, 'Turn it on when I'm down there and keep everybody back unless they jump me.' He took off like a greyhound."

Another guest in the house, Marjorie Carroll, an Atlanta television anchor, said the scene of Josephson silhouetted within ten feet of the flaming cross was "straight out of your worst dreams. On the other side of the cross were these ghostlike figures, a nightmare from your childhood if you grew up in the South. I thought, can this be Pennsylvania?"

The London-born Tom Cooney said, "They continued to shout but I was astonished that none of the invaders tried to wrest the hose from his grasp. It was a show of respect, perhaps, for superior courage. But in fact the flames mostly defied his meager jet of water. Perhaps for them it was 'mission accomplished.'"

Joseph Aronson, another overnight guest and a photographer from the New Orleans _Times-Picayune,_ raced for his cameras in an upstairs bedroom. Hastily erecting a tripod, he threw open a window sash and took time exposures of the scene down the yard. But believing his shots would be blurred by movements, he seized one camera and against Josephson's orders ("hey, I work for the paper first," he said) he charged into the yard, snapping pictures by photoflash as fast as he could while heading towards the confrontation. "I think that realizing they were on camera helped chase them away," he said. "That and the police sirens."

On her cell phone press agent Mulcahy called emergency lines of the state and township police. "They know me pretty well by now and knew I wasn't kidding," she said.

By the time police arrived, just before 10:30 p.m., the cross-burners were gone. Police vehicles followed westward along the unnumbered county road that fronts the Josephson farmstead, but the intruders had dispersed. The home builder's entourage made no attempt to follow. No arrests have been made.

Within minutes the yard was swarming with reporters and photographers summoned from lodgings at New Stanton, Greensburg, Latrobe and other nearby locations. The movement has been receiving daily coverage from media around the world, with Josephson delivering twice-a-day sermons in the yard where last night's incident occurred. Crowds have numbered in the thousands.

Asked if he anticipates further violence, the "moneybags messiah," as he is often called, declined to predict but commented, "This is my place. If you don't stand up for your own home, who is going to do it for you?"

As for international interest in Jess Josephson, the _Guardian 's_ Cooney said, "British readers can't get their fill of him. It's no doubt wrapped up in a general disaffection with authority - crown, church, conventional politics, all of that. There is a hunger for heroes in this age of leaders who follow the polls, media creations and mediocrities."

# 7.

The day had begun awkwardly for Maggie Deland; awkwardly and (she was forced to admit) unpleasantly. She had yielded to a man to be rid of him. Submitted! It was a first. And there would damn well never be a second!

Once more a Josephson story had landed on newspaper front pages. And her news service, which should have known by now to keep him covered daily, hourly, instead of relying on "stringers," telephones, and second-hand sources, had been caught flat by the cross-burning. By the time she got approval to go out there, half the next day was gone. She broke a date with Bren Hazelwood, leaving a message on his machine, and reserved the last room in a motel that for all she knew might be twenty miles from the Josephson farm. A flight from LaGuardia to Pittsburgh, then a fifty-mile drive across the metropolitan area at rush hour, brought her to the farm at dusk. And the place was deserted. Only one or two crowd assistants and a cruising police car kept a token guard. The star and his trailing media had gone to Cleveland, for a campus rally and invitations to three talk shows. Feeling stupid, tired, and sticky in clothes she had worn since morning, she phoned her desk - which, of course, already knew - and when she reached her lodging, after wrong turns in the dark on unsigned roads, there, in the lobby, sat lovable Bren. He had driven from Manhattan, "evading the speed-Gestapo all the way," and arrived before her.

A day of frustrations had left her with not the slightest interest in sex; none; zero. But her lover produced a bottle of Scotch from his bag, and she did have a wish for that. They sipped it over ice from a machine in the corridor, in plastic bathroom glasses. He won permission to wash her back in the shower, proceeded gently to lather her breasts, licking drops of water from her ears and shoulders as she turned, slippery in his arms. And almost before she realized it, she was pressed to the tile wall (not entirely unwillingly) gasping in the spray off his shoulders. Next morning her wake-up call was for 5:30, to get him out of the room before other news people might see. "Just leave," she said. "Buy a paper, have a coffee." But it was going to be such a long day, he said, stretching under the sheet... such a fuckingly long, theological day. And so, mainly to get him moving...

Now she felt bad about it, degraded. Before leaving the room (he was gone, at last) she studied herself in a mirror. _How fortunate that sex doesn 't show,_ she thought. She put on khaki slacks, a white blouse, walking shoes, and a skin-saving headgear for outdoor assignments. It was a khaki cap with a long visor, of the style worn on a ship's bridge, the gift of a former lover, a Navy lieutenant. She might have walked up to Jess Josephson's front porch for a personal greeting ( _what would be the expression on his face?_ she wondered). But with the press of another man on her body... no, impossible. And her day's work might be more authentic if she arrived like any random member of the public, coming to hear him fresh.

The morning was fair, cool, and cleansing, the breeze smelling of mown hay. Corn stood high in the fields; cows and sheep and an occasional horse grazed in pastures. Early-arriving vehicles already were filling makeshift parking spaces in a shallow ditch along the dirt road a full quarter-mile from Josephson's gate; Maggie pulled over and locked up. On foot she found herself in the company of farmers in overalls and their cow-like wives with fat arms, bra straps showing, skirts bulging over bellies and buttocks. There were blue-collar workers, off-shift or unemployed; teenagers filling a morning of school vacation; city people in casual clothes; tourists; television crews lugging tripods, cameras, and power-packs.

The farmyard was more spacious than Maggie remembered, the house a brighter white. Had the disciples been wielding paint brushes in the master's service? She liked the situation of the house better. It commanded a gentle slope of yard, with shade trees halfway up, although the grass was badly trampled, practically gone; it would need resodding some day ( _if he lives that long,_ she thought). People clustered ten deep before the porch; many sat on the ground to reserve their space. Maggie felt a reluctance to stand too close, or to be seen by him while he spoke, lest the performance be falsified in some way. Better to get more people, more scene, in front of her. She moved up the yard as far as the trees, then to the right towards a loudspeaker that marked a perimeter of sorts. She heard someone say "Jew-boy," but matter-of-factly, without detectable malice.

"I'm a reporter," she said, extending the microphone of her recorder into a knot of teenagers. "Who do you think burned the cross?"

"Ku Kluckers," a boy replied. "My dad says he's lucky they didn't burn his... hind end." (He might have cleaned up the phrase at the last instant in deference to the gender of the questioner.)

In a lower corner of the yard no one stood. Traces of charred wood blackened the turf. The spot was avoided as if cursed. A few people, the first of an overflow, had already migrated to a hillside pasture across the road, where loudspeakers also were set up.

"Where the fuck did you go? We could have driven together," said Bren Hazelwood when he found her.

"I'm working, you're working," she said. "See you around." And moved away from him thinking: _You 're breaking too many rules, mister._

At exactly 11:00 by Maggie's watch Jess Josephson opened a screen door and walked out on his porch. People in front applauded, and when he emerged from the shadow of the eaves into sunlight in the familiar white slacks and shirt, applause swept down the yard. He waved a cordless microphone and smiled broadly. Maggie realized that she and everyone whose face she could see were smiling back. A woman said, "He's better looking than his pictures." A few months ago he had been nothing but a media freak. Now he was the paradigm: the only man in public who seemed to have sensed, and was grappling with, people's deepest anxieties. Conventional politics seemed to have faded to background noise. Somehow this man from nowhere had made a farmhouse yard the focus of the world.

***

_There is going to be violence,_ Waldron Tilbury told himself. _And will I be able to deny later that I 've seen those morons, Crombie and the others; I, an officer of the court? Are they here to listen to a sermon, two fucking days after burning a cross in his yard? But I don't know it was them, thank God I don't know that. They wore hoods. Would they wore hoods now._ The words repeated in his head, nonsensically pleasing, as in the ear of a child. He cursed himself for dithering. _That goddamn meeting at the fire hall. Just let this Josephson end up in a ditch and everyone 's name will come out. Tilbury was there! And down will go forty years of reputation, down the drain like some shit-kicking Ku Klucker. See if you can talk sense to this Crombie... work your way over there._ The lawyer was startled to hear applause. People seemed to like the speaker. And why not? Handsome bastard... takes chorus girls on vacations... hadn't he heard something like that? _No wonder an ape like Crombie hates him._

Tilbury studied his "accomplice" standing some yards away in the packed crowd (and goddamn it, "accomplice" is how it would come out!) and gauged the malice boiling in the man. The lawyer glanced from him to Josephson and thought, _God, it 's like seeing both ends of the line of evolution._ He tried to work himself closer but it was awkward for a large man. He had a horror of being accused of brushing against women. _What 's he saying up there?_ He couldn't concentrate on the speech. He edged past a beautiful girl so intent that he might indeed have brushed her unnoticed. She held out a microphone in the speaker's direction. She was young, late twenties (he caught her scent: delectable) mysterious in dark glasses; a Navy wife or girlfriend, judging by the cap on her head. _That sailor would be jealous now, seeing her intentness..._ He glanced at Crombie, over to his right, trying to catch his eye. But the other's face was closed, turned inward, listening to his own hate. _Goddamn you,_ Tilbury felt like yelling at the Jew. _Don 't you know there are people down here who'd...?_ He feared he might actually shout it, like an obscenity in a theater. Then suddenly he took something like a spear to the chest.

"Why," said the speaker, "should this little girl with leukemia be saved..." _Jennie!_ "... because I am her father and prayed hard for her..." _That angel 's face, blond curls, blue eyes_ "... while this other little girl dies because her father doesn't pray as well or at all?" _Nine years and thirty-seven days on earth. A narrow white box... clumps of earth falling, making that unbearable noise... Louise sobbing on his arm. Thank God for the other kids._ Waldron Tilbury felt he might weep. This could be bad for his heart... in this heat...

"Which of us would prefer, because we have to die, never to have lived?" the speaker said. "Are you sorry you're here, or the people you love are here, because someday we have to leave?" The lawyer nodded. He had often reflected similarly, thinking of life as a party where, after all, eventually one must say good-night. But was this not a better deal, infinitely so, than never to have been born? _Not to have had Jennie with us for nine years?_ His eyes stung; he wished he could follow the man's argument better; his mind moved in and out of memories... and a nagging obligation to reach Ned Crombie.

A long hesitation snapped the lawyer's attention back. The speaker seemed to be concentrating, as if groping for a thought. Tilbury could not believe it wasn't an act: the fellow was good, a real performer. He conveyed a sense that he wasn't scripted, that he worked things out as he spoke, which got people on his side, as if he were searching for something that everyone struggles to put words to. The crowd stood in suspense and extraordinary quiet. A blessed puff of air cooled the lawyer's back. "Rather," the speaker said, "let's try to comprehend _His_ burden. He stands the watch over eternity; we have only this little life to live. And who knows but that in trying to understand the Creator as He is, without insisting that He love _us_... or demanding more life than He has given us... that we find it in ourselves to love _Him._ To love God."

The last phrase, all too familiar, the most worn of platitudes, yet now voiced tentatively, by way of suggestion only, somehow thrilled Waldron Tilbury. Love with no thought of reward? Love refined of desire, selfless, the love of a parent for a child, radiating out in the universe for its own sake. The speaker lowered his microphone. There was a quiet in which the only sound was of leaves stirring. Josephson's gaze was down, his brows knit; he seemed not satisfied with how he had expressed this thought but as if he could do no more with it. He stepped back and the crowd began to applaud. The girl in the Navy cap smiled. The speaker waved; the audience reaction seemed to persuade him he had perhaps said something worthwhile or close enough.

Now a tidal movement passed Tilbury. People were trying to approach the man on the porch, who was shaking many hands. The surge gave the lawyer his chance. He reached across shoulders and pushed sideways. "Excuse me... 'scuse me," he said, using his big frame to edge past people towards Ned Crombie to his right, who also was advancing. "Ned!" he called out sharply. The garageman turned. Tilbury reached his shoulder and gripped. Bodies moved past them. "Not now, Ned," he said against the noise.

The other man's pores were pitted with grime, his eyes black and unfathomable. Hatred emanated from him like the odor of grease. "Gonna show that kike," he said.

"Not now... a bad time," the lawyer said, out of breath, conscious of neglecting to say what he should say (for fear of turning the man's malignity towards himself) - that there never could be a good time, that _timing_ was not the issue.

"Gonna show him not everybody's lapping up this shit."

He was a bomb ready to go off. The officer of the court had an impulse to distance himself. But people would remember seeing him here, talking to the lout just before... "They'll tear you apart, Ned," he said, inspired. "Look at them. They love him."

The other glanced up at Jess Josephson in the shade of the eaves, smiling in a circle of cameras and admirers. The lawyer could sense, in a certain uneasiness on his skin, the proximity of other village idiots, follower types, crowding around, waiting for the attack signal from the dominant ape. "They'll tear you fellows apart, kick and stomp you," he said, pouring it on. He observed a drainage of zeal in the garageman's eyes. "There'll be a riot," he said. "Too many of them."

Ned Crombie stiffened, made a final effort to regain resolve, then gave it up. Something flickered out in him. "You're right," he said and found a rationale. "Why should we give the fucker warning what's coming to him?"

Tilbury took care not to deflect undischarged hostility towards himself. "Let's go home, fellas," he said, too easily making it a decision of "us... let's," a usage he would have wished to unsay. It was so confoundedly hard to dissociate himself! But slowly, grudgingly, the others began to move in the direction willed by the three-time president of the county bar. Away from the porch steps. Down. Out of the yard. "That's the way, guys," he said. Crombie glared as he retreated, with a limp, as if lately kicked.

Tilbury felt a stab of angina. _Not now, goddamn it!_ "See ya, fellas," he said. He looked with longing toward the shaded porch. The girl in the Navy cap approached Josephson, who smiled in surprise - _lucky son of a bitch, whose skull I just saved, will you be into her pants tonight?_ God, he'd like a drink of water... The departing crowd jostled him into the shade of a tree, which was a blessing. His mind cleared. He thought: _Distance yourself. Why in the hell are you dawdling? Wash your hands of it. Phone Louise: a trip, starting tomorrow! Don 't be here when it happens._

***

This was the part of the day John Donovan liked most. Just after the morning speech, when he could check out the people who congregated around Jess. Real celebrities showed up; not just reporters but anchors, even an occasional Hollywood star. The regulars on the Jess Beat were mostly routine newsmen. It was the special assignment people, the writing stars of the profession, who brought unspoiled curiosity to the story. They were the ones who lingered in the crowd's afterglow. The Americana aspects turned them on. They interviewed tourists at car windows, tramped around the farm soaking up "background," and engaged the assistants in small talk to pick up anecdotal nuggets missed by the regulars. These elegant scavengers fascinated Donovan, who at age twenty had had nothing published outside of school newspapers.

Equally clinging through midday, though less interesting, if not tiresome, were what the assistants called "the antis." These were serious religious critics ranging from the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh and the Rev. Jeremy Kirk of New York, who happened to be present today, all the way down to local pastors with a church column to write. Invariably Jess was patient with them, as if under special obligation to people of faith. Even the cross-burners the other night: Donovan had the feeling Jess did not entirely hate them, at least not so much as he, watching from the front porch, hated them, with the loathing of a boy born Catholic. From a publicity point of view the lowlifes had actually _helped._ The younger men wondered if there was not something in Jess that goaded people to violence, an unsuspected, unconscious guilt that sought expiation in danger. Yet look at him now, smiling at applause and praise. A gorgeous reporter from New York (Mary Mulcahy had recognized her) was interviewing him.

Donovan could not get over the effect Jess had on women. At night on guard the assistants would shake their heads over it. Particular favorites were those who approached the hero every day, declaring an intent "to have your baby." Afterward there would be lascivious reviews of the ladies' qualifications for "child-bearing and giving suck," as Bob Morse, an assistant from Boston, put it. That all such goodies had to be rejected took just a moment's reflection. Any panting female might be a plant from the tabloids. "I Gave Jess My Herpes" was a headline even the Old Red Hen never wanted to see. And by a cruel irony, damsels who might have turned to other knights of the table had to be rejected by them as well, to head off headlines like this one, also a Morse composition: "I Thought Jess Hired Good Boys But Learned Better Back of the Barn."

The knot of people around Josephson had been worked down toward the gate posts. Donovan noticed the New York beauty still taping as another reporter, a tall, rugged-looking guy, needled Jess that his love of God sounded "all one-sided." He said, "You're proposing a turn-on for monks and saints, not for men of flesh, blood, and balls." There was a gasp at the crudity, but Jess only shrugged. Leave it to Jeremy Kirk to seize on the point. "The man is right about one-way love, Jess. A shrewd observation, sir! It's of the essence of love to seek a response. Any kind of love. An unanswering God, the figment of Deists like you, will inspire no feelings, inevitably." But the tall guy who had challenged Jess in the first place fell silent, as if he didn't want a cleric horning in on his line of questioning or didn't give that much of a damn in the first place. He said something in the beauty's ear; she shook her head.

"Who is that guy?" Donovan asked Mary Mulcahy, who knew everybody.

"Brendan Hazelwood," she said with no great approval. Well! That just happened to be one of Donovan's favorite writers. He had a book of the man's columns from the last presidential campaign, murderously satirical stuff. Seemed pretty chummy with the glamour girl, too.

Later, after the crowd had gone, Jess Josephson was helping with the police-up and Maggie Deland tagged along as he bent over to pick up cigarette butts or whatever. Brendan Hazelwood lolled under a shade tree. Once Donovan heard Jess and the woman laugh aloud at something; they were the last on the lawn, and then drove off in his pickup. "Unprecedented," said Si Pickering, an assistant from West Virginia. "Displays a rare confidence that this one won't cry rape." Donovan glanced toward the tree where her boyfriend had been waiting. He was gone.

The volunteer thought no more about it. Then, as he and three others were about to leave in Mitch Swartz's car, a voice called out. "Hey fellows, where's to eat around here?" The famous Hazelwood stepped from around a corner of the house, smiling. Swartz invited him to come along. Once on the road he said, "Lots of curiosity about you gentlemen out there. Why would a half-dozen able-bodied guys be working for this hombre without pay?"

"It's only a couple of weeks," said Pickering, removing an unlit pipe from his mouth. "Sort of like national guard duty."

"There's also the matter of believing in what Jess is doing," said Swartz. " _He 's_ not drawing any pay."

Hazelwood smiled. "People outside - I'm just repeating now - say this has all the earmarks of a cult. What's your view?"

"Bullshit," said Swartz, summing up for all.

"Well, you fellows don't look brainwashed to me, I'll say that. Believe me, I've seen the look. In the Middle East and other garden spots, after torture. In fact, the kind of men you are speaks better for Jess in some ways than Jess speaks for himself." This had a semi-complimentary but cryptic ring, and no one responded. The NYContrarian correspondent pressed the point. "I worry about a Jess type," he said. "I mean, the fucking ego a guy has to have to think he can change the world!"

"Jess has less ego than you'd think," said Morse.

"Nope," the man of experience shook his head. "That's an act. Nothing's easier to pretend than humility. Except contrition. I've done 'em both many times and been undeservedly believed." He grinned. Putting aside the subject of the Josephson ego, he exhibited an interest in his companions, seemed flattered that all had heard of him and that one, Donovan, was a true fan, who remembered some of his best lines.

"In your book on the last election you called America 'the Cadillac of the road to doomsday, with dried come all over the back seat.'" The others laughed and the phrase-maker beamed.

At lunch, which he preceded with two martinis, straight up, standing the younger men to whatever they wanted, which happened to be beers, he told tales of covering wars, disasters, and the phenomena of popular culture. He seemed to relish an audience and spoke entertainingly. Donovan had a sense that he embellished. He alluded to women he had known on all continents, dozens apparently, of varied nations, races, and sensual repertoires. "But I always come back to fair skin and pink nipples," he said. "I'm faithful that way." His analyses of the character flaws in every candidate for president were very funny. Having amused and flattered his companions, he asked at one point, in a confidential tone, "What's this Jess's angle? Come on, you fellows' eyes are open, what do you really think?"

Morse took the defense. "You're talking about one guy who's all rounded edges." The writer looked blank. "No angles," Morse elucidated.

"Very good. I might use that. But quit shitting me now. We all know he's going to make a mint out of this." The assistants made noises of demurrer. "If he doesn't get shot first," Hazelwood amended himself, "which I admit is thinkable. But that just parlays his bet. Don't kid yourself, wheels are turning in that smart Jewish head, saying, 'Hey, my ass is on the line. This better pay _big._ '" He smiled. "Excuse the reference to 'Jewish.' You all put on pained expressions, as I expected. I know who I'm talking to. I assure you, I detest anti-Semitism as much as any of you, and been at it longer, I daresay. Paid a rather heavy price, too."

"What do you mean?" Donovan asked.

"Oh, that sometimes you'll be in a very proper social setting, black tie et cetera, and you'll hear some cretin spouting drivel against the Jews, knowing fucking well that none of the tribe holds membership there. On occasion I have put up a hand, introduced myself as one born Rabinovitz, Greenberg, or some such, and offered to close the gentleman's mouth if he cared to step out on the terrace. It hasn't always earned me a return invitation - and once, I think, cost me a movie script."

Donovan was impressed if this was true. Pickering said, "If I challenged one-tenth of the Jew-hating, black-hating, anybody-hating remarks I've heard at polite tables, I'd look like a punching bag. Also would've missed a lot o' desserts."

"What do _you_ think Jess's angle is?" Swartz asked.

"Money, power, sex - the usual trinity."

"I don't think so," said Swartz and the others nodded.

"The sex of course I can't vouch for," the writer conceded. "Some fellows are funny that way. Not all balls click, as they say in the better billiard parlors."

"That doesn't apply to Jess. No way."

"Well, money and power, what the ancients called 'glory,' will suffice. There are no better surrogates for somebody who doesn't get it up very often."

Donovan found himself beginning to dislike his writing hero. "Money?" he said. "Jess pisses money away."

"Invests it," the older and wiser corrected him. "Every dollar he pisses away, to use your metaphor, may flow back a hundredfold. I admit it's a daring game. Of course he doesn't want the nickels and dimes of the rubes. But I guarantee you there are billionaires out there who, if he acts sufficiently selfless and Christ-like, will force money on him. Big money. 'The Jess Josephson Foundation' on some fucking Alp-top in Switzerland! Where the moneymen gather to be assured how 'creative' they are. And a naked houri slips into each guest's bath before cocktail time to help the good fellow wash."

He grinned as a signal that his listeners were permitted to laugh at these fancies. He told a story or two about baths in Japan, including the time he managed to diddle a housewife under water as her husband washed the children nearby. "Sex and water go well together," he said. "Maybe it is our evolutionary heritage, the mating of amphibian ancestors in tidal pools." His gaze focused inward on agreeable memories. "Just last night," he said, "I had a woman in the shower. Standup job. Soapy but refreshing, if you've got the hamstrings for it."

Donovan felt a chivalrous shock. His instant thought was: the woman reporter. The others laughed but either realized no personal reference or set the man's brag down to just that. Only Donovan sensed the truth. He had just heard a specific woman insulted and took it as an affront to himself, an act of contempt towards the listener. His impulse was to reach across the table and smash Brendan Hazelwood's finely shaped nose. He trembled with the strange responsibility to do this. The writer was rugged and strong-jawed; he looked mean in a fight (as some of his stories hinted). He would undoubtedly repay with interest, the more so for not comprehending how he had given offense. Nor would the young assistant's friends understand. It wasn't his fight. What was Maggie Whatsername to him, his cherry sister? If indeed she was the woman of the story. If indeed the story had ever happened. John Donovan sat through the rest of lunch detesting successful writers.

# 8.

_Where the hell are they? Almost two-thirty and not back yet._ Mary Mulcahy called that a hell of a long lunch. Not to mention driving off with the guy's girlfriend, especially a reptile like that. The day was not going well for the Mulcahy. _Jess should be here!_ She was forced to mark time for him. She had managed to feed Peter Winslow to some of the media, had even performed the negative miracle of matching up Jeremy Kirk with a trio of Korean ministers. "He'll give you what our American churchmen are saying _against_ Jess," she said. At 2:30 Bren Hazelwood, the neglected boyfriend and poison pen, drove up with four of the assistants. _Good God, what have they told him?_

On a small porch in back of the kitchen Winslow was being interviewed in shirtsleeves, leaning against a roof post. "Religion is an industry too," Mary heard him say. "It has budgets, a physical plant, management, employees. Family incomes depend on it. None of us welcomes a challenge to our livelihood."

"Are you saying the opposition to Jess is a career thing?" a reporter asked from the yard.

"Part of it, yes. Certainly there are deep theological differences..."

"Unbridgeable, Peter!" Jeremy Kirk interjected. He had wandered around from the front lawn with his Koreans.

"What I'm saying is that apart from differences about God, Jess is an _industrial_ threat," Winslow said. "He's the first imported car crossing the ocean. He's going to put organizations out of business. That's tremendously disruptive. There are priests and rabbis out there saying, 'I've invested my life in this - prayed, sacrificed, given up so many..."

"So many pieces of ass!" Bren Hazelwood raucously contributed.

_Now where did he come from?_ thought Mary. _And so crude!_

The right-hand man pretended not to hear. "I'm speaking of devoted religious servants. Pastors. Literally, shepherds of flocks. They ask: what can Jess, with a more rational concept, bring to their sheep? What..."

"The shears!" cracked Hazelwood. "He'll shear them!"

Winslow stood. "It seems our friend wants the floor."

"What I want," the writer shot back - he was standing in the yard with other media people - "is to figure out the payoff from all this God-hotrod. When does our latter-day Hebrew prophet cash in and leave the rest of us knee-deep in bullshit?"

The right-hand man scowled. "I'm afraid you have it wrong, friend. There are legitimate religious questions, but if you're looking for a racket, you're up the wrong tree. That's not where it's at."

"Thanks, Pete. Couldn't have put it better myself," said the lord of the manor, putting his head out the screen door.

_About time!_ Mary Mulcahy looked at her watch: 2:48.

"Sorry," Jess Josephson said. "Went to lunch and lost track. But come in, everybody. I'll show you my remodeling."

In a corner of the kitchen stood Maggie Deland, prim in slacks and blouse, her hair freshly brushed. Nothing could be read in her glance, which was polite and professional. When Hazelwood entered she frowned, perhaps having forgotten he was there. Mary saw the Donovan boy glance from Hazelwood to Deland. _Who knows what crude talk passed at lunch,_ she thought.

"When do you expect the cross-burners back?" Hazelwood said.

"Expect?" Josephson said. "I don't expect them at all."

"You think they'll let a Jew get away with making monkeys out of them?"

Silence. The word "Jew" was nothing but factual. Yet it hung in the air, rude and tactless. It had the sound of a taunt. "You'll have to ask them that," said Jess. "Anybody thirsty? Iced tea? Coke?"

"What if next time somebody takes a shot at you," Hazelwood persisted.

The host paused long enough to indicate the bad form of turning an interlude of hospitality into a press conference. "I'll just have to hope he misses," he said.

"Mistel Josephson," one of the Koreans broke in with an accent. Eyes turned to him respectfully, as a foreign visitor. He said it was the function of churches to bring people to God, and the function of a congregation, a gathering of the many, to prevent deviation and spiritual isolation - which he painfully pronounced "spilituar isoration." Without a church there could be no reliable idea of God. This would leave a fearful void in people's lives. He cited examples and went on too long. Feet shuffled, throats were cleared.

"Aw, ask a question already!" Bren Hazelwood snarled.

Mary tensed. _Is the man tanked?_

But the Korean was deflated and fell silent. Jess himself picked up the implied inquiry. "People do need institutions, yes. But institutions grow rigid and self-serving. They lose the spirit that got them started. They need to be renewed, or replaced with something better."

"You'd replace them with nothing," said the Rev. Mr. Kirk by way of amends to the mortified Asian.

"Not nothing, Jeremy. A better idea would be going out in the world."

"The world, the world," said Kirk. "You ignore the heart, Jess, which requires a loving, personal God, whom you would take away. Communism tried to change the world without God, too."

"Bravo, Padre!" said Hazelwood. "The church shows balls!"

Now he was scaring Mary Mulcahy, like the drunk who insists on being thrown out of a bar. People edged away, making a space for disassociation around him. Josephson tried to answer Kirk's last point but the _Contrarian_ 's man interrupted:

"Why is it, for Christ sake, tell us why it is, that these world-saving movements, as the Reverend here correctly calls them - Communism, psychoanalysis, Christianity itself, which helped bust up the Roman Empire: read Gibbon - right up to today, with your own simplistic attack on every fucking religion on earth..."

"Hey, who gave you the floor?" Peter Winslow broke in.

"Easy, friend, I'm getting to it," the other said, raising a keep-away hand. "Why is it that all these fucking world-saving movements have to start with a Jew?"

Josephson's face darkened. He said, "First of all, you have an offensive manner, mister. Second, your history is full of... it's all wet. I don't buy your premise for a minute."

"My premise? You mean the premise of a self-loathing minority constantly trying to undercut the majority?"

"That doesn't describe me or the Jews," Jess shot back, his voice taking a hard edge. "I don't recognize myself in that... idiocy."

Hazelwood took a step forward but Maggie Deland across the room said sharply, "Bren, shut up." Eyes turned to her.

"How dare you!" the columnist said.

Mary Mulcahy put up her hands. "Folks, let's..."

"How fucking dare you! I'm working press here. So should you be."

"Okay, folks," said Mary. "Jess has to speak in an hour."

"I'll ask questions my way, you ask yours!" Hazelwood shouted. "If this faggot can't answer..."

"What? What was that?" said Josephson.

"You heard me!"

_He wants a fight,_ Mary realized, _it has all led to this._

"You're out of here, mister!" Jess said.

_Oh God, a brawl._ The boys were moving towards Hazelwood. Poor Johnny Donovan was white as a ghost; Pete Winslow had his fists clenched. The Koreans, Kirk, and others moved back.

"Any shithead lays a hand on me...!" said Hazelwood.

"Out of my house, now!" Jess Josephson's voice was like nothing Mary had heard from him.

"If I go, you go with me, Buster."

"I'll buy that."

Winslow stepped between them. "You don't have to fight this creep, Jess."

"Who are you calling a creep?" Hazelwood shouted.

"I'm calling _you_ a creep!" the ex-marine shouted back, his face as close as an enraged player's to an umpire.

"Stop!" Mary said. "He wants the publicity."

Josephson reached around Winslow. "It's not your fight, Pete."

Hazelwood pushed his hand away. "Get your fucking paw off me."

"Come on outside, you!" said Jess.

The columnist looked ready to throw a punch right there, but the assistants crowded him. "See you outside," he said and pushed through people blocking his way to the kitchen porch, his host directly behind.

"Watch him, Jess! He's been in a lot of fights," a woman's voice called: Maggie Deland's.

Mary's heart pounded. She was fifth or sixth out the door, clawing at the shoulders of someone ahead. _God, if he gets hurt!_ Sunlight momentarily blinded her.

Hazelwood had jumped down the two or three steps to the back yard. Turning as Josephson followed, determined not to let him reach terra firma, the writer aimed a vicious kick. From Mary's view in back, partly obscured, her champion seemed to twist in air, the toe of the other's shoe catching him on the thigh. But as he landed, Jess Josephson drove a fist into Bren Hazelwood's midsection, backed by the full force of his descent. The punch buried itself under the other's rib cage; it may have brushed the heart muscle; it certainly paralyzed his diaphragm. He toppled. The wind went out of him. He fell on his back in the dust, unable to utter a sound. Josephson was on him in a moment, standing over him. He might have pounded downward in quick succession, once, twice, three times, breaking the chiseled nose, cheeks, and teeth. And the fighter in him wanted to do it, Mary sensed. But he stopped a punch halfway. Instead he pointed a finger in Hazelwood's face. "Stay out of my house," he said. The fallen one flushed, struggling to regain breath; he may have nodded, maybe not.

Josephson straightened. His back was towards the people on the porch. His shoulders heaved; he was breathing hard and trying to control it. Then he turned, looking flushed and taut. A smudge from Hazelwood's kick marked his trousers leg. One of the boys, Bob Morse, broke the silence: "Hooray, Jess!" Johnny Donovan let out a cheer, as did Mary Mulcahy. Peter Winslow grinned, others on the porch applauded, including Jeremy Kirk and a Korean, as if they had seen a piece of theater, another triumph of the hero. "What happened, what happened?" others asked, still trying to clear the kitchen. Hands reached out to slap Josephson's back. Mary studied his face. _God! And what if he were the one doubled up in the dirt?_

Maggie Deland must have seen it all. She stepped down in the yard to assist the fallen man. She helped him to a sitting position, then to his feet, and walked with him around the house. He seemed bent in two; the boys jeered.

Later, after his second speech of the day, which he got through with no hint of strain, nurse Mulcahy applied compresses to the bruise on the warrior's thigh. "You know, Jess, she went away with him."

"Yes," he said. "But I've a feeling she'll be back."

# 9.

Maggie Deland awoke, coughing, to a chorus of crazed birds. A bare-chested man was pawing at her. "Don't fight me!" said Jess Josephson. "The house is on fire."

She smelled smoke and struggled upward, instinctively covering her pajamas with her arms. Moonlight at the room's window was intensified by sudden glares. Lightning? No, flashlight beams from the yard below. Smoke alarms were chirping like sparrows. Josephson half-lifted her from bed and wrapped something around her: his own pajama tops. He led her barefoot to the hall under the sharp angles of the attic roof; hers was the highest room in the house. A reddish glow flared on the walls. "No," he said and pulled her back in the room. "Purse and car keys - where?" he said. Unable to speak, coughing, she motioned towards a chair in a corner. "Don't be afraid," he said. "We can go out the window."

"No!"

"There's a porch roof below."

He raised the sash as high as it would go and shouted something to the yard. A light beam outlined his shoulders and arms. A screen blocked the window; he lifted it out and set it on the floor. (Afterwards, in her news story, she mentioned the deliberate way he removed the screen and brought it inside.) He held out his hands to her. "Don't be afraid." He was in pajama bottoms. Had he slept with her? No, _that_ she was clear about. They had said good-night in front of others, ostentatiously, after she had come back to the house, having delivered the disgraced Hazelwood to the inn and sent her story of the fight to her office.

The yard looked far below. Josephson directed her to sit on the window sill, legs outside, and, half turning, to wrap her arms around his neck. The smoke grew thicker. Voices from below shouted encouragement. Kneeling on the floor, he gripped her armpits and eased her away. Gingerly she released his neck, hung the length of her arms, and felt, under her toes, the porch roof. "It slopes. Don't fall," he said. He would not let go until she, flexing her bare feet to the roof's angle, stood steady.

"Okay," she said.

"Don't move. I'll be right there."

In a moment he was beside her, with an arm around her shoulder. People were scurrying below. "They'll have a ladder up in no time," he said.

"Are you all right, Miss Deland?" Peter Winslow called out.

"Ye..." she coughed. "Yes."

"You're the last, Jess. Everyone else is out."

"Can you get more water on the house, Pete?"

"Every damned hose but one is cut! Fire department's on the way."

The man beside Maggie Deland grunted something. It did not sound like an expression of faith in volunteer fire-fighting.

She saw a crimson flare in a window. She coughed, shivered violently, and was grateful for the arm around her. The top rungs of an extension ladder appeared above the porch roof. Wretchedly she thought: _What will they say at DayLight?_

***

**Excerpts from** **_Christians All,_** **July 12**

**By Jeremy Kirk**

...(The) demagogue's finest hour, I say without irony. More and more I believe the church has much to learn from this Jewish carpenter, this hammer-and-nails of a new faith... (R)eferring to his ex-farmhouse near the sweetly named village of Pleasant Unity. I say "ex" because the house was destroyed yesterday as I write this. A band of hooligans as brainless as they were malign surprised two unarmed sentries and torched the place, endowing the cult with yet another flare-up in the world's attention.

From the most cynical stop-Jess point of view the crime was misconceived. First, it gave him a hero's role. He rescued a damsel. And none other than - let the cameras roll! - Ms. Maggie Deland, beauteous correspondent of _DayLight_ on the web. He helped her out a window and followed in turn, the last to leave his ship; she in pajamas, he bare-chested in only the bottoms of his. But we are not to conclude anything from their state of dishabille. Other occupants of the house have assured the world _ad nauseum_ that Jess runs a one-per-bed establishment. And none of your low suspicions that they could have scooted down the stairs like everyone else, albeit with less publicity.

... 11 a.m. had arrived, the usual hour of the cultist's matinal revelations. But the size of his public wending along country roads in autos, SUVs, and pickups (and twice-a-day chartered buses out of Pittsburgh, if you please, enterprised by a regional excursionist) was doubled, trebled, by the sensational news on morning radio, TV and iPhones...

I and other chroniclers not privileged to sleep under the prophet's roof lodged at an inn ten miles from the scene. I woke in the middle of the night to hubbub in the corridors. Jess's tireless press agent had kept phoning from the house till the wires melted to alert the mischief's necessary appendage, the media. (One hopes her _first_ summons was to the fire department.) A caravan of at least thirty vehicles rocked along under the morning star till halted by the flashing lights and tangled hose of firefighting equipment...

I've no way of estimating the crowd by speech time, but it was huge... The scene was somber: skeletal timbers, a blackened chimney poking up like an accusing finger. Wisps of smoke still arose; the stench of burning timbers... I thought, what if someone had died? Would the char of flesh linger on the air? I imagined a horror of centuries ago, the auto-da-fes of Savonarola and St. Joan, of doomed Jews or Huguenots. I prayed the world might never see a return of such enormities, prayed indeed for the safety of Jess and all who follow him. Let us defeat them in fair fight. And look to a day when even he will kneel beside us in Christ...

Mind you, we were, and knew ourselves to be, participants in a media event. The same news of the fire that flashed round the world might have added: No speech today, sorry, folks. Stay home. Avoid traffic. But no, when the world gives Jess Josephson attention, he seizes it. Builds on it. Piles it higher. So here came the hero!

Now I ask you, friends, how would you or I have dressed? Keep in mind, hours had passed, a sufficient interval that everyone else on the premises had managed to rustle up some duds by purchase, loan, or donation. Ms. Deland herself, who by all accounts had not hauled her two-suiter out the window, had located a respectable jacket, slacks, and shoes. In fact, I was told that the puissant credit card of Jess himself had persuaded a clothier to open his premises early so that all could secure an emergency kit. But ah, wouldn't you know? Our host had forgotten his own needs in all the ado.

At the crack of eleven, a four-wheel drive pulled up where the front porch had stood, and out popped Jess. In a moment he was up on the hood, where towels had been thrown so the metal might not burn his feet. Yes, bare feet. For he was still in his peejay bottoms! And in a fireman's jacket.

I suppressed a laugh, others did as well. This was too much. For a moment we thousands gaped, in full knowledge that we were being _had_ by our barefoot boy with cheek, the sunlight enhaloing his tousled hair. And do you know what we did, myself included? Someone started applauding, then we were all doing it; and we cheered, our hurrahs echoing from hillsides as the cameras rolled... women, and men too, in tears, my own cheeks bedewed, such is the contagion of hysteria.

Jess put up a hand. It is part of his charm that he cuts off applause rather than milking it. Someone had handed him a bullhorn. "Thank you all... thanks," he said. "First" - and he paused for silence, the amazing silence of thousands - "I'm not quitting." Another cheer erupted.

"Second, it's up to the law to find the misguided people who did this, and I know the police will give it their best. The firefighters gave it their best..." He could not help smiling at his neighbors' "best," which allowed the crowd to release its own tension with laughter. "But we're not that close to town," he said, "and the house was too far gone. Good men all, and I thank them. A fireman loaned me this jacket..." He grinned again. "And I'm sort of getting attached to it."

Then, having warmed us up - oh Sunday sermonists, learn from this fellow! - he turned grave. "I'm angry," he said. "Lives were put in danger and a fine old property destroyed. But I don't want to get too angry. I feel sorry for the sort of minds that think if a house is burned down, it will somehow serve God, it will stop an idea. No way, folks. This idea isn't stopping. We can't change the nature of God by silencing me. God will be there regardless. He doesn't need me. If I'd be scared into a hole, other people would figure out the truth about Him. And if not today, tomorrow, next year, next century. Somewhere is a truer idea than the religions give us - and it will out! Because..." He paused in mid-sentence, having everyone's attention but wanting more, an intensification. Only a rustle of leaves competed on the morning air.

"Because," he said, "a better world can only come about through better understandings of God." And though I know his formulation to be heretical, a thrill went along my spine. He said, "There is no way that can be stopped by a little thing - _a little thing, I say --_ like a house burning down! The idea didn't die in there, no more than God did." Then he waved, stepped down, and volleys of cheers sounded like artillery...

***

**' MESSIAH' HITS THE ROAD**

**Fire Sparks Long Hike for Jess**

(From McKeesport (Pa.) Daily News)

LATROBE. - Cult leader Jess Josephson yesterday began a 350-mile journey on foot to advance his controversial religious movement in the wake of a fire that leveled his farmhouse near this Westmoreland County city.

He declared an intent to "walk to New York" - that is, across most of Pennsylvania and the straightest line through New Jersey - preaching along the way to "whoever cares to hear."

The 33-year-old millionaire's trek began within hours after he spoke to a crowd that aides say was the largest he had ever addressed at his 113-acre farm. As the ruins of his century-old house smoldered, Josephson, barefoot on the hood of a car, told upward of 5,000 persons that he would not quit his four-month crusade for a "better idea of God."

Mary Mulcahy, his press aide, told reporters the decision to take to the road "came as a complete surprise" to Josephson's small, unpaid staff. "He just announced it and said, 'Anybody who wants to come along is welcome.'" Mulcahy, 62 and semi-retired from a New York advertising career, said she intends to "hoof it as best an old lady can - you only live once."

By 7 p.m., after approximately four hours' intermittent walking, at first on a dirt road, then along two-lane blacktopped State Route 981, Josephson and entourage had reached U.S. Route 30, the east-west bypass of this community of 9,000, and checked into a motel. Other vacant rooms were immediately snapped up by news media.

"Of course I want the attention," the ruggedly handsome, 6-foot-1 homebuilder-turned-religious-activist said, about two miles into his hike as television cameras swarmed. "I'm pushing an idea. The more attention it gets, the better."

He was attired in a wide-brimmed farmer's hat that a neighbor had loaned him, jeans, shirt, and lightweight ankle-high hikers. A small backpack contained an extra shirt and changes of socks, underwear, and toilet articles. "Maybe I'll buy more on the way," he said. He told reporters, their microphones bobbing before him, that the idea of the walk "just came to me... I needed some place to go anyway; my house was gone."

At times the impromptu marchers, augmented by news media vehicles and local devotees ("Jess is the bes'," young people chanted from the roadside) spread the width of a highway lane and brought traffic to a virtual standstill - and police sirens wailing.

State Police Capt. Lowell Limpus of Latrobe Barracks, with whom the cultist had clashed before, in a rock-throwing melee at a state park on Memorial Day, warned of potential arrests for traffic obstruction. "State highways are for vehicular traffic, not pedestrians," Limpus said. "The code is very clear on that. If he wants to parade, he should apply for a permit."

Josephson kept walking, however, after pledging to confine his followers to the highway berm. Soon the file stretched more than 100 yards. Rubbernecking motorists brought traffic to a snail's pace, despite whistle-blowing and arm-waving by troopers.

"It was about as bad as it could be out there," Limpus said after the march was off the road. "I won't allow it to be that bad tomorrow (Thursday). The commonwealth's highways are for more than one individual's use."

Josephson told a press conference in the motel's parking area, "I understand the police problem and am sure we can work something out."

Press aide Mulcahy said, "There's a lot of organizing to do. We've only really begun to think of what's ahead of us." Asked what Josephson intends to do if and when the trek reaches New York - probably a month away at walking pace - Mulcahy laughed. "Search me," she said, "but Jess is a great idea man."

She scoffed angrily, however, at a reporter's suggestion that both a cross-burning in Josephson's yard Sunday and the Tuesday night house fire could have been "inside jobs," staged as publicity stunts. No group has claimed responsibility in either matter.

# Part Three -THE ROAD
# 1.

**Cover Story, WEEKWATCH, August 9**

**THE PIED PIPER OF GOD**

**On the Road With Jess Josephson**

A full moon rose over the weathercock atop farmer Fred Hostetter's barn at the foot of Pennsylvania's darkly forested Tuscarora Mountain one night last week as Mandy Logan fluffed her sleeping bag within whistling distance of Hostetter's unconcerned Holsteins.

Logan, a 20-year-old Radcliffe junior, was one of some 200 happy campers in the cohort of millionaire cultist Jess Josephson, who has been crunching along a highway in southern Pennsylvania en route to New York at a speed no quicker than a Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad's would have been, harvesting converts to his trendy deism like roadside wildflowers. And finding them almost as numerous.

What one grizzled newsman calls "Jess's most protracted stunt" was drawing national, indeed global, attention as July sizzled into August, alarming the leaders of conventional faiths like the belatedly awakened elders of fabled Hamelin. "If the Pied Piper came alive and led the children away, wouldn't that be page one all over the world? Well, here we are," said footsore Hank Pierce, veteran _Baltimore Sun_ reporter.

Daughter to a Wall Street lawyer and herself a straight-A microbiology major, statuesque Mandy Logan said she would not be involved "in anything as tacky as a cult." Yet she confessed to the role of spiritual follower in a quite literal sense. "The other morning when the dew was heavy and the highway shoulder soft and oozy, I was right behind Jess in the line of march," the nominal Episcopalian said, a glitter of camp lanterns in her fiord-blue eyes. "I made sure to put my feet down in the footsteps he had left. Someday I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that."

Logan and her tent-mate, Hobart Beacon, 24, a Harvard Law senior with a shock of hair black as the coal his forebears mined in these same Alleghenies, consider themselves "hard-core Jessites." They had marched for four consecutive days without, as he said, "feeling honor-bound to drop out." Explained Beacon: "When the crowd grows too big - Sunday afternoon we must have been strung out a half-mile - Jess asks people voluntarily to leave. Those who've marched a day or two, who've had a chance to walk and talk with him, will usually do the right thing and give someone else a chance."

Why hasn't the hard-core duo dropped out?

"We love it too much," sighed Logan, a flaxen-haired, journal-keeping "occasional churchgoer" sufficiently creamy of complexion to eke out her tuition with modeling fees. "The countryside is so lovely and everyone on the march is so neat. We've met people from at least forty states. And the chance to speak with Jess is priceless."

Like most over-nighters, who are a mere fraction of the day-hiking multitude, Logan and Beacon accepted the host farmer's invitation to dip their smarting feet in his pond, though he cautioned that his herd of milkers ofter indulges in the same comfort. Before dusk the bivouackers deployed in colorful tents over an upland pasture aromatic of clover.

The evening proved fragrant, fair, and starry. Indeed the homebuilder-crusader's meteorological luck has been as bonnie as husbandman Hostetter's has been troubled, beset by drought. "My corn should be this high by now," the sixth generation of his kin to till 178 hard-scrabble acres in venerable Franklin County said with a fretful squint. Allowing that Josephson's overnight rental for the pasture, $1,000 in crinkly hundreds and fifties, "comes in mighty handy," he added dryly, "these folks might be my only cash crop this year."

The "crop" has yielded publicity on a cornucopial scale, reminiscent of cause-dramatizing treks led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King decades ago in India and Alabama respectively. Jess's cotton-socked legions weren't three days afoot before TV networks began plotting their progress across the country's video screens. Updated daily in color are maps with dotted lines, animated, as if tracing Stanley's route into darkest Africa. Indeed "the march across Pennsylvania" has become the country's seasonal news of choice. Its daily exposure rivals that of those other boys of summer, baseball's major leagues. The result was predictable. Of Jess's trackers, whose numbers often swell above 2,000, dozens at times are working press.

But the media operate under disabilities. Practically no one in the cult misbehaves, at least openly. No ragtag rabble of rootless ragamuffins this. Blandness is the moral coloration of the Josephson banner. If there has been a single case of brawling, drunkenness, or pot, it has escaped public notice. Many news gleaners indeed sigh for a smidgen of Saturnalia. "If one could only pass a tent," chuckled Percy Trelawny of the London _Express,_ "and hear the sound of love's tender exertions."

The absence of overt pleasuring surprised no one, to be sure, among tenters who trudged to one of two "john" trucks parked at the foot of the Hostetter pasture: flatbed trailers laden with portable toilets. (A nearby tank wagon dispensed water for nightly washing, tooth brushing, and canteen-filling. The Josephson movement enjoys considerable, if inelegant, logistical support.) The notion of a specific ban on sex stirred chortles among the faithful. "I don't think people here would stand for any such prohibition in either a married or unmarried state," New England chemist Roberta Weiss vouchsafed, tapping a flashlight reflectively in the palm of her hand. "The key is appropriate public behavior. Anybody might be on camera. I'd call it a case of people restraining themselves to further Jess's cause."

An hour before midnight, as the last softly strummed guitar was put away by a tentside circle harmonizing old camp songs, came the leader of the expedition on his nightly rounds. He missed not one of a dozen sentries, young and sturdy-looking, recruited by word-of-mouth to augment his own elite guard of musclemen. None was armed with so much as a birch switch, but more than enough were available to keep watch in shifts from sundown to cockcrow.

"How are things?" asked the unpied piper, clad in jeans and jacket, of an outpost on the camp's perimeter as he advanced, hand extended.

"Very quiet, Mr. Josephson."

"Call me Jess. What's your name?"

Pumping the leader's hand, the young man shyly introduced himself, as inspirited as a pikeman before Agincourt by "a little touch of Harry in the night."

"Good people, the best people," Josephson said, traipsing on through the clover. "They give me added confidence we're making sense."

"'Night, Jess," someone called out as the man variously dubbed the "moneybags messiah," the "guru of groovy," and the "prophet of thislife" - as opposed to the afterlife - passed with a wave of his flashlight, its beam scarcely needed in the moonglow.

"I'm talking about the example they set," he said. "Television is showing faces like this every day. Whoever is watching has to be thinking there must be something to it if this is the kind of people it attracts."

What would be the wrong kind of people? Someone posed that query to sentry Jim O'Brien on the pasture's far side, rimmed by a stand of yellow pine alight with fireflies. "Oh, drugs, heavy drinking, violence, rowdyism," the 43-year-old California biology teacher rattled off. "You know, the counter-culture type." (Curious irony: for Evangelicals right now Jess himself is at the very top of _their_ counter-culture file.)

Asked how the objectionable are kept out, Josephson's right-hand man (RHM, the media wags alphabetize him) bristles at the inference of exclusionism. Tough, burly Peter Winslow, stolid and self-effacing, an ordained minister and one of the few African-Americans on scene, is the bear to Jess's lion. It is he who does the guru's grunt work, keeping peace among the concession trucks and scouting upcountry for tenting grounds. "It's not a matter of keeping anybody out," said the RHM, scuffing a brogan in the grass. "A certain type comes out thinking we're a floating pot party, a wandering Woodstock. They soon realize how wrong they are and drop out by themselves. Nobody has to tell them."

Cocking an ear to the chorus of a Pennsylvania night - chirring crickets, a passing car, the leaf-stirring breeze - Winslow stiffens when asked about "the rock band incident."

"Second day on the road," he said, "this ratty-looking crew - dark glasses, torn jeans, aroma of pot, the works - came out on the back of a pickup truck, blasting away. The police wouldn't let them block traffic, so they parked by the john-trucks every mile or so, playing - if you could call it that - as the line marched past. A pretty obvious ploy for TV exposure. Jess finally had to tell them to stop blasting everybody's eardrums. They jeered and gave him the finger, but that ended it. The word's out. No more rock bands."

Opines George Edson of the New York Daily News: "You have to realize Jess's delicate position with the state police, who hate all this. His only hope of being permitted to cross two states on foot - with an army behind him - is if they're scrub-faced, hygienic, and respectful. Niceness is uppermost."

"It isn't uppermost," rejoins Winslow. "Substance is uppermost. A better idea of God. But yeah, good behavior is damned important."

High-level responsibility for the cult's orderly image devolves on press aide Mary Mulcahy, a spry, flaming-haired 62-year-old whose resume includes stints as a Manhattan fund-raising flack, a nurse, and, in her salad days, a nun. She beamed over having personally marched all the 120-odd miles from the smoldering ruins of Josephson's farmhouse to the Hostetter pasture. Though still far from svelte, she let slip that she has "shed four sizes." Crowed she: "When you're an old gal who starts the day climbing out of a sleeping bag on an air mattress, you've got to believe you too, like the South, will rise again."

Mulcahy related that the first night on the road Josephson took counsel with his staff in a motel room. He confessed that the inspiration to walk to New York was woefully wanting in anything that could be called pre-planning. "'The more I thought about it,' he said, 'the more I realized it's a way to keep making news.' But he laid down the law. First, we had to be sanitary. He'd noticed a number of people, including distinguished members of the press, sneaking into the bushes. That had to stop; public opinion and general decency would demand it. Obvious solution: portable johns, which Jess was used to hiring for construction sites. He was sure he could get a contractor to load toilet booths on flatbeds, shuttle them ahead of the line of march every mile or so along the road. After that, other ideas fell in line." Including:

*Reliance on food concessionaires to provision the hikers through the day with sandwiches, snacks, non-alcoholic potables.

*Procurement of overnight campgrounds. Checking into motels would prove a physical and economic unfeasibility.

*Assignment of the willing Winslow to drive 10-12 miles ahead to cajole roadside farmers into lending an acre of fallow for $500 cash on the barrelhead (later boosted to $1,000), with Jess paying the tariff.

*An adequate supply of tents and sleeping bags? Not to worry. Supreme is the march leader's belief in the inventiveness of the Creator and of small business. The passing of hundreds of customers, he rightly guessed, would bring out vendors of camp gear, shoes, socks, and toothpaste from pickups and tailgates.

Refinements have been contributed by vox populi. From the start it was understood that all provisioning would be by Dutch treat, although Jess takes care of the campground tab. Early on, an unsung foot soldier offered a gratuity to a john-truck driver; the latter promptly thought of appending an honor box to his necessary vehicle. Typical day's take per truck: $2,100, more than sufficient to relieve Jess of at least one cost.

"It's not so much the well-scrubbed faces that bug me," said waggish St. Louis blogger Herb DeSoto, himself sporting five days of defiant stubble, "it's the homogenous faces. You rarely see any that departs from the norm of white, middle class, and straight. Blacks are a rarity, despite the example of Pete Winslow; likewise Hispanics and Native Americans. And if any gays or lesbians have marched, they brought their closets with them."

More problematical have been relations with the Pennsylvania State Police, always near flashpoint when traffic is disrupted. An uneasy peace is maintained by shooing the marchers onto the highway berm whenever Smokey heaves into view by car or cycle. Happily, the bulk of east-west traffic through the state's southern tier of counties is conveyed by the limited-access Pennsylvania Turnpike on a line 20-odd miles away. Of no minor importance is a political ally in Harrisburg, a governor who glows at the attention his famed taxpayer keeps drawing to the now With-It State.

Well before departure from the Hostetter pasture in the morning, all the awakened soldiers of the new faith, their commander included, spread out at arm's length and comb the clover, bending to pluck traces of litter. Leaving a one-night stand neater than they found it lingers with the tenter-in-chief as an undiluted commandment from his Boy Scout days.

Asked what other duties might be enjoined on a Jessite, loyal aide Winslow insists, "There aren't any 'duties.' Jess talks, people listen and talk back. We get a lot of clergy 'truth squads' and boy do they talk back. But if anybody takes away a new idea, fine. It's up to them. 'Jessite' is baloney. Like 'Josephsonism.' There isn't any 'ism.' Or personality cult. He detests cults. Only one personality counts in Jess's belief system. That's God. Everybody else, including himself, is just folks."

But where is he bound, serious religious leaders wonder, this most unbiblical shepherd, moving at Abraham's pace while his ideas fly in the ten-league boots of modern communications? Towards what Jerusalem does he lead the children of a world infinitely more complex and spiritually adrift than fabled Hamelin?

"He's wrong on the nature of God - terribly, tragically wrong - for his own immortal soul and for those of the history-tossed tribe that sired him," said an anonymous Catholic tract widely circulated on the Internet. "The coming of Josephson is the best proof yet that secular post-modernism has reached the endgame. It cannot be long before a Coming not scripted in Hollywood, nor hailed by the media, but for which Christians have never lost hope through two tormenting millennia." The piece has been disavowed by an ad hoc committee of clergy who police the Internet, on grounds that it is "theologically arguable enough... (but) latently anti-Semitic." Its title: "What if the Anti-Christ Turns Out to be a Nice Jewish Millionaire."

Jess Josephson said he hadn't read it.

# 2.

WRLD Radio, New York, 4:45 p.m. - _Bulletin. We interrupt for this bulletin. The Jess Josephson religious march was scattered by gunfire just minutes ago..... Repeat: Gunfire has scattered or dispersed the Jess Josephson religious march in south-central Pennsylvania, now in its fourteenth day. No reports yet of deaths or injuries. What is known is that close to three thousand followers of the millionaire cult leader from Pittsburgh were driven from the road at approximately 4:35 p.m. - that is, U.S. Route 30 a few miles west of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - by gunfire. We will report details as they come in. No reports yet of death or injury. This is the first known violence of any substantial kind since... But wait, this just in from the Associated Press:_

_One person dead! At least one death now definitely confirmed from the Josephson march near Gettysburg - by gunfire which dispersed some three thousand marchers at 4:35 this afternoon. Identity of the victim is unknown - repeat: unknown. We will interrupt our regular broadcasting with further details as they come in..._

_***_

It took a moment for Maggie Deland's eyes to adjust from the afternoon light. The bar was dimly lit; she stood inside the revolving door until the familiar plants, pictures, tables and booths of leather and mahogany grew clearer. Bren Hazelwood came forward from their favorite corner. The noise of conversation was low, the place almost empty. It was too early for cocktails (though _he_ had a head start, she noticed). For her this was only a work-break; but she could extend it, having virtually finished for the day.

Her lover, very much out of favor recently, wore an elegant gray double-breasted suit and a contrite smile. He took her hand and leaned forward for a kiss, but she turned and his lips brushed her cheek. "Have missed you awfully," he said, accepting the rebuff as no more than his due for behaving like a swine at Josephson's two weeks before. Her inevitable re-surrender would only be the more piquant. "Tell me you've missed me," he said.

"I could but it wouldn't be the truth."

"A shaft to the heart!" He dug a thumb into the silk tie she had bought him the day after their first night. "Just as I've been rehearsing..."

"Yes?" She eased into the leather bench on her side of the booth as he, still standing, signaled for service.

"... How to ask you to marry me," he said.

"Oh pooh."

"I'm serious."

A redhead with half-exposed breasts approached and said, "C'n I help you?"

Resolutely focusing on her face, he said, "Uh, the lady will have... a Chablis?"

Maggie shook her head. "No. Iced coffee, please. Black."

He looked disappointed but nodded. "And another of these for me." It was a martini, straight up, with a twist of lemon. The girl smiled and walked away, generating more motion than seemed anatomically necessary. She wore a crimson mini-skirt and net stockings. Hazelwood averted his eyes. He extended his hands over the table, inviting Maggie's halfway, but she kept them in her lap. "In these two weeks since..." he lowered his eyes at the painful recollection, "I've realized something. How much, how really much, I adore you." Her lips twisted. "I mean it," he said. "There'll never be another."

"There'll be scads of others."

"I've asked myself: Bren old cock, what are you searching for? Someone smarter? Of sturdier character? Better in bed? Negative, negative, negative. Let's do it, Maggie! Love, honor, obey, every word, every clause. I'll sign, won't you?"

She felt herself blush ( _damn it!)_ and his expression became adoring. "Thank you," she said. "Really, thank you... if you mean it." His face went into preparation mode for disappointment. "I acknowledge the flattering gesture. But no," she said.

He sat back and blew a puff of air as if requiring a moment to absorb this unexpected, this painful development. To be refused, ah! She sensed performance. Like most unserious lovers he wished to revel in the escape of being rejected. He could now anticipate other women with a clearer conscience. If he was tweaked at all, it was in his vanity.

He said, "It's absurd to ask why, but why?"

"Right the first time. It is absurd."

"I ruined myself with you that day... at his house."

"That was only the camel's back."

He appealed to professionalism. "Look, I was asking legitimate, tough questions. You know me. I play the gadfly. I get my best stuff that way. It was you who lost objectivity."

"You behaved disgustingly. Far, far out of bounds. Calling him a fag, for Christ sake. And Jew, Jew, Jew! You wanted a fight and you got one."

"One lucky punch, the son of a bitch." He smiled wryly and rubbed his belly. "I'm still sore."

"After you tried to kick him in the balls. What fighting style. I'll say this: the better man won."

He smiled. There was no way to damage his opinion of himself. "And yet," he said, performing still, and not unamusingly, "as I lay in the dust, despised, outcast, who out of the host of mine enemies assisted me from the field? I told myself, let one true heart come forward now, when I am struck low, be she ever so ill-favored of face and form, yet will I make her my bride."

Maggie had to laugh.

"Why did you?" he asked. "Seriously?"

"No mystery. You were the date I came in with. I felt responsible for your shitty behavior. At least to see you back to the hotel. Or to a hospital."

"And the quicker these duties performed, the quicker back to Galahad. Tell me, did he fuck you that night?"

She got up. "I can't tell you how pleasant this has been."

He touched her arm. "No, sit. I'll be good."

"One more crack like that..."

"Scout's honor," he said, raising his right hand. He drank off his martini and looked around for the waitress. The place was beginning to fill. At a table to their left sat a man and woman of middle years, tourists out of a matinee, Maggie guessed. The wife wore a dowdy suit and blouse; she kept looking their way, perhaps thinking "such a glamorous couple, so New York."

"I admit I'm curious about your relationship," said Hazelwood.

"What relationship?"

"Romantic, Platonic... what? You won't enlighten me?"

"Can you conceive of a _professional_ relationship?" she said. "He's a news source, and a nice enough guy, that's all."

"Tell me another."

"Well yes, I have a concern about the risks he's running. As a fellow human being. I wish he'd get out of this. Why not?"

The waitress brought her coffee and his second (or third?) martini and departed, with undulations. "I notice you keep averting your eyes from her tits and ass," said Maggie.

"Caught that, did you?" He rolled his eyes heavenward and she had to smile again. He tried to rub knees under the table. She shifted. He said, "I want to talk seriously about your future. You can't be thinking of hooking up with that Jew-boy?"

"What did I just tell you, for Christ sake? It is possible for a woman to grow tired of you, my friend, without being interested in someone else. I'm independent that way."

"A one-nighter is one thing, a relationship another," he said.

"Insightful!"

"Be sarcastic if you like. But you're talking to a guy who's had a lot of experience with Jews."

"Are you playing the gadfly again? Watch it, Bren."

"Would you prefer euphemisms, circumlocutions? Attention to all the politically correct no-no's?"

"Yes, I think I would."

"I'm paying you the respect of talking straight." He gazed solemnly at her, like a concerned elder brother.

She sipped. "I'm listening."

"Individual Jews are okay. It's the group that worries me," he said.

"A hundred and eighty degrees off from correct thinking, I'd say. Any individual might be detestable. Or admirable. But to condemn a group..."

"I didn't say condemn."

"I heard what you said."

He decided to start over. "Look here, if you marry one..."

"Marry! How many times do I have to tell you...?"

"He hasn't asked you?"

"I hardly know the man. He's a subject of news coverage."

"Come on!"

"It's true."

"You went back to stay at his fucking house!"

"With others! A guest under his roof. Extremely well chaperoned, I might add, not that he had anything in mind."

"He never hit on you?"

"Not once. Not a tone of voice, not a touch on the arm."

"In all this time?"

"Exactly. I shouldn't be telling you, but it's true."

"Christ, I've been right! He _is_ a fag!"

She had to laugh. "No way on earth."

"How do you know?"

"I know, and everyone who knows him knows."

"Some guys are good at hiding it."

"No sir. And you, Mr. Gadfly, have known it all along. Why you keep suggesting otherwise..." She shook her head.

He sat back and folded his arms, studying her. "All right," he said. "All right. Let's give Jew-boy the benefit of the..."

"Excuse me. Cut that out."

"I beg your pardon."

"'Jew-boy.' Cut it out. It's not funny and you know it."

"Fine. I proceed to my gravamen. Let's give his heterosexuality the benefit of the doubt. Yet what sign has he given you, absent a hint, a touch, that he's at all interested?"

"I get it now. This is a deep plot to drive me crazy."

"I'm compelled to theorize then," he said, rubbing his chin in a charade of Sherlock Holmes. At his worst (no, not quite at his worst!) he could still amuse. Observing him in his smartly fitted clothes, she realized again his animal magnetism, but for her he now lacked a central core. Against a background of leather and mahogany, in the subdued light of an upscale bar, he seemed a prototype of the men who would shine at gentleman's clubs, swapping tales of wars, escapes, safaris, the unreliability of native races, and the embraces of dusky women under mosquito net. She realized that she herself was even now becoming one of his war stories, her sexual assets to be chuckled over in some of the best bistros in the world. She was a notch in his belt, one o' the best - ah, where is that sweet piece now?... while Jess Josephson had telephoned once like a schoolboy confessing a fear of losing her high opinion...

Hazelwood stroked his imaginary goatee. "Let's see. A woman has a suspicion, no more than that, that a famous man is attracted. There is an intellectual rapport. Nothing that engages the phallus, mind you. But only because he is involved in this _cause._ It is bigger than both of them. Even a hint, a pat on the arm, must wait. Am I close?" She could not help smiling. "Do you know what's wrong with that picture?"

"I can't wait to hear."

"No one is that busy. Edison wasn't that busy. Mozart wasn't that busy."

"Oh, if you're just talking busy..."

"The day always has time for a little..." His eyes twinkled.

"You're way off," she said.

"Nevertheless let me noodle along here. Some men - ambitious, insincere men, unlike myself - have a gift for making a woman feel that she is the one. The one! If only they weren't so tied up. And they can give this feeling to fifty women a day."

"You don't think I'd spot a phony like that?"

"All right, he's a _crowd_ freak. That's worse. A demagogue. He feeds on a sense that multitudes love him. The whole world wants him, not just one pair of open thighs."

" _Ech!_ That's repulsive. You usually manage to turn things ugly."

"Don't get hurt, Maggie." He leaned forward, the concerned brother again. "Recognize a guy on the make when you see one. Not just for a woman, like harmless me. But for the world. The sound you're hearing is an alarm bell."

"That's not the man I..." She stopped herself.

He pounced. "You were about to say, 'the man you know.' But you don't know him, Maggie. No one does. Who knows a public man? A Reagan, a Churchill, a Castro? They are users of people. I'm posing a cautionary hypothesis. You, Maggie, adorable as you are, might in a certain person's eyes be no more than the million hits a day on _DayLight._ "

She reached for her purse. "Okay, very good, very plausible. I'll take it under advisement."

"I've hurt your feelings. You'd like to think you're more important to him."

"No, I appreciate the advice, I get the picture."

"You're angry." He lowered his gaze in hypocritical contrition, which in him she preferred to sincerity.

"How could I be angry with you? It's for my own good you're handing me this shit."

"Know how I can tell you're angry?" he said. "Your mouth, normally so ripe and kissable, like cherries, turns straight and sharp, like the blade of..." - he invented something - "... my deer-skinning knife. It makes me want to lean across the table and, strictly as a kindness, kiss and soften that judgmental Protestant mouth."

"A mercy mission of sorts."

"Kiss your lips... kiss till they respond and open and admit my tongue. The ripe, thousand-kissed mouth of Magdalene..."

"Oh, way past a thousand. Working on a million."

"Then kiss down your neck, shoulders, breasts..."

"My my, you're having a good time over there, aren't you?"

"Am I turning you on?" he asked with a silent-movie leer.

"I'll say this: I believe you are curing me of this kind of talk for the rest of my life."

There was no way to draw blood like that. "The rest of your life is what worries me," he said as if she had fallen in a trap. "Married to a Jew."

"Really, Bren. You should see somebody. This is obsession."

"Your children, _Jews._ "

She sat back, perplexed, and to some degree vulnerable on that very point. "Another joke, I see, and a stale one."

He gave a sigh of world-weariness. "If what the situation calls for is liberal cant, 'multiculturalism' till we both throw up, I could recite it to you by the yard. But if you're at all curious what Bren Hazelwood thinks, a man who adores you, can't get enough of you, really thinks..."

"But who can ever tell what you really think?"

"I think that you, Maggie, oh magpie mine, whom it has been my good fortune, beyond my deserving, to know... know well... deeply... in our loins..."

"Get on with it."

"... I think you stand at the forward edge of a thousand generations of evolution, the best that homo sapiens can produce. Beautiful, intelligent, strong. The best, Maggie! A thoroughbred. What the great Breeder in the Sky would have us reproduce, if we gave as much of a damn about the human species as we do about horses and dogs."

She narrowed her eyes. "Where is this getting?"

"It's wrong, Maggie, genetically wrong, a profanation, to take the best and mix it, combine and alloy it with... less than the best. Do you see what I'm driving at?"

"I hope not."

"Maggie. He's a _Jew_."

"Ah, hell. I would not have believed this of you, Bren."

"Okay, he's the exception," he said, putting out a hand. "Brains, good-looking, a certain amount of guts, let's grant that. He's still a member of... that group."

"And what's wrong with that group?"

"Oh don't turn hypocrite on me."

"No, I'd really like to know. But even your premise is wrong. He's not a Jew in any religious sense. His whole point is to get rid of distinctions like that."

"Oh Maggie, the religious sense is the least of it. Did the Germans exterminate millions of them over points of theology? No, it was their... other characteristics. Which any fair-minded person would admit."

"Oh yes? Tell me."

He blew his cheeks. "You'd make me spell it out. You won't play the game with me that you've played all your life. Growing up with the 'right' friends. The best schools. Where the handsomest boys from the best families..."

"Could be first-class jerks."

"... Had crushes on you, and you on them, and certain things about other groups never had to be said, but sure as hell were tacitly understood. Tacitly, that is, till a favorite uncle or partner of your dad's came to dinner and had one too many, and then there was nothing tacit about it. It came right out."

"What came out, Bren?" _(But this was true!)_

"That why was it every time you opened the paper and some sleazeball was getting arrested in Wall Street, nine times out of ten it was a fucking Cohen or Levine? And every name in the Mafia that wasn't wop was kike?'

"Bren, Bren." She shook her head.

"If it wasn't a Costello or Luciano, it was a Lansky or Siegel. And all the moral sludge that oozes out of contemporary culture, the filth and foulness of Hollywood, television, the degraded language..."

"This from you? I'm laughing."

But he talked on in a kind of fervor. "The cheapened laughter, the 'situation comedies' that degrade and belittle life, poisoning the minds of the simple, stupid people, who are always the most people, and all of this from Jew studios, Jew writers and producers..."

"Bren!"

He smiled. "Oh, shall I throw in some balancing shit to make it all even? I can do it. Yes, there are Murphys and Kennedys in there, too. And in the media, Gannetts, Murdochs, Turners. But it's the Jew who sets the tone of popular culture in decline. Not on the upside."

"I never suspected this of you," Maggie said.

"Not on the upside, no," he kept on. "When culture is going up, you get Poe and Melville, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt. Down, you get sitcoms and modern art, gay rights, Clintons, Obamas and their Jew staffers, fag theater, talk shows, and what's falsely called news, factoid-entertainment with pictures, in Jew magazines and networks."

Now he was ladling it on too thick, out of personal revulsion but also some pleasure he took in twisting his sting into her.

"I look on in helpless astonishment," she said, "at the decay of a fine mind."

He chuckled. He liked that. A well-turned insult amused him. "Did you ever read Wagner on 'Judaism in Music'?" he asked.

"I can't think of any reason why I would," she said.

"Remember we went to see 'Tristan' last spring and you couldn't wait to get at me afterwards?."

"Maybe there's something in this coffee," she said. "The conversation is going round and round."

"Wagner spotted something very true about the Jews."

"I doubt it."

"He said - I paraphrase, of course - that lacking a contemporary culture of their own, rooted in the soil of a native land, never mind the torahs and talmuds they drag through the centuries, the Jews imitate and absorb other cultures. In fairness (nobody denies they're smart) they really admire the culture surrounding them, probably more than most native people, who don't see its beauties so poignantly, taking it all for granted. That's why Jews seemed to love Germany more than the Kaiser, America more than the DAR. Did you ever see a bunch of Jews at the Grand Canyon.?"

"I've never been to the Grand Canyon."

"Why not? It's your canyon. But the Jews have been there. The Jews and the Japs."

She clicked her tongue. "I didn't realize the Jews have all been to the Grand Canyon."

"Ninety percent of them, and they love it. They're up on the rim, raving as if they discovered it, verbalizing, while good Nebraska Methodists stand by gawking. 'Morrie, Morrie, take my pitcher in front of this gorgeous view!' 'Goldie, don't stand so close! It's a mile deep, God knows!'"

She had to laugh. "Look, just pass me the application to the Ku Klux Ladies Auxiliary. I'll sign."

"You don't know what I'm getting at?"

"You're not making it easy."

"The Jews love the country and music and art around them, which welcomes them and to which they actually want to contribute. But they can't, you see, not in any first-rate way. Which is Wagner's point. They don't have roots in the land, the blood, the _folk._ So what you get is second- and third-class stuff, imitation rather than original. Worse, they undercut the standard. So people forget what top-grade is. They contribute to cultural decline. You don't get a Mozart anymore, you get Tin Pan Alley, Leonard Bernstein. Not a Goethe but..."

"My God, there's a thousand holes in that! If we only _had_ a Bernstein today."

"But the general trend Wagner spotted is correct. The Jews rise toward the top, clever and facile. They gather in cities, gravitate to the media and the arts. Soon they dominate entertainment and popular culture, which is always the scraps, the garbage heaps of culture. Look at all the comedians, journalists, movie producers..."

"All, all! You keep saying all. They're not nearly all."

"But they dominate. They set the tone."

"They do not set the tone," she insisted, the more frustrated for half-agreeing. "Is your intellectual life so barren that you're turned on by this... warmed-over Nazism?"

"Go ahead, call me names. Don't face facts."

"Facts? If Jess were Irish, you'd be telling me all this crap about the Irish."

"But he's not Irish. He's a kike."

"That does it." She got up. "I'm out of here."

"Get used to the word, Maggie. I say it precisely for effect. Don't let your children be called kikes, the girls raped, the boys shot, Jess's own grave torn up and his bones scattered - yours too, if you lie beside him."

"What's that supposed to mean?" His manner frightened her.

"It's coming, Maggie. As surely as the turn in seasons."

"What is coming?"

"Another slaughter of Jews, a new Holocaust, this time a hundred percent."

"Impossible!"

"Not only possible but likely." He gazed at her, his blue eyes impressively serious. "Not only likely but inevitable."

"Which you would welcome, I now gather."

"Don't try to bullshit a bullshitter, Maggie. I am not the enemy you've got to worry about. It may not come in our time, although millions of Arabs can't wait to wash their hands in Jewish blood, while Europe and America click their tongues as they did the last time and privately believe the Hebes asked for it. Who will be blamed in the coming defeat of the West, Maggie? That's easy - the Jews! _Your children,_ that a daughter of the American revolution allowed to become _yids_."

Another hateful word. Despite herself she was allowing him to wound her. Tears of rage stung her eyes; and there was no way to hurt him back, knowing that it was possible he only believed half of this garbage, that in another mood he might argue exactly the opposite. He was less real than Jess Josephson: a construct of words.

"On what side would be be, Bren, if the world started killing Jews again?" she said. "Come on, let's hear one honest word out of you."

"The truth is, I don't know," he said.

"Stop the bullshit! You'd be with the Jews."

"I honestly don't know."

"Because goddamn it, that's where I will be!"

"Well, three cheers for you." His coolness was deflating. "Anyway, it's no great issue for you. You'll be WASP till you die, with your fine cheekbones and blue eyes, your patrician bearing. It's your children and grandchildren, mongrelized."

"Quit that, for Christ sake! There's not a thing between us."

"But it's only a matter of time, I can see the signs. To join your blood, the blood of generations who built this country and fought its wars, with the blood of peddlers and pawnbrokers..."

"Stop."

"... Of shysters and sports agents, doctors who inflate their bills..."

"You have it bad, you really have it bad."

"... Of producers of shit television, shit movies to turn the brains of poor American idiots to shit."

"Go ahead, froth at the mouth, Bren. Maybe it'll turn me on."

"Goddamn you, Maggie. Goddamn you." His voice was cold and hateful. He shook his head in disgust. Maybe her resistance really had drawn a spot of blood.

"Is this what wounded vanity does to the master race?" she taunted him, desiring to build on his frustration, that he might do something unforgivable, slap her perhaps. She wanted a wedge between them, to reject him with a whole heart, the more surely to reject everything hateful and horrible he had said and in which, despite herself, she half believed.

'You're a stupid cunt after all, Maggie. A cunt that went to college."

Good! This made her despise him. It was a miscalculation if he meant to hurt. The word no more touched her than if it had flashed past on a subway wall.

"And you, what are you?" she said with the inspiration of a triggered contempt. "You're the bottom of the glass, Bren. You're what becomes of a culture when there's no belief left, no faith, no plan or even inkling of making the world better. Does it have to take a Jew for that? That's what you can't forgive him for. For reminding you of what you should be doing, instead of wallowing in hedonism and self-loathing, where the only goals left are to lower your golf score and raise your fuck score."

"Now look who's frothing at the mouth," he said. But there was alarm in his eyes; his nihilism was his vulnerability.

"Consider the cheap courage you pride yourself on," she said, feeling her face grow flushed and ugly, not that she gave a damn; the uglier the better. "The courage of a second-rate writer, in a country that's never persecuted writers, knowing how fucking harmless they are..."

"Touche!"

"... And when somebody comes along with a view of the world that's miles ahead of yours - because yours is empty, Bren - a man whose highest ideal is nothing but a goddamn orgasm..." He laughed hollowly. "... All you can do is sneer at him for not being up to Wagner's cultural standard, and retreat into this sick Jew-envy."

He clapped hands. "A hit, a palpable hit. Keep flushing your toilet on me." But his face was darkening.

"... These visions of Arabs with their hands in the blood of _my children!_ " she hissed, forcing her voice down; there were other people in the bar. "And goddamn you... goddamn you..." She almost choked to stifle screaming. "You dare to imagine I'd light up at marriage with a son of a bitch who can't even say what side he'd be on if they were killing Jews in the streets. As if that's the height of wit and sophistication. Oh, if I could tear out of my guts every moment I ever had with you..."

He sat very still. She felt he was struggling between alternatives of explosion. _Good,_ she thought. _Boil for once._ Absently he reached for his martini; the glass was a quarter full. "This is the thanks I get for trying to do you a favor," he said. "Giving you advice a father would give."

"Up your fatherly ass, bastard!"

He threw the contents of his glass in her face.

For an instant she was blinded. Her eyes stung. Through a blur she saw him leap up, fling something on the table (two twenty dollar bills, absurdly in excess of the check) and rush out. Her eyes did not follow him. She sat motionless, as if in that way others in the place might not notice.

Drops fell from her nose, lashes, and chin; they formed a puddle on the table; a sliver of lemon peel sat in it. Her right eye smarted from the alcohol sting; she closed it. She sensed a horrible quiet. The poor shocked middle-aged couple at the table to her left! If only a piano had been playing, glasses rattling. She would not allow her glance to move an inch for fear of meeting stares. They must be thinking, will she scream now? Such an impossible bitch, that a distinguished-looking man should so lose it with her. Deliberately, without glancing down, she raised the napkin in her lap and blotted her face. Then she circled the napkin in the puddle on the table, sponging it up. The lemon peel she put back in the glass. She stared ahead. She breathed evenly.

Nearby conversations resumed. She felt very calm, with no inclination to tears. The drink was colorless and would not stain her suit; any dampness would evaporate on her walk back to the office. _I am glad this happened,_ she thought. _It separates me. A reverse baptism. I feel cleansed._

She forced a smile and said, "No, thank you," when the waitress nervously asked if she wanted anything else. When she got up to leave, hitching her purse to her side, she put on a thin, fixed smile and avoided eye-contact with anyone.

It was not until she had reached the door, had actually pushed it open and was assailed by the noise, heat, and glare of the street, that from a television set over the bar she heard the word "assassination."

# 3.

"Harry? This is Mary. Sorry to be so late. I know how worried you must be...

"Yes, of course. But I knew you would have heard the news by now. That it wasn't Jess or me. Or anyone you know. But the poor kid!...

"No, I can truthfully say right now I don't know the answer to that. It's up in the air, I'm being honest with you...

"That's exactly what the police have been telling him. Get off the road. There's no way to protect against snipers. Other innocent people may get killed. He knows that, Harry. But people underestimate how important this is to him, and how much he'd hate to abandon it, having come this far. An argument knocking down his viewpoints might stop him, but don't let anyone try scaring him off. They don't know their man. The same as when those kids threw tomatoes at your mall. It makes him that much more...

"What's my advice? He hasn't asked. I assume he will tonight, with Pete and the others. You should've seen Pete when he got back from renting a campground. I never saw him so shaken...

"I usually end up saying, 'Do what you think best, Jess.' He has a terrific instinct, Harry. Even with all those troopers yelling at him this afternoon, after the shooting... the captain calling him all kinds of son of a bitch for not getting everybody off the road, his answer was go ahead and arrest him then! So he'd make news from jail...

"No, I don't think he wants to get arrested, but if he got arrested, that would advance the idea too...

"But...

"But... yes, the idea is that important. To all of us. And he wasn't going to let any lowlife murderer in the bush control him, control history. That's Jess. That's one reason people love him and follow him..."

"Where was I? No more than ten feet away... Yes, Jess was closer, three or four feet. He got all this blood on him, and worse... bits of brain and bone. I don't want to sicken you. I'm a nurse and almost threw up. The poor kid, only twenty-three, we hear...

"I was talking to a reporter, walking along, and right beside me I heard a girl scream. Everybody stopped, like a mass paralysis. Then more screams and someone said, 'He's hit!' My first thought was: Jess. Then everybody seemed to collapse at once, hitting the dirt. Somebody pulled me down by the arm. People were scrambling on the hot asphalt and on the gravel at the edge of the road. And there was all this screaming, legs and arms in all directions. And blood, so much blood. A girl was bent over the boy on the ground, shrieking like a mad thing. I saw Jess with tremendous relief. He was lying over this... this inert body, listening to the heart, but the kid must have been killed instantly: one shot, brains exposed, blood all over the place - just awful...

"No, no, I can talk about it...

"Yes, I know exactly what you mean. But I look forward to phoning you. It helps me clear my thoughts. You're a good sounding board...

"Where was I? Yes, everybody hit the dirt. The whole line seemed to disintegrate as the panic spread and everybody dropped down in ditches and bushes. Some damn reporter asked Jess not ten minutes after it happened if he had _run -_ turned tail! - and Jess, who never blows up at the media no matter how obnoxious, simply said no, he'd hit the dirt like everybody else, then scrambled over to the kid who got hit...

"That's true. At first there was no way to tell if the shot came from somebody with a gun right among us or from a distance. That was part of the panic...

"Even the police were crouching as they ran around. I crawled over to the screaming girl and had to shake her to stop that useless yowling. I said, 'Stop it, stop it!' She calmed down enough to tell me, gasping and retching, that one minute she and the boy were walking along in conversation with Jess - that close! - and she heard a thump. That's how she described it, a thump. All this blood sprayed her, and the boy fell as if a truck hit him...

"No, no, I can talk about it. It wasn't till a minute later or so that, damn it, I felt sick and had a shaking spell. Coming that close... It seemed to me I saw a tremor in Jess's hands. He stuck them in his pockets...

"No, no, it never occurred to me to quit the march...

"Excuse me, Harry, there's no sense talking about it. You're very kind but right now, don't let it hurt your feelings, this is the biggest thing in my life. If the march continues, I continue. I'm like Jess: if fate says this is where I die, okay. It's as good a place as any...

"Oh, now I'm talking as if I have the martyr complex. Well, maybe it's catching...

"That was a joke. I do not have a martyr complex. Neither does he. Don't believe that crap in the news...

"No, no, don't even think of coming out here...

"Wait... that's just what I was about to say. You have no idea how much helicopter traffic we're getting. The governor of the state is on his way. And the parents, I understand, of the dead boy...

"No, don't come. Even though a hug would be comforting...

"At least I'm less and less to hug every day... the incredible shrinking fat woman...

"Yes, that would be very nice. A plane to Philadelphia and a night in a comfortable bed. Don't tempt me, Harry...

"Nothing to be done for the boy, that was obvious. Then the troopers, screaming at Jess and the assistants, me too, 'Down, down, ya stupid assholes!' Their word, Harry, not mine. 'There's a sniper out there, maybe more than one!' So for about three minutes we all lay on the shoulder of the road, in the ditch, in the weeds, and Jess got sick of it. He put his head up and must have felt it was degrading to be cowering out there, he the leader of the march, and hell, he just stood up and said let's get going...

"Yes, I know guys get killed like that in war. But I think he must've been thinking if there are snipers and he's the one they want - which was obvious with the kid being shot so close to him - well, he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life trying to hide from them...

"Foolhardy? Sure...

"Sure, I have to agree. Foolhardy is one word, but gallant is another. Sometimes I think he feels invulnerable; or else if he's going to die, well, his idea will go marching on. In any case, there he was, the only one standing on the road for about a quarter-minute, with the police yelling bloody murder, and there weren't any more shots, so I guess that was a sign that the sniper, wherever the hell he was, had taken off...

"No, just ordinary countryside. Rolling farm country. But with patches of trees and scattered houses and barns in all directions. He could've been anywhere in a thousand yards or more, the police said, with a telescope lens. Crazy for sure! To think he'd hit one specific person among three thousand...

"No, Jess was in about the middle of the line where he usually walks, so people can move ahead or drift back to walk and talk with him. He was wearing white, which he usually does - or did till today. Everybody realizes now, that was a mistake, making himself a target. In fact, he stripped off his shirt - did I tell you how bloody it was? - a few minutes later and changed, but not before every photographer here got pictures...

'Yeah, I admit it...

"Yeah, I made damn sure they got the pictures before he changed the shirt...

"Yes, I know I'm a cold, calculating professional bitch...

"No, I know you didn't use those words, but...

"But I can't forget I'm in the midst of the biggest news story in the world, a P.R. person's dream, and...

"And when they bury me, let the epitaph say: 'Whatever else, she was a pro'...

"Ha ha, yes, will you see to that?...

"So we started moving again. Maybe half of us, maybe two-thirds. A lot of marchers decided right there: enough for one crusade. They scooted back to wherever their cars were parked and got out. In droves. But the rest of us, a surprising lot of us still, agreed with Jess, the hell with being scared off, and kept going to the farm Pete had arranged for the night, about a mile and a half farther. It's where I'm calling from with the last few seconds of cell-phone battery...

"My guess is that he'll say we keep marching. But the governor's coming and the state police and, well, everybody knows what their advice is going to be. If Jess had listened to them, we'd still be lying in the ditch waiting for night. The hell with that. We got here, and now there's some time to think. And...

"Would you believe, three of the assistants are begging for just a minute each on this phone. Everybody's cellphone batteries are shot...

"Good to talk to you too, Harry. Watch television tonight. Something tells me there'll be news with the parents of that poor kid coming here. And the governor's coming and I haven't washed my face yet...

"Thanks, ah thanks, I'll tell him. G'bye."

# 4.

"We go now, live, to south-central Pennsylvania, west of historic Gettysburg, where this afternoon, about two hours ago, at approximately four-thirty Eastern Daylight Time, violence claimed the first life in the anti-religion crusade of millionaire cultist Jess Josephson. A sniper's bullet cut down Andrew Bruschtein, twenty-three-year-old graduate student from Queens, New York. Correspondent Josephine McGowin is on the scene. Jo?"

"Right here, Bernie. Events are unfolding quickly. First, the parents of the slain marcher are expected momentarily by helicopter. And the governor of Pennsylvania just announced he has asked Jess Josephson to disband the march across the state."

"Asked but not ordered, Jo?"

"Correct. The governor just held a brief press conference. He stressed that the march has been a peaceful demonstration. 'Pennsylvanians take the right of free speech very seriously,' he said - that's a quote - 'The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted in this state' he said, and he no more than Jess wants to give de facto veto power over free speech to a 'lowdown murdering sniper,' his words."

"And Jess's reaction?"

"We haven't been able to speak to him yet but he apparently told the governor he will think it over and announce tomorrow."

"More suspense. He's a master of it."

"In any case, should Jess decide to continue, the governor said they made a handshake agreement on five hundred marchers, max, in line at any given time."

"But many more than that have marched, correct?"

"Yes, far more, sometimes extending over a mile. That's got to stop, the governor said. Moreover, Jess and his aides must announce, as often as every hour, that this march is inherently risky and warn people 'their lives may be in danger' - that's a quote. But wait... there's a sound of helicopter engines."

"We have it on our monitor, Jo, don't go 'way, live from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, while we pause here for a commercial message...."

"... Now back to reporter Jo McGowin at the Josephson encampment near Gettysburg, P.A., where at this moment a helicopter bearing Mr. and Mrs. Hillard Bruschtein, of Queens, New York, parents of the marcher slain by sniper fire today, is just arriving. Jo?"

"There is just an incredible mixture of emotions here, Bernie, in the final hours of an incredibly, ironically beautiful summer day. Shock, anger, a dull, questioning grief among the Josephson people, and the inevitable thought: might they be next? Frustration and anger among the state police, torn between their duty to protect public safety and their view that..."

"They're getting out of the helicopter now, Jo."

"You can probably see more clearly than I can, Bernie. State troopers have formed a cordon across the road, where the Bruschteins' helicopter has landed near the governor of Pennsylvania's... What? Yes, they want us to stay put for a moment while the governor pays his respects... Hey!"

"Jo, it looks like a stampede. Are you in contact?"

"A number of news media - camera people especially - tried to charge across the road for closer shots of the grieving Bruschteins. Now people are forcing them back... but yes, being helped down by the pilot, that must be the mother."

"Mrs. Shirley Bruschtein, Jo, to give her the complete I.D., which we have from New York. Age fifty-three. Occupation: English teacher, New York public schools. Imagine the thoughts that must be going through that poor woman's head now."

"Her eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, Bernie, but her face looks drawn with shock and grief... a petite woman, in a gray suit, and here behind her, also in dark glasses..."

"Hillard Bruschtein, aged sixty, tax accountant and, as we understand, treasurer of a synagogue in Queens, New York."

"And now the governor is shaking hands with them on camera."

"Yes, there are a lot of photo flashes. And there... there, the governor, touched and angered by today's events, leaned over to kiss Mrs. Bruschtein on the cheek. He himself has been resisting pressures to order the march off the road. Church leaders are reported infuriated with him. There now... he is walking away toward his own helicopter, and the Bruschteins, ringed with state troopers, are coming over..."

"Mrs. Bruschtein, any comment, ma'am??"

"Could you give us your thoughts at this moment?"

"Whatcha gonna tell Jess?"

"Bernie, Bernie, reporters are shouting questions. The Bruschteins are shaking their heads... oh, this has to be very hard for them. These are not public people, ordinary quiet citizens wrenched into sudden, tragic notoriety... and here comes Jess Josephson, walking fast, down from his tent pitched in a field to my right."

"Who's that clearing a path?"

"His bodyguards, crowd assistants so-called."

"Give 'em some space! Give 'em room, please."

"There's a tremendous crush around them... reporters, cameras. Now this momentous meeting..."

"Murderer! Killer! You're responsible!"

"Oh... oh my..."

"What's going on, Jo? The crowd blocks our view."

"Oh, that was unexpected. Mrs. Shirley Bruschtein just slapped Jess Josephson. She shouted 'Murderer' and 'Killer' and slapped his face once, twice, three times..."

"We could hear those slaps, Jo."

"Very audible, Bernie, to us too. In silence. Everybody looks just stunned. And Jess stood motionless, not even putting his hands up, as the mother of the victim slapped him..."

"We've lost our only child! To this madness!"

"Mrs. Bruschtein's voice, still shouting... sobbing..."

"And such a boy, a golden boy!"

"... Sobbing uncontrollably now on her husband's shoulder."

"Shirley, Shirley!"

"Dear, dear lady..."

"Jess Josephson tried to say something. I think his voice broke. Now he has put out his arms and is half embracing them, mother and father weeping, Jess apparently close to tears..."

"It does kind of choke you up, Jo. I don't see many dry eyes in this studio, including yours truly's."

"Emotions are being rubbed raw here today... and the way Jess wouldn't even put up his hands to ward off the mother's slaps, as though they were coming to him... now embracing both parents. A hush has fallen - can you hear me, Bernie? - I'm whispering... a hush over this now large crowd in an ironically beautiful late afternoon. News media, police, Josephson followers, and everyday people coming out no doubt from Gettysburg and nearby towns, drawn by these events..."

"People! Everybody... can we..."

"That's Mary Mulcahy, press aide. Listen."

"People, can we hold it a second? Just... I'm sure the Bruschteins and Jess would appreciate a few moments..."

"Mr. Bruschtein, do you plan to sue?"

"Your thoughts at this moment, Mrs. Bernstein?"

"Jess, do you have liability for this?"

"Reporters are shouting questions, Bernie, but... no way... as bodyguards open a path... yes, now they're moving away from us into among the tents."

"Is it true, Jo, that Jess Josephson pays a thousand dollars personally for these impromptu campground venues?"

"So we're told, Bernie. But rumors have persisted from the beginning that he has secret contributors."

"Denied, of course."

"Always. But Jess is rumored to be under investigation by the IRS. Photo sessions are staged every day of donations being returned to senders. The mail reaches him even out here."

"The Bruschteins and Josephson seem to have stopped, Jo, our monitor shows."

"Yes, in front of Jess's tent, indistinguishable from dozens of others: lightweight, dome-shaped summer camping tents for one or two."

"Wait, Jo. Here is a replay, from another camera - they'll be playing this again and again - of that heart-stopping meeting just moments ago when the mother of the murdered marcher, Mrs. Shirley Bruschtein, shouting 'Murderer! Killer!' slapped the cult leader across the face forehand and backhand while he refused to defend himself... and now back to you, Jo McGowin, at the scene near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania..."

"Jess and the Bruschteins continue to parley, just the three of them, in camp chairs before his tent. They're turned so their backs are to us, perhaps to defeat directional microphones."

"What _do_ you say, Jo, to the parents of a young man slain by a bullet meant for you? It's obvious that the mother, emotionally at least, blames Jess Josephson himself, yet now here they are talking quietly, the three of them, apparently civilly. But you referred a moment ago to rumors of illegal contributions?"

"Illegal would be a big conjecture, Bernie. Nobody has charged Jess with any crime. But the crusade is a whirlwind of rumors. And the contributions question always comes up. Very few people believe he is funding this movement out of his own pocket."

"Then who is?"

"We hear of laundered oil money and..."

"Oil money? You've got to be kidding."

"No, sir. That rumor - repeat: rumor - goes like this: the money is being supplied by OPEC Arabs on the theory that the religions most vulnerable are those of the West, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, while Islam is sufficiently authentic and militant to prevail. Iran, Saudi Arabia, most Islamic countries, have one after another banned all news coverage of Jess Josephson, and if he tried to speak in the Middle East - as some have urged him to do as part of a general counter-attack on Islamo-fascism - he'd undoubtedly face assassination."

"He seems to, even in the U. S. of A."

"True, but an alternative to the OPEC rumor is that the Catholic Church is his secret bankroller."

"Come again?'

"Unproven speculation, of course. But it gives you an idea of the controversy that swirls about this man who was totally unknown, a conventional homebuilder from America's hinterland just five months ago. Anything and everything can be said about him - and has been! - ranging up to alleged ambitions for movie stardom or, indeed, the presidency of the United States by a way of a new, anti-religious third party."

"But spell out that Catholic rumor."

"It's to the effect that Protestantism's hold on people is relatively loose and a sense of spiritual uprootedness will bring Christians back to Catholicism. Indeed, this past week a magazine ran a cover story headlined: 'Jess's March: Is It on Road to Rome?' But there's also a scenario of _anti-_ Catholic support."

"The head swims! And I imagine the Jewish faith figures in these speculations?"

"On both sides, Bernie. One school holds that international Jewish bankers - quote unquote on that old cliche - are backing him to quote 'destroy Christianity'."

"A typically anti-Semitic canard."

"While the opposite view is that his financial support is precisely anti-Semitic."

"No kidding."

"... On the theory that his teachings and example will cause the Jews to disappear as a distinct people, give up support for Israel, which couldn't survive, and so forth... But wait, the Bruschteins and Jess Josephson seem to be breaking up their parley now."

"From what we could see on our monitor, the Bruschteins did most of the talking."

"I also have that impression. Jess mostly sat and listened. A few times I saw him pat Mrs. Bruschtein's arm. It's got to be hard for him to say anything. In effect, these people's son died for him... Now they're rising, Jess embracing Mrs. Bruschtein... Cameras trying to get closer. Now the two men embrace... Hillard Bruschtein unashamedly weeping..."

"The strain on these folks has to be incredible."

"Now they're coming this way, the Bruschteins and press aide Mary Mulcahy, ringed by police and bodyguards - not Jess Josephson, who remains standing up by his tent. But here's Mary Mulcahy..."

"Folks... yes, just hold it a minute. The Bruschteins will take a few - a very few - questions, and then they have a sad errand to perform, accompanying their son's body back to New York..."

"From where?"

"The morgue in Gettysburg. Under the circumstances... but well, here are the Bruschteins."

"Do you plan to sue, sir?"

"Whadja talk about?"

"Can you tell us what he said and you said?"

"Just let me say, we had a quiet, my wife and I, a decent and quiet conversation with Mr. Jos..."

"Louder!"

"Could you get a little closer to the mikes, please?"

"We had a decent, quiet discussion with Mr. Josephson. We got the impression he feels very bad."

"Yes, so he cried, we cried, my husband and I. A lot of good it does now!"

"Still can't hear you back here."

"Did you say he cried? Tears?"

"Tears, yes, that's what people cry. But too late! Better this mischief had never got started."

"Are you saying you hold Jess Josephson responsible?"

"What kind of boy was your son, Missus or Mister Braunsteen, either parent? Will you describe him for us?"

"Did you tell Jess to quit marching?"

"Are you going to sue?"

"They're all throwing questions, Bernie. Wait, here's Mrs. Bruschtein..."

"My son was..."

"Ah, she broke down sobbing.:

"Come on, have a heart, people..."

"That's Mr. Bruschtein, looking pretty shattered. This may be impossible."

"One question, sir. Do you hold him responsible?"

"Yes, in a certain sense, and told him so."

"His reaction?"

"He listened. If he had never started this, our Andy wouldn't have been here. Young people today, they're searching for things our generation took for granted. You're looking for God? Fine. That's what synagogues are for, that's what churches are for. Yes, I have to say we hold Mr. Josephson somewhat responsible."

"You gonna sue?"

"Ah that... we haven't even..."

"Mr. Bruschtein turned away and here's Mary Mulcahy."

"Okay, people, enough?"

"Just one more question. How did Josephson answer you?"

"All right, really the last. He said he felt terrible about it, but how many ways can you say it? He said he believes, and he thinks Andy must have believed, in ending this kind of senseless violence, shooting each other over religion. He said we should be proud of our son..."

"Did we need him to tell us that?"

"Shirley, I'm just trying..."

"To be proud of our son? We weren't proud of him before? When you and I had a son...!"

"Okay, everybody, have a heart. Let 'em out of here."

"That's Mary Mulcahy, virtually shooing the media away. A very formidable lady. Both Bruschteins are in tears. This is... excuse me, Bernie."

"Chokes us up here too at News World Central, reporter Jo McGowin. There, the Bruschteins, parents of the slain Josephson follower, now walking with police and bodyguards, towards a helicopter and the grim duty of conveying their son's body home to Queens, New York. Back to these tragic scenes in a moment. First, this commercial message..."

# 5.

Maggie Deland watched television until she heard Mary Mulcahy declare, for the fourth time, that Jess Josephson would not, absolutely not, have anything more to say. "Let's give the Bruschteins the last word today," said the press agent, surrounded by reporters and cameras. "Believe me, Jess and all of us are feeling for them more than we can say. He'll talk at eight o'clock tomorrow morning to the media and whoever is here. And that's it. Over and out." Maggie looked at her watch. She had been away from her desk for forty minutes.

"Christ, I've heard of spending time in the head but this is ridiculous," her editor said. But his temper was sham. Bald and grandfatherly, he was near retirement, and she was a favorite anyway. "Didn't you hear my page?"

"Sorry. I was watching the Josephson stuff on television. I think you should send me out there."

"No, ma'am." He shook his head.

"I want to go, Max."

"We've got enough manpower at Gettysburg, overkill in fact."

"Why are you keeping me off this story?"

"Keeping you off? Who is keeping you off? You are not the only filly in this stable."

"Send me out there. I'll get you some great stuff."

With a frown he half-swiveled in his chair. "You've lost your objectivity on this one. I'm doing you a favor."

"The next man who says he's doing me a favor..."

His brows went up over half-lens reading glasses. "You embarrassed the news service bedding down at that guy's house," he said.

"And getting you the best goddamn first-person story of the year!"

"Then we're even."

She resorted to wheedling. "Be nice, Max. Let me go."

"Now you're pestering. Unusual for you." He swiveled away.

"Then I want vacation time."

He turned back. "When, now?"

"When I get off tonight."

"No. That's not how we operate. We schedule things, remember? And I'm already overtime on this discussion."

"Max, I have to get out there."

His look softened. "You're sweet on this guy, aren't you?" She barely kept herself from stamping her foot. _She was not going to be asked that!_ He had the sense not to press the point. "How much vacation time do you have left?"

"Two weeks."

"Then do me a favor. Take it. Take it all."

In fact she had been thinking only of a day or two, a week at most. But she agreed, so as not to complicate matters. "And when you come back," he said, "let's start acting professional again, okay?"

The rental car was delivered on the street outside her apartment building at 2 a.m. Sleepless at midnight, she had taken a shower, thinking it might be her last for days, trimmed her nails, brushed her hair fifty times (absurd in the circumstances but a daily habit); thought of making-up; thought of abandoning makeup forever; compromised by throwing the paints and brushes in her purse. She packed minimally, stuffing everything in a small athletic bag, counting on coin laundries along the way. Every ounce might have to be carried for miles.

Under stars and a bright half moon, night on the highway felt safe, calming, and hopeful, the traffic reduced to scattered tractor-trailers. The New Jersey Turnpike moved like black velvet under the tires. Before dawn she was far into Pennsylvania - forested, misty, eventually opening out in the checkered and striped colors of farm country. The sun was up before she reached Gettysburg at seven, having subsisted on a single coffee-to-go.

The town appeared not to have awakened, its streets cool and untrafficked. She drove slowly, with a curious solemnity, along blocks of Civil War-era facades, past doors marked by plaques and flags. Depositing the car at a rental office just as it opened for the day, she took a taxi to the encampment west of town, 4.2 miles by odometer. En route she was surprised to see cannons and statues, monuments and memorial groves. The highway cut directly through a section of hallowed ground. Her driver was a veteran of the tourist trade. The day before, "after the shootin'," he said, he must have made twenty trips. "Won't last, though. Next bullet'll get 'im, mark my words." She made no reply.

They arrived at a scene that resembled a folk festival grafted onto a traffic accident. Vehicles clogged the road in both directions: autos, vans, pickups, motorcycles, camp trailers, television mobile units, and trucks with portable toilet booths on flatbeds. Lights flashed on the roofs of police cars parked in a roadblock. Troopers made circular motions ordering motorists to turn around. Farm boys held up placards: "Park Here, $5.00," and directed cars into fields where lines of autos extended through beaten-down hay. Musical noises were heard. They came from a rock trio wired to speakers, blasting away by the side of the highway. Queues waited at concession trucks selling coffee, soft drinks, sandwiches and snacks. Men and boys hawked newspapers from folding card tables and upturned crates. She saw the major dailies of New York, Washington, and Baltimore, plus regional papers celebrating the sensation that had fallen their way. BULLET MEANT FOR JJ CUTS DOWN FOLLOWER... Governor Limits 'Death March' to 500. One paper headlined the suspense angle: WILL JESS FOLD TENTS UNDER FIRE?

It was a fine morning, the sky a silvery blue with scattered puffs of cloud. To the west, low mountains humped on the horizon like sleepers under blankets. Tents were being struck in a field rising at a gentle angle from the south side of the road, but the camp was under siege now by far more people than could have stayed the night - farmers, city men early for work in shirts and ties, country women, truckers, teenagers, children, even infants, some borne in slings from mothers' shoulders.

Maggie strapped her purse one way across her chest, her athletic bag the other, and tugged down on her cap. Pushing through the moving mass, she apologized, "Reporter... sorry... gotta get up there." The grass was fresh-smelling, dewy, and soft underfoot. The crowd thickened as she approached its center, until resistance became too great; but she had got close enough: only a few yards from a ring of crowd assistants (she recognized some of them) who kept an open space by joining hands and stiffening their backs. A dozen TV cameras were perched on shoulders and tripods. Loudspeakers stood on stands above people's heads. A drift of noise could be heard from the rock band by the roadside. Hemmed in by bodies all around, Maggie felt drowsy on her feet, having not slept in twenty-four hours. _Like Lindbergh,_ she thought.

A cheer arose. Jess Josephson must be on the way down. Maggie stood tiptoe. Yes, she could see him in a baseball cap, unsmiling, a hand raised in solemn greeting. Peter Winslow and Mary Mulcahy walked beside him and crowd assistants ran interference. The mass before him opened. Applause intensified, inappropriately; a marcher had been killed yesterday. But here was the celebrity; that reality trumped all.

Gravely he ignored shouted questions. Maggie was touched by his appearance. They had spoken by cell-phone but she had not seen him, except on television, since the fire. The strain of two weeks on the road, and the horror of yesterday perhaps, seemed to have drawn him to a tighter line, his face thinner, his gaze sober. The hatred he was arousing had left wounds. _He is suffering,_ she thought. _Can 't anyone see it?_ Yet in public his manner was invariably upbeat, the pain never coming through. He had brought his knapsack with him and he set it in the grass at his feet.

"Morning, everybody," Mary Mulcahy said into a wireless microphone. "Jess was going to hold a press conference..."

"Are you calling off the march?" a reporter shouted.

"... But the many who've come out this morning," Mary said, "especially after yesterday... well, Jess wants to say something." She handed him the microphone and stepped aside.

He stood alone in a space about three yards across. Hushing sounds spread up and down the field. The roadside trio stopped playing, in a coincidental (otherwise hard to believe) gesture of courtesy. Only the groan of a distant semi and a jet in the sky broke the stillness. Jess Josephson raised the microphone and turned to take in more people in his glance, then made a complete circle while everyone waited. Green and yellow fields, with a scattering of farm structures, spread away to glaring distances. The rising sun promised a hot day. The crowd fell silent except for scattered cries of infants.

"A young man was murdered yesterday," he began. "I want to consider with you what his death meant. And what his life meant." He spoke solemnly, deliberately. "I want to weigh the loss of Andrew Bruschtein. To ask you, and to ask myself, how this cause we are marching for should deal with such a loss." He had grown used to the acoustics of loudspeakers and outdoor crowds, Maggie realized. His voice was still a street voice, firm but without the baritone gold of polished oratory. He gave the impression of a man speaking his mind, not reaching for effect. She stood on her toes to gauge his audience, several thousand faces in early sunlight, many shading their eyes, here and there someone holding up a newspaper (useful for once) as an umbrella.

"Andy Bruschtein was young. Twenty-three. I did not know him; we had only just met. But I have learned about him. He was a student with a promising future. An only child. The jewel of his parents. Their loss..." He paused, or else momentarily faltered. "...Can never be redeemed." And now he took a conscious pause, perhaps to regain control, but it had the effect of a traditional moment of silence, and the crowd took his cue. A woman standing near Maggie crossed herself.

"He died beside me," Jess Josephson resumed, his voice carrying over the fields. "Of a bullet probably meant for me. There was no reason to kill Andy. He got in the way. It was a clumsy and wasteful as well as a wicked death. And never would have happened if we had not been on this road."

Josephson said these things soberly, factually, like a lawyer reciting clauses in a brief, without euphemism or evasion. "Who do we blame then?" ( _Should be "whom,"_ the grammarian in Maggie thought; but "who" was truer to the speaker and his listeners.) "Some would say me. If I hadn't started this, Andy never would have been here."

"Then get the hell out!" a voice shouted. There were cries of assent, and not from a small number. "No, no!" others called, as if the moment demanded a vote of confidence.

"But I have to ask..." he said, holding up a hand. "I have to ask... if a cause that is good in itself... ought to be held accountable for moving a lowdown killer to violence."

"No! No!" his defenders shouted in greater chorus.

"I have to ask... if we have a duty to hide our thoughts, watch our step, for fear of stirring up murder in haters and criminals. I don't think so," he said. "That is not my idea of how to live. I feel grief at Andy's death. Regret. Outrage. Disgust. As I think we all must. But I do not feel guilt."

He paused there, not, Maggie felt certain, for applause; the issue was too charged with anguish. Rather, he offered his listeners a chance to oppose, to reject, to decline to acquit. The crowd seemed curious as well. It stood waiting, listening for its own reaction. And it was silence.

"God then," he went on. "Should we blame God? Is he sending a sign of disapproval?" His glance passed Maggie's without recognition. (Apart from her dark glasses, he would have no reason to expect her here. _Better,_ she thought; _no performance for me, let him be exactly himself.)_ "I say no," he said. "God doesn't hire hit men. If I thought He caused an innocent person to die, to make some kind of impression on me, I could only detest Him." Maggie saw a country woman's mouth fall open, a churchgoer very likely. The possibility of hating God, whatever trials He sends, scandalized the poor soul. But no one spoke.

"Some would make God responsible passively," the speaker continued. "He didn't cause this to happen but allowed it to happen. Again I say no." His firmness on the point thrilled Maggie. _I say no!_ Take that, he was telling all theological contortionists, who would stuff irreconcilable evils into the envelope of God. _No!_

"I do not believe -- I think it works against human progress to believe -- that some supernatural force enters the space between a gun and its target, spares one man and strikes another by a last-minute bending of the laws of nature. I believe God set up these laws as laws, literally. Unbreakable. But also reliable. Do we want a world where trees grow up and water flows down? Then metal flying through the air will follow its path. Yet every bullet ever fired is put in motion by one of us. Let's focus our hopes where hope can do some good. Not on God; God's done enough for the world. On us! Murdering people is what _we_ have to quit doing!"

This had a certain force as rhetoric, _but who is asking for miracles now?_ Maggie thought. _You want more than the raising of Lazarus, Jess, more than the loaves and fishes..._

"It was hope for bringing help to the human race that brought Andy Bruschtein, that brought all of us, to this road," the speaker continued, and paused again, as if weighing the size of this claim. He faced east, toward fields ablaze with sun; the shadow of his cap crossed his face. "I believe Andy saw that a better world leads somehow through a better idea of God; that thinking of God clearly will make us better people. Not perfect people; certainly not passive people, with all the spirit gone out of us."

He turned again in his circle, as if pursuing a thought in flight. "What a poor bargain it would be to give up hope of heaven and become misers of life," he said. "Piling up days and years, taking no risks, as if accumulation of time is what it's about: quantity above all. And yet" - he turned again - "if we live to a hundred, or only twenty-three, all the life we are ever going to have is this life. Beyond this, what will any of us know, or have to fear? Nothing. In a sense, then, we each contain a kind of eternity."

He looked down, frowning, unsatisfied with how he had put this difficult thought, and scuffed at blades of grass. "Some say that without hope of heaven, you'd never get people to risk their lives for a good cause. I disagree. I think that's how you get them to throw life away in _bad_ causes: the illusion that death in war, even a bad war, is a ticket to paradise. How many have gone to the slaughter believing such a lie?"

He turned to those on the other side of him. "Only the best of causes deserves our life. For me, and I hope it was true for Andy Bruschtein, this is such a cause: _that no one again will die - or cause anyone else to die - over differences about God._ Let us wipe out, once and for all, that old, old madness."

He put up a hand against easy applause. "But that is my choice," he said. "It may not be yours. Understand, everybody! There is danger on this road. Only you have the right to put your life in the scale. For me, I understand that being born in this world I have to die; that that debt will someday surely be paid; and if so, there is no better cause, and no better day."

His cadence, whether artless or consciously shaped, marched out and was met by a murmur of assent.

"I believe in building for beyond my lifetime," he said. "I believe in victories we may not see." His glance at that moment, astonishingly, found Maggie Deland's. "My choice is to _walk this road. "_

# 6.

**Sunday Commentary, Global Christian Radio**

"Could Jess Josephson's parade in behalf of Satan - let's call a spade a spade here - be coming apart at the "souls," dear friends, to make an atrocious pun?

"The Pied Piper of Pittsburgh's anti-Christ legion is at rest this Sabbath morning, just west of York, Pennsylvania. Rarely has the Lord's Day been observed with such irony. The mayor of York demanded, and footsore Jess agreed, that he should not press his flagging luck by bringing his minions down Main Street while townsfolk were at church. The city of York could not afford a riot and neither could Jess.

"The order to keep out of town, a spiritual quarantine in effect, capped a week of catastrophes for the so-called 'Moneybags Messiah.'

"At its worst it was a week of murder, still unsolved. A 23-year-old marcher from New York City was slain by a sniper's bullet that sprayed the guru himself with gore. The victim's funeral the next day, intended as a private affair, drew a crowd of a thousand outside a Jewish cemetery in Long Island. They waited respectfully till the rites were completed, then erupted in a shouting indictment of Jess as a lightning rod for interfaith conflict. 'Don't blame this apostate on us' was a typical placard. Another, hastily lowered, although television unerringly caught it: 'Next Time Shoot Straight!'

"It was a week of rising tension with authority. The state police daily excoriate the cultist for flouting a solemn commitment to limit his line of march. Up to 5,000 Jessites at a time have snaked a mile and more in his path, _tenfold_ the promised maximum. Harrisburg insiders now agree that Pennsylvania's permissive governor has mishandled this sorry business from the word Go. A gleeful Republican at the state Capitol says Jess should have been arrested in the first ten minutes of day-after-day lawbreaking, for simple obstruction of traffic, and that would have been that.

"On a higher plane it was a week of evidence from around the country of a _resurgence_ of the word of the Lord. Maybe all it takes, sometimes, for re-invigoration is the sneak attack. Mainstream churches claim increased, not to say record, attendance. And the Sunday sermon text that's sadly bringing 'em out nationwide - this according to an Associated Press survey - is some variation of the theme of 'Christianity Answers That Jewish Millionaire.'

"And for the homebuilder turned parade marshal, after months of brick-by-brick image-building, it was a week of public relations demolition.

" Within twenty-four hours of being publicly slapped on television by the mother of his slain follower, Jess flouted a clear mandate of common sense. That is, to humbly and contritely attend the boy's last rites. Instead he gave his own funeral oration in a venue forever linked to Abraham Lincoln. Big mistake. Rationalistic, stagey, and unfeeling, in contrast to Honest Abe's classic elegy, the speech seemed pitched mainly to absolve Moneybags himself. "Don't Blame Me," the New York Post mercilessly headlined. By nightfall the oratorical dud was ridiculed far and wide as 'Josephson's Gettysburg Undress.'

"The morning after _that,_ the prophet awoke to find someone had daubed a big swastika on his tent. Given that his camp bristles with sentries, newly armed with baseball bats - curious image for a so-called non-violent movement! - the offending graffiti clearly seemed an inside job. Yet even this perhaps has been less of a shock than some of his farmer landlords have discovered on the mornings-after: their grounds littered with used condoms. All we can say is _Yecch!_

"Under the circumstances, friends, the Sunday banishment from York, Pennsylvania, perhaps came as a favor. By the Seventh Day of this dispiriting week, Jess Josephson, like the Lord he profanes every time he opens his yap, needed a rest."

# 7.

"Hi, Olive. You sound sleepy. Did I wake you?...

"A quarter past eleven. Couldn't get a moment before. We're past the Susquehanna River. Good progress today...

"Mmm, yes, that was a nice kiss. Mmmuh!...

"No, we needed the rest. The mayor did us a favor...

"The swastika? Too much has been made of that. Somebody's idea of a prank...

"Who knows? Maybe some press hyena. Anything for an angle...

"No way. He just trashed the tent and bought another and forgot it. The other day he found a bug in his tent...

"No, not that kind of bug. A bug! A listening device. All we can figure is that some scandal sheet wanted to catch sounds of... you know, having sex. Can you believe that?...

"Orgies? Ha ha. What orgies? Are you crazy?...

"No, wait, listen to me...

"That bullshit about condoms again! You know who I think spreads that garbage? The churches. To gross out the farmers who might rent to us. Maybe in all this time we've had one or two condoms to pick up. And they get picked up...

"No, I'm not losing my temper. But if we could just keep the focus on religious issues. We keep getting all this extraneous crap...

"Yeah, that's the latest. Now we're laundering drug money! Because people come in and out of the march every day. A lie like that has to be purposely planted...

"Of course it's dangerous! It sets up the myth that he has bottomless pockets and criminal cash. Just perfect for an IRS audit to waste more of his time, huh? And encourage the farmers to hit us up for more money. Hit him up, I should say. We forked over seventeen hundred tonight...

"Well, at least every day gets us closer. Eight or ten more days and we're out of this cursed state...

"But we've been trying like hell to keep the crowds down! Can't do it. People love Jess and want to be part of what's happening. He's struck a chord....

"Of course I miss you. Do you think I like sleeping on the ground in a tent, alone, when back home in bed is this voluptuous white broad...

"Ha ha... mm yeah...

"First night I'm home. Promise. Repeatedly!...

"But wait, speaking of media curiosities, Judah Iskaritz is back. Remember him, the Orthodox Jew? The rabbi-reporter who left in the middle of the night, back at the farm? Well, he's turned up again, on the march, not only to cover the story but to _help protect Jess,_ he says. Can you beat it? Claims to feel an 'obligation.' Which actually doesn't do us any good. This very Orthodox-looking Jew hanging around Jess, it's just more fodder for the Jew-haters. But leave it to Jess. Slaps him on the back and says, 'Welcome back, pal'...

"What, that makes two martyr complexes? Nonsense.

"Of course he'd like to quit! In some ways we'd all like to. But can't. We've got ourselves stuck with the truth...

"Never in so many words, no. But he's spending a lot of money on this, and could get killed doing it. Don't kid yourself, the death of that boy the other day, it hasn't just rolled off him. I know he's phoned the parents more than once. So sure, why wouldn't he want to get out of here, go off with his girl, back to work, build...

"Girl? Did I say that?...

"Ha-ha, no, I'm not going to tell you...

"Because you'd blab it all over the hospital, that's why...

"How the hell should I know? I don't spy on them...

"His tent? Are you crazy? Her tent, same thing. Next morning it would be all over the front pages, how with all his preaching he personally is living it up. You see how absurd he'd be? He's got to behave himself even if he didn't have the basic good taste to behave himself, which he does...

"Don't pump me, I'm not giving you any clues...

"All right, yes, she's good-looking. I didn't like her at first but Jess saw something in her and I'm changing my mind...

"Ha-ha, me? You're the only girl that turns me on, don't you know that? And mind, I'm just speculating about them. Don't blab it, I'm serious. The point is, the girl is another incentive to get out of here. He's said everything he possibly can. It's like he's gotten stuck...

"No, he does not love the limelight. Personally I think he hates it...

"The Gettysburg speech? You mean you believe that crap? Delusions of upstaging Lincoln?...

"All right, if you want to believe I'm naive, okay...

"All I'm saying is...

"Will you let me get a word in! The media got it all wrong, as usual. The reason he spoke there, in fact a few miles west of there, if accuracy means anything, was because it was our first camp after the boy got killed, and he had to answer whether the march would continue or not. It was the sniper who picked Gettysburg, not Jess...

"He _wanted_ to go to the funeral. But all it took was a minute to realize that he, the big celebrity, would be taking the focus off the parents' own loss. He stayed away out of respect! So leave it to a mob of other people to make a circus of it...

"Believe me, he feels more grief, more guilt...

"Cold and conceited? Only people who don't know him could think that...

"All I say is, if somebody came along who could do what he's doing better, I think he'd throw him the keys and say, 'Okay, pal, you drive it.' He's never satisfied that he is really doing this well, surprised he's doing it at all. He's only getting it started. It's like a... a higher responsibility, make of that what you can...

"Well, I think I know him a little better than you do. I see him as a reluctant prophet. In a great tradition, actually. Moses himself...

"All right, I don't expect to convince you...

"Yes, Olive, I will take care of myself...

"Yes, actually, pretty sleepy. Kiss the kids for me...

"Of course I do...

"Eight more days, ten at most, and we're out of here. Then I'm coming home and gonna jump right in a hot shower...

"Ha-ha. Then right into you. Exactly my intention...

"I feel the same way, sweetheart...

"Mm, yes, always. Mmm. Mmmuh. 'Bye."

# 8.

Maggie Deland awoke to a hard drumming on the fabric of her tent. She felt cramped, damp, and dirty. A strand of hair had trailed around her cheek and invaded her mouth. The noise of the downpour was too loud to be denied. Hoisting herself up, legs still tangled in her sleeping bag, she unzipped the tent flap and swore. Outside was the wettest, dreariest morning so far. Other tents sagged and glistened. Raindrops splashed and bounced in the grass, which was covered in mist.

Pulling a sleeve back, she put a hand out in the shower and wiped her face, then dried imperfectly. Her towel was still damp from last night. She desired never to see a tent again or a sleeping bag. She had bought these cheap ones from a vendor in a truck, having arrived six days earlier with the thought of bedding down alongside a certain man. That idea now embarrassed her. She pulled a brush through her hair without counting strokes, only to get the knots out; laced on her hikers, and from an awkward, kneeling position wormed into a poncho over the sweatshirt and jeans she had slept in. Then she crawled out and was drenched below the knees before she could fasten the flap.

Many were already up. Shapeless in hot-orange raingear, they hustled down towards a graveled area by the roadside. Under the awnings of food trucks, early risers huddled with steaming cups in their hands. Lines waited to use toilets on the flatbed trailers, one marked with a "Men" sign, the other, "Women." A television camera was filming the day's wretched start, perhaps live. Maggie turned her face. What if someone at home, or at the office, recognized her waiting in the pee line? Rainwater dripped from her poncho into the mud. Her hikers were soaked through. Everyone looked a mess, yet she heard no complaints; if anything, cheerful talk and laughter. Mentally she plotted the first bath she would enjoy in her apartment, her darling apartment: a 45-minute soak, with the Jacuzzi on. Then sleep. For ten hours. In her delicious bed.

"Morning, Maggie." A figure in an orange slicker waved to her, slogging toward the Men's.

"Morning..." She would have added his name but for the calling of attention; although in fact everyone observed a tactful anonymity at potty time. Even the media never shot him urinating (not that she knew about; maybe a checkout rag would surprise her with that, too). At times she fantasized about being caught up in a rampage of history: Athens against Sparta, the Crusades, the Civil War; corpses bloating on battlefields; the Jewish Holocaust, mass graves; stench, disease, filth, rats. Not for her, oh no! She would not have survived, she who required baths and changes of clothing, plates and silverware, flush toilets, soap and water.

"You've avoided me this morning," Jess Josephson said to her later.

'Have not. Deep in thought." (An excuse he always accepted; she was a writer!) They happened to meet by the baggage truck. Each had thrown a rolled-up tent, sleeping bag, and duffel onto the soggy pile, tagged like others for retrieval at the end of the day.

"I didn't like the idea of you getting rained on," he said.

"Ah, you thought of me comfortless in my lonely tent."

"I did - and do."

A suggestive tone in his voice pleased her. "Go to hell," she said. "You _like_ camping. The bugs, the damp, the hard earth."

"I can take it or leave it."

"Prefer a soft bed, do you? Clean sheets, carpet on the floor, a warm bathroom with dry towels?"

"Much."

She smiled. For once a camera wasn't on him. But she took care to stand at a distance. "Have you heard?" she said. "Your disciples took a vote last night - on whether you're laying me or not."

"Off with their heads!"

"We were found to be chaste, I understand, by the narrowest of margins."

"I'll take a narrow margin," he said.

"But is this one a compliment or an insult?"

He laughed and changed the subject. "I got a message from the governor of New Jersey, pleading with us not to extend the march." Maggie raised a brow. "Well and good," he said. "But how do you get to New York without crossing Jersey? And I've told everybody I'm going to New York."

_Fifteen more days!_ "How did you answer?"

"That I'll think it over. Have an opinion?"

She put up a hand. "Your show, mister."

He smiled, knowing well what her opinion would be but approving her restraint (she guessed) at keeping it to herself. "Come spend a little more time around my section of the line today," he said as they parted.

There was a magical moment when the march began. Maggie was near the front. The sun was well above the horizon. A celestial city of clouds daubed pink and gold stood high in the east where the showers had gone. Fields of corn and hay glistened. The light of the sun shone laterally off the land, dazzling to the eye. Maggie inhaled deeply. The air was tart and fragrant, washed clean. _No, I would not have missed this,_ she thought. Energetic now, she would like to have been among the first to step forward, to get the long, slow, heavy line moving. But in fact a pair of crowd assistants, changing as the day went on, took turns as point men. It was up to them to control the enthusiasts, who were either of the Rocky Mountain High type, too fast to be allowed to set the pace, or else such committed Jessites that they wanted to be the first to face the world, its jeers, cheers, slings and arrows. The earth yielded up its overnight soak; the air grew steamy. Maggie felt sweat under her packstraps. Facing the eastern glare, though shaded by the long visor of her cap, she reached around to her pack for a squeeze-bottle of sunscreen. _Never mind looking greasy,_ she thought; _I 'm saving this skin for you, mister._

And saving it was right! It astonished her that their nearest approaches to intimacy had been good-night kisses and hand-holding, the gestures of pre-modern adolescents, and with all the restraint on the boy's side, as if in some old-fashioned courtship, "to be sure of each other first." To her friends she might have lied: that yes, they had slept together and yes, it was "terrific," for fear they would suspect something odd about him. Yet strangely this restraint was satisfying and almost - after all her experience ( _too damned much_!) - purifying. Absurd in its way, of course...

"Hi, Maggie." She caught herself smiling absently. Two assistants passed her, walking towards the front. "Jude the Obscure is looking for you."

"For me?" She did not welcome conversation with Jess's hanger-on rabbi, who had mysteriously turned up again, so conspicuously Jewish, like a reproach. She brushed away gnats attracted by her sunscreen. Ahead she saw marchers bending to snap off an orange wildflower that grew along the roadside mile after mile, its spotted petals curled back like a horn. The botanical identification was ambiguous: Philadelphia lily or tiger lily, most people called it. They inserted the stems in their knapsacks, so that the flower bobbed erect like an orange flag from the motion of walking. Editorial cartoonists had picked up on the theme. They loved to caricature Jess moony-eyed with a lily sticking out of his ear.

She slowed her pace and allowed marchers to pass. Soon she was back among those who clustered around him, their numbers bulging into the traffic lane, an ever fluid group, new ones coming in, others dropping out to give someone else a chance to shake hands with the famous man, to raise questions, discuss and debate. Many members of clergy turned up to dispute with him as the cameras rolled, advancing before them. Maggie never overstayed. To have thought of herself as a "follower" repelled her. She was researching a book; that was cover enough. She walked at the fringe, close enough to listen, to exchange an occasional glance, no more. The result was that their times alone, really alone, took on a special sweetness; usually late, after the last cameras and microphones had left the camp; moments by a pasture fence, arms around each other's waists, mingled breath, assurances, kisses.

Now a young couple was hiking beside him bending his ear, the man with a two-year-old girl in a papoose rig on his back, the wife with an even younger infant slung in front. She talked angrily; Maggie listened. A minister had told her that Jess was supposed to have voiced the opinion that "God doesn't care if we kill off the handicapped - just kill them for being too much trouble!" And her own baby had Down Syndrome. Cameras zoomed in on the poor thing she carried; on her tears, and Jess's stricken look.

"I never said it, never thought it," he said. Misquotations were always being thrown up to him. "People's lives aren't for our convenience," he said. "Never kill anyone - never."

What about in war then, or in self-defense, a half-dozen wanted to know. That was how it was in the central group: a debating society on the hoof, never mind that he resisted the role of public moralist, insisting that he did not have all the answers. Every hour someone tried to pin him down on abortion, legalization of drugs, war in the Middle East, euthanasia. _You_ decide issues like that, he would say. It's a democracy; vote on it. But yes, he would fight in a war, he said, a just war. What do you mean by "just," others shouted, and on and on. If he opposed killing, was he also against capital punishment, every stated opinion entangling him in others? Maggie marveled at his endurance, his tolerance, cameras constantly on him (including one, she was nauseated to hear, assigned to catch the priceless moment, if it came, of his getting shot! No more reliance on a home movie as with the Kennedy assassination, oh no).

"What do you think about gay people?" she heard. The questioner was a young man in tight black shorts, his eyes large and dark as a harem girl's, set off (Maggie would have sworn) with shadow. A friend was with him, prematurely bald, wearing gold necklaces.

"Hey, I don't say what I think about everything," Josephson said. "I don't _know_ what I think about everything." Probably he would have preferred being rid of them. (But Mary Mulcahy had told Maggie that as long as she had known him, he seemed never to encounter anyone he would turn away from. This was one reason why, with no pretensions on his part, people sought him out as a kind of healer, a Saint Francis of social lepers.)

The homosexual persisted. "I'm gay, my partner is gay, we've always been attracted to boys and men. What do you think, are we part of God's universe or what?" _And this on camera,_ thought Maggie. Maybe it was _because_ of the cameras, always floating in front like spots before the eyes. (A TV friend had once told her he meant to apply to the Guinness Book for the record of most miles walking backwards shooting people walking forwards.)

"Yep," Josephson said, "you're part of the universe."

"Part of God's plan then? Homosexuality?"

"Well, I don't know about the plan."

"Why not? You claim to speak for God."

"I do not." Everyone chimed in on that. He never made any such claim; on the contrary, denying that any person or institution _could_ speak for God. "What I'm saying is: here's the universe and God created it. We should draw conclusions from that."

"Well, his universe included homosexuality," said the boy with girl's eyes. "The conclusion I draw is, gays are part of the plan."

Others groaned in sympathy with Jess, but to him this was only fair. If there was a flaw in his ideas, he wanted to know. He reminded Maggie of a lion nipped by a jackal, and by new jackals all day long. _How does he put up with it?_ Just then an open convertible rolled past, horn blowing. A half-dozen teenagers yelled, "Hey, Jess! Way to go, Jess!" - cruising the celebrity. Cars and trucks were always giving friendly toots in passing. Or unfriendly. He waved and smiled. "You could say murder is part of the universe, too," he said. "Wars, famines, genocides. But part of the plan? I wouldn't think so. Yet they're here. We've got to deal with them."

"Deal with me then," Girl Eyes snapped back. "I'm gay and always have been. What do I do, shoot myself?"

The cameras grew more interested. They reminded Maggie of birds of prey, animated by the scent of flesh. This might be their best meal today. A reporter called out, "What's your name?" and the boy gave it. _Address and phone number, too?_ Maggie wondered. That night on the tube, he and his partner could easily be called "Josephson followers," the story could be played that way. Poor Mary Mulcahy puffed to keep up; the look on her face was not happy.

"Or do I go on living," Girl Eyes sneered, "as a pervert?"

"You have to make up your mind about that," said Jess.

"I have and I am."

"But did you start at the right place? With an idea of God?" (A snort of contempt: ignored.) "God made the universe; we have our lives to make. That's where I'd start."

"Easy enough for you to say!" the other suddenly broke out. His eyes were tearful (or else he had a talent for the stage). His friend put an arm around him. Cameras snuggled in. "Some things are given!" he said. "My sexuality is a given, as yours is. Imbedded in me, like my bones, my skin. Should I deny half my life? While you, Mr. Handsome, with a different set of givens, don't have to deny yourself anything?"

It _is_ unfair, thought Maggie. This was a cry of pain at the injustice of things, like a wheelchair case crying out, "Goddamn your legs, look at me!" Jess said nothing; he nodded and kept walking, not away from the man but pondering the point. Ahead, marchers stretched two hundred yards and more, three and four abreast on the highway shoulder, sunhats, backpacks, and orange lilies bobbing. It had grown hot; the line was climbing a long, shallow rise, and when a puff of cloud passed over, bringing a moment's shade, there were audible sighs. From the crest more farmland rolled away, an endless supply, reeling up out of the horizon, green and gold to burning distances. Cows grazed near patches of trees, outcrops of rock, yards, barns, silos, houses; and a quarter-mile farther on, other islands of barn, house, and trees, no family too far from its neighbors nor too close. The world seemed unchangingly right, to be enjoyed. _Yet here are these two,_ Maggie thought, _dragging us back to the incurable unfairness of things._

"Answer the young man, Jess," said a voice to the right. "He threw you an easy one."

"Welcome, Jeremy, we've missed you," Josephson said with a wave. "Reverend Kirk, everybody. Organizer of the Truth Squad in person."

The feisty one loved being recognized. He tipped his hat, a summer Panama that only clergy seemed to wear anymore. With his Roman collar he had on a short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, and knapsack. He must have planned to hike all day. "Moral relativists like you, Jess, have to go into a deep brown study over questions like this. The church gives answers people can stand on, straight out."

"Well, if the answer is straight out, let's hear it, Jeremy."

"Unequivocally. What you do is wrong, young men. A hundred percent wrong. The Lord abominates it."

Girl Eyes sneered and Gold Chains said, "Oh yeah? You know that, I suppose."

"He tells us so," said Kirk. "Makes no bones about it. Do you want citations from Scripture? The only possible advice is stop. Stop now. And pray for the strength."

_But answers like that don 't cut it anymore,_ Maggie Deland thought. _Can you tell someone dying of thirst, Give up water?_ A thousand people weren't on the road to learn that moral issues can be settled by stating what is abominable to God, according to men.

"Let me take a crack," Jess Josephson said. Maggie caught a worried glance from Mary Mulcahy. _You won 't make any friends. Leave this one alone._ Jess began by saying he had used to be as certain as anyone that homosexuality was wrong, dead wrong, assuming people were that way by choice. But what if there were no choice? He could not judge that, having never walked in those shoes.

Kirk pounced. "You're misapplying Hillel's standard!" he said, a touch too proud of referencing a rabbi, accurately or not. "All men can't walk in all shoes. God saw that before you did, Jess. That's why He helps us out, gives us a rule."

"But if there's no choice, morality comes down only to self-denial."

"If you insist on stating it as a negative," Kirk said.

"But I don't like telling somebody else to deny what I don't have to deny," Jess said. "I never had to make such a choice. Neither did you, Jeremy. By what act of character did you and I discover we liked girls?" There were chuckles and the churchman momentarily seemed checked. "It's just the fortunate way we turned out," said Jess. "If someone else is different, has more self-controlling to do, does that make me more moral? Or did I just get off easy?"

"Damn right!" said the little homosexual.

"Jess, Jess, the pit opens wide and you don't see it," Kirk said, and Maggie also thought _no, he doesn 't quite have it... This would allow anything._

"What I see," Josephson said, "is religion making judgments by dogma, without knowing the facts. Seems to me we need a little science here. What if homosexuality is..." He groped. "...A psychological response to overpopulation... a chemical imbalance... genetic? As well blame someone for having diabetes."

"I do blame someone for diabetes and not doing his best to control it," said Kirk.

"Don't treat us like a disease," said Girl Eyes.

But then Jess gave him a look that reminded Maggie of a doctor's forced to break bad news. "I'm sorry," he said, "I may not be right on the morality but to my mind it is a kind of... affliction."

"Well goddamn you then!" the other cried. Everyone jumped except Jess. What if the boy had had a gun or a knife? Just that suddenly might violence break out. "From you I expected more compassion."

"And you've got my compassion, and most people's," Jess said. "But what you want is to be told you're okay. And in all honesty I can't tell you that. I don't think homosexuality is okay."

_Right,_ thought Maggie, _of course he has to draw that line. And yet if he 's not sure on the morality, how can any line be drawn?_ Everyone in the knot of marchers around him seemed as curious as the two gays were. He answered in this way: When a baby is born, does anyone hope it grows up homosexual? Of course not. Why? Because we want life to reach its "full potential as a human being." That is the natural goal. And that, to him, implied attachment to the opposite sex; completion; adulthood. "The two halves of the human race have got to find each other," he said. "Instinctively it's the way."

Uproar! Names were shouted... Michelangelo, Tchaikowsky. Weren't they fully developed as human beings? The gay couple laughed. Jess was talking esthetics, preference, not morals. "Confusion, confusion, if there is no Supreme Law!" wailed Jeremy Kirk. The cameras gorged on it, darting this way and that, catching agitated faces, waving hands. Who knew how the footage would play?

But meanwhile... progress. The half-mile procession moved along. Traffic went past. Troopers rode by on motorcycles at slow speed shooing stragglers onto the highway shoulder (and winking at the 500-marcher limit).

When Jess could reply, he said he felt certain that Tennessee Williams, Cole Porter and the rest surely would have preferred normal manhood. Which made someone shout, "What's normal?" Which stirred more groans. The body language and exclamations of nearly everyone told Maggie they knew very well what normal was. _It 's what nine out of ten reasonable people say is normal,_ she thought. _And don 't ask what reasonable is; you'll never get a hundred percent._

And although not satisfied with this formulation either, she could see that Jess's base of morality was indeed in God, not by command but by the shaping of the human mind across the long path of evolution from the First Cause. An imperfect standard, yes, unreliable from age to age, culture to culture... _but what else is there?_ Hadn't Jess, in their interview months ago, attributed his crusade to promptings of conscience? It was what denied him release even now. Every desire for happiness, safety, and sense must be telling him to quit; quit being shot at, quit throwing money away, grab his girlfriend and get out of there. She found it maddening (but maddeningly hopeful, too) that God might still take a hand through whatever chamber of the mind contains the conscience. _Too thin,_ she thought, _the connection to God stretches out too thin. To rely on it will always be uncertain, a risk and a struggle. And what of the 'consciences' of monsters? How 'right' a Hitler must have thought he was, a Stalin._

"Pardon me, you are deep in thought," said Judah Iskaritz. Hours had passed; it was mid-afternoon, and she was walking far towards the rear.

"No, no. I don't mind talking, really." But her cheeks felt hot (that childish blush!) and she had the feeling that others stared at them. It was uncomfortable to be seen conversing with so blatant a Jew. Like having a black man walk beside her in town, even a respected colleague; did people think they slept together?

"I came looking for you," the rabbi said. "It's hard to find a moment to speak privately."

She felt alarm, sensing the impossible man harbored a lust for her, sublimated in wistful gazing. She had inadvertently touched his arm once, and he recoiled as if scalded. Now, gawky and stoop-shouldered, he shifted the straps of his knapsack the way he adjusted the prayer shawl he wore during his embarrassing morning devotions.

"What would you like to discuss?" she said.

"Jess."

"Well?"

"And your feelings towards him."

"Ah, out of bounds, I'm afraid."

"That is, if you truly love him and wish the best for him."

"Excuse me, Judah, but don't you agree, that would be our business?"

"Ordinarily, yes. Not now. It's the world's business."

"Oh, fuck the world!" She said it to shock him, to get him away, but she was not prepared for how it did shock him. His face fell and she could hear him thinking: _my friend - and this whore._

"I am speaking to you," he said carefully, "as one who has the highest admiration for Jess. I love Jess." Her brow went up, at which he frowned anew. "Oh, not in the way you're thinking. Not that at all. As a brother, and a Jew. Maybe the greatest Jew of our time."

She laughed. "Jess?"

"He has it in him to be."

"Then I don't think you've been listening very carefully."

"Or is it that I hear overtones that escape you?"

"All right, don't be cryptic. Say what's on your mind."

"No, the time is wrong. You are not receptive."

Now her curiosity was piqued. She disliked cat and mouse. "I'm well aware you don't like me," she said.

Which threw him off balance. "Don't like you? Why not?"

She made a blind cast. "You know goddamn well why."

"I have no reason. You're very intelligent... concerned for Jess..."

"Because I'm a _shiksa._ " His laugh was like a dog's bark. "Isn't that your demeaning word for a Gentile woman?"

"There's nothing demeaning about it. It means just that: a woman not Jewish. What could be demeaning in a statement of fact?"

"Then why did you laugh when I said it?"

"To hear you say it. It sounds funny from... a _shiksa._ "

"It's demeaning. Be honest. It means an easy lay."

"No!"

"Someone not good enough to marry."

"Wrong. Unfair. Not in that sense at all... of being not good enough." He frowned. The charge of snobbery seemed to wound him, whose people had been so often on the receiving end. "The point is, Jews should marry Jews. This has to do with survival of the people and the faith. It's not a matter of not being good enough, certainly not."

"But you would oppose me as the... wife of a Jew?"

"Conversion is possible..."

"But I can tell you don't like the idea."

"I say it's possible. But it's not a short or easy process. And for what? Only to marry? It should involve more: a true religious conviction. That's very rare."

"Could you convert me, Judah? Could you make me a Jew?"

"Now you're making light. It's not funny."

"True," she said. "Forgive me. I don't want to be a Jew. I don't want to be anything. I haven't set foot in church for I don't know how long, except for weddings and funerals."

"You don't believe in God?"

"Not in the conventional way, no. But yes, I suppose, in Jess's way. God as Creator."

He grunted. "In your own image."

"How do you mean that?"

"You are a creative person, a writer. Jess also, a builder. It pleases both of you that God should be similar."

"But I notice you excuse yourself. Don't you also project?"

"Not me." Lowering his chin, he put up a hand with a small, dodging shrug so immemorially Jewish and laced with comic weariness, she sensed that if a thousand rabbis were to hail her as a true daughter of the faith, Judaism in her would never be more than a veneer, a change of hairdo, compared to this man's lifelong saturation. "No, ma'am," he said, "I'm too aware of the dangers. Subjectivity. Narcissism. Therefore I take the only safe way, the written law. I don't care to construct some petty formulation of my own."

"Then with your mind so comfortably closed, why the hell do you hang about here?"

He barked his short laugh and took a breath as their segment of the line crossed a rise in the road from which golden fields followed contours of the land downward and to the right. He murmured something, a Hebrew blessing for nature's glory perhaps. "I am covering the story," he said. "Why do _you_ hang about?" He stared shrewdly at her.

"Also the story."

He snorted as if to say tell him another. "I happen to have a further reason..." he said with hesitation, for fear of sounding foolish. "... To help in my small way to shield him. I didn't like him getting shot at... That boy who was killed. I feel I owe him..."

"You owe him? For what?"

He answered with what she sensed was an evasion, a rationalization. "Why... a total refuting of all his nonsense. Hoping he'll return to his senses. I mean to test Jessism against Torah, word for word, and to show him, and my readers, how one hundred percent wrong he is."

"And this is loving Jess? Being a friend?"

"I am his friend and he knows it."

"With friends like you..."

"I love his courage, his integrity," the rabbi said. "I love how closely he approaches the ideal of what a man and a Jew should be."

"Excuse me, Judah, you sound awfully mixed up to me."

"More than Jess? Talk about mixed up. On God as Creator, the limited God he will stipulate to, he is the most persuasive I have ever heard. I don't see how atheism could stand against him."

"Ah, but not in seven days, Judah."

The rabbi rolled his eyes. "We'll let that pass. In time even the wisest of our wise will come to terms with geology."

"Jess will force them. And others too."

"Jess could _help_ them. He is the one who could bring us together."

"You mean everyone, or just...?"

"The Jews!" he said. "No Gentile - excuse me - could possibly be aware of how divided we are. 'The Jews think this, the Jews say that, how will the Jewish vote go?' They have it all wrong. As if the Rabin assassination, the dozens of political parties of Israel, weren't clues. You should only know how at each other's throats we are. What hateful divisions. So dangerous for a vulnerable people. Insane in fact."

"Oh Judah, Jess's concerns are broader than that."

"They're not! He's a Jew! I know how he suffers. You don't."

"Suffers?"

"For his people. For what he is doing to us."

"To the Jews only?"

But at that moment the rabbi raised his head, listening. Maggie became aware of a stir among nearby marchers. "What's wrong?" she said. _Another shooting! Jess?_ But Judah Iskaritz lunged away, abruptly leaving her. He pushed ahead, towards the center of the line. She tugged at the shoulder of a man in front, who had radio earphones on.

"A barn got burned down," the fellow said. "Where we camped two nights ago."

She cursed to herself and walked faster towards the central cluster of cameras. Before she reached there the first report, of arson at a farm thirty miles back, near Lancaster, was rapidly followed. Barns also had been torched at two other tenting grounds. The message to farmers was clear.

"Want a word for it? _Numbskullduggery,_ " one of the boys, Si Pickering, remarked to Maggie as the group halted at a "roadside rest" - shade trees and a few picnic tables beside the highway - for a hurried press briefing. "They never learn. The stupider they fight him the more openings they give him. He's a counter-puncher."

Hundreds gathered around and cheered the hero's predictable announcement: "Of course the march goes on."

"What are your feelings, Jess?" a reporter asked.

"Outrage. Disgust. It's no way to win an argument."

"How about the loss to the farmers?"

"I assume they're insured. If not, we'll do what we can to help. I'm sure neighbors will help, too. Good people around here."

"You're still a few days from Philadelphia. What if nobody will rent campgrounds to you now?"

He shrugged. "We'll see."

When the line started moving again, Maggie passed a radio reporter broadcasting, live, that "Jess's crusaders are marching off into the sunset - _wrong, dummie, we 're going east!_ -- "with lilies in their packs, smiles on their faces, and no assurance of rest but boundless faith in their leader." _It 's not faith in him,_ she thought, _he doesn 't give a damn about faith in him, but by all means personalize it. It is the media's function. Don't let us get bored. Millions of commuters will listen to car radios wondering where we will spend the night. Suspense! Entertainment! Yet it serves his purpose._

At four in the afternoon Peter Winslow returned from fruitless scouting. No property owner within reasonable distance would rent a place to camp. "They're afraid of arson, and who can blame them?" he said into microphones. This was another perverse success. The crowd had swollen during the afternoon to at least 3,000, stimulated by radio and television, although the temperature had climbed to the nineties and heat waves quivered over the fields. Bandanas and sweat bands appeared on marchers' heads. People waved and smiled at network cameras moving past on truck flatbeds.

Josephson, with a can of soda in hand, kept talking to all comers, apparently unconcerned about the coming night. Maggie caught a few words he had with a famous evangelist, a national figure, sometime adviser to presidents, who told him it was "perversely inconsistent" to discount heaven because he could not visualize its joys. "You admit that our own limited minds would not have been able to create a tree, Jess. Or a bird, mountains, oceans. We've got no conception of the timeless peace of God and Jesus. Time is a very earthbound thing. Why not leave yourself open to the astonishment of heaven?"

"Right, take it on the word of preachers and theologians," Josephson replied, although with respect. "It keeps coming back to that, doesn't it? God gave us minds to think, but if something makes no sense, believe anyway."

An hour later it was a Catholic priest from a college near Philadelphia, pressing a business card in his hand. "The Hebrew faith failed to satisfy you, Jess, as it did also our Lord - I've no fault to find with that. But you jumped clear across Christianity to deism. Come give us a look." Maggie Deland smiled, remembering something Mary Mulcahy had told her: that the one thing Jess dreaded on the march was crossing a stream; someone was bound to offer him baptism.

Toward the end of the day came a white-haired minister, a Reverend Sagel. He was club-footed and used a cane, hobbling along with a cross bouncing on a chain around his neck. Jess slowed his own gait to let the old man keep up, and the entire line decelerated. The heat and humidity of the day eased. Clouds piled up like Himalayas in the east, but without threat of storm: pink cloud mountains with whirls of blue and white beyond, like a vision of an infinitely climbable heaven.

The Rev. Mr. Sagel was inspired to take the tack that Jess was making his way towards Christ! "The church needs a kick in the pants now and then," he said. "I believe God loves the rebel who finds him by the stony path." He saw an analogy in the gravel of the highway berm, seemed elated that so many were marching in belief of a goal fine and desirable but with no assurance of rest.

The front of the line entered the western outskirts of a sizable town. Seven o'clock newscasts on hand-held radios reported "a crisis in the Josephson ranks." Into view came an orange brick church surrounded by dark trees in a spacious yard adjoined by a cemetery, with gravestones blackened and eroded by age. A look of inspiration lighted the visage of Pastor Sagel. He marveled that his ill-matched legs had carried him several miles.

"Jess," he said, "this is my church! If your people aren't superstitious about sleeping by a graveyard, in the spirit of Christian charity you are welcome to rest here." And he smiled as if despite his guest's own error of thought, the Lord was indeed forgiving - and had provided.

# 9.

_Gonna get me some Jew pussy tonight for sure! Lots o ' gash walkin' around that camp, and gonna be a hot time before this night is over. I mean there ain't no way to hold me back, much less guys like Needle and Bull. Christ, if they run into that Josephsteen before somebody sweet n' gentle like me does, ha ha, his brains are gonna be all over the place... Christ, I gotta take a leak again! What I get for drinkin' twelve beers before we come out here, I counted 'em. Well, what can you do if you're waitin' till midnight before you make your move? Okay, do it. Jeez! Louder than Niagara Falls! Naw, it's only landing in grass, man. And here's a promise, old buddy: you're gonna get some use pretty soon now. All these gals are whores, what I hear. Josephsteen takes his pick every night. Well he's in for a shock tonight, ain't he? It's the friggin' insult that's so disgusting. These Jews on church propitty! Ain't that givin' ya the finger in y'r face? We made a mistake nobody bringin' guns. Just beat some sense into 'em with their own ball bats. Let 'em put that on the news tomorra! Christians get a little o' their own back! About time somebody did it, people'd say. An' that miserable excuse for a preacher back there on the teevee in the bar, Rev'nd Sagebrush or whatever his name was, sayin' he let them in the churchyard outta Christian charity. Who's he think he's kidding? Josephsteen slipped him a few thousand, you c'n bet... Jeez, it's getting' cold, man. Should've stayed in town till the last minute. More guys wouldda showed up, then we could overwhelm 'em instead o' bein' just eight, freezin' our asses. 'Course Bull and Needle are worth two each. I wouldn't want Needle comin' at me with no Louieville Slugger... Look at 'em over there, while I'm shivering, them sittin' in front o' the tents with the girls. Christ, if the kikes don't have it all their way! They own the friggin' country. Every day the Christian gets froze out a little more. Soon there won't be nothin' left for us in the United States of Amerikike - ha ha, wonder if anybody ever thought o' that - and 'stead o' July Fourth it'd be Young Kipper, an' for anybody to get a job he'd have to be circusized. Wanna go to work? Git your dick up here on the operating table... Well now, looka that pretty couple walkin' this way. What's he, a rabbi or something? Skinny bastard with a beard and beanie on his head, holdin' a bat. Well, I'm gonna take that right offa you, Your Honor. But ooh man, dja see that? The girl with him got in front o' the light for a second, somebody musta shined a flashlight back there, and it come through her dress. Jeez, what a body! Can't see what kinda titties you got in this light but I bet they're 'ceptable. Hee hee. Remember Bull sayin' that. How he picked up this gal hitchhikin' his bike one day, and before they got three miles he pulls her into a field kickin' and scratchin' an' leaves her there minus a few teeth an' Needle asks afterward how she was for a piece o' tail an' he says, 'Restless. But 'ceptable.' Well, you look 'ceptable to me, lady. So just keep talkin' to yer Jew rabbi an' watch me take that bat right off 'im, pussy-wussy..._

_***_

Maggie Deland almost collided with Judah Iskaritz. He stepped from behind a tree with a bat. He was on sentry duty this night. "What are you wandering about for?" he said. "I almost brained you."

"You look very formidable with that," she said.

He gave a grunt. "You wish to continue our chat?"

"Oh..." she said absently, "why not?" In fact, she had been strolling without purpose around the perimeter while Jess was occupied being friendly to people. A gust of wind stirred the trees. She drew her jacket around her. With only lanterns and flashlights, no campfires among the tents, and fewer tents than usual, she found the camp unnervingly cheerless. It had been set up at the rear of the church property on a small rise above the graveyard. They were on the edge of a town that seemed to become a darker dark after nightfall, perhaps an unfriendly town despite its darling old minister, a chilly and vulnerable situation. Maggie's legs were goose-pimpled in the thin dress she had bought at a shop along the road, and bought only that Jess might see her in one. Jeans and a sweatshirt would be more sensible, but she felt lazy to make the change in her cramped tent. Passing headlights sent shadows of gravestones dancing over the trees. Once she heard a rustling that she thought might be made by a raccoon, but then a string of profanity and a liquid sound, and she hurried on. _Why would any of the men break a trivial rule like that?_ she thought. _The john trucks were close enough._

Judah Iskaritz said, "You admitted hanging about for love of Jess."

"I said no such thing."

"... And I admitted hanging about in hopes of keeping him for the Jews."

"You're way ahead of me, my friend. And what's this shit about keeping him for the Jews?"

He scowled in the moonlight. "How is it that a woman of intelligence and breeding can think she is any way enhanced by foul language? That's a mystery to me."

"Don't moralize, Rabbi. Your views and mine are very far apart."

"Are they, Maggie? Don't we both have the highest opinion of Jess?" She sniffed. _These quicksilver Jewish minds!_ "He is the real thing," Judah went on. "A good man, trying to make a personal connection to God. What a shame that he should be wrong by this much." He raised a thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. "But also by a thousand miles."

"That sounds very... Talmudic. Is that the word?" she said.

"If we could bridge the inch, the miles would be nothing. If he could be coaxed, kicked, clubbed, whatever it takes, across that inch, what a prize for Judaism!"

"Is that what you have in mind, Judah? Then go ahead and do it."

"I don't say me. I don't say I have the gift. But if our faith can't keep such a man as Jess..."

"It can't," she said.

"He is so much what we need! _That close_ to a true prophet! Risen not from the rabbis, the schools - look at me, what could I ever lead? - but a practical man of affairs, a man people look up to, to open the mind of the world, the mind of Judaism, too, to get us out of these Old World garments and habits, this in-breeding and exclusivity. To give Judaism again to mankind, to all peoples."

"Wait, let me understand this," Maggie said. "Your hope is that he will make the world more Jewish?"

"If you put it that way."

"You're crazy. You've got him all wrong."

"Maybe. Perhaps. I may have him all wrong." In the light of the half-moon Judah studied her as one in a position to judge, and whose judgment deserved respect. "But I ask myself, could it be that after the catastrophes of the past century the Almighty has stirred Himself for a new awakening of faith, and chosen as His instrument this remarkable Jew, whose gifts, you will admit, are unexpected, astonishing, hardly to be believed?"

Maggie felt a touch of awe. This man's dream for Jess was higher than her own. What had any woman to offer compared to a mission from Yahweh of the Hebrews, commanding across the centuries? "But Judah," she said, "if God works in that way, looks down into the world and chooses instruments for his bidding, then isn't Jess's concept that much more false? God does take a hand?"

"But you don't see how close he is!"

They stood in an open space under old trees, the flashlights and lanterns of camp behind them. The rabbi seemed to have forgotten the duties of sentry; the bat rested idly on his shoulder.

"Not close at all!" said Maggie. "A hundred and eighty degrees off. There's no way in the world that people would follow him as a Jew. It's precisely because he is so _un-Jewish. "_

"Which is his charm for you too, I suppose."

"Remarks like that... Look, I'm speaking to you frankly, realistically."

"And I to you. Give me your opinion, Maggie, your _frank_ opinion - how much longer does he have to live?"

"Ah, don't pull that on me."

"But you're the one who is talking realism. I'm asking you a simple question. How long will the bigots and idiots let him live, this fellow you're in love with? You must have thought about it."

"I'm aware... we're both aware..."

"No you're not! Else you'd stop him. He'll be lucky to last another week." ( _True,_ she thought.) "People have shot at him! And will again. Or a bomb next time and get all of us. They killed a marcher, they're burning barns, have you noticed? Anyone in line could step right up and be a front-page hero for Christianity, God forbid. Or for Islam."

"Stop - please!"

"I can't, you can! Tell him it's either you or this continuing madness. Give it up now or forget about ever having you."

She had to shake her head. "I believe he'd choose this."

"I believe you'd rather he would! Better he go on with this mischief _that will end in his death_ , than your media hero step down from his pedestal."

"Don't, Judah. That's too unfair." Tears stung her eyes.

"Maggie, Maggie, beautiful Maggie," he said with a sudden tenderness. "Don't you see how much you and I want the same thing for Jess? That he live! You for a husband, father of your children. I for a leader of Jews."

"But Judah..."

"He is unmistakable! A new David! Can I let him die worthlessly? Become a martyr to a false cause? Which he surely will, Maggie."

"What can anyone do?"

"Save him! Get him to quit at all costs! We can fight over him later - you for a husband, I for my Jew."

"But he's not trying to bring an idea only to the Jews."

"No matter. That's not today's question. Today, save him! Whatever a woman can give, or refuse..." She recoiled as if stung. He saw it. "Forgive me, I'm at wit's end," he pleaded. "I don't know what's between you and don't want to know. I only know if he dies in this cause, he advances it. Draws millions to it who might otherwise be faithful. Shall it happen again?"

"Again?"

"As with Jesus! What was he? A local radical. So let him talk! He'll talk himself out. Instead what did they do, my genius forbears? Martyred him! And now shall we repeat the stupidity? _Ha-Shem_ would say: Judah, I counted on you. Is this why I gave you brains? Will you spread this heresy in a thousand directions or stop it, even to putting your own body before the next bullet?"

"You would do that?" said Maggie.

"Yes! That is... I hope I would have the courage. What is my death? Nothing. His ruins the world." The rabbi's eyes glittered.

She felt awed, confused, near panic. "I have to think."

His tone softened. "Maggie, he has said everything ten times over. He is sick of hearing it himself. He wants to go back to normal life, wants to build houses, wants _you_ , beautiful Maggie. Let him out .."

He was interrupted by a sound - close! - a footfall, a grunt of effort. His bat was seized, pulled away. Maggie saw the bat go up, Judah recoiling, a hulking, horrible boy, his head shaved except for the crest of a fake Indian, the degenerate of every woman's fears. But the boy was not focused on her, rather on the Jew. A flash from a fitness class came to her - _quick, don 't think! -_ and she jabbed two fingers at the boy's eyes. They felt rubbery, egglike. A cry broke from him. The bat fell from his hands. She kicked at his shins but felt that she lacked force, that her movements were detached from her. Yet he went down, howling. She saw Judah Iskaritz's face, blanched in moonlight, as he lunged for the fallen weapon. She tried to scream. The sound seemed to come out insufficiently, forced, like a moan from a nightmare - "Jess!"

A noise caused Dan Greenspan on the other side of the camp to tighten his grip, or he would have lost his weapon at once. Wrenched halfway around, he looked into the face of a teenage boy, shorter than he but stronger, and crazed, with a shaved head; only a T-shirt covered his torso. "Fuckin' Jew nigger!" he said. Greenspan held on by reflex. His attacker had the bat by the upper, more awkward, grip, but he jerked and pulled while kicking toward the sentry's groin. They resembled boys in a peasant dance, some ritual of phallic supremacy. Then Greenspan's hands were empty and he threw himself forward, to ram his head in the other's belly, but something hard came down behind his ear...

Si Pickering saw a darting shadow and at the same moment heard a woman's voice screaming Jess's name across the camp. Immediately he was seized in a headlock. He twisted. Embers from his pipe sprayed the face of whoever had grabbed him. With a yelp the attacker let go, and Pickering's bat slapped down on his elbow. He groaned and stumbled backwards. Pickering whirled and shouted, "Alarm!"

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" the Rev. Jeremy Kirk had been telling stubborn Jessites across a circle of lantern light. "If all humanity at this moment - now - were to declare faith in Jesus in a single voice, can anyone doubt that a better world would be instantly upon us? Universal peace! The True Way, which the world has resisted for two thousand years, and resists yet? We'd be there, people! Arrived!"

The air was rent by a scream. Heads snapped around. "Jesus!" said Peter Winslow. He jumped to his feet, picked up a lantern, and ran towards the cry. Three other men sprang to follow. Kirk also seized a lantern. "Women stay here!" he said, with no authority other than centuries of tradition. But the flicker of his lamp was worse than useless. It cast reddish glares and shadows, half-blinding him. Shouts were flying in every direction. He had no idea where he might be needed. Then he was struck between the shoulders. He went down; the lamp flew from his hand, shattered, its glare lingering on his retinas. Pain burned his spine. Had he been hit by a Josephson lad? Inconceivable. He turned on the ground. Someone loomed overhead with a club, shrieking obscenities. "I'm a minister," he gasped. He rolled desperately as the weapon descended, missing him, but in fact not aiming at him but at the dome of a tent; its frame buckled; he heard a scream. The maniac lashed at other tents, exhorting himself to "break fuckin' heads, break fuckin' heads!" Kirk rose to one knee. "Stop!" he said as the other flailed about. The churchman tried to stand up, fell again, and dragged himself away crablike in humiliation on his buttocks, kicking at turf. By lantern light he had a nightmarish vision of savages batting at tents and heard outcries. _What can I do?_ he said miserably to himself. To his left he saw two men, each with a club, running towards one of the intruders, who swung back recklessly, but a bat landed on his shoulder and he dropped his own. _Good! Brain him!_ was the Christian's thought. His own assailant charged in the direction of the melee but tripped between tents as if swallowed by hell. Kirk found he could stand, which meant his spine was unbroken. _Thank God!_ The thought of cowering at the edges of battle while skinheads attacked - _women defenseless! -_ was unbearable. He stumbled about with no plan, no weapon.

Mary Mulcahy had fallen in a doze, her feet elevated on a rolled-up sleeping bag. The position felt good. She wondered if Harry would like her legs... still too fat... She seemed to have napped only a moment when the dome of her tent buckled. Nylon slapped her cheek, and the plastic frame rebounded. A second blow collapsed it; something heavy struck her upraised hand. A fallen tree? Lightning? Tons of lumber might come crashing down; she cried out, "Jesus Mary!" Then she heard loud voices. Punching at the nylon floating about her (where the _hell_ was that zipper?) groping, clawing, she found the damned thing, and it stuck! She felt suffocated, jiggling the zipper in its track, she forced it up halfway. A stranger was swearing overhead, battering the tent next to hers. His head was shaved; an earring glittered as he thrashed about. Something caught his attention. He started towards it and would have gone directly past her. Barely thinking, she thrust a hand in his path. He tripped and went down. She heard a thwack, a groan. _Smack the son of a bitch again!_ she thought, and tore at the zipper of her tent.

"Maggie," said Jess Josephson under a tree just off the edge of the camp.

She fell into his arms. "Thank God it's you."

"Are you hurt?"

"No. He is." She motioned at a boy with an Indian crest rocking on the ground, moaning and alternately rubbing his eyes and legs.

"Stay with him. Take this." Jess put a stone the size of a fist in her hand. "Smack him if he makes trouble. They're in the camp and we've got to get them out. Give me that." He reached for the bat in the hands of Judah Iskaritz, who stood mortified at having lost the weapon and regained it only by a woman's presence of mind.

"No," the disgraced one held back. "Let me."

They stared at each other. "Good man," Jess said. "Stick with me." And he and Judah moved towards the camp, crouching low.

Maggie lost sight of them. The wretch at her feet, though fallen and in pain, seemed dangerous still, a wounded animal. "You try one thing," she half screamed, "I'll kick you so hard you'll never get up!"

Needle Bangum nudged his motorcycle against a tilted grave marker. "Easy," he cautioned himself. His front tire scraped on the stone, which was okay; only rubber, but he wanted no nicks on the fender. His bike was going to come out of this without a scratch. In style! Bloodstains maybe, but not a scratch, not like that time he ran down a biker who called him a cocksucker and his Harley got dented. Now he felt a yielding before the machine's thrust. The blackened grave marker, a relic of the 1840s, was only two inches thick and rotted below ground. It broke and fell over; his bike rolled across it. "Shitstone!" he spat and put his tire against another. "Serve ya right, rentin' fer Jew money." The quiet action of his machine pleased Needle Bangum (not his real name; he had chosen it to advertise what a mean sumbitch he could be to anybody who so much as looked cross-eyed at him). He also could have made noise enough to bust eardrums into the next county if he'd o' wanted. But tonight the strategy was quiet. An' damned if ol' Harl couldn't purr softer than a broad bein' licked. If there was one thing Needle was good at, aside from a fight and a fuck, it was strategy. Who else couldda organized a pack o' beer-soaked cornholers such as he was leadin' tonight to surround the Hebes' camp without so much as a pin drop? If each shitkicker snuck up on one Jew and bashed his head in with his own bat, there's be eight or ten busted heads an' no proof he was anywheres near; excep' wouldn't he love to ride up that little rise past the gravestones, straight through those tents, gunning for King Kike hisself! At this moment he could not make out whether the noise in the camp signified his troops were doing destruction or getting their own asses kicked. Not that he cared much either way.

"Needle, Needle!" someone called. He put his feet down but remained saddled. Two fuckups staggered toward him through the gloom with no idea how to keep their stupid voices down. One was groaning like a girl and holding his arm. "They was too many," the other said, drunker'n shit. "I coul'nt get the fucker's bat away an' Art got his arm busted."

"So y're runnin"" said the commanding officer.

"They all got bats! I coul'nt get 'em away."

Needle let go of a handlebar and drove his gloved fist at the malingerer's nose; he went down. "Whuddja do that for?" the fallen one said thickly, bleeding.

"Ya left yer buddies," said the outraged leader. "Art can stay put; he's hurt. You get your fuckin' hide back there or I'm 'o ride this bike straight up your ass!" Struggling to his feet, blotting his nose on a forearm, the chastened one stumbled off in the direction of battle. "He'll never get there," Bangum said. "Gonna have to finish this caper myself. Me and ol' Harl. Gonna make mincemeat every Jew gets in our way, ain't we, ol' buddy?"

Jeremy Kirk saw a woman struck with a bat in the side of the face. She reeled against a half-collapsed tent. The churchman felt a rush of anger beyond anything in his life. "You... you...!" he spluttered. No word was foul enough. The perpetrator was a skinhead of powerful build in a torn undershirt, with a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps and a cross dangling from one ear. Kirk sprang for him, unconscious of pain or fear. There was alarm in the oaf's eyes as the minister cut in between the flailings of his club, hands clutching for the hairless scalp. The force of the older man's rush bowled both of them over, Kirk clawing and snarling. But he rolled too far, tumbling over by momentum so that he lost hold and came to rest on his back, the brute no doubt ready to bash his brains out. _Please God...!_ But miraculously a friendly face appeared above. "Nice work, Jeremy, I got his bat," said Jess Josephson, then was gone. The editor of _Christians All_ sat up with a groan. His back felt as if on fire and something sharp, wet, and sticky was in his hand. It was a brass-plated cross, bloody, with clinging shreds of flesh. He flung it away in disgust. _" The son of a bitch's earring!"_

"Coming, Peggy! Hold on!" Peter Winslow called out, wishing he could sound trumpets. An assistant, Al Supovitz, ran alongside him. Three skinheads were taunting a young woman at the back of the church. So much for a girl taking guard duty with the boys! Cornered, she thrust with the bat at her tormentors as they, fortunately drunk, tried to pull it away. A lucky poke caught one of them in the mouth; he stepped back spitting. Another seized the end of her bat, but Winslow at the same moment ran in from behind, slamming him against a metal railing; he collapsed like a sack of meal. Then the ex-marine heard the noise of a gunning motorcycle.

Judah Iskaritz's bat was struck aside, wood on wood, but he held on. Never again would he release a weapon; better dead than such disgrace! He raised his bat in time to ward off another blow, but it never fell. The enemy's position was hopeless, surrounded. A hulk of seventeen or eighteen, in torn jeans and a T-shirt printed with a vile cartoon, he stood panting and sweating, all the spirit draining from his pores. Other assistants advanced on him with bats. Outraged as he was, the rabbi had no stomach for a public bludgeoning. "Look at him, pissing his pants," someone said. A dark stain spread down the lout's jeans.

"Put the bat down, man, it's over," said Jess Josephson. He stepped into the circle and held up his hand. The boy's panting was audible: a dog's. His eyes darted from face to face. _Can Ha-Shem see what He created and not vomit?_ Judah Iskaritz thought. In front of his eyes the skinhead's will imploded. He sank to his knees blubbering. In a stride Jess was beside him. "Easy," he said. A glance from him told Judah to get the boy's bat out of the way. "You're out of the fight now, aren't you? No more trouble, right?" Jess said. The wretch looked up, sodden-faced, servile. He received an unexpectedly mild look. Was he actually (joy beyond deserving!) going to get out of this without the beating of his life?

Mary Mulcahy tore out of her tent at last, kicked at the collapsed nylon, and swore she would never climb into "one more goddamn bag." Many tents were down. Tangles of fabric, luggage, tent poles and doused lanterns lay strewn about. The shouts and alarms had ended. Mary turned toward the middle of the camp, where the last of the goons appeared surrounded by a group led by Jess. _All over?_ She couldn't believe it, but it seemed to be so. A woman moaned, lying back against a tent. Mary knelt beside her. "I'm a nurse," she said, and felt the woman's forehead: clammy but no blood; concussion; undoubtedly shock. "You'll be all right, honey. We'll get you to a hospital, first thing." She told someone to pour water from a canteen on a towel as a compress. She got up with effort, not until then having noticed the usual stiffness, and looked about for more wounded.

The intruders were being herded like prisoners, some with hands covering their heads. One took a kick in the backside from an enraged camper. Mary caught sight of Jeremy Kirk hobbling beside, and apparently preaching to, a hoodlum with a hand to his ear. At the upper end of camp she saw Maggie Deland approach Jess; they embraced. He was holding a bat at a casual angle on his shoulder; she tightened a jacket against the chill night air, having only a thin dress on ( _the easier to get raped, dummy,_ Mary thought). Then, as she leaned over to help the injured woman to her feet, Nurse Mulcahy was started by the acceleration of an unmuffled engine, as if a Hell's Angel insisted on calling attention to himself. She turned; everyone did. Some had to lunge out of the way.

A black motorcycle with garish trim climbed the little rise from the graveyard. Its wheels spat grass and dirt. It leaped the top of the slope and arced in the air. The rider let out a war whoop, audible over the blast of his motor. "Eeyaaa-HOO!" Mary heard. (Judah Iskaritz said no, it was a drawn-out Jeeeyoooo - Jew!) The spinning tires chewed earth between tents, heading straight at Jess Josephson. As Mary reconstructed the event in her mind, cycle and target could not have been more than ten or fifteen feet apart. (Later measurement showed the actual distance to have been twenty-six feet.) Mary saw Jess, acting by reflex but with agonizing slowness, get the bat off his shoulder and fling it, or rather lob it too gently at the oncoming cyclist. Wrong, wrong, Danny Greenspan argued. But his account was suspect; he had been stunned by a clubbing early in the fight and later went to a hospital with concussion. According to him, Jess put a wrist-action flex on the bat like a baseball hitter. Judah Iskaritz did this version one better. He saw the hero whirl the bat around his head like David with his sling (but Judah was always likening Jess to David) and only then letting fly. Every witness seemed to form a vivid but different impression.

What was established beyond doubt, however, was that bat met rider over the handlebars with much of the force of the impact supplied by the oncoming vehicle. The cyclist was struck in the visor. And a good thing the visor was down, said doctors at the hospital. He toppled from the saddle, breaking an arm and a leg, while his bike sped on and smashed into a tree. Jess Josephson barely dived out of the way.

The rescue squad summoned by state police found the cyclist unconscious but breathing. They decided not to remove his helmet pending arrival at the hospital, for fear his neck might be broken. Broken teeth and a smear of blood were visible inside the visor.

"That Needle, that Needle," Mary Mulcahy heard one of the hooligans giggle, shaking his head in the blinking light of ambulances. "Gawd, when that muh'fuck wakes up, is he ever gonna be pissed!"

# 10.

_Good morning from Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Bert Wilson here, reporting from the campground of Jess Josephson. Here 's what's happening. The governor of New Jersey and the mayors of New York and Philadelphia have arrived within the hour by helicopters. They are conferring at this moment with the Pittsburgh cult leader whose march across Pennsylvania has been rocked by murder, arson, and, last night, a full-scale attack by skinheads, leaving twelve injured and five admitted to hospitals this morning as well as damage by vandalism and several arrests. But wait... the parley is breaking up and we're getting a sign from the governor's staff that he'll speak to us. Here's New Jersey Gover..._

"Morning, everybody. I'll be brief... Oh, hi there, nice to see you... A brief statement. I have asked on behalf of the citizens of New Jersey, and Jess Josephson has agreed, that he will not - repeat, _not -_ march on the public roads of our state without permits. And we have decided, for public safety's sake, not to issue such permits..."

"Did he threaten..."

"Wait, one more point. The matter is moot in any case. He assured me he has no intention of marching across New Jersey."

"What did he say? He's stopping the march?"

"Quitting, did he say?"

"Governor, could you...?"

"Wait, wait, I don't think he's disbanding - but ask him that. My concern is for public safety on the roads of my state, and on that point he satisfied me."

"Governor, a question? Speaking as a governor, do you think Pennsylvania has given him too much leeway?"

"That's not my call to make. I know the governor here and have the highest regard for him. We all take seriously the constitutional right of free speech. As far as that, didn't I hear a network commentator make the point that Jess Josephson has been heard, via the media, by more people - incomparably more - than the founders of all other faiths combined:? I mean Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and so forth, there's no comparison. So no American needs to apologize for the free speech he has had. It's an example to the world. And now I have to get back to Trenton. So long, everybody."

"But Governor, Governor?"

_" No, he's not taking any more questions. Bert Wilson here at the... But here's New York Mayor..._

"Hi, everybody. Good morning. A quick announcement: Jess Josephson has agreed not to march - not to _attempt_ to march - his people through the tunnel or bridge approaches to New York City, in exchange...

"But he's not going across Jersey anyway, Mayor."

"Wait, just let me finish. In exchange, I say, for our pledge, the City's, that he will be allowed to make an open-air address in Wall Street. I said sure, come ahead..."

"But how's he going to get there, Mayor?"

"Not too sharp today, are we? Ever hear of cars, buses, trains... ox carts?" ( _Laughter_.) "How do I know? Just don't bring a mob on foot to the Lincoln or Holland tunnels or the George Washington Bridge, I said. And he didn't seem to regard it as the babbling of a madman."

"Do you have any security concerns about him speaking?"

"Security? No... no _special_ concerns. We've got all the religions represented in New York... the United Nations... a long tradition of respect for diversity. We're the crossroads of the world's ideas. He knows where the action is."

"Mayor, what's your personal impression of him?"

"My... well, he seems like a nice enough guy. I'm not a psychiatrist, of course." ( _Laughter_.)

"Did he try to convert you, Mayor?" ( _Laughter_.)

"Religiously, you mean? He knows better. Maybe I could convert him. I'm giving him a lift back to New York."

"What? Now? In the chopper?"

"What did he say? Jess is leaving the march? What, now?"

"Wait, here, you tell them. Maybe I spoke out of turn. This lady is his press secretary... Mary... I'm sorry..."

"Mulcahy. No problem, Mayor. Thank you. Wait, everybody, don't get excited. Jess has a private meeting in New York."

"With who?" "Who with?" "What's it about?" "A meeting, did she say?"

"I don't know and wouldn't tell you if I did. But he's going to New York anyway, and the mayor has kindly offered..."

"Just tell us if it's to get money."

"What was that?"

"More money. Is he running out of money, Mary?"

"Gee, not that I know of. But it's not up to me to say. It's a private meeting. Can we agree on what the word 'private' means?"

"What's going to happen with the march today?"

"Business as usual. We march. Jess'll be back in a few hours. Meanwhile maybe we can get a few more miles down the road. But here's the mayor of Philadelphia. Your Honor, please?"

"Thank you. Good morning, everyone... or I guess good afternoon by now. I also came to talk with Jess Josephson today in view of last night's violence. The citizens of Philadelphia have a right to know his intentions. As you know, we're only about twenty-five miles from the city as we speak. If he means to march there, he's got to have a permit. That's the law."

"How did he answer, Mayor?"

"I'm getting to that. He agreed that a march in the streets is, in law and in fact, a parade. Requiring a permit. He proposed to cut back to under five hundred people..."

"Hundred or thousand, what was that?"

"Wha'd he say?'

"Mayor, could you move in closer to the mikes, please?"

"Sorry, is this better? I said that he offered to reduce his group, when they reach City Line Avenue, to under five hundred people - _hundred,_ get that? - and then..."

"How? By shooting them?" ( _Scattered laughter_.)

"He'd ask them to voluntarily leave, just go away. And also disband the accompanying vehicles, for food, water, and so forth. And this relatively small group - five hundred _max -_ would not march in the streets per se, but use the sidewalks like ordinary pedestrians, observing traffic signals and so forth."

"Do you believe that?"

"Believe he means it? Yes, I have no reason not to."

"How did you answer?"

"I said we'd study it and..." ( _Laughter.)_ "All right, all right, but not study it to death. I promised an answer by five this afternoon. There are people to consult. We wouldn't want to set a precedent for un-permitted sidewalk parades either, as you can appreciate."

"Are you gonna let him speak at Independence Hall?"

"Well now, the Hall is national park property..."

_Bert Wilson here. Sorry to break away from the mayor, but everyone is moving now to where Jess Josephson is leaving with the mayor of New York in the latter 's helicopter, for what we understand is a private meeting of some sort in New York. There appears to be an Orthodox Jewish rabbi with them. Let's see if I can get closer... there's quite a crush..._ Jess? Jess? One question? _... No, he's smiling, shaking his head... But here's Peter Winslow, his right-hand man, and reporters gathered around... let's listen..._

"... Absurd to think he's trying to get away from a few hours' marching."

"Pete, we hear he's received more assassination warnings. The escalating..."

"Nothing to it. Just nothing to it. He'll be back. We're marching."

"Could you tell us if he's meeting a girlfriend?" ( _Laughter, whistles_.)

"No way am I touching that one!"

"Any place to camp tonight, Pete?"

"Not yet - and I'd better get to it."

"Can you give us an update on the people in hospitals?"

"Ask Mary. She's got a complete list."

_Bert Wilson here again, live from Coatesville P.A. No clues, as you 've just heard, about Jess Josephson's mysterious mission to New York. But many theories. One, that it's a tactical retreat to cool off the mounting violence. Two, a rendezvous with a woman friend. Three, to replenish the movement's shrinking finances. Four, a medical or psychiatric appointment. We've even heard that Jess hopes to schedule a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, urging the UN to take up a resolution against organized religion as a persistent threat to world peace... But wait, here's Mary Mulcahy._

"Hold on, everybody. I'm going to make this loud and clear so I don't have to repeat. A lot of marchers are eager to get on the road. It's past noon and we've never taken this long to get started. Here are the injured, none critically..."

"One, did you say, Mary?"

"None, none, zero. At Holy Name of the Redeemer Hospital here in town, admitted early today, with concussion and a fracture..."

# 11.

The mayor mouthed pleasantries and Jess Josephson leaned over to shout a comment or two, but the roar of helicopter rotors made normal conversation impossible. The cabin was colder and windier than Judah Iskaritz had expected. He felt, for the first time, the vulnerable and intimate sensations of flight, in the puffs and dips of a small craft at only a few hundred or a thousand feet. Jess pointed down, where a river flowed through forested hills. "The Delaware!" he shouted. "Over there, Jersey." It would be less than an hour now to touchdown; another short interval for Jess's private business; then a taxi ride to the meeting which Judah had arranged and persuaded his stubborn friend to include. "You're going to be in New York anyway, aren't you?" And so at last the two men Judah Iskaritz admired most in the world, possibly the two greatest living Jews, would be brought together. And who else but he, the nonentity, could have served as go-between?

Jess was pointing again, toward a line of gray spikes on the horizon. "Manhattan! Isn't this terrific?" _The All-American boy,_ Judah said to himself. _Can 't experience something he enjoys without wanting everyone to share it. Including his apostasy. We must all participate in how "terrific" his life is. It's time, past time, to bring the prodigal home!_

The mayor was heading for City Hall but as a favor, to enable his guest to avoid the media, he had the pilots stop at a police heliport in Queens. "At least tell me," he shouted as they shook hands under the rotor, "is it the girlfriend?" Jess laughed and shrugged.

Judah had to stretch two cups of coffee in a neighborhood restaurant while his friend paid a visit to the parents of the young marcher shot dead near Gettysburg. Such was the notorious egoist's private mission to New York. A condolence call! But it did offer supplementary advantages. It got him out of the line for awhile, to reduce the crowd and the potential for trouble. When he rejoined the rabbi-journalist, his manner was grave and he kept his dark glasses on. "They showed me photo albums," he said in a thick voice. "Going to try to keep in touch here."

And now to business! A taxi brought them to a street in Brooklyn lined with rows of brownstones. Judah produced an extra yarmulke from his pocket. "As a favor," he said. Josephson smiled and put it on his head. The doorbell was answered by a worn-faced woman of about forty, pregnant. A kerchief covered her hair. This was Bluma, eldest of the sisters of Judah Iskaritz. A pair of children clung to her long skirt: a girl, barefoot in a tiny dress and diaper, and a boy, no more than a year older, with the stringy fringes of _tzitzith_ hanging from the top of his trousers. Their uncle gave them hugs and said how big they were getting. "You're early," the sister said in a tone of injury. "The Reb wasn't expecting you yet."

"We're here by the mayor's helicopter, can you imagine?" The rabbi-journalist cocked his head, not without pride, at his celebrity in tow.

Josephson said, "Pleased to meet you," and extended a hand but the Orthodox wife put hers behind her back. She murmured a greeting with averted eyes, doing the minimum necessary, not a word or gesture more, to admit the notoriously bad Jew, such a source of shame under her roof. "I'll tell the Reb you're here already," she said.

They entered a parlor of worn furniture and frayed curtains. A dry smell hung in the air, of old books and stale tobacco. Glass-fronted bookcases were stacked to the ceiling, their shelves laden with heavy, ancient volumes, torn bindings, and loose pages. A menorah stood on a high shelf; bluish gewgaws from the souvenir shops of Israel cluttered vacant places on others. A table extending nearly the length of the room was surrounded by mismatched wooden benches and folding chairs. It was covered with a cloth that had once been white; clean but stained by wine-spills. Josephson walked about glancing at book titles (those he could read), then moved to a window and looked down in the street, from which muted noises penetrated, the air inside seeming sealed as in a tomb of ageless, desiccated learning.

Footsteps were heard. A man of powerful build entered. He appeared to be about sixty, with a thick beard and hair barely salted with gray, topped by a yarmulke. His black suit was in the fashion of a previous century, the frock coat almost to the knees, but of good quality, and he wore a clean white shirt, tieless and open at the collar. "Judah, _mein_ pal!" he exclaimed with a grin of well-shaped, yellowed teeth. The two embraced, slapping backs. "You got here by chopper, your sister tells me," the elder exclaimed as if in admiration and amazement.

"Let me present my friend, my _great_ friend, Y'shua Josephson," said Judah. And feeling a need to embellish this introduction, without alluding to matters unpleasant, he added lamely, "Of Pittsburgh." Only then did the older man acknowledge the newcomer, turning towards him with a hand advanced, taking his measure with full concentration: the foe at last! Jess in his turn seemed to steel himself; his customary smile looked strained.

"Mr. Josephson! One hears so much about you."

"Pleased and honored to meet you, Rabbi."

They studied each other like boxers at a weigh-in. They were of roughly equal height, an inch or two over six feet, the rabbi heavier and softer, his powerful frame never having been exploited athletically but rather in intellectual and moral domination. How much had it helped him in the contests of life, Judah wondered, to be a bear? Jess also had profited by physical superiority; but in his case the body was something to be trained and used in sport, on land, water, and snow, and (why not) in the beds of Eros. It was a meeting of the Hebrew and Greek ideals all over again. Did not the two patterns constantly clash in the Jewish soul: duty to God and the allurements of the secular world? Any boy might follow either path. What a footballer the Rebbe might have been; what a rabbi Jess... _might yet be!_

As soon as they were seated, the fecund Bluma entered with a tray. It contained a teapot, glasses (not cups), a bowl of cubed sugar, a dish of lemon slices, and a platter of sliced cake. "Have, have," she said and they thanked her. She stole a glance at Jess Josephson, who dared to smile back. Dropping her eyes, she hurried off and pulled the sliding doors behind her.

The Rebbe picked up a portion of moist dark-brown cake, broke off a morsel, spoke a _brocha,_ a blessing, placed it in his mouth and tasted. "Will someone tell me," he said, with a smile at the mystery of it all, "why in the length and breadth of Eretz Yisrael I can't find a piece of honeycake like this?"

"A land of milk and honey, too," Josephson commiserated.

The Rebbe looked at him and laughed. "Exactly!"

" _Nu, "_ said Judah, "take with you, your next trip over."

"No! With me, El Al would confiscate it. One look at my passport they tear open all my luggage. They'd say you're running guns in that cake! Tanks, missiles!"

The others laughed at this joke, as did the teller of it. This beginning was friendlier than Judah had expected. The Rebbe stirred lemon in his glass of tea and took a sip through a cube of sugar held between his teeth. He looked for a long moment at Jess, who held his gaze without effort. "Mr. Josephson," he said at length, "you are giving us a lot of trouble these days."

"Trouble?"

"We are losing Jews, and some must be attributed to you."

"How do you mean 'losing?' Religiously or..."

"Religiously of course. What else matters?"

Jess came back with unblinking candor. "In that way you lost me a long time ago, yet I'm still a Jew, and proud to be."

The other shook his head. "It is hard for me to understand that position. True, I know many people feel as you do. The majority perhaps. _Shabbos_ means the golf course, keeping kosher an annoyance; yet they introduce themselves as Jews. Fine. Anyone who calls himself a Jew is welcome to the _chosseneh,_ to the wedding, as we say. And who knows? In every _gring Yiddl_ , every easygoing Jew, there is a chance his children may feel differently, feel an emptiness inside - the rabbi gestured toward his heart - "without the joys of _Yiddishkeit._ Aren't we seeing today a whole younger generation more observant than their parents, a good and hopeful development? But I tell you frankly, sir, you are a bad development."

The younger man took this with a smile (for which Judah was grateful). "I don't agree, but I'm here to listen," he said.

"Mr. Josephson, be honest with me." The Rebbe leaned forward, his large, soft hands folded on the cloth. "If you win, so to speak, if all the millions you address through the media, if they end up agreeing with you about the nature of the Almighty, what happens to the Jews? Tell me, sir, what happens to your people?"

"I've thought about that a lot," said Jess. "First of all, I don't expect to win tomorrow, or the day after. There would be a lot of time to adjust. This might go on, who knows, for a century. But I see the Jews continuing as a people... with a long, long culture, and now a national state. Look at Israel. Most of the founders were not religious. They were irreligious. Yet proudly Jewish. The majority of Israelis today..."

He broke off. The Rebbe was shaking his head. "No, Mr. Josephson, this is not persuasive. You know, and I know, that the seedbed which produces Jews from generation to generation _is the religion._ Orthodox Judaism. Intense, observant, _narrow_ if you will, Orthodoxy. It repels you perhaps, and others; they drift away on the wind. But the source of continuity through the centuries has been the worship of God in the distinctly Jewish way."

"Let me grant that," Jess said. "But you are talking about centuries, except the last two or three, that were ignorant of science. Centuries of hardship, disease; every life process a mystery and a fear; in which it was possible for intelligent people to believe in supernatural forces and the biblical Creation literally. That's not possible now..."

"It _is_ possible."

"A new basis has to be found for renewing the Jewish people," Josephson went on. "And that basis has come into being: Israel. It's got to be maintained."

The older man gave a weary smile. "Then how is it that you, a Jew, a proud Jew ( _a hint of sarcasm there?_ ) have not made _aliya,_ emigrated to Eretz Yisroel, tell me that?"

"A fair question. I'll tell you. First, I'm an American. And I love America, I mean in the original textbook sense. I love the beauty of the land, the history, the pioneering, the greatness of the greatest men, Washington, Lincoln, and the decency and reliability of the average American. All of that means something to me."

_It is a gift,_ thought Judah; _he can say these things without seeming to mouth platitudes; he makes you believe._

"Understood," the older man nodded. "Wasn't I born right here in Brooklyn, went to Dodgers games as a boy, and loved - and still love - America, which saved our people from who knows what disasters? But go on."

"Second, I've been fortunate," Jess said. "I have no personal need, no incentive to leave. My father left a fine business, which I've been able to maintain, and even to grow."

"Yet you've given it up for this... this movement of yours."

"Not given it up. Set it aside. Believe me, I plan to build houses again."

"When, Mr. Josephson?" the Rebbe said with a laugh. "We might have a very positive discussion about that. Many homes have to be built in Eretz Yisroel. Built and rebuilt."

"Yes, I'm sure there's a market there. But since I don't need it, have plenty to occupy me here, and a good life... well, you asked my reasons. There they are."

"Exactly. The classic rationale of a prosperous Jew of the Diaspora. You don't mind if I lump you in with a category, do you?"

"Lump me, Rabbi. I probably deserve it."

All three laughed, and Judah took another slice of cake.

"But you must realize, there is no survival for Judaism in the pattern you have stated," the Rebbe said. "Most Western countries are sufficiently hospitable to the Jews now - I say _now -_ that successful people feel comfortable and patriotic where they are. French Jews still adore _la belle France,_ don't ask me why; memories are short. Jews in the U.K. are as British as fish and chips. And who could have been more loyal Germans than the Jews, before Hitler? It is the standard paradigm. We are seduced by worldly success. Why run farther? This is nice; let's stay. And in a generation or two, the _shiksas are_ so sweet, we marry them. What is the rate of intermarriage now, fifty percent?"

"At least," Judah interjected without being sure.

"At least? This is mass suicide. We dissolve in the surrounding society like this lump of sugar, and disappear... except...! The rabbi raised a finger. "Except this quaint and narrow remnant, the observant Jew. Strange, exotic, separate. The _un-_ successful Jew, if you will. No millionaire. No _goyim_ to pet and praise him for 'not acting Jewish at all.' A regular guy!" In a surge of energy or anger he got up and began pacing. "Ah, Mr. Josephson, if you successfully remain in the Diaspora and millions more like you, then where is the survival of Israel?"

It was a rhetorical question. The younger man frowned and looked down. Judah was certain it was not the first time Mr. All-American Boy had confronted the point, and not without guilt. "The survival of Israel, and more importantly, Judaism," the Rebbe continued, "is precisely the unassimilated, _unassimilable_ Jew. The Orthodox, now being sneered at as ultra-Orthodox, are our only substantial source of individuals who remain in the faith. To put it bluntly, Mr. Josephson, we have the babies. We don't calculate, as others do, that every child means someday twenty thousand a year for schooling in the Ivy League."

"You're out of date, Reb," Judah interrupted again to lighten the tension. "It's not enough anymore, not nearly."

The rabbi looked blank for a moment. "Not enough yet? But _Ha-Shem_ never said to have only as many children as you can _afford._ To put through medical school or give golf lessons to. He said be fruitful and multiply. And only in that mandate, inscribed in Torah, can Jewish survival be assured. Look at the numbers, Mr. Josephson, the demographics now so-called. See how our enemies increase."

The Rebbe resumed his seat with intent to press his case, and Judah rose from his. He walked to the window, absently put the curtain aside while listening to the debate behind him. He gazed moodily down at the street scene. Children were playing a formless game on the sidewalk, confined by parked cars. _So vulnerable,_ he thought: _innocents in a sea of goyim._

"... But why add to their numbers, Mr. Josephson?" Judah heard the Rebbe say. "Why be a propagator of doubt? Will the world thank you for that?"

"I propagate the truth, at least what seems to me..."

"Why not keep it to yourself? Seriously. Silence is an honorable alternative. The alternative, I should imagine, of sensible skeptics through the ages. A man has doubts? Fine, be quiet and prosper. No one demands your opinion. Your timing is off, Mr. Josephson. Your fellow Jews happen to be in danger, rowing like hell for a safe shore, every man, woman, and child straining, the boat taking on water, swamped by the surrounding secular culture. Is this a time to tell us to quit, we'll never make it anyway, too much water coming in?'

"Not even to attend the leak?" (Yes, thought Judah, you _would_ attack the metaphor, hardhead!)

"Our theology is leaky?" The Rebbe's eyebrows shot up. "So come in, Mr. Plumber, don't be bashful. Come into the house of serious scholarship. Study with us. Discuss. Fix leaks. Seriously, I put this question to you. Have you studied Torah. Are you studying now?" The apostate shook his head impatiently. "Ha! A great beginning, don't you think? Wishes to go in a new direction but has no inkling from whence he starts."

"That's an old trap," said Josephson. "Come spend years in _yeshiva_ before you raise a question, even though it's obvious - obvious! - that the God we pray to, for this or that small favor, didn't intercede as six million were ground to death. One would think the Holocaust would teach somebody! That it would be an absolute knife-edge in history. Impossible, you'd think, for men to behave in the same way after as before, as though it never happened. Mouthing the same prayers, the same rituals, for what? To be cured of a cold? To avoid losing money on a deal? It's indecent to be so blind, to still expect personal attention from the Creator of the universe, after the evidence of such a century."

"Mr. Josephson," the Rebbe called him to order, drumming his fingertips on the tablecloth. "I must tell you it really upsets me to have someone like you, born late, never in danger, to throw the Holocaust in my face, who had aunts and uncles, cousins..." His voice broke. Judah walked furiously toward Jess but was astonished to see tears spring also to his eyes. Then his own smarted. He turned towards a bookcase. The others got up and moved in different directions. Street sounds, voices of children at play came mutedly through the windows. Judah thought of his great-aunt Rivka in Poland, her husband Yacov, their four darling daughters, none of whom he had ever met... faded pictures in a frame...

The Rebbe spoke first. His voice was under control but he still faced away. "How the Almighty suffers, the anguish He suffers from such horrors as the Holocaust from the free will He has given to the worst of His creatures, who can tell? What we know of God's plan, _all_ we know, and it must be enough, Mr Josephson..." He turned and moved back towards the table. "...Was revealed in Torah. He has not left us in darkness, not granted such a painful blessing as life with no clues to its meaning. He has assigned us not to melt away in other nations, but to be a light unto them - separate, distinct, held high. Come Holocaust and suicide bombers too! Bloodshed and murder indeed may not be the greatest _spiritual_ threat. Prosperity may be. Technology, abundance, and incessant entertainments seem to have changed the rules of life. We are enticed to be modern, up to date, with-it. Quit praying so much, you Jews! Enjoy! And yet, Mr. Josephson, doesn't every man with an inkling of evidence - your word! - realize that modernism brings as many evils as blessings? Must we not still pick and choose, with greater care than ever, among the toys in this department store of life? Amid these temptations there remains one essential guide: God-given law. Torah. You take your stand on facts; there is a fact for you."

Josephson began to reply. "And if I were to agree that ninety percent of the moral guidance of Torah..."

"Don't give me ninety percent!" the Rebbe exclaimed. "Ninety percent of Jesus is all right, too! Ninety percent of Buddha, Muhammad for all I know. Law is law. Indivisible!"

"But if the law says God takes a part in human affairs," Josephson came back relentlessly, "and along come six million chances to take part, _and He refrains,_ doesn't it shake your confidence, Rabbi, that one little clause of the law might have it wrong?"

"Shake, shake? Yes, it shakes it!" the other conceded at once. "Does that make you happy? Faith is shaken. And after it is shaken, what then? After another generation has wept, and rent its garments, and cried aloud, 'Why? Why?' - faith returns. The tree stops bending in the storm. It remains rooted in the earth, again puts forth leaves. Faith is the sustaining force. God has purposes; we don't know them all."

"I'm amazed," said Josephson. "I'm told to be quiet, study, and hold fast in faith. Yet at the end of the day, on the most critical point, we don't know! Might as well worship the law of averages."

"You're trying to pin down the infinite," the Rebbe said. "Be patient, my friend. We all die soon enough. The six million lost in the Holocaust - lost to us, that is - how can we know the glory and justification treasured up for them in the presence of God?"

"You mean when the Messiah comes? A thousand years from now? A million?"

"What does it matter?" the Rebbe spread his hands. "These intervals, these eons, would pass in an instant, perhaps already have passed for the _neshamas_ , the souls of the departed, may they rest in peace. Leave them to God, Mr. Josephson! But get down to the task He gives us, the living. In absolutely unambiguous law. Maintain the Jewish people, faith, Torah. That is clear, that is solid, that is right in front of us."

"No," said Josephson - ( _always no, no, no,_ thought Judah) - "Jewish survival needs other underpinnings today. If we are worth saving as a people, and I think we are ( _we_ , he says; _includes himself! My hope!)_ it can't be by retreating into pre-science; ignoring new centuries of history, discovery, fact, for the pieties of the ghetto."

"Now who is not looking at evidence?" the Rebbe said. "Look about you, blind man. Young Jewish families by the thousands, fearful of becoming lost (and rightly so!) if they wander down your path, the secular path, so barrenly rationalist, find security, comfort, and fulfillment in just such Orthodoxy."

"Look about _you,_ sir," Josephson shot back. "So you are filling a few more seats in _shul._ Most Jews are staying away from you in droves. They _are_ secular, as the world is, with all its ambiguities. And they are not going to buy Torah as a practical guide..."

"For shame!"

"... Except where it states universal ethical principles equally available in other religions or no religion."

The Rebbe leaned back in his chair, tucked his thumbs in the lapels of his coat, and took an elaborate sniff to mark a new stage in the combat. "Why do you delight in this negativism, Mr. Josephson?" he asked. "I thought you were a builder. You seem to prefer demolition. Tearing down a structure which has endured for centuries, which..."

"To replace with something better. Is that negative? Is that demolition?"

"Why not make _yourself_ better?" the Rebbe caught him up. "Seriously. If you are satisfied with your conception, fine, although to be consistent your search for God should be much more rigorous. But you are comfortable with this conception. All right. Why look for converts?'

"Because it's the truth. Do you think it's easy? Don't you think I'd ten times rather..." He stopped himself. ( _What would he ten times rather?_ thought Judah.) The stubborn one shook his head. "Keeping silent wouldn't be right," he said. "The world can be made better. I might be able to give it a start. Others will pick up the idea, make it clearer."

"And you appeal to history, to evidence!" The Rebbe's voice was contemptuous. "All history proves you wrong. Look at you. A single individual, without serious credentials, merely a cliche of God that you picked up somewhere, out of superficial observations. _Oy,_ bad things happen to good people, so centuries of scholarship are to be flushed down the drain? As if such an amazing thought never came to anyone else. The Jews are reviled for claiming to be chosen as a people. You do us one better, sir. You are the chosen person."

"No sir, I'm not buying that," Josephson said. "That argument has been put to me a thousand ways. A man catches a glimpse of truth but is told to keep quiet. Why? Because 'centuries of scholarship' are against him, and 'society will fall apart without religion.' Or, on the other side, the atheist side, 'it's so un-cool to believe in God at all.' So shut up. Keep it to yourself. And I might, Rabbi, if I were alone. But in fact most people are with me, not with you. They want and need God, but they know that the world doesn't square with the God fed to them by the sectarians. If I hadn't struck that chord, this movement would be nowhere."

"Hm, mm, mm," the Rebbe murmured, shaking his head, as if confronted with a recalcitrant child. "You are not being honest with yourself, Mr. Josephson. The cheers of the crowd, the media attention, the adoring glances, you relish this more than you realize."

"Go ahead and think that if you want."

"That a man of intelligence," the Rebbe continued, "would imagine he is helping people by leading them into this no-man's-land. A no-God's-land, one might say."

"I don't deny God."

"Your cult is indistinguishable from atheism in any practical sense," the Rebbe insisted. "I admit the hand of God is mysterious. But your God takes no hand. Never lifts a finger. He might as well be, as in Nietzsche's blasphemy, 'dead.' Nothing but some sort of mythical _artist_..." The Rebbe stood up in agitation and strode about, hands clasped behind his back to avoid sawing the air. "... Whose creation of the world is some sort of cosmic sculpture or architecture, and whose busy creativity is to be emulated. But how will it be emulated by your followers, my good sir?" He glared at his tormentor. "What enormities will not be called 'creative?' What evil politics and perversions will not be advanced in the name of creativity when Torah no longer bars the way?"

Josephson would have replied but the other held up his hand. "You are leaving the anchorage - the only safe harbor for morality, in a Higher Being Who cares, Who watches, Who ultimately judges. Even if we lose our way for a time, if we torment and slaughter each other, if I myself, a rabbi, forget Him and fail Him a hundred times a day, He is the rock to which we return, exhausted of every alternative, wondering how we could have strayed so far."

"Rabbi, Rabbi," said Jess, who was possibly moved. "I also believe there is a living God, that He is not dead; is eternal; has a plan, and we are part of it."

"Only creativity? Not enough!"

"Look at the facts!" Josephson repeated in a raised voice, less cool that Judah had ever seen him. "God does not operate as you say he does, answering prayers, responding to..."

"You're so sure of that, _chochem,_ wise man? You have a thousand eyes? Are you everywhere? Can't you understand that unless we accept that God takes a part, God as judge, God Who is on the watch, there is no authority at all above men, terrible men?"

"I admit that problem but you don't see yours. That the old foundation of morality has crumbled away and a firmer one is needed. We are out of the age of myth. It's over. Millions of people cannot accept a Supreme Judge who is not judging!"

"You say!"

"He shows us! You are not paying attention, sir! Isn't there more respect in trying to see God actually at work and not at work?"

The Rebbe's face grew red and he clenched his fists. Judah half started to his feet. Would he have to separate them? They glared at each other; then it was the younger who seemed to sense that both were overstepping and forced himself to remain seated. The Rebbe took a breath and resumed in a weary but quieter tone.

"Mr. Josephson, on this line we could dispute forever. But I am here precisely to tell you that time is short. We Jews cannot be listening to siren-songs that undermine loyalty and would reduce our numbers. Can any of us honestly say that Israel is firmly established? Surrounded as she is by enemies who hate us with a boundless fervor, never mind 'peace processes'" - he fairly spat the phrase - "and are armed with unimaginably destructive weapons? You appeal to reason, Mr. Josephson. I ask you, would it be reasonable to allow someone like yourself, a media freak - I'm not mincing words - to keep pouring into young people's ears that the Jewish conception of God was all right for the childhood of the human race, a good enough junior high school, but that the obligations of Jewish identity, including perhaps the duty to fight and die for Eretz Yisroel, can now safely be put aside, _because Ha-Shem doesn 't operate that way?"_

Josephson would have said something, but the Rebbe swept on: "All this, sir... all this in favor of a very shopworn piece of goods, which secularists and anti-Semites have sought from time immemorial: the homogenizing of mankind under gods that don't give a damn how we behave, and especially the disappearance, sir, better yet the _obliteration_ of the Jews?" The older man leaned over, hands trembling till he rested them on the table. Judah felt he must be struggling with an impulse to strike, as certain Hebrew teachers, _melameds,_ plagued beyond endurance by a boy's stupidity or willfulness, were tempted to beat sense into a thick head. "I ask you, Mr. Josephson, if this is the time to dissolve the cement that holds the Jewish people together? Is your ego trip worth so much?'

The other looked up with a calm for which Judah Iskaritz could have taken a whip to him. "Rabbi, this is the time."

"Bah! That's talking like an idiot."

"The truth is not something to be put on ice and served later," Jess said. "It's here. It has to be dealt with. Everyone who cares about the survival of the Jews, the culture, the nation, and I include myself, must face the fact that it can't depend anymore on myth and notions of spiritual superiority... "

"Mr. Josephson, Mr. Josephson," the Rabbi interjected, head shaking, "if only with all your well-meaningness I could get through to you! You don't seem to realize what a cliche you are. How closely you fit the pattern of false messiahs, self-intoxicated bearers of half-truth, who have arisen over the centuries, shaking their little bells to say, 'Follow me, follow me, away from the burdens of law, study, prayer..."

"But don't you as well, Rabbi, say follow you, follow you?" Josephson interrupted in turn.

"Ah, but with what a difference," the other said, straightening, with a hard smile, as if his opponent had allowed an opening. "I am inside the institution, subject to its discipline, which will always be larger than me. It sets limits to my ego, which may be as puffed-up as yours but I doubt will ever be as dangerous. That is the value of an institution. It is why religion cannot be left to individual 'creativity.' Do you want to change it? You must do so from within, by winning others to your cause. Have you ever thought of coming back in, you who would replace Judaism? Have you the intellectual courage to _learn_ Judaism? To discover the virtues of the very institution you would dismantle?"

"What, enter the yeshiva at this stage?"

"Why not? Are you so in a hurry? The world needs to be saved this afternoon?"

"You can't be serious."

"I'm quite serious. Orthodox thought is strongly rooted but not immovable. I've never believed so; have you, Judah?"

The go-between shook his head, although in fact he did consider it immovable. It was law, God-given. That was its legitimacy; subject to interpretation against the facts of particular cases, but essentially to be learned and obeyed, never, never to be "moved."

"Impossible," Josephson said. "What, walk into roomfuls of academics? Whose idea of life is to spend it arguing fine points of doctrine, while, fortunately for them, others put bread on the table; and try to tell these learned drones that their whole structure needs throwing over; that science has found out a few things since the Exodus; that the world wasn't made in seven days and God isn't dishonored by driving on Saturday? No, sir!" He seemed to have grown angered in his turn and, rising to his feet, repeated: "No, sir. I'm not buying it. I don't agree that beard and yarmulke, _Shabbos_ piety and Torah study give me some right to question the nature of God that I don't have as I am. You flatter yourself that in Orthodoxy there is hope for a larger, stronger Judaism. You are wrong. It is a recipe for a small, narrow Judaism on into the future. More of the same as in the past. Forever vulnerable to a repeat of all the old antagonisms and pogroms."

"Then help us build a bigger Judaism!" the Rebbe said. "Why so defeatist? Why so certain that every rabbi doesn't harbor in some corner of his mind a suspicion that not every punctilio of traditional practice must survive as far as the eye can see? We don't have our heads in the sand." Josephson gave a shrug of impatience. "Go ahead, doubt if you like, said the Rebbe. "The fact is, there are serious divisions between us. Yes, between us ultra-Orthodox - _ultra,_ how's that for an insult?" he said with a glance seeking support from Judah Iskaritz - "on quite a few points of doctrine. I resent your suggestion that we are drones poring over texts all day. Orthodox Jews work on farms, Mr. Josephson, run machines, invent computers - and fight wars! As I myself did in '67 and '73, a tank crewman in the Sinai, with a yarmulke under my helmet. Have you fought in wars for Israel or America, Mr. Josephson?'

"No, sir."

"Ha! That's very interesting then, isn't it, which of us should be advising the other on Jewish survival? It seems I have risked my skin in combat and you have not."

"I honor you for that, sir."

"Don't honor me! Be guided by me! By my experience, the experience of centuries: that people give allegiance to a group, an institution, nation and law - not to an intellectual construct, an abstraction like God the Big Bang, without the heart to spare a look, a moment's help for suffering humanity."

"Suffering humanity!" Josephson exclaimed. "It's obvious that suffering humanity has got to help itself, for all the..."

"Under God!" the rabbi shouted. "In the name of God, at the command of God. Otherwise it has no force, it won't stick."

"It hasn't stuck! You won't admit the loss of grip in religions based on myth."

"No, sir, you are wrong, factually wrong! Look around you. It is precisely the soft, easygoing heresies whose only creed is to 'get along,' who keep looking for more scientific evidence - your word again - our precious Reform Jews with their feminist rabbis; the Marxist 'liberation' Catholics; the pathetic Protestants who no longer know if it's right or wrong to 'marry' homosexuals - and ordain them! - these sects lose adherents. Of course they lose! They've lost all connection to what they believe! But look at the fundamentalist faiths, including our Orthodox; including more numerous than all, and posing limitless dangers, Islam! That is the real world, Mr. Josephson, beyond your media circus. These are religions with power to bring people back."

"People who can't think for themselves," said Josephson. "Or are afraid to. Confused people, who are kept in the dark by fundamentalists like yourself, who offer the real siren-song. Come get in on our pipeline to God! Don't question the absurdities, just go through the motions, bow to Mecca or Jerusalem, murmur the words, eat the right foods..."

"That's vilely unfair."

"... While people like that pigheaded Josephson, with a sensible conception of God, should..."

"Pah!"

"... Keep it to himself, as you have just advised me. Don't upset the holy applecart. But I'm not playing, Rabbi. The answer to confusion is not silence, it's a clearer idea."

"Then bring it to us!" the Rebbe exploded. "To your own people, the Jews. I say come in, Mr. Josephson. With your ability to move crowds, what an example. Build your houses in Israel. Build your ideas, too. Challenge us, stand toe-to-toe."

"Nonsense!"

"It's not! Don't imagine that how young people flock to you, voting with their feet, so to speak, escapes our notice. Why else am I pleading with you? Perhaps as we renew the land and nation, the faith also needs - I don't know what - something. I'm not saying it's impossible. Speak; we'll listen."

"Not interested!" Josephson said with a rigor, almost a violence, that astonished Judah Iskovitz, who could not have stood up to such an appeal. "To argue this case within Judaism only, that's going backwards. These boundaries divide and antagonize people. We've got to go beyond Judaism."

"Ah, beyond Judaism, wonderful!" the Rebbe said. "Now we've heard it. There is the authentic voice of the false messiah, the would-be Christ."

"That kind of talk gets nowhere."

But the elder repeated it, twisting the knife. "Another Christ. Judaism is too small a stage for him. He needs the world. Your egoism is truly monstrous."

"For which," Josephson caught him up, "you would substitute the humility of listening to you! 'Go home, Jess. Shut up. Build your houses and be satisfied.' But my idea of God is closer to reality than yours, and with a hope, at least a hope, of saving the Jewish people and other people."

"Be careful your head doesn't grow so big it blows up."

"And you be careful," Josephson dared to fire back. "Be careful of the future Holocausts you are preparing with this narrow Judaism."

The Rebbe stared as he might have at an unwitting prophet. "You truly, literally see future Holocausts?"

"I do."

The other frowned. "On that point, oddly enough, I agree with you. How would you defend, then?"

"By breaking down sectarian barriers with an idea of God that could unite all the world's people of good sense against the dividers and haters."

"A gigantic pipedream!" The Rebbe slapped his head. "While I am breaking down barriers, is the other guy breaking down? The Muslim, the Christian? Here am I, in the fortress of God, strengthened by centuries of loyalty, tradition, and trial, consecrated by sacrifice and untold suffering, and you would have me tear down these walls as I might dismantle a _sukkah;_ simply surrender and abandon the people, God's chosen, unprotected, to drift away and dissolve in the ignorant multitudes? Give up birthright and destiny for the coward's peace, assimilation? And only a temporary peace at that. Oh, don't imagine, Mr. Josephson, that if religion were out of the way, other murderous conflicts would not divide the human race. Who knows how many more people God is saving than men are killing. Your prescription for 'peace' was always there, my friend. It is nothing new. Disappear, Jews! Only then will you cease to be hated. I'm afraid, sir, that yours is not a new 'final solution.'"

Jess went pale. "That is a low blow and a disgusting distortion."

"I beg your pardon," the Rebbe insisted, pointing a finger at him. "Jewish disappearance is one of the first, I say _one of the first_ results of your movement. You are _our_ virus, sir. Do your really expect to uproot Christianity with your cliches and stunts? To overcome all the backwoods ignorance, not to mention the social privilege of centuries? Or to make the first inroad, even the first, I say, against Islam, across thousands of miles and millions of believers? Come, Mr. Josephson, set up your microphone in the squares of Teheran and Mecca. Your head will hang from a lamppost."

"What I am saying is reaching those places, too," Jess said, "over, under, and around the broadcast bans.

"Yes, where the Jews are," the Rebbe said, shaking his head. "The first to hear an idea, the first to take it up. That is why we are your first victims. Oh, you come at an opportune time, sir! The others are so weary of us. Your impatience with Judaism, now in the dress of Zionism, this barb in the world's conscience, is so widely shared. You flatter yourself that you stand at the beginning of something - no, sir. You are at the end. Spiritual fatigue and defeat. You are not on the side of the future, Mr. Josephson, you are on the side of decadence. Come over while the battle of survival is still being fought. Join us. Don't be a traitor."

Jess recoiled. "I don't accept that word. I'm on the side of truth, as close as I can get to it."

"You haven't tried enough!" the Rebbe shouted. "You'll face ignorant crowds, whose view of the world comes from television, from movies, sound-bites, but not scholars who would tear your half-truths to shreds. That's what you are afraid of, that your ego-trip might end and you exposed as a _schmuck,_ a clown for the entertainment of goyim whose feet you would lick. At bottom you have no guts!"

"Enough, Rabbi, enough." Josephson put up a hand, but more to restrain himself, Judah felt, than his opponent. "I get the picture. We understand each other." His face was pale, his gaze turned inward. Who knew what fires of rage and guilt tormented him? And yet the stubbornness! "I'm ready to go, Judah," he said. "Are you?"

Slumped in grief and despair, the younger Orthodox began to rise, but the elder spoke: "It seems time that Rabbi Iskaritz explained to his friend the significance of the Torah portion of Phineas, a very instructive _parsha. "_

"What is that supposed to mean?" said Josephson.

"It means," said the Rebbe, "that I will not tolerate the loss of our young people to a worthless cause such as yours, not to mention - not to mention, sir! - the hostility against Jews that you continually foment among bigots and fanatics. How many ways can one man be asking for it? Do I make myself plain? We are at war, sir. I will not stand for what you are doing."

Josephson met his gaze for a long moment but said nothing. Neither moved. Then the Rebbe turned his back. He stepped toward the windows, hands clasped behind him, a signal that the interview as over. Possibly he still hoped for an offer of compromise. But no. "Good-bye," Jess Josephson said, opened the door, and walked out in the hall.

The rabbi's hostess hurried from the kitchen. The loud voices must have alarmed her. Josephson, still pale, said, "Thanks for the refreshments. Delicious. Pleased to meet you." He opened the front door and left.

"Not good," Judah Iskaritz hastily told his sister. "I'll be in touch."

At the bottom of the front steps Josephson told him, "You tried."

"You didn't!" his friend exploded, angry enough to throw a punch, except that Jess would not hit back and only make him feel worse. "Now I have to clean up after you."

"What does that mean?"

"That there's no way I'm going back with you, you _putz._ I have peace to make."

"On my behalf?"

"And on mine, you fucking hardhead!"

Josephson smiled wanly. "As in the story of Phineas that he mentioned?"

"No, _dumkopf,_ you have that wrong, too. An enemy of Israel was leading the people astray by false worship, and Phineas was the Jew in the Torah..."

"Yes?"

"... Who killed the son of a bitch, don't you understand?"

# 12.

Jess Josephson returned alone from Brooklyn in a rented car. Backtracking along U.S. 30 from an intersection west of Philadelphia, he found his marchers, reduced to a spiritless few hundred in his absence, at a truck stop near Paoli, Pennsylvania, in the last hour of a hot August day. He was hailed like a rescuing army. People shook his hand and slapped his back as if now, yes, the "real" march could resume. But those who knew him best, Maggie Deland, Mary, even a few reporters, detected a change. Whatever his personal business in New York, it must not have gone well. And there was a new crisis. The barn-burnings and churchyard fight had accomplished their purpose. None of the dwindling number of farms towards Philadelphia had an acre to rent for an encampment.

The "trinity" (as the media wits called them) held a parley. Peter Winslow proposed disbanding overnight and reassembling the next morning at the same location for whoever showed up. "We'd still draw a crowd and by ten a.m. there'll be a thousand of us," he said.

"Every man for himself," said Mary Mulcahy. "It doesn't have the ring of a rallying cry."

"I've been thinking on the drive back," said Jess Josephson. For an instant Mary was alarmed. Then he gave the weary smile she had begun to recognize as something new to him. "The weather looks good; let's keep going through the night."

The announcement brought cheers from the marchers and an outer circle of news media, truckers, travelers, and bystanders in the lengthening shadows. "Jess's latest stunt!" a radio reporter broadcast live into his microphone. It was agreed that no large number ought to go tripping through the dark. "A few dozen can make the point as well as hundreds," Peter Winslow said into a bullhorn. "We're asking for volunteer dropouts. If you have cars parked somewhere back along the way we came, go get them now - you'll have enough daylight for an hour - and thanks."

"What if there's no place to stay _tomorrow_ night?" a reporter asked.

"Then Philadelphia here we come," said the right-hand man.

"Who did you meet with in New York, Jess?"

The prodigal smiled. "Not saying. It was private."

"Just tell us, was it the girlfriend?" There were laughs among the onlookers.

"My lips are sealed."

"The word is, you're running out of money, Jess."

"I'm saving a little tonight."

"How did you give the New York media the slip?"

"Don't ask me. I might have to do it again."

"Shouldn't you at least put down some of these rumors?"

"Rumors?"

"That you went to raise funds from Jewish bankers."

"Absurd."

"You're denying it?"

"Of course. Quit chasing that ghost."

"Then how about denying the one about the girlfriend?"

"But I like that one!"

"Okay, did you raise funds from _non-_ Jewish sources?"

"From nobody. We don't raise funds. Everybody here buys his own lunch - don't we?" His followers cheered and waved at cameras.

"Are you disappointed New Jersey won't let you march, Jess?"

"Disappointed? I'm grateful. One state's enough. Good thing we didn't pick Texas."

Mary Mulcahy stepped in. "Let's go, folks. We've got a long night."

A truck driver heading west with an empty flatbed offered a lift to as many dropouts as cared to climb aboard. "Takin' a hell of a chance with his insurance," another trucker grumbled. A brilliant sunset consoled those who left. Cameras danced about to catch the traffic under flaming streaks of cloud, the blushed faces of marchers, and final frenzied interviews. A Philadelphia television reporter, her hair lifting in the breeze, with the twilight of the gods as backdrop, intoned towards a camera...

Night fell. A bright moon, just past full, rode in the east. The motion of flashlights, approximately one to every two or three marchers, caused the line to resemble a progress of fireflies. Television cameras filmed from the backs of pickups. Microphones floated before Jess Josephson's face; lights came on; he smiled and tipped a baseball cap. "Going strong, going strong," he said. But the pace slowed. Service trucks pulled off more frequently and hung out lanterns. The stops were longer. Jess had kept the rental car he brought back from Brooklyn; an assistant drove it along the line for stragglers and parked a quarter-mile ahead by the roadside while two or three catnapped in the seats. Crickets and katydids made music in the fields, and sheep-clouds floated before a gauzy moon. Voices carried on the night air.

"I'd still rather have heaven," Maggie Deland said in the group near the leader. Profiles looked silvered by moonlight like faces on coins. "That's the flaw that will keep your ideas from winning the mass of people, Jess. Nothing after death. I believe that puts me off more than dying itself. Nothing! Everything we've learned in life, all our thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories - quenched. Emptied like wastebaskets at the end of the day. After all the effort we give it, life ends up what? - a zero."

"I don't see it that way," he said. "New people are born every day. Our getting out of the way gives them space. They learn life all over from the beginning as we did. It's a constant renewal. Shouldn't the world be as new for them as it was for you?"

"But I detest the thought of becoming nothing."

"You won't _experience_ nothing. That's the mercy, and when you think of it, the best solution to the problem of death."

"You act as if you welcome it," said another voice.

"Not at all. But look at the misery otherwise. So many deaths are unfair. Children killed in accidents. The slaughters in war. The young guy murdered beside me. Imagine if in some afterlife his spirit went on raging at what happened. But he is spared that; we all are. Death isn't conscious of death. Perfect rest. The absolute end of all pain. It's the optimum choice. God worked it out right."

"But wouldn't peace in heaven, a _conscious_ peace, be better?"

"How could it be? The religions always skip over the boredom factor and the eternity factor. There'd be no rest in it. We'd have this turmoil on earth to witness without end, a show whose curtain never comes down. The griefs of our own children, and of the human race. And not one way to help. I say, better to sleep. Be done with it when the time comes. Let's do our living now."

"But I want the people I care for" - Maggie Deland's voice again - "to be more than nothing when they die."

"So would I," Jess said, "until I think it through. I also hate the idea of being erased, crossed out, with everyone I've known and loved. I'm not singing praises for death. But here's something that's occurred to me. See what you think." People set their feet down softly, like spirits in the insubstantial light. Mary Mulcahy thought: _It 's his best trait, never laying down a law, just an idea; see what you think._

"How many do we really grieve for, each of us?" he said. "Immediate family and friends, of course; going back to grandparents or great-grandparents. Beyond that are ancestors we never met. The same on the forward side, into the future; we'll have children, grandchildren, possibly great-grandchildren. So each of us has this bubble of relationships surrounding our life, a half-dozen generations back and front. Everyone we love is in that cluster around us. Can we truthfully say we 'miss' more distant ancestors? Or that we will 'miss' our great-great-grandchildren, although no doubt we'd wish them well? But if we have to die, I say let's not underestimate oblivion. That, not eternal life, is the merciful answer to death."

"But this life," someone asked, "what meaning does it have if this is all there is?"

" _More_ meaning," he said. "Precisely _because_ this is all there is. Being brief is part of its meaning. We get a window on eternity. That's a terrific privilege. But if life is only a preparation for some future life, it's fair to ask: what's the meaning of _that_ life? You only kick the question down the road, to another place where it can't be answered. If meaning is what we're after, let's find it here. And in fact, I think my life has meaning. I bet most of you do, too."

"Aren't you ever afraid, Jess," -- another voice in the dark -- "of making God angry by thinking like this?"

"No," he said. "That, never. That is one criticism of the religions I _know_ is right: how they foster this nonsense that God's first priority is faith in Him. As if He needs constant reassurance. From everybody. And all other roads lead to hell. What is that but terrorism, pure and simple? And by human institutions! There's no way the Creator of the universe would trap us like that. It's cruel of the religions to play that game."

Eventually the cameras and microphones had enough. Television sets were turning off across America. It was past midnight. The marchers had dwindled to fewer than fifty. There was practically no traffic. The countryside slept. Jess Josephson put an arm around the shoulder of Mary Mulcahy. "You're going to have to quit," he said. "I promised Harry I'd deliver a healthy woman to Philadelphia."

"I'll jump in the car and catch some winks," she said.

"No, jump in the car and take it to the next motel. Hire every room you can. You'll be lucky to find a vacancy at this hour. Let's get 'em off the road."

"You're quitting?"

"Not me, and a few others. A very few."

Twenty minutes later Mary was standing under a sign that had been switched to "No Vacancy" in letters of quivering neon. "I got six rooms, folks, the last in the place," she said. "Some of us can nap on the floor. Jess is paying." No one volunteered. Peter Winslow picked the most tired-looking; then Josephson picked him, then Mary, Maggie, three of the boys, and all the remaining women. He reduced the line to himself, two assistants, and four other men who still had some reserve of stamina.

At 3:45 a.m., a telephone rang at the news desk of a Philadelphia television station. The voice of an elderly woman said, "Jess Josephson is here."

"Where?"

She named a suburb six miles from City Line. "I heard footsteps and peeked outside," she said. "I was up watching teevee; can't sleep much anymore. These boys were walking along in the moonlight. I put my head out, probably shouldn't at my age, but I was curious after the news, and Lancaster Pike goes right by my door. 'Hey,' I said, 'is one o' you boys Jess?' He raised his cap and said - quiet, so as not to disturb the neighbors - 'Morning, ma'am.' The others tipped their caps, too, something you don't see anymore. I thought, well, this is one of the pleasantest things that's happened in years. I said, 'Come in for coffee, boys.'"

"Nice story. What's your name? Where do you live?"

"No, wait. Jess says I shouldn't tell. What if I get my house burnt down?"

"No way. Tell him to stay there. We'll have a reporter and cameraman right out."

"No, no, they're leaving in a few minutes."

"But we'll be right there."

"I knew I shouldn't 'a called. I'm hangin' up."

"Don't, don't hang up! I don't even have your name. I don't have your address. Let's just talk. We won't send anybody. But give me a few details. Like what are they doing now?"

"This minute?"

"Yeah, describe it."

"Well, most of 'em are dozing in the parlor. I put on some coffee and served cookies that I baked just today, oatmeal-raisin from a nice recipe I found in the paper... no, I guess it was yesterday, this is Thursday already, I keep forgetting..."

"Is Jess Josephson, too?"

"Is he what?"

"Sleeping, too?"

"Yes, stretched out on the floor, poor boy, with his head on his pack and a cap over his eyes. He said not to let him sleep too long."

"And the others, where are they?"

"Snoozing on the couch, in chairs, on the floor. I think one's in the bathroom upstairs. Oh my, it's almost like having my son's team in the house after a game, like in the old days."

"Oh lady, what pictures that would make! I can get a camera there in fifteen minutes."

"But I'm scared o' my house burning down."

"We won't use your name, promise! Word of honor!"

"I'm sorry, I have to go."

"Don't hang up!"

"I'm sorry..." ( _Click.)_

"Goddamn old bitch!"

# 13.

The house stood at the head of an avenue of poplars that opened to reveal more than a house - a castle. It had Gothic windows, gables, and a notched roofline where bowmen might have stood. The approaching driveway ended in a tight circle around a fountain of Neptune mounted on dolphins, the god crusted in patina as if the sea had frozen green. Peter Winslow parked along the circle and walked with Maggie Deland across flagstones toward a pair of tall, arched oak doors in a recessed entryway. Maggie guessed the place must have forty rooms. "I'll say this," said the ex-minister from Pittsburgh. "I've preached in smaller churches."

They were admitted by a butler in uniform. He disappeared through doors to the left to announce them. While waiting in the foyer, which was paneled in more oak, Maggie glanced up a marble staircase to a landing lighted by a stained glass window. It depicted Venus awakening, life-sized, modestly draped, on a conch shell. The butler reappeared with a woman in nurse's white. "Mr. Nicholson will see you now," she said with a finger to her lips. "He is sensitive to loud voices."

They entered a library of not one but two stories. It had tall, diamond-paned windows that admitted sunlight slashed with pink. An iron stairway spiraled up to a balcony at the second level. Shelves behind glass were stacked full with books, some in modern jackets but most in the leather bindings of antique collections. A shoulder-high fireplace dominated the far end of the room. Before it stood a desk of polished mahogany, behind which a white-haired man sat bent over in a wheelchair, his lap covered with a tartan blanket. A tweed jacket hung on his wasted shoulders, and a white shirt and tie gaped at his neck. Light from one of the high windows slanted across him. Maggie was put in mind of an aged cat taking comfort in a patch of sun. His face was clean-shaven but pale and shrunken about the jowls; yet a residual strength marked the chin and bloodless lips. His eyebrows looked fierce, bristly and untrimmed, and when he raised them, despite age and infirmity his eyes flashed a startling blue.

"You folks will pardon me for not rising. Mere decrepitude," Eldridge Nicholson said in a voice between a croak and a whisper. He extended a tremulous hand across the desk. To Maggie his skin felt like silk, the bones soft and fragile. She and Winslow settled into armed straight-back chairs and remarked on the beauty of the grounds and the mansion. The nurse wheeled in a cart containing pots of coffee and tea, cups, saucers, spoons, and a plate of rolls and cakes. She poured a three-quarter cup of tea for the invalid, using a silver tongs to drop a half slice of lemon and a lump of sugar in it, and added a crumpet on the edge of the saucer. All were decorative; the laird neither sipped nor nibbled. "Thank you, Nancy," he said, and with a smile she left them.

After a taste of coffee Maggie asked, "Do you have any children, Mr. Nicholson?"

"Three, ma'am," he smiled spectrally. "And seven grandchildren. One great."

"I was thinking how much a child who enjoyed books would love this room, and that particular spot for reading," she said, nodding toward a window-seat at the left with a tufted leather cushion.

The ancient smiled again. "One did, the youngest. I'd always find her there. Not the boys. Horses for those gentry. I'd invite you to inspect the stable but it's all cleaned out now. Just swept-up stalls and hanging tack."

Winslow cleared his throat. "Miss Deland, sir, I should explain, is..."

"A reporter," she took the cue. "For _DayLight,_ the Internet news service. But on leave right now. Doing a book, I hope, on the Josephson movement."

"Not at this moment, then, here to report anything to... your computers?"

"Correct."

"When will the book be finished, do you think?"

"Oh, but the story's still running," she said with a smile. "Jess keeps surprising us."

"How do you think it will end, your book?"

"That remains to be seen, I suppose."

The patriarch shook his head. "Personally I don't think it will end happily. But if it should end tomorrow, your book would not be off the press for weeks or months, I imagine?"

Maggie frowned. "True."

"Very well. The repercussions will have to reach me beyond the grave. You may stay," the old man said, implying that until that moment her removal had been an equal possibility. He had not lowered the drawbridge for a news person, and his brusqueness indicated he would be on guard against other deviations. Maggie even detected (or thought she did) some wariness that his principal guest was, unexpectedly, a black man, perhaps the first who had ever sat in his library. "Now then," he said, directing his attention to Winslow, "as I suggested to the person who called..."

"Mary Mulcahy, our media representative."

"Yes. A gushy woman. Too grateful, too early. I haven't agreed to anything yet. Transactions are easily ruined that way. I believe I used the word 'considering.' I am considering letting your group pitch tents on these grounds tonight, before you go on into the city. But it's never been done before. Not even when the boys were in Scouts. I wanted to be sure, still want to be sure, that I'm not acting out a senile impulse. Damned insurance liability and all that..." Winslow began to reply, but a pained expression indicated that the most sacred oath forswearing litigation would be a waste of words. His lordship chiefly desired to stipulate that there should be "no poking about the house, or souvenirs left in the flower beds."

_Souvenirs? What does that mean? Of sex?_ Maggie decided she did not like appearing before Eldridge Nicholson as a supplicant although, strictly speaking, that role was not hers. She was along for the ride, at Jess's suggestion (he thought a visit to an interesting mansion might be a nice break for her), while poor Pete, desperate for a final tenting site less than a mile from the Philadelphia line, and with a high fence around it as well, looked ready to crawl, to lick boots if necessary. He assured their host that a campground was always left cleaner than it was found. "Although that would be a hard claim to make on a property like this," he fawned. "And we pay, of course - that is, Jess pays - a thousand dollars fee."

The old man snorted. "And don't think I won't take his thousand! A rent's a rent. Although the twerp wouldn't take my million."

Maggie turned to Winslow in surprise, and the invalid spotted it. Ha! So his offer of months before to virtually underwrite the movement's expenses was still secret. He seemed to respect that. At least the idiots could keep a confidence. Yet he enjoyed revealing it now. "It fits," he said, warming to the pleasures of exasperation, which his doctors normally forbade. "Consistent with the martyr complex, and with a brat born rich."

His guests would have demurred but he rambled on with an impatient wave they now recognized as expressing the last potency of a dying man of wealth: _oh keep quiet, my time is short, I 'll do the talking._ "Make yourself poor to help others," he grumbled. "Or the illusion of helping others. That's the naivete of Jesus for you... why Christianity keeps making steady contributions to human folly. Under my own roof! One of my sons, would you believe -- best damned medical education in the world. Know how he's using it? Treating AIDS and delivering tar-babies in Africa!" _Yes, and probably quite a fellow,_ thought Maggie, sensing a grudging pride in the curmudgeon himself; and if his black guest should wince at "tar-babies," well, like it or lump it. "There's a screw loose in this Josephson, count on it," the old man declared. "Which, however, doesn't alter the case. I happen to agree with what he says."

Winslow spoke up with more backbone. "In what he says and what he is, Mr. Nicholson, I've never known anyone as consistently first-class as Jess."

"I'll second that," said Maggie, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

Nicholson sniffed and toyed with the handle of his teacup. "Let me ask you," he said. "This fellow's been shot at, and someone was shot dead next to him. The lawyers will still make him poor for that, I promise you - if he lives long enough. But what if, one of these days...? He shrugged, allowing the fatal implication to hang in the air. The bait was not taken. "People like him do get killed," he spelled it out. "What happens to his crusade when he is no more?"

Winslow stirred uneasily. "Well, we certainly hope..."

"Make no plan based on hope, sir, never do it!" A modicum of color appeared in Eldridge Nicholson's face. He leaned forward. "Calculate the worst case - catastrophe! - and give it a place in your strategy."

"All of us take security very..."

But the old man interrupted, under a senior's compulsion to hold forth, to refight his battles. He said, "Forty-eight years I went to sleep every night thinking that one of my workers, someone who irrationally hated me, the company, his wife, the world, whatever, would poison a batch. And somehow that batch, never mind all the safeguards, would reach a customer. And be swallowed, sir! Gulped down with a glass o' water. One mouthful! And wash me right out o' business."

"I can imagine," the helpless listener to these reminiscences nodded.

"I fought that employee. Never quit fighting him. I fought him harder than I ever did the government, the unions, banks, lawyers, and fought him to a draw. But never more than a draw. All I could say was that no skull-and-bones every reached a customer's teaspoon while I ran the shop. Never. And when I began losing the energy to assure myself of that, and had no son with the backbone, I sold. Merged! Cashed out of every blessed share of stock. And sleep well o' nights. Except for..." A gesture indicated the wheelchair, the illness.

There was silence. Maggie had an intimation of how much the dying man would have loved an audience for his reminiscences. But now, mindful of having rambled, he coughed and returned to the subject. "So you're going to lose this Jess fellow one way or the other. Plan for it. Let's say he gets tired of being shot at, and quits. Not likely, but what then?"

"In fact, it is likely," said Winslow. "Jess has made it clear he doesn't see this as his life's work. If the movement stalls, or he feels he's repeating himself, he'll quit."

"And then?"

"Go back to building houses, I suppose."

"You believe it?"

"I do."

"Never. It's a narcotic. Once they get a taste, the cheers of the crowd, your true demagogue needs it too much."

"Jess is not a demagogue," Maggie felt compelled to say.

The accuser gave her a severe look. "He is, by definition. Has a gift of working-up crowds and enjoys exercising it. Maybe he fools himself into thinking he serves an idea larger than self. More likely the idea serves him. It brings him the crowd-jollies."

"Well," Winslow interjected to forestall any more debate, "we might have to agree to disagree on that, Mr. Nicholson. But I hope you get a chance to meet Jess." It was a reminder of why they were there.

The host made a gesture to signify that personal acquaintance would not alter the case one way or the other. "It does him credit," he allowed, "that people like yourselves think well of him. In fact, all the people I've seen with him on TV. If he collected a bunch o' hippies, we'd have nothing to discuss." A fit of coughing interrupted him. He reached for his tea but the spasm passed. "In any case," he cleared his throat, "what the man has to say, his attitude to... God" - the word sounded apologetic to Maggie Deland's ear - "agrees pretty well with my own. I'll soon be gone. Cancer. No complaints. Eighty-four. I don't expect heaven. I expect sleep... and will be pretty damned mad if I don't find it!" He hacked a small laugh at his joke. "What's the point of keeping human beings going forever? Is there a shortage of 'em? Common sense and biology say no. But to return to the point... this Josephson fellow. What happens to the message when the messenger is gone?"

Winslow replied. "Some of us also have been turning that over in our minds." He hesitated, then decided to air a tentative idea. "There's got to be some place, some sort of setting, however informal, maybe just their own homes, where people can gather and discuss God in the terms Jess has been laying out."

"A new church?"

"Not a church!" the ex-Presbyterian said quickly. "Not that word." He smiled. "No buildings, no budgets. On the other hand, congregational values matter. Spiritual isolation is an obvious pitfall: every man, every nut perhaps, his own religion. That way lies chaos. So we are wrestling with some format that would be _non_ -institutional, yet can't quite get our hands around it."

Their host swiveled a quarter-turn in his chair and grunted, head down, weighing the problem.

"The main thing is to keep the message clear, not to let _that_ fade," Winslow added. "People will ask - not only after Jess is gone, after we're all gone - what did he say? What was in his words, his formulation, that gave people a clearer idea?"

"You've kept a record of how he puts things?"

"Why no... not officially," the right-hand man said, as if the idea had not come up before. "He's always being quoted, though."

"And misquoted, I take it."

"Well... but television has taken major excerpts, and here and there entire speeches."

"From prepared text?" It was becoming a cross-examination.

"No, as a matter of fact," Winslow said. "He doesn't use... but I know he rehearses... at night... gets by on only a few hours' sleep. His casualness fools people. He's never haphazard."

The old man turned back toward them; infirmity and age seemed to slough away. Maggie wondered how many junior executives must have sweated before his desk as he pounced on some flaw in a project. "My dear sir, are you telling me that this man whose words are changing lives, that no one is specifically charged with keeping a verbatim?"

For all his powerful physique the ex-churchman squirmed. "Mr. Nicholson, at any given moment, dozens of microphones, tapes..."

"But what he _says_ is scattered in bits and bites. A jumble. If he's shot today, how will the world be sure what he said? You'll pick one thing, this girl another" - Maggie stiffened: _girl!_ - "and Tom, Dick, and Harry something else."

"But Jess doesn't consider his words that important..."

"Wrong place for modesty."

"He says people have to think these ideas through for themselves. He resists putting texts on paper. Doesn't want to appear to be handing down 'holy writ,' so to speak."

"You're begging for trouble. All the mischief of sectarianism again. Just like the Christians. Each ready to slaughter the other, over what? Some itty-bitty difference in what exactly the original Jew-boy said."

Maggie started. Winslow put a hand on her arm. "I assure you, sir, we'll begin today keeping a better record."

"Do it. Who knows how short his time may be?"

"Why do you keep returning to that?" said Maggie, unable to keep silent.

The old blue eyes turned a solemn gaze on her. "Can someone keep attacking the illusions of the creeds, tell people to quit throwing their coins on the collection plate, and yet avoid some fanatic stepping out of the crowd with a knife or gun to 'do God's work,' as the maniac undoubtedly would view it? If not an offended Christian or Jew, my money would be on a Muslim. Haven't they stirred up the faithful to kill a harmless _novelist,_ bless your soul?"

Bren's and Judah's warning again: Maggie felt a chill. "You consider it inevitable?"

"Inevitable. And, from a certain angle, desirable."

Now both guests started. Outraged, Maggie stood up and paced around behind her chair to glare down at the dying man.

"I am giving you a businessman's assessment," he said, enjoying the effect he was having. "By one who has bought and sold with the public. Your Josephson would understand. His success till now has been too easy."

"Easy!" said Maggie.

"And he knows it. Else he's a fool. What, an amateur wrecking crew pulling a house down and not getting crushed? His crusade till now has been _fun._ A series of sensations retailed by the media that have made him a 'star' - whatever that means."

"He's made himself," Maggie said.

"Enjoyed himself, you mean," the other snapped, an older Bren Hazelwood. He seemed to take pleasure in the clash, feeling himself to be on the firmer ground; perhaps pleased as well to have the attention, if only in anger, of a young woman whom he might master by the last devices left to a ruined male: wealth, will, and experience. "What has it cost him?" he said. "Only money. He's invested in a recreation, tearing down an institution in decay, confident he can dance out of the way as it crashes. But let him get caught in there, willingly, never to quit till he dies for it, then yes, the world might take notice. He meant it. Maybe there was something to him."

Winslow tried to speak, but the invalid pushed on to a merciless conclusion. The glance under his brows was fierce. "That's the price we finally put on truth. What will you die for? Everything else is blather. The tommyrot of journalists and academics. If something counts with you, show us! People sit up at crucifixions, not at platform speeches. He understands that, I'd wager. It's the last card he'll play."

Maggie felt sick. The old ruin, so near the end himself, seemed to have constructed a death-view of history, a downward spiral to draw Jess and everything young and strong into the vortex with him.

It was Peter Winslow who defended the living. "Wishful thinkers we may be," he said, "but to us, and with all due respect, sir, Jess comes as an _end_ to that pattern: faith bloodied by sacrifice. People around the world are sick of that. They want a credible idea of God, common sense and life-affirming."

"Hear, hear, Peter," said Maggie.

"Prove it to me," Nicholson challenged him. "How will you sell 'common sense' against the humbug of sacred texts, rituals, vestments and superstition, not to mention this New Age claptrap I hear about?... 'Earth mothers!'... Meditations and mantras. Reincarnation cults."

Winslow stood up, moved by nervous energy. "It can't be a new church, that's for sure," he said. "I see something smaller, more personal, more involving. No more priest up there and everybody else down here. No more of that. The idea of God is something to welcome and love, not to be afraid of. If there's only one person under a tree, explaining to two others, it would be a valid format."

Nicholson studied him with perhaps a new respect. He had not made his billion by cutting ideas short. "Tell me. These sessions under a tree: do you foresee getting paid, you the 'pastor,' shall we say?"

"No, sir, we shall not say. Anything but a paid clergy. Then we're just another church."

"Are you a rich man, Mr. Winslow?"

The ex-marine grunted. "Hardly. My wife works... also my service pension."

"Then how would you support yourself?"

"With a job, I suppose. Teaching. Or in industry. But not in a pulpit again, ever. I'd try to advance Jess's ideas in some sort of... I don't really know... as a volunteer. Once paychecks get involved, institutions develop a life of their own."

"Yes, but don't you want his teaching to have a life of its own?" came the sly rejoinder.

"It's not the same thing."

"My dear sir," the older man said, leaning forward, "while you are seeking converts by ones and twos in the shade of a tree, some young squirt who might have spent all of one afternoon tramping a highway with him, or just watching on TV, will be drawing crowds around the country claiming to be the true, anointed voice of the prophet. Have you thought of that?"

Winslow responded doubtfully, "Yes..."

"Well?"

"If the young squirt has the gift for it, so be it. I don't claim any special fitness."

Nicholson probed on. "But what if our young friend, lacking your scruples, starts soliciting hundred-dollar checks?"

"I suppose that's a possibility. Okay, let him. People would realize it's not in the right spirit."

"Don't be so sure. All it takes is enough brass. Some swindler to jump up and say that Jess told him personally he's leaving to join Jesus in heaven! As soon as your Jess is not around to deny it. You're sitting on a glorious new money-maker here, Mr. Winslow. Music, lights, television! And all in the name of a fellow who caught my attention in the first place because he'd chuck all that." In his excitement the old man began coughing but he waved a hand to forestall assistance. "Don't forget..." he coughed, struggling to resume, "never forget... imposters... punk religionists. They're the enemy."

Maggie said, "He's right, Pete."

"Damned right I am," said Nicholson. He shook a finger over the desk. _He loves this,_ thought Maggie; _loves lighting a fire under the slower-witted._ "And you'll never win as a _volunteer " -_ he sneered at the word - "talking to twos and threes. The moment he is gone, I say the moment your Josephson is off the scene, the myths will begin. Some female hysteric will claim to see him walking in Fairmount Park, trailing light and glory and giving the message to her personally that the world will end next Tuesday. Be ready, Mr. Winslow. Land on it with both feet."

"We will," the right-hand man said firmly.

"Get him on tape, get him on video, saying, and saying again that if anybody says that he, Josephson, performed this or that miracle, dead or alive, or prophesies the end of the world, it's hogwash. A racket!"

"I see your point," Winslow said. "But I can't tell you the number of times he's assured people that he makes no such claim, doesn't _believe_ in the supernatural..."

"But he won't be here to assure them. And all the old superstition will flow back. 'Jess was one of us,' the Jews will say. 'He wanted the world to be Jewish.' Christians will call him the Second Coming and begin advertising a Third. Atheists will claim him. Vegetarians and tree-huggers. Every jackass and charlatan. Everybody who hopes to turn a dollar..."

Now he fell into more violent coughing and rang for the nurse. She hurried in and, kneeling, held the teacup to his colorless lips. He tried to speak again too soon. "Succession..." he said hoarsely. "You must have... succession... as any well-run company... " He drew a phlegmy breath while the others waited. "There will be a moment when the world will ask if the... movement is finished. No! you must be able to answer. No time for Christian humility. You are in charge."

He glanced sharply up at Winslow and turned his head as a signal to get the cup away. With a pat on his shoulder the nurse smiled and again departed.

"Second," the sick man said with effort. "Recruit and train. Find people who believe, and make them your instruments, your proselytizers. Unpaid volunteers, perhaps, but you, sir, must not consider being an _amateur. "_ He spat the word. Winslow looked down, scuffing a shoe on the carpet. "Time is too important," Nicholson went on. "Get to my age you realize it's the ultimate resource shortage. Don't think of wasting it. Anyone can take an ordinary job. This work deserves all your time. And overtime. Recruiting... training... fighting the churches on one side - and don't forget the mosques - and the atheists on the other. Fighting the pressure to become a church yourself. Never take money! Don't deviate. Tattoo it on your hands if you have to. Josephson's right about that. It's what caught my attention. I thought, I'll test him. And when he turned down my million, as confidential as could be, I thought, okay, there's something to this Jew-boy..." He coughed again but the spasm passed. "A single initial funding is what I propose... a self-liquidating trust, managed by a bank."

Winslow looked puzzled. "But wouldn't that violate...?"

"It would not. I'm not fool enough to propose a permanent endowment, some fat foundation for trustees to sit on, hire flunkies, and puff themselves up at board meetings. I've been down that road with hospitals and colleges, devil take 'em. I propose to keep a reasonable sum coming for a reasonable time. How old are you, sir?"

"I'm... I'll be fifty-four next month."

"A twenty-year trust then, to get you to retirement," said Nicholson, "amortizing, say, three million... never know what's going to happen with inflation." He rubbed his hands, delighted to be planning something. "Not a penny left at the end, y'understand. Get the thing going so it'll run on its own. Or maybe something will turn up in the next twenty years. You won't get rich, mind. It'll pay less than an average church in a good neighborhood. But it'll finance a small office, a girl to answer the phone, place to receive mail, maybe a small budget for printed matter. Put a notice at the bottom: 'This movement doesn't solicit, and doesn't accept, donations of any kind.' That'll keep it honest." He giggled. _We 've made him happy,_ thought Maggie.

Peter Winslow replied uncomfortably. "That's... very generous, Mr. Nicholson. But I'd have to discuss it with Jess."

"Why so? It's not his question. The payments needn't start till he's off the scene."

"It's his movement, sir."

"I beg to differ. If he's hit on a truth, that doesn't give him title to it. The horse is out of the barn. The only question is, how to advance the truth when he's gone?"

"But the point is, I... can't help identifying the movement with Jess. With his standards. Never taking money. Under any circumstances. I don't think I could." _Bravo, Pete,_ thought Maggie. "My wife would murder me, but I can't."

"Listen to me," said Eldridge Nicholson, not ungently and perhaps not entirely displeased to find a man reluctant to reach for his check. "I've had good workers turn down a chance to be foremen, supervisors, at higher pay. I've understood that. They took the work itself seriously - hands on - and didn't want to be in a position to have to get it out of others who had less heart in it. I believe you'd be a good worker under your tree, Mr. Winslow. But the situation calls for someone who can send out ten thousand workers under a million trees."

Maggie looked at Peter. "Of course you're right," he said. "And yet..."

The old man spread the tips of his fingers and touched them in front of him. He stared thoughtfully at the man across his desk, his hands unconsciously suggesting the vault of a cathedral. "Some excellent men, as I've said, are constitutionally unable to lead," he said.

"I have to think about this," Winslow said, "and discuss it with Jess. And with my wife."

"Perfectly proper."

"I'll need time. A few days... a week."

Eldridge Nicholson's visage creased in a smile. "I am told I will live that long. The offer is on the table. And now..." He cleared his throat, stirred in his wheelchair, and pressed a button beside the phone on his desk. It was his guests' signal to rise and reach across to shake hands. "I look forward," he said, "to your encampment on my lawn tonight. A new thrill, in my state o'health. Will wonders never cease?"

# 14.

The heat of day was past. A breeze had come up, ruffling the tents on the lawn. The sun, near setting, sent a golden light and long shadows across grass and flower beds. People sat in small groups before the tents. They picnicked on food from concessionaires who had been allowed to park, this last time, at the bottom of the poplar avenue leading to the mansion. In the absence of Jess Josephson, who was dining in the house with Eldridge Nicholson, the day's final press briefing was held by Peter Winslow and Mary Mulcahy beside the Nepture fountain.

"Here's where we drop the word 'march,'" Mary said. "March is yesterday's word. Tomorrow in Philadelphia we take a stroll, a sidewalk promenade." She had put on a dress to celebrate, a flowery cotton print. It was her first appearance out of slacks in weeks. "I saw it in a store window along the pike and bought it. With my last dollar on the credit card. Smallest size I've worn in thirty years. What do you think, fellows?" There were mock wolf-whistles; she laughed and wiggled a hip.

"When you're in the city, what if you can't keep the crowd down?" a reporter asked.

"We are _going_ to keep it down," Winslow said.

A sound of applause rose from the lawn behind the fence. People were standing among the tents. On the roof of the mansion a wasted old man appeared in a beret and a shawl (though the air was warm) limping on the arm of Jess Josephson. Maggie Deland had doubted that Eldridge Nicholson could get to his feet; yet there he was. He and Jess waved to those below, and the invalid, on impulse, lifted his cap. The cheers redoubled.

Night came. The last television crews departed with images and sound. Iron gates clanged shut at the foot of the lawn. Private guards deployed along the high fence. There would be no need for sentry duty by the crowd assistants tonight. The Nicholson estate and its neighbors were secluded in any case, served by a winding two-lane road, "old suburban," intentionally uninviting to traffic. The way was dark, shrouded by old trees amongst which street lights glimmered like no more than lanterns.

The moon, not quite full, hung low in the sky and cast a glow over the front lawns. But Maggie Deland and Jess Josephson were seated behind the house, in its shadow, under an arbor. They were not alone. Others, in pairs or groups, made explorations of the property (avoiding, however, by specific order the flower beds). Couples walked past arm in arm. Below and beyond the rear veranda a private park of more than twenty acres, carved into terraces, gardens, and lagoons, spread away in silence save for the chirring of insects.

"I notice you had him walking, Great Healer," Maggie said.

The man in shadow beside her chuckled. "He said this business has perked him up; maybe he'll live another six months. I said, 'Okay, give me back my thousand bucks then.' He said, 'Nothing doing. A rent is a rent.' And by the same token I ought to accept his million."

"How did you answer?"

"Can't do it, I said. It would turn the whole thing into a con. This one thing in my life I am going to keep on the level."

"Hmm. Only this one thing."

He squeezed her shoulder. "And one other thing I just remembered."

"What was his reaction?"

"He shook his head but I think he was secretly glad."

"I also am shaking my head but am secretly glad."

"He asked if I had any objection to his financing an organization to carry on after I'm shot."

She gasped. "He used that word?"

"Exact quote. Why not? He's staring death in the face himself."

"What did you say?"

"I told him Pete had already mentioned the offer to me. I don't have an opinion. It's his call to make."

"After you're shot, that is," Maggie said, trying to force a reaction.

The "temporarily most famous private citizen in America" - a new dig in the media - grunted as if she had added an item to a grocery list. _He won 't allow himself to believe it,_ she thought and nudged him with an elbow. "I need a consoling gesture."

"Something like this?" He gave her a long kiss. With a sigh she rested her head on his shoulder and said, "Tell me more."

"He asked, 'What if I donated this place as world headquarters for your movement? Tax-free. A center to train leaders to go out and talk to people under trees' - and where'd he get that idea? 'How would you like that?' he said. 'Great,' I said, 'if you want to kill it. Just give it a huge estate, tax exemption, and a board of trustees, that'll do it'."

"You know, I think you're right," Maggie said.

"So did he but wouldn't admit it. 'All right,' he said, 'what would you do with a white elephant like this place?' 'Ever think of putting a for-sale sign on it?' I said. He got a laugh out of that. In old age, he said, businessmen forget what got them there. They start giving things away. He warned me against doing that - if I live that long."

"He liked you," said Maggie. "That's why he's telling you to work up a better survival plan. Oh hell, give me another kiss." Her tongue darted into his mouth and she pressed his hand to her breast. "Is this turning you on?" she whispered.

"What do you think?"

"Let me feel!" She pretended to reach. He flinched away and laughed at himself. "Mystery man!" she said.

"Seductress!"

"The lady is willing, Mr. J. Scandalously willing. Shocked and astonished at how willing she is. Here in the dark, in a forbidden flower bed. Or down in the private park, under a shrub. Let me make you happy." He grunted something that sounded regretful. "Is it wicked of me to keep enticing you like this?"

"Temptress of the Nile!" he said. "And other principal rivers."

"Put me in my place, saintly man. Revile me."

"I revile you!"

"The joke's on you. It turns me on to be reviled. Now I _will_ have you!"

With a laugh he shook his head, as she knew, and hoped, he would, wishing him never to fall for the opportunism of ordinary men. "Give me one good reason," she said. Silence. "I have a theory," she teased on. "You are afraid that if you and I... if we... that it would somehow change your luck." He chuckled. "Am I close?" she said.

After a moment he said, "I haven't cut one corner, don't you see. From the beginning I knew there couldn't be anything for little ol' Jess in this. I'm giving too many people too much pain. Throwing cold water on their prayers. Denying them heaven with everyone they've loved, dead children, parents, soldiers. Can a guy do more destruction than that? So when old man Midas says, 'Here's a million, Jess, no one would ever know,' or the most desirable woman on earth says, 'Here in the dark, Jess... '" He blew a puff of air. "As the old coach used to say, 'The game don't wanna be played that way, sonny.'"

She touched his cheek. "The last man standing by the rules," she said.

They strolled in the private park. The moon had risen over the house behind them, its light filtering through the trees just enough to see by. They followed a bridal path, which reminded her: "I believe you owe me a ride to your hilltop."

"That will be a pleasant debt to pay."

"Shall I let you make love to me in the grass?"

"Wow."

They were not alone. Others walked the paths, secure in the magical obscurity. Small animals stirred in the brush. A passing couple, holding hands, said, "Good-night," perhaps not even knowing who they were, backlighted by the moon.

"I can't tell you how much I want to be done," he said.

"With the movement? I'm so glad."

"I'm sick of acting 'perfect,' some sort of icon, which I know I'm not. I want to be myself again, out of the public eye, doing my job, telling people who get me mad to... well, not having to be so careful about my language."

"Oh yes!" she laughed, conscious of how sanitary her own choice of words had grown under his influence.

"I don't want to be in the _grip_ of something. I'm a man, not a movement. If I could tell you how sick I am of the sound of my own voice, and knowing that with the best intentions I could be leading people astray. Get off the stage already, Jess! What are you doing up there? Build houses. Be in love. I wake up sometimes, thinking..."

"Yes?"

"That there's got to be a penalty for this."

"Penalty?" She thought of Islamic bombs, riots in streets, Jesus... the cross, blood, nail holes, the fate of anyone who dares tell the world _you 're wrong, all of you wrong..._ "For what it's worth," she said, "it would make me very happy, relieve me tremendously, if you'd quit."

"But I can't," he said. "Not there yet."

"Where, Jess? Don't tell me it requires you to..." She was going to say "die," as if historic inevitability demanded it, a need more compelling than any mere woman's.

"An enemy of Christianity, and out to destroy Judaism! That's what they think," he said, wrestling inner demons. "That I'm a traitor to my own country's moral tradition. But I'm an American, Maggie. And a Jew. I can't stand the thought of Jewish disappearance. A light would go out of the world. My children will be Jews."

"Of course," she said, breathless at this agreement.

"All I'm saying is, let's get Jewish monotheism back in line with Jewish common sense."

"I like that."

"And what if I wanted to build houses in Israel one day?"

"Yes, Jess. Wherever. Whenever." Another agreement, sealed in an instant.

The idea seemed to strike him only then. "I haven't worked much in stone," he said. "Jerusalem stone, they call it. The color of sand - golden. A house might last a thousand years. Do you think I could do it?"

"You could do it, Jess! Better than anyone ever has, at anything you want."

And then she was in his arms, her face covered with kisses, eyes, lips, ears, every taste of her seeming delicious to him. He murmured her name and she his, pressed her hips to his, feeling his male urgency, and joyous at it. "Yes... yes," she said, "beautiful man... right here... now..."

But his arms supported her, refused to let her weight bear him down. Tenderly he held her away, her head resting back on his forearm, her face tilted upward in a patch of moonlight.

"Jess, tell me it doesn't require you to die. Tell me that."

He put a finger to her lips. "Just a little way more to go, Maggie. Stick with me, beautiful girl..."

# Part Four - THE STREET
# 1.

_Cortisone and prayer - marvelous what they can accomplish in concert!_ The hospital people had remonstrated with Jeremy Kirk: "You can't leave. Stay another day. You took a hell of a swat. Blue Cross will pay." And cede the city to Jess? No, better to spend the rest of his life in bed _after_ today.

_Praise God no broken back!_ he thought. _Thou hast preserved me for Thy service. He must be fought in the street; he is there, we must be there. Memo to myself: check role of street crowds in ministry of Jesus. If He keeps the fight with Pharisees inside the temple, his impact zero. His enemies knew that. Keep it in-house, they must have urged Him. But He turned the mob to his account (see Sermon on Mount, impact of 'multitudes' cited in Gospels, etc.) Arranged it so that his martyrdom was a crowd scene, Way of the Cross, etc. His throat wasn't cut in a cellar. JJ also courts destruction in public; and in Philadelphia, like Gettysburg, playing on historical resonances, lives, fortunes, Sacred Honor, breakup of the Old, millenarian possibilities! And oh irony - Washington, Jefferson, Adams, et al - Christians all! Unconsciously he wants to restore the religion of the Founding Fathers, wants to restore their country too - give him credit for that! - but residual Jewishness distances him from Christ. Tragic!..._

A lifetime record cab fare, $105.35, took the Rev. Mr. Kirk from the hospital to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Stiffened by the ride, he groaned as he got out of the seat. The driver had to help him to the sidewalk like an osteoporotic dowager. But he had got there in time. It was a glorious morning - sunny, fresh, not humid - not yet. Energetic, healthy-looking agnostics presently heaved into view, filling a suburban avenue.

_Memo to myself: Has enough attention been paid to the image projected by the attractiveness of JJ followers? No beer bellies, tattoos, earrings in eyebrows. Always well behaved, scrubbed-looking, an elite in fact. Query: What type followed Jesus? Bible suggests poor and humble; now I suspect liberal-left bias, later interpolation. Original Christians must have looked like this: intelligent, salt of the earth, "nice." Am struck again how middle-class this crusade is. His appeal is to upwardly-mobile Me Generation. Give them God, but not too much. Not the Spoilsport. Am I on to something here? Do lifestyles (nauseating word) produce their own creeds? If not ruled by law and institution, will we not slap together a view of the universe that rationalizes whatever kind of people we happen to be? No hedonist himself, Jess's subliminal appeal is nevertheless to enjoy-yourselfers. No way can morality last if the goal and purpose of life is a party. He fools himself._

Kirk waited for the bulge in the line signifying Josephson's own presence, surrounded as usual by assistants, media, and hero-worshippers. There was a moment of eye-contact, a grin, a wave. "You made it, Jeremy! Welcome. The fighting preacher!" Eyes turned. _So damnably kind of him!_ "The end's in sight," the matinee idol said and swept past.

"What does that mean, the end's in sight?" Kirk asked, falling in beside Peter Winslow. "What end? Whose sight?"

The right-hand man (who didn't like him) growled something about Jess's feeling that he had said all he can. "He wants to be on to something else. He's in a hurry."

"Of course," said Kirk, intending a jest, "he's a Jew." The other pushed on with a snarl, taking the remark as anti-Semitic.

A fatuous little ceremony, fodder for the media, occurred at City Line Avenue. Josephson shook hands with the state police, asked for a round of applause for their help, and dismissed the concession and toilet trucks. "Thanks, fellas, thanks for everything. But we're just a few hundred strollers in the city now." Television loved it.

And then, so soon... phantasmagoria! _Le Cite Noir,_ thought Kirk. _What a colossal insult we are. Ninety-eight percent white, toddling along in our sun hats and sneakers, tabby cats in the urban jungle: this warren of teeming brats, men in undershirts, hardly interrupting their craps shooting at front stoops to glance at us, women lolling bulbous-breasted on window sills; littered streets (where 's the municipal sanitation?); yards with broken fences stark in sunlight; pissing dogs; rubbled lots where homes of hard-working families once stood; exposed walls, tatters of wallpaper; plywood storefronts, open-doored bars dark and filthy; sullen youths glaring, working themselves into resentment of Whitey intruding on "turf," as if we're a rival gang, flaunting prosperity and privilege._

Kirk buttoned his wallet pocket. He felt grateful for the city police walking alongside ( _thank you, Mayor, for never believing Jess 's sashay of the five hundred in the first place)_ augmented by patrol cars with flashers, driving slowly in parallel. It struck him that Jessism might end right there if the police were removed. The heresy would disappear without a trace, a half-hour's work, before the orator could get one word out about the Big Bang Creator. Just reassign the cops and Moneybags Messiah & Co. would limp home (by way of the hospital) mugged, chastened, the girls flushed out 'tween legs, and all soberly thankful that God's in His heaven after all, watching and merciful.

Yet within an hour the editor of _Christians All_ realized he had misjudged the neighborhood mood. Struggling forward through an August forenoon that grew more humid by the minute, with the towers of the city's center visible in sunny haze over rooftops, he would have thought the avenue should be empty. But no, sidewalks were filled; an air of festivity prevailed. Excited by the clamor, microphones and cameras, West Philadelphia realized the world had come calling. Women emerged from houses in frocks and hats, their Sunday best! The cakewalk ramified: urchins, layabouts, gang members, thirteen-year-olds carrying babies. Jess's white hundreds proliferated, grew to a multi-racial thousand. Instant integration!

Kirk forced his way into the group around Josephson, too numerous for the sidewalk to contain. People spilled into the street, in spaces between parked cars. _Sorry, mayor, what 's another broken pledge?_ Kirk thought. _Jess will send $1,000 to your next campaign._ A space of a few feet was kept open in front of the cultist for advancing cameras and microphones; he had a can of soda in hand, his throat already dry in disputes with a pack of Negro clergy. Kirk heard Jess tell a black pastor he was "not minimizing the good work of your churches."

"Yes, suh, you are!" the other shouted in a sweat. "You're tearin' down the one institution that upholds God, hope 'n family. You're not only wrong theologically, suh, you're socially imprac-ti-cal!"

Others shouted encouragement. "Tell 'm, tell 'im, boy!"

"I grant you..." Jess tried to reply and had to speak louder. "I grant you the good values your churches stand for. But you're not... not getting through to enough..."

This brought a furious interruption from his opponent, who was bald as an egg and looked about seventy. "We're the on'y in-sti-tyu-tion that _is_ getting' through! Do you want to depend on the poh-lice?"

"No way! Tell 'im, Brother!" the crowd goaded him.

"Want to depend on the gov'ment... the welfare... the free ennaprise system? Man, there's free ennaprise fo' ya!" He gestured towards storefronts. "Look a' them bars, suh, four an' five to the block, poisonin' our people. An' you blamin' the _churches!_ " He was a scene-stealer in the grand tradition. "Look a' them slumlord proppities, suh." His periods rolled out as liquidly as a boat's wake in a bayou. "An' drug dealin' on any street cornuh. Ain't no _free-er_ ennaprise in this com-mu-ni-tee than crack cocaine, Mistah Josephson, suh!"

"Tell 'im, Brother!"

Kirk thought: _He is showing all Christendom how to fight, this honest, sweating Negro protecting Christian turf._

"An' heroin!" the man bellowed in the face of Jess Josephson, who seemed powerless to stanch the eruption. "An' ol' Satan alcohol!" he roared, his backers urging him in choral rhythm to pour it on that honky knucklehead: "Tell it, keep tellin' it, praise the Lawd, Amen!"

"An' no-fault sex!... An' fatherless chillum!... An' the one institution capable of fightin' all this..."

"Preach it, man!"

"Fightin' it and beatin' it day after day, suh... standin' like a fortress above the decay and destruction - a mighty fortress is our Lord, Amen! - toward which the people flee for their only safety an' comfort an' succor. That is the church, suh, and nothin' but the church!" A cheer arose but he bellowed above it, not to be denied his peroration. "The one institution you've taken it into your head to fight! Ah tells ya, Mistuh Josephson, it puts a humble man o' God in danger - in danger, suh, o' losin' his tempuh!"

Cheers and laughter swept the street, resounding from building facades. A chant began. "Amen, Preachuh, aa-men! Amen, Preachuh, aa-men!" Some sang it, put a rap beat to it. In an upstairs window a woman brandished a fist in the direction of Jess Josephson. With a grand toss of his sweaty head and a roll of his eyes Jess's antagonist glared into the cameras, Moses in ebony, facing down Pharaoh. The pavement shook with cheers. Then the humble man of God, assuming he had walked all over that white boy, winded now, and with a shrewd sense of when to get off, allowed the flow of the crowd - still walking all this time, with no stops except for street corner traffic directed by police - to move on around his slower, patriarchal gait.

Younger black clergy piled into the gang-tackle on Jess Josephson, who craned about trying to answer the Great Bellower; but where did he go? The celebrity was forced to reply in desperation to cameras and to whomever was near. He argued that churches take credit for their successes but what of their failures? What good are threats of hell against drug dealing, thievery, murder? Criminals simply don't believe. A few good families do believe, "but they probably would behave themselves anyway," a phrase that had a patronizing ring. It was a tired argument, and it infuriated those who were near him.

"A few? Where do you get a few? Thousands!" a young pastor shouted. Another said, "Three hundred families in my flock alone!"

"A _relative_ few," Jess replied with the lame white-boy qualifier.

"Not fair, not fair!"

"Help us then, don't hinder!" This quickly became a chant. "Help Don't Hinder! Help Don't Hinder!" Hundreds picked it up. It became impossible to hear Josephson in the din. Police shouldered toward him. Was he losing control of his monster?

Jeremy Kirk sensed a rising blood-lust. _But how is this playing on TV?_ he wondered. _My ears are filled with raucous voices and car horns. Traffic is surely clogged for blocks. This is madness and Jess, I suspect, gets the best of it. He is the underdog and who is watching out there but white, underdog-loving America? He may lose in the street but win in the country. Clergy, media, and mob play his game, furiously surrounding him. Women are pausing at chores in millions of kitchens with the TVs on - oh the poor handsome boy! Jess milks the martyr role. He's "on" and he knows it. Flinch? Not he. (Horrible blasphemous thought stuns me: did Jesus realize the value of being "on" en route to Calvary?)_

Someone managed to get a bullhorn into Josephson's hands. He grinned. Yes, Kirk saw a flash of teeth. Stone him, lash him through the streets, he would remember to look like a champion for the cameras and cell phones. "You can shout me down," he cried out, the horn blasting a crowd-hole in front of him, "but you can't shout down the truth!"

What? Astonished faces! _Take that, Logic!_ thought Kirk; _a mob can certainly shout down the truth, it 's done in all the best mobs._ Yet he seemed to stun the crowd with this empty assertion. The chanters of "Help don't hinder" hushed to hear what amazing thing had come out of his mouth to quiet so much racket.

His voice crackled out over the heads of hundreds, maybe thousands by now. And apart from the bullhorn he had another marvel going for him. A Philadelphia radio station programmed for black listeners had abandoned its usual format and was broadcasting the march, live. Hand-held and earphoned radios in the crowd amplified him. As if by a miracle his every word could be heard.

The multitude had come to a halt at a busy intersection, Lancaster Avenue at North Forty-Seventh Street. An unexpected rally was in being, unwanted, impromptu, not even legal, blocking not one but two traffic arteries. None of this had been planned (if one could believe that!) yet Jess Josephson had managed to collect another audience, to create a drama starring himself. _And all of us,_ thought Kirk, _including all who know better, root for him to scamper for another score; I shock myself._

And what was the truth that "could not be shouted down?" When Jess had reduced the crowd to lambs, and he the shepherd, he dared point a finger upward, declaring: "And the truth is - there is a God!"

# 2.

**Excepts from a letter to a seminary classmate**

... pray for your understanding. God knows I regret the pain I've given you and other old friends. Not to mention my own flock. And my wife!

... felt the ground slip under my feet when Jess Josephson, pointing to heaven, cried, "The truth is, there is a God!" You will protest: What, this commonplace, this truism? But imagine us there, the late morning sun beating down, a crowd nearly all African-American, overwhelmingly poor, so many with scarcely a hope. The surprise of it! Surely this "fighter against religion" must be an atheist. Then to hear him, even he the enemy, proclaim the reality of God. It was like church bells ringing.

Mind you, I came to resist. As I know you would have, had the march come through Kansas City. We have our gardens to tend and West Philly is mine. Could I allow this invader, a country club Jew at that, to march his milkskin battalions through my turf without challenge? And this after weeks, months, of being plagued by questions at the door, phone calls in the evening: "Reverend, this man Josephson says thus and so; how does the church answer?" Josephson! I hated the name. I would massacre him in debate. Dozens of other brothers had the same thought. And he stopped us with "there is a God!" I waited on his followup with at least professional curiosity, as one sermonizer to another. He had to be true to his own limitations. He could not suddenly plead, "God is watching us," or any such ploy to get away from 47th and Lancaster alive.

"Yes, there is a God!" he repeated, as if digging his spikes in the batter's box before taking a first real cut at the ball. "A God Who created this universe, Who set everything into motion - but Who is _not_ going to help us!" The twist was a surprise and earned him another swing. "But believing in Him will help us help ourselves. _We_ are our hope!"

A most un-Christian assertion that; but he stomped on grumbles and murmurs with a claim that sounded momentarily authoritative. "All history shows it," he said. (And who among us, suddenly challenged, has enough data in front of him to argue with "history?") "Yes," he said, "good people's prayers are sometimes answered, but as often not, and no more often than bad people's. But when cities are destroyed by bombs" - he lifted a hand and plunged it, clawlike - "or by rats from the sewers" - and here he raised his hand, fingers up, twitching and nipping in a gesture horribly real in so many homes - "the good and bad all get burned and bitten, including babies who never had a chance to be good or bad. I ask you..."

He paused. You or I might have rushed on. He took the risk of a pause, to acknowledge our attention, to persuade _us_ of our attention. "All the praying in that church there," he said, pointing across the street, "isn't going to stop the drug dealing on this corner, and we know it. All the praying in all the churches won't stop girls from bearing children out of wedlock, and we know it - condemning themselves and their children, I don't say to Hell - I don't believe in Hell _; we make enough Hell for ourselves right here. "_ Applause and cries of agreement would have interrupted, but he overrode the noise. "... Condemning themselves and their kids, ninety percent of the time, to poverty and struggle, and we know it. Two strikes against them all the way! Am I right?" He took a chance that many would give him their voices, and they did.

"Sure, the churches say, _our_ young folks aren't having kids out of wedlock; they're getting married, holding jobs, and I believe them. Churchgoing people _do_ a better job keeping families together, I'm not denying that. What I'm saying is, the churches don't reach _enough_ people. And can't! Not any more. Why do I say that?"

He turned to another segment of the crowd and boomed into his bullhorn, "Too much competition! Junk television _reaches_ _everybody!_ With pictures of how life is a big comedy, a shoot 'em up, fun and excitement - and you don't even have to learn to read! Drugs and alcohol _reach everybody,_ in childhood, before they even have a chance to know any better. All the temptations of the street corner, they reach 'em better than Sunday school."

"Tell 'em, Whitey!" someone called out. People laughed.

"Doin' my best, brother!" he said with a grin, and continued right on. "Dropping out of school," he said, "that reaches everybody! And sex too early, let's steal a car, let's shoot up, _they reach everybody!_ Churches reach a few people. But all those others, they..." Hundreds of voices in the crowd (my own included) completed his sentence: "... _reach everybody! "_ How endearing to adapt his style to the community's desire to respond in chorus.

"Second," he said, raising two fingers. But we were still making noise. "Does anybody want to hear my second reason?" We hushed. "Churches, even good churches, divide people. As long as your church says you and your kids are going to heaven and I and mine are going to hell, we've got a reason to hassle each other. Do we need that?"

"No, brother!" someone answered. And there were many other cries of "No, no!"

"Third," he said, "and the _biggest_ reason!" He put up three fingers, and I tell you nobody uttered a peep. Women were motionless in upstairs windows. Not a foot shuffled. Traffic sounds came from a distance, muted, as if the world's business had no place here, as if it was something that took place in an unimportant elsewhere. "The religions can't get a fix on the kind of God there really is," he said. "Because there's no need for priests or rabbis or ayatollahs with the real God. No need for a collection plate with the real God. They tell you He looks down and turns little screws and pulls little strings so I get what I want if I'm good and you don't if you're bad..."

But he had upset someone in the crowd. Someone was really listening. Critically. Not just being mesmerized. And realizing what this man was taking away from him. He shouted something, but Josephson had the horn. No heckler was going to silence him.

He said, "Most people know the world isn't like that. That's why religion can't reach them anymore. They know that if there's a God - and I've told you I believe there is - He doesn't operate that way, that's all. No reason to panic about it. I say let's get in line with how God really operates, that's all I'm saying. Okay, okay now, mister."

He took a huge risk. He acknowledged the heckler. Who could tell what the fellow would say? In the dynamics of the situation an automatic politeness takes over. Josephson was a _guest_ in the neighborhood, as it were. We didn't want us all to be embarrassed. A curious reversal that, rooting for the white boy. The fellow who had challenged him was a huge black brother, a construction laborer perhaps, glistening with sweat, superbly muscled in his undershirt. He strode forward; people made room for him. "Okay, here's a man who wants to say something," Josephson said. "Your turn, friend." And actually held out the horn towards him.

But the giant stopped where he stood, about ten feet away, and called out in a bass voice such as an archangel might bring to earth: "God helps _me! "_ Cameras turned. Children were hoisted on shoulders to see. The man pointed an angry finger. You must have seen it on TV if you watched at all that day. He told Josephson, "You sayin' God don't listen, don't help a man. Ah _knows_ you're wrong. He helpin' me all the time! To stay off liquor! He's the _on 'y_ help I got. And you takin' him away!" Wrathfully spoken this, a cry from the guts of a tormented brother. It went to the heart of the question better than any roomful of doctors of divinity. I thought, how bland is Sunday service in comparison.

The white man's expression softened. You could sense his compassion for one who requires a Lord Who heeds and helps. How could he admit even to himself that the inevitable result of his white, college-bred rationalism would be a world without mercy? "I'm not taking God away," he said. "There's no atheism here. I believe in God."

The African was too sharp for that. "You takin' away a God Who _listens!_ Ah need, ever'body needs, a God Who listens."

"And maybe He does," Josephson said. "It's not up to me to set limits on God." I heard murmurings. Was he falling into this simple man's trap, he who had resisted theologians by the carload, because he flinched at wrecking the hopes of one recovering alcoholic?

The brother was relentless. He demanded: "You sayin' now He _does_ listen, _might_ listen?" What an instinct for rhetorical weakness, the opening in an opponent's defense.

"I'm saying if that's your experience, go with it, man," said Josephson. And then (generously, I thought, but maybe to give himself a moment more to think) he aired the argument to everyone in the crowd who might not have been able to follow. "Here is a man who says God does listen, and helps him stay off the booze. And I say to him, I think everybody here would say to him, go with it, man. Go with your experience of God. It may be better. That's okay."

But how could it be okay? The crowd sensed that this wasn't enough of an answer. He could not have it both ways. The giant gaped like a fighter whose challenger has dropped his guard. Josephson had to say more. And maybe he arrived at his formulation in that moment, while all eyes and cameras were on him. Such were the risks he took.

"That's okay," he repeated. "I also get comfort thinking about God, bringing into my mind thoughts of the Creator. I don't consider it praying; I consider it thinking. But I'm not sure how far it is from what this man is doing. When I think of God's creation, it reminds me I am part of the universe and have a purpose, a life to make. Thinking about God helps me to do that. It puts me back on track. Is it so different from this man's praying? Neither of us is asking for a miracle. We aren't asking God to put out a fire we've got to put out. Or bring peace to the world that we've got to bring. Or help the Phillies win the pennant."

He dared to crack that joke. Would you or I? The crowd laughed. I laughed. Maybe the tension required it. Who could resist such a dude? "No," he went on. "This man is not asking God for anything outside his own control or the laws of nature. He wants the strength to stay off liquor. And he is doing it. Maybe he calls it prayer and I call it thinking about God. Whatever it is, it supports us. And helps us be stronger."

There it was. He offered it humbly. He did not make too much of a claim for it. But what he was asking, from a crowd containing in its mix addicts and illiterates, muggers and prostitutes, was the whole nine yards, "the intellectual love of God." And we considered it, took it under advisement, we hundreds, or even thousands by now, packed in that hot intersection. I looked at my brothers and sisters, good black West Philly faces, each formed by the trials of a lifetime inside the pigmented skin, each longing to create a life, still to make a life! I felt astonishment. Could the intellectual love of God, that high concept of a dead white European, be the key after all? The synthesis of faith and reason? The best hope of uniting Christian, Jew, Muslim, bringing all the varieties of anguished mankind at last into an embracing yet unfettered relationship with the Lord, free and uncoerced? Mind you, he never used the Spinozan phrase; I could not testify he knows it, or knows the immensity of what he is asking of a human race overwhelmingly non-intellectual. But then, would an "expert" have launched his crusade? He is not aware that what he is doing is impossible. Whole libraries tell us so.

Many applauded. There were shouts of "Amen, brother!" He took a step forward. He looked about, as if seeing the 'hood for the first time.

He said, "These streets here could be the best place on earth to live - what place wouldn't? - _if we could get to be better people._ If we could find the strength as this man has, to stay off the booze, off drugs and crime... keep our families together..."

There were murmurs of "Yeah, yeah," a sigh of desire for this golden dream.

"... And manage our kids better, our homes and money better."

"Oh tell it, brother!" a woman's voice cried out.

"... And clean up our yards," he said, all these simple neighborhood things, these difficult things.

"Tell it, tell it, man!"

"... And go after the rats and roaches. And plant trees and flowers, and show our kids how to plant them. Why shouldn't West Philadelphia be the garden of the earth for raising families? Why not? Why shouldn't it?"

Now he was the conduit of all hopes; we cheered.

"We need God..." he said.

"Oh, yes!" I myself shouted.

"A better idea of God..."

"Yes, yes!"

"To give us strength to be better... home, street, neighborhood better..."

"Tell it," the people responded, the women's beautiful sopranos, the men's baritones.

"We don't need a program for the whole world," he said, mystifying us for a moment, making us listen harder. "We need to be better in ourselves..."

"Yes, brother, yes!"

"The world around each of us will grow better if we are better!"

The roofs of buildings seemed to blow off with the cheering.

"And now, folks..." he paused. It was a long pause and he smiled. "Let me walk, okay?" Windows rattled with laughter. He had the comedian's timing, knew when to get off. "Best thing we can do for West Philadelphia right now is to end this traffic jam," he said. "I'm walking." Cheers. "Point me east, somebody!" Laughter... and the crowd began to move. "Anybody wants to go with me is welcome!"

I turned my feet in the direction of his. You would have, too. His is the authentic voice of the age. If God wishes to save the world (a dubious proposition at times), it will be through some such concept as this. I can't claim the view was unanimous. It is, after all, a dictionary definition of heresy and a temptation to the chaos of every-man-his-own-religion. Many clergy resisted. As I moved towards Jess, trying to get closer, one of these approached me, a furious little white man, bent over as though crippled. He was trying to exhort others. His eye fell on my collar.

"Are you local?" he demanded. I must have looked puzzled. "From Philadelphia, man!" I nodded. "Then get on your phone. Call every member of clergy you know - minister, priest, rabbi! Get them downtown!"

"Why?"

He exploded. "Can't you see he is taking it away from you? We must build a wall against him, a wall of faith! With our bodies! Every man of God we can find."

I hesitated. The crowd was sweeping Jess away, whom I now believe to be a true prophet, and I wanted to walk in his steps. The enraged minister gaped at me, then flung himself away. Yes, late in the day I took part in the dangerous stunt he organized, risking my life with others. But that was my body responding to the collar around my neck. My spirit was on the march with Jess. I wish you could join me, dear friend...

# 3.

"... All right, that was live from City Hall, the mayor's announcement that Jess Josephson has been granted an _emergency_ parade permit, possibly the first in municipal history, recognizing - quote - the spirit of revived hope that Jess and other clergy have brought to West Philadelphia today, unquote. Jess "and other clergy"? -- hmm. Wonder what both sides think about that pairing? But to check on the progress of this amazing event we return now to reporter George Anderson at the scene, live."

"Right here, Walt, in a crowd that police now estimate at upwards of five thousand. There's a magnetism happening here."

"Where are you exactly, George? Crossed the Schuylkill yet?"

"No, still in West Philadelphia. I'm looking up at street signs marking the intersection of Thirty-fourth and Chestnut. We're proceeding east, completely filling Chestnut Street, a major but not very wide thoroughfare. I wouldn't want to have a car parked here."

"Are you anywhere near Jess himself?"

"About a hundred yards ahead, I think. It hardly seems to matter. This is as much Mardi Gras as religious crusade."

"Any reports of disorder?"

"Minor, I believe, the usual neighborhood incidents... and it's perhaps a little indelicate to mention... a shortage of public lavatory facilities along this highly impromptu route. Police are reporting some understandable complaints. You begin to understand why cities require parade permits."

"George, we hear conflicting reports. Some say the Josephson people are urging marchers to leave, to reduce the crowd; others that clergy of all faiths are being exhorted to get down there."

"Yes, but not by the Josephson people - far from it. It seems to be the religious right, hoping to take a stand against him."

"What kind of stand?"

"It remains to be seen. That's not yet clear."

"Well, time's a-wasting for them."

"Maybe not. This could go on for hours yet. We've fallen below normal walking speed with this many people moving forward, and we have to cross a river, the Schuylkill, before entering Center City; then another two miles or so to the Delaware River, with New Jersey on the other side. And of course that means through the busiest part of town; a speech is scheduled at Independence Hall."

"Not to mention that it's turned into a humid Philadelphia scorcher this noon, ninety-two degrees at last count."

"The sun stands almost directly over the street. Very little shade. I've seen ice cream and soft drink trucks approach as close as they can along side streets and get sold out in minutes. People are walking along drinking soda pop, beer, bottled water, milk. A fire hydrant was turned on a few blocks back with a spray attachment for neighborhood kids. Lots of marchers walked right on through, glad enough to get drenched to cool off."

"We have reports of eleven persons so far taken to hospitals, George... don't know how serious. Also minor crimes, scuffles, and so forth."

"Not surprising in a throng this size, Walt. We do hear intermittent sirens above the tremendous din of the crowd itself. I'm standing two steps above the sidewalk in the entry to a neighborhood convenience store. A river of humanity seems to fill sidewalks and street, wall to wall, moving from my left to right, a stream of bobbing heads, hats, orange lilies, portable radios held to ears. TV cameras and camcorders on people's shoulders are moving downstream like birds caught in a flood, and there's an immense throbbing sound like rushing water in a canyon. Here comes a banner, Walt. We're starting to see some of those in the crowd or unfurled from windows. One across the street says, 'Jess the Bes', ' ha ha, which appears to be the unofficial slogan of the movement. But this one coming down the street is being carried at shoulder level by a dozen young people. Red, white, and blue letters. 'Menn of Penn Say Yess to Jess!' We're near the University of Pennsylvania campus here in West Philadelphia, now in summer session. And here's another: 'Revolutionary Ideas Welcomed in This Town.'"

"Witty."

"Oh, two helicopters are flying over the rooftops, too low, it seems to me... wow, that rotor noise! They heading off up the street. I thought they might be called in to rescue someone out of the crowd... Here's someone near me on the store steps. ( _Interviewing_.) Anything like this ever happen here before?"

"No, thank God. Ha ha. But it's made to order for the media. This Josephson seems to be a master of putting on a show."

"Do you have an opinion of his religious views?"

"What do they matter? The media's the message. I happen to be on the communications staff at Penn. My wife sent me out for a quart of milk. 'Hurry home, Hon,' she said. That's a laugh. But his religious views? Irrelevant. He could be selling watermelon out there. Cameras and microphones need people, and people today need to be 'on.' To assure ourselves of our own existence, I guess."

"Okay, thanks. Interesting views. Now I gotta get out there."

"Lotsa luck, friend."

"Walt, Josephson's immediate entourage is moving this way, directly opposite me... I'm going to... wait... try to get closer... Excuse me..."

"We now understand that two cable networks are giving live TV coverage to this if it takes all day, George, even as we are. I guess you're seeing lots of mikes and cameras."

"It's like trying to penetrate... Excuse me, sorry... a giant spider web. A miracle we're making any forward progress at all, one mile per hour if that. But let's listen a moment... A young African-American woman is talking to him..."

"... Can't quite recognize you in the glasses."

"Just want to thank you, Mistah Jess. You saved my life."

"How?"

"Long time ago. Union Square, New York. It was still winter."

"Yes?"

"Told any gal workin' the streets, just quit. Get outta here. Pack up, go to Philly or Atlanta. Be a waitress. I did it. You was right. It changed my life."

"But... that's terrific."

"I'm workin', found a good hard-workin' man, gonna get married. I got you to thank."

"That's terrific. I do remember now. Union Square. You came up after..."

"An' you said go ahead, you can do it. You're like they say, the bes'."

"Wait, what's your name? I want to thank _you._ You've made it all worthwhile."

"The woman's moving away now, Walt, and others are crowding around. I'm not sure I understand what happened there, but Jess seems definitely moved. Of course he hears many personal stories... and the march moves on. Now somebody else has his ear... I see a scratch on his face, possibly left by a fan... or a non-fan. Here's a sign being waved _against_ him by a little knot of people on the left-hand sidewalk. It says, 'Your Homophobia, Jess - It's So Unbecoming.' I don't get it; has he attacked the gay community? But he's always being quoted, or misquoted, on something. Four or five police in crash helmets are ringed roughly around behind him, but not so close as to appear in too many photos and TV shots - bad image - and, yes, that's Police Commissioner Tom Gibbons himself walking alongside, with press aide Mary Mulcahy and others. There's a little space in front of them that allows cameras to keep advancing, plus microphones held out on poles. Gonna be a lot of sore arms and shoulders among the media tonight, not to mention dry throats."

"All the Jacuzzis in the hotels will be running full blast, as will the beer taps, I'd bet. How many media people would you estimate are there, George?"

"No way to say. Maybe we're all media!"

"Ha ha. But don't go away, anybody. This live coverage of the Josephson march through Philadelphia will continue after a break for headlines from all over. You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world..."

***

"God, don't let anyone fall," Mary Mulcahy said aloud.

"Calling on God, Mary? A little late," a voice said in her ear.

She fought an urge to change the Rev. Jeremy Kirk's expression with a hearty "Screw you!" But a microphone might pick it up. Also he was still hurting from the battle in the graveyard. Lifelong honors to him for that. "This is more than we bargained for, Jeremy. You won't believe this, but Jess really did hope to keep it on the sidewalk."

"Right, I don't believe it. You're reaping the whirlwind. Feed the mob, it ends by devouring you."

"Which would give you satisfaction, I suppose."

"Wrong. No one wants to see him retire to peaceful obscurity more than I do. It's his 'friends' who push him to martyrdom." She had to resist taking a punch at him.

"Shouldn't you be doing more to reduce the crowd size?" a TV reporter on Mary's other side shouted at her.

"Jess has made at least four personal appeals - I've counted - not to mention Pete and the assistants," she answered, presumably on camera. "We're doing everything we can." A cheer went up from somewhere in front, probably drowning her out anyway. "Enjoy it!" she gave up with a smile. _Harry, are you watching?_ And oh, enjoy _this,_ she thought. It was the sky opening up, beautiful blue sky, with downtown buildings ahead! They were coming out onto a bridge. "The Skoo-kl," she heard people pronounce the river's name. Out of West Philadelphia and still moving! Like crossing over into Jordan. _And what if he had led us to the banks of the river and said, "Come, people, across!" Would we swim? And reach shore safely, new-baptized? Let this be told centuries from now, and a miracle is how it will be told: that a mighty host followed him over the waters, to a city blazing with light, skyscraper windows flashing the sun._ Just two more miles across the downtown now, she had been told, to the river at the end of the state. _Harry, be there!_ Faces looked down from windows. Street signs said Twenty-fifth and Chestnut. Only twenty-five more blocks, did that mean? Or were there an east and a west Chestnut?

"You're hurting the Jews! Hurting the Christians!" A hysterical voice came over hand-held radios; several stations were now broadcasting from the group around Jess. An Orthodox rabbi was confronting him now. For a moment Mary thought _Judah Iskovitz._ But this one was shorter, chunkier, a bulldog. "Do you know who is rejoicing in this circus?" he said. "The Arabs! Iranians! Terrorists of all stripes, who hate America, hate the West. That's who you're comforting!"

"Wait, wait," said Jess. "You're mixing up all kinds of political stuff here."

"But of course it's political, ignoramus! When you undermine the religions of the West, you make a political statement. And for what? To benefit the enemies of Israel and America. For shame, that a man born Jewish..."

"Wait a minute," said Jess, reddening. "You claim truth for your religion, others just as strongly for theirs. You can't all be right. My guess is that none of you is right. And God is trapped in the middle."

"What sort of gibberish is this?"

"You're just promoting divisions among people forever. Five hundred years from now, still having the same differences to fight about."

"But Torah is law. Without it, life is chaos."

"What _you_ call law. Another just as devout says no, _his_ law, his prayers. And another, his. I don't think God is giving the time of day to any of you."

The rabbi swung at him. The blow was meant for his face but landed on his shoulder. The crowd recoiled; there was a mass groan; cameras leaped. The police chief and assistants seized the attacker, who was screaming, spraying spit: "Destroying the Jews, your own Jews!" Jess shook his head, not hurt, already minimizing the incident, moving forward with pacifying hands, everything in his body language signaling peace - and _oh goddamn it,_ thought Mary, _isn 't it already a bulletin breaking into the TV and radio of the world, poisoning every news story?_ "The next Holocaust, on your head!" the rabbi's voice split the air, fanatical enough to carry over the noise of the crowd, which still was moving as long as Jess kept moving, even as cops closed in around the fanatic, engulfed him, and got him out of there.

Microphones popped up in front of Mary. She was speechless, furious; but there was Jess's voice, already being _interviewed,_ the crowd hushed to hear him on radios, "No, no, a lovetap," and blaming himself: "I must've upset him. It happens..."

She heard the scrap of a reporter's question: "... prosecute?"

"No way," said Jess. "He'll cool off and in a few hours it'll be Jewish Sabbath. As far as I'm concerned, peace, _Shabbat Shalom,_ to him and everyone on earth."

A cheer greeted that sentiment. _Leave it to Jess,_ she thought. _The perfect client because the perfect gentleman: treat him badly, he treats you better, and gains the advantage. Talk about turning the other cheek. Interview me now, you bastards!_ Twenty-third and Chestnut, the street signs said, moving past so slowly...

"Folks, this is Jess." His voice echoed in the street, amplified by radios. "We don't seem to be communicating here, not reducing the crowd enough. When I said we'd keep to the sidewalks, I meant it..." There was a wave of laughter. "We're costing the taxpayers I don't know how much in extra police, traffic, disruption. But Philadelphia is a gracious city, the friendliest on earth..." This drew a cheer; people love to hear their town praised by celebrities. "But now, folks, I have to tell you..." Amazingly, thousands hushed. "I originally meant to say a few words at Independence Hall. I thought we'd be only a thousand or so. But now the commissioner and I agree we'd be taking a risk at the hall..."

"No, no," some began to resist.

"... Trampling grass and so forth. I don't want that, I don't think you want that." Outcries could be interpreted either way, but he said, "I didn't think so. So here's what we'll do. When the front of the line reaches Broad Street - are you listening, Si and Melv up front? - police will be there to direct us south a few blocks. Got that, south on Broad? And then east on South Street. Hey, that's confusing, commissioner!" He chuckled and the police chief, an Irishman with pink cheeks and a snub nose, grinned till his eyes squeezed shut.

"We don't need a speech anyway," said Jess. "We're having plenty of good discussion with people in line." Mary was not the only one disappointed, mass grumbling told her. He deserved to speak at Independence Hall. "But here's some good news," he said. "City sanitation crews have set up portable toilets along South Street at Broad..." Cheers went up. "Thought you'd like that. Let's hear it for the city sanitation guys!"

Microphones moved in on the Mulcahy. "What about the change of plans, Mary?"

She ad libbed. "Just what Jess said. The crowd's too big. We don't want to overwhelm a national shrine."

"There's a rumor it's to avoid an assassination attempt."

Silence. She let it hang there like a rotting fish. "That again?" she said and broke eye contact with the moron who asked it.

"How about this charge we're hearing from gay and lesbian people that Jess is casting them out of the new millennium, the same as the old religions did?"

"That's got to be a hundred ways mixed up," she said. "He never claims standing to 'cast anybody out' of anything."

Jeremy Kirk horned in, stealing her camera time. "You know very well, Mary, it's to avoid us!"

"What's to avoid you?"

"The clergy. From all faiths, Christian and Jewish. They're assembling in front of the Hall as we speak: hundreds, perhaps thousands, to witness against _him,_ and he turns tail. For shame!"

"To prove what, Jeremy?" Peter Winslow shouldered in. The media loved it; the hotter the tempers the better. A few feet away, Jess walked along with a smile, listening to what someone else was yammering at him. Mary thought: _If only Harry sent a helicopter. If it hovered overhead and let down a ladder..._

"To prove? To prove?" cried Jeremy Kirk, knowing well that cameras were on him. "To prove how many faithful servants of God, scholars who've given a lifetime to religious study, not just a few months to an ego trip - how many would refute every word he says, his lies and half-truths!" And it was Kirk's voice booming over radios.

"Quit raining on somebody else's parade, Father!" someone shouted, mistaking him for a priest (which he hated).

"You're looking for trouble, _Preacher,_ " said Pete, putting contempt in the word. "You're increasing the chance of disorder while Jess is trying like hell to reduce it."

"Lies, lies," said Kirk. "If you're scared to meet at Independence Hall, Philadelphia's aroused clergy will meet you in the street!"

Every camera and microphone fed on it. Uproar! In front of Mary the entire throng swiveled to the right. Police stood in the middle of a wide avenue, skyscrapers on every corner; banks; the heart of the city; horns blaring and people waving in windows. _Broad Street!_ But how far was that cursed river?

_***_

"Broad Street!" Maggie Deland heard people say, like a mantra, a declaration of significant arrival. At least the street was literally broad, a boulevard with wide sidewalks crowded by spectators. For one startling moment she thought she saw Bren Hazelwood but as quickly lost him. Everyone was focused on Jess, especially the women. "Look! There he is! Like his pictures!" He waved back, even as he was giving ear to some tiresome cleric. Maggie was surprised at how easily he had agreed to bypass Independence Hall, so prominent a public stage. With an army behind him the city would have backed down or might have faced a riot, if all he cared about was publicity. His enemies never gave him credit for how cynically he might have played the game.

"You're never going to get people back to God; you might get them _ahead_ to God... a better idea of Him," she heard his voice on portable radios but missed the context. Many applauded. _This is what panics the clergy_ , she thought: _his acclaim. Who ever cheers Christianity any more? The new adventure of the spirit is with him. The modern mind rejects the myths; no way can they last another century. But his way might..._ And now what? Another turn, this time to the left, and into a cursedly narrower canyon. "South Street, South Street." people said around her. _The immense sound of our feet. What number did I just hear? Twenty thousand!_ The sidewalk was lined, blessedly, with portable toilet booths. Radios reported that Jess had agreed to reimburse the city for setting them up. A television cameraman, walking backwards, tripped and went down. People gasped. He could be trampled! - but no, he was up again! The police chief looked worried. Peter Winslow broadcast another appeal to reduce the crowd. At each intersection (which was this? Maggie looked up: Eleventh Street) marchers escaped, released from the oppression of long blocks of store fronts with apartment flats above. In the oven-like confinement she felt that many might become claustrophobic (as she herself was). But for all those who fled, others came in, intensifying the press of bodies.

The crowd seemed to _darken_ around Jess: more individuals in religious garb: priests, ministers, nuns, rabbis in skullcaps. The ecumenical ideal, at last - Christians and Jews, but united in _opposition...Let's have some imams here, too,_ she thought; _Hindus and Buddhist monks. Statues of the Virgin should be carried above our heads, Torahs, and the choir of St. Paul 's. O come all ye faithful in humility and humidity, make a joyful noise unto the Lord, drown out his truth, shout him down, beat him into silence, raise him high, nail him up!_ She came to herself with a shock, astonished at the waking nightmare of martyrdom... at any moment, from any window. _Where, where is that river?_

"Let me answer that!" someone was shouting at a point Jess had made. More people tried to reach him. The police commissioner was jostled; he caught his cap falling into his hands. He looked angry. _Watch these jolly Irishmen when you lay a hand on them._ There was a whiteness around Jess's lips; his smile looked fixed and taut. Was this, Maggie wondered, the source of his charisma: that he, with no belief in heaven, offered himself as the sacrifice for which a crowd pretends horror but secretly craves: a mortal token to appease the gods on one hand and on the other to intensify in each survivor a sense of life renewed? _His death demonstrates that we nobodies are still alive, more blessed than he?_ The commissioner was not smiling now. Everyone around Jess looked agitated: poor Peter, the boys, the police... a swarm of cameras, microphones... Mary Mulcahy, being interviewed again on the march, sweating, her flaming hair getting loose; she looked ready to scream. Maggie felt jabbed and poked from behind; someone stepped on her heel. _I am so sick of this,_ she thought. _Smelling bodies and sweat... feet hurt... What's that idiot, no, just a kid, doing on a rooftop, waving a flag?_ "The minds of millions of people are waiting to turn on to a better idea..." she heard Jess say.

"Charlatan! "You're leading people astray!" "The Lord will punish!" some of Kirk's truth squadders screamed at him.

"This is beginning to look bad," a voice said near Maggie, a young man with a pale-looking girl. "Let's split, next corner." _Now that 's insight,_ she thought. The end of another horrid block of high-windowed storefronts loomed towards her, but so slowly. What street was coming? She looked up at the sign: Sixth. _Just six more blocks, if they intelligently name the street by the river First, but they never do, do they?_ At the intersection the straight line of sky opened up to a cross formed by the side street. A cross of blue sky. _Oh Lord, is that the Goodyear blimp up there?_ People pointed. The sighting confirmed it: _we 're at the center of the newsmaking universe!_

But now many were gesturing excitedly towards the left, north along Sixth Street. What? More? A great number of clergy were marching down the street, moving fast, then breaking into a run, a heavenly host to meet the flank of the Jessites. Maggie recognized the hobbling gait of Jeremy Kirk in the van, leading the troops of Christ. "They're coming from Independence Hall!" someone yelled. Cameras leaped. A shout was heard: "Here come more, Jess!" He turned, absorbed in the discussion around him, unaware till then of the advancing wave. The crowd's reaction was a convulsive slowing of the pace, but police pumped their arms, desperate to keep the march moving. _My God, we can 't try to stop!_ thought Maggie. _Thousands behind us... the crush!_ The tidal movement filled the width of South Street. People were backed against storefronts. _Don 't let windows break!_ A woman tripped and almost went down; Maggie caught her under the elbow.

"Forgive us, Jesus!" someone shrieked. It was Jeremy Kirk's crazed voice.

Maggie tried to move more slowly; others also struggled to hold back. The noise and press of bodies from behind felt irresistible. Then she saw members of clergy fall in front of her, on their knees in the street. They were kneeling - madness! _We 'll be crushed! Death!_ A policeman blew a whistle but only intensified the panic. "Fathers, get up!" an officer cried. Others shouted obscenities. One hysteric in uniform waded in, stick high, among the religious on their knees. Mary Mulcahy, arms outstretched, held back as if she were being sucked into the abyss. Hundreds of clergy clogged the street like sheep in a rural road, impossible to penetrate. Maggie had an imminent certainty of toppling over, bodies smashing, crushing down on her... life's last moment.

A voice boomed: "Folks, this is Jess! We're stopping here." He sounded no note of alarm, a routine announcement.

Every nerve in Maggie's body tensed. She felt jostled from behind, _dying..._and the wave never broke. She stumbled, teetered, but the tide that rolled against her from in back subsided; she rocked like a buoy in a swell. In the rear, thousands could have had no idea what was happening. In front, on the brink of disaster, the bullhorn and the familiar voice meant everything. The impulse was to stop, to listen; and this effect, multiplied, gave the needed impulse. Some few individuals did trip onto the backs of the martyrs. "Forgive them, Jesus!" someone screamed. "Christ a'mighty!" exclaimed a cop. But the footfalls of thousands damped; individual cries became random, insignificant.

"We're stopping for two reasons," Jess announced. "Number one, people are praying in the street. Hey, I wonder if they have a permit for that, Commissioner." He dared to joke! "Maybe you can hear them." He paused. A Babel of outcries underlined his own apparent casualness. "When we start again - not yet! - we're going to go real slow, folks. Let's be careful how we walk through these people. Make sure nobody gets hurt. And the second reason..."

He held them with another pause, a familiar rhetorical trick of his. South Street and Sixth looked absolutely packed. _An acrobat could scamper over us head to head,_ Maggie thought. A breeze stirred, fortunately. Otherwise, jammed like this in unyielding sunlight except for those shaded by facades along the right sidewalk, some would collapse. A few managed to get their heads above the mass by climbing front stoops. Every second- and third-story window had been thrown open and seemed occupied by a woman leaning on elbows in the immemorial village manner. On a rooftop a boy waved a flag.

"The second reason," Jess said, his voice commanding the streets, "is to say what I meant to say at Independence Hall." His face was tense, his shirt stained with sweat. In the tableau around him the face of Mary Mulcahy was drained of color; the police commissioner's lips were moving (not in prayer, Maggie judged); Peter Winslow's arms were outstretched behind Jess in a frozen gesture of protection. Incredibly, a young father had a toddler on his shoulders, afloat in such a perilous sea.

"I did not come to this city of independence to talk about freedom from God," Jess said. "I came to talk about the freedom _of_ God."

A woman in an upstairs window shouted, "You're a doll, Jessie!" Those who heard it laughed, and he waved to her but continued without a break in tone.

"For the people on their knees in the street," he said, "and I respect their view," - _Like hell you do,_ Maggie said to herself. _A stunt like that? They ought to be horsewhipped -_ "for them, God is an absolute ruler, a king. Greater than any fought by the men of 'seventy-six. A loving king, I'm sure they'd say. But what they really have in mind, and plant in other people's minds, is a tyrant."

Protests erupted from the kneeling clergy, but the speaker was relentless. "No secret police is more tireless than His. His eyes and ears are everywhere, we're told. Seeing everything we do. Hearing our most private thoughts. He watches our lives from birth to death, His whole purpose in creation not the joy of creating, as you might expect, but to have a world of people to rule, unchallenged, forever."

"No, no!" cried the clergy, and Maggie saw the police commissioner point a finger and bark something at his cohort as if riot control might yet be called for.

"He prepares eternal joy for us when we die, or eternal torment. Billions of years of it, either way. And under such a ruler, promising impossible happiness, threatening inconceivable tortures, we are expected to learn how to live. And I suppose we would," Jess said, turning to the flock kneeling in front of him. Some had their eyes closed. They moaned prayers as if their words going out could jam his coming in. "I suppose we would," he repeated, "if we could see this version of God making people better. Show us the great job tyranny is doing, reducing evil, raising the level of decency in the world." He paused, as if to allow listeners to make their own calculation. "Excuse me, folks, I don't see it," he said. "Culturally, morally, spiritually, _we are losing our way..._"

"Yeah, damn right!" someone in the crowd responded. "Give it to 'em, Jess!"

"Because there is no moral authority in tyranny. It doesn't hold," he said. "It fools people for awhile, or terrifies them, but eventually they catch on. And get rid of it. As they did in this city so long ago. The irony is that people _want_ God and want to acknowledge Him. We don't want to be alone in the universe. To honor and love the Creator is satisfying to the mind and heart. But what feeling can anybody have for a tyrant?"

He insisted on the word; it awed the crowd, resounding through the streets like a new Declaration. "Not that people don't try," he said. "They would agree that all is not well - but _because we 're not listening!_ He is angry with us. We have to be more obedient. So they strain to reconcile wars and disasters with a God of love. Millions of Jews, Armenians, Hutus, and who knows how many others slaughtered in genocides. Millions more in wars and terrorism - never mind! Obey each word, light the candle, rattle the beads. Exactness in unimportant things is pleasing to Him."

Maggie was conscious of an extraordinary quiet. Even the massed clergy, rising now to their feet by ones and twos, listened to this indictment.

"This is why, in the age of space flight and Internet, we see a pathetic clinging to ancient ways; a desperate ultra-Orthodoxy, born-again fundamentalism and radical Islamism, not even to mention the poor souls who fall for cults and weirdos, New Age balderdash, and doomsday hysterias. And all this..."

He paused again to make a new collection of silence. In the sky a rising, distant airliner sent a murmur over the rooftops. "All this," he said, "because religions give us the wrong slant on the _God Who really is._ God is not fooling us, people; we fool ourselves! It is no disrespect to Him to point out the plain fact that He _does not_ alter the outcomes of war, disaster, and illness to please us."

"Pray to Him, Jess, and He will!" A cry of anguish rose from among the clergy. Maggie Deland recognized Jeremy Kirk's voice.

"Nor can I believe," Josephson went on without a break, "that He saves the ultimate reality till after we're dead. Holding out incredible pleasures or punishments to last forever, in hopes we'll behave now. It's not working any more, people! And the worst of it is that by clinging to the tyrant, we lose sight of the real God."

Turning to another part of the crowd, he noticed that cameras and bystanders had opened a space to his right and he took a step that way. "God is not going to make the world one bit better than He made it. _We_ have to do that; what could be clearer? And how shall we do it?"

His voice, now measured and reflective, filled the streets. More people made room to his right and he stepped that way, conveying an assurance that the crowd was not, after all, so dangerously packed. Most of the demonstrators were up by now, brushing their knees. Their aborted martyrdom had lost point. Jess Josephson hadn't been stopped; it was his voice that dominated.

"How shall we live?" he repeated, and allowed the question to float, too important to be hurried. Maggie looked at the faces around her. She found them thoughtful, attentive, even (could the word be used?) beautiful. _Is this what contemplation of God does?_ The boy on the rooftop, awed by the hush of thousands in the canyon below, stopped waving his flag. He stood still against the sky, the banner barely fluttering.

Josephson broke the silence. "Imposing rules by terror, even good rules, and calling them supernatural commandments, hasn't made people better. Tyranny has failed. I say, let's see what freedom can do. Let's see..." A spatter of applause, which he did not want, stopped him for a breath. "Let's see what opening the mind can do; if by starting with a better idea of God, millions of us wouldn't come to a better idea of how to live. I bet ninety-five percent of us would. We haven't yet seen how _well_ the human race can behave!"

The crowd applauded and the boy on the rooftop began waving his flag like a signal that all might now be well. "In the freedom of God," Josephson said, "there is only one thing that could be called a rule: We can't avoid thinking. Freedom and empty heads don't go well together. It will deteriorate to license; always has. The only way it will work is if we turn on our minds. No more leaving the big questions to the experts. We've got to think our way to a better idea of God and from that to a better use of our lives."

Somehow Jeremy Kirk had wormed to within a few feet of him. Straining forward, the Christian cried out in a voice loud enough to be picked up by microphones: "You're leading them to hell, Jess! God forgive you!" It was an act of fury and fanaticism, and, considering the mood and density of the crowd, of desperate courage. Fists and nightsticks went up. Maggie thought the little man might be torn to bits. But Josephson, who should have been outraged at the interruption, reached out and wrapped an arm around him.

"Doggone it, Jeremy," he said, "will you get your own parade!"

The rhythm of his speech was ruined; he must have been near finishing anyway, but the sudden act of gallantry, comical in frustration, caused people nearby to laugh. They began an ovation as if in fact he had ended. Women cried his name from windows. More flags sprouted on rooftops. With his arm still on Kirk's shoulder, he looked up in surprise. No doubt he had more to say. He caught Maggie Deland's eye just as she was thinking: _Leave it there. Get out of here alive._ He smiled and raised his cap and, turning with poor trapped Jeremy Kirk beside him, his face caught the late afternoon sun. "Thanks, folks," he said and waved the cap. The cheers redoubled. People near Maggie slapped backs and embraced like an army in victory. She heard glass rattling, thought store windows might yet come down. Near her a young couple were inspired to kiss. She saw Mary Mulcahy wipe away tears. She thought she saw, was suddenly sure she saw, Bren Hazelwood shaking his head at her from a store entry.

Then Jess Josephson ascended. His assistants and others took him by the legs and raised him to their shoulders. He lurched, almost fell over, righted himself, and waved his cap. The cheering continued. Maggie saw the police chief's hand go up, probably to try to get the hero lowered: too tempting a target, bobbing on a sea of heads that stretched a block in four directions. "Jess!" people shouted, "Look this way for a picture!" Maggie caught his eye again. He seemed to be asking: Do I look ridiculous up here? She clapped her hands.

A voice spoke in her ear. "A bad time, but I apologize."

"Oh, let me enjoy this," she said, not turning.

"I've missed you painfully."

She turned to Bren Hazelwood, handsome as ever, in a display of contrition. "You'll find other women," she said, intuitively offering this consolation in the plural.

"They don't do it for me," he said. "Single notes on a piano. I need chords, arpeggios, harmonies." She had to smile. Had he rehearsed? "Marry me, Maggie," he said, loud enough to draw stares and bystanders' laughter: a guy _proposing_ in this riot scene.

Studying him, she guessed that this time he might believe he meant it (momentarily, and with a tacit proviso: we can always divorce). "Too late," she said.

"I've changed. That behavior of mine in the bar..."

"Irrelevant. I'm not at all mad. You set me free."

He looked surprised. "You mean I had a chance till then?"

"Let's say it made the choice clear."

Jess Josephson was being borne away in another direction and police whistles were blowing. "What are you doing here anyway?" she asked.

"Looking for you."

"Seriously."

"Covering. The man makes an ephemeral form of news. We Christians can't ignore him."

"Have you been writing about him? I haven't caught your stuff lately. Sorry."

"I've managed to find other subjects. But what the hell, it's only two hours from New York. Here, let me help." She was adjusting her backpack. His hand lingered on a strap. "When I think how this must be cutting into the shoulder I've so often kissed..."

"Stop."

"Has he kissed your shoulders?"

"Out of bounds, Bren."

"Sorry. Just jealousy speaking. Take it as a compliment."

"Be honest," she said. "Did you ever hear anyone with such a gift for holding a crowd? Ten minutes ago this looked like disaster."

"He's wonderful. I love him."

She laughed but sensed again what a thorough nihilist he was, merely gifted with the looks and talents to make life an agreeable recreation. She felt something like pity. "I hope you find someone too, Bren," she said, "and something to believe in." The hero of the day was being lowered from shoulders, and people near Maggie seemed impatient to get moving.

"Just tell me one thing. Is he... making love to you?" He had sanitized the question at the last moment.

"Is that really your business?" she said.

"I think it really is. You will be the great regret of my life."

"Oh, rubbish."

"As a chronicler of the passing scene then. A maker of footnotes."

"You'd use it in print."

"Scout's honor, I might not." He laughed at the non-commitment.

She smiled. Why should she satisfy him on the point; what did she owe him? Yet she decided to, and with pride. "The answer is no."

He looked hard at her. "And it doesn't worry you?"

"I believe every woman he has known before is... past. And every man I've been with... as if they never happened."

"Including me," he said. "Impressive." Then he had to ruin a sincere moment with a wisecrack. "History's first case of the hymen restored."

The crowd had begun moving. She took a step, expecting him to follow. But he stood planted, allowing others to pass around him, separating them. He called after her, "Good-bye."

# 4.

**From NYContrarian, August 18**

**THE SWAN KNIGHT MAKES HIS GETAWAY**

**By Brendan Hazelwood**

It came to me I can't say like a religious revelation; I don't get those. It came to me as a journalistic kick in the pants. However acute my distaste for jessjosephsonism and the threat it poses to public order, the professional part of me, hearing the trumpets of duty, said Go, pilgrim! Hie thee to the Quaker City. No greater folly stalks the country at this time, and within two hours of where you sit, lonely truthseeker, scratching your stubble, testy holdout against the teaching that a little bit of God can brighten the darkest day. Up, up, old stud!

I shaved as the telly told how JJ & Company, white, middle-class, and college-bred, had invaded the black ghetto of West Philadelphia like a jet of cream into coffee. I taxied to the Port Authority Terminal, cupped my hands over wallet and groin while tripping through assorted crackheads, whores, and homeless; then for two hours jounced in a Greyhound across the turnpike barrens of Joisey whilst the dream of a moral universe went lumpty-bump in my head.

I reached City Hall before the Prophet did. His progress was slowed by the hosannas of the multitudes. Mine was quickened by the canting of the city's population westward to strew his way with roses. If you know Philly, you will know that the rococo pile of municipal administration stands athwart the main crossroads, Broad and Market streets. But the bulge of greatest anticipation, a melange of shoppers, office workers, media freaks, panhandlers, cops, and shutterbugs was congregated a block south, at Broad and Chestnut. My heart went pit-a-pat as I groped to the front, even as I did at age nine when the bands blared and baton-twirlers were pumping their knees and boompsies. To the west on Chestnut one could see a wall-to-wall tide, as in the Bay of Fundy. It advanced, it foamed, it roared unstoppably, rolling along the wretchedly narrow cartway ordained by the short-sighted colonials.

"Fuck," said a police officer beside me by way of inviting conversation. "He don't even have a parade permit. Everybody sticks it to this idiot of a mayor." I blamed this expression of civil service spleen on the heat and humidity, which I judged at 95 each. All assembled could have stood a fire hose turned on them, especially the cops, who must have been bracing at any moment for a homemade bomb or some crazy in a window to take a shot at the Faultless Peerless. The constabulary among whom I was proud to stand were charged with turning the human flood southward. They flexed their hamstrings and reached for the reassuring heft of nightstick on belt. It was mid-afternoon and they hadn't enjoyed a piece of skull yet. At times I myself have resisted arrest when my cause it was just, but now my sympathies were on the side of the badge. Thousands marching on the public streets without a permit! Gad, it made the blood boil.

Nevertheless you will be relieved to know that no blood was spilt. All the thin blue line had to do was to circle their arms thataway and the deluge of enthusiasts turned and foamed like whitewater in the gorge of the Zambezi. They were so well behaved they put me in mind of Christians. As the mob right-flanked, you could hear hundreds, thousands, of portable radios picking up and amplifying the yammer of their Beloved. He was publicly batting the breeze as usual, his minions loving it.

But let me not scoff too much. Ask me if I was impressed and I tell you frankly, yes. It is not possible to see 20,000 people go past (the police estimate; others went as high as 100,000, a million!) but no, you can't see so much mankind on the hoof, be it for nothing better than Prevent Forest Fires Week, without giving their passion some credence. Gag if you must on our hero's servings of Theology Lite, his sugared deism under dollops of inflated ego, yet admit this: the man has struck a chord. The people have a grievance. Mainstream religion has got to do better by them in the brains department. It has relied on mythology too long and if you insist on mythology, heck, Islam outbids Christianity, at least for the menfolk. Unlimited virgins for everybody, or even (the preference in my own tent) rather more experienced ladies? Hey, who wouldn't?

The equivalent of two blocks of parade passed me before Himself hove into view. He is never in the van anymore, nor conspicuously attired, for fear of attracting the sharpshooter's ball. Not long ago an innocent marcher stuck his brains between Jess and an errant sniper, and the fellow's life was forfeit. For the survivor, of course, this had an upside; he couldn't have bought the publicity. Too rough? Okay, _you_ count the front page attention before and after the surrogate assassination.

Orgasmic noises surrounded me. Oo, oh, ah, oh my, Jess, Jess, yess! It was embarrassing to a shy fellow like me. The womenfolk were recognizing _that face._ For weeks he had been more tube-iquitous than that notorious lens hog, the President. He was rigged out in his man-in-the-street uniform: a Phillies cap, slacks, and a sport shirt. I had not seen him close-up in some weeks and the change would have worried me were I his health insurer. He looked 15 or 20 pounds skinnier from a fairly meatless frame in the first place. His temples had sunk and his eyes, which have awakened rhapsodies for their "mildness," looked haunted: Buchenwald eyes. The man had been living with death for so long, hustled along by the SS guards of his self-sought martyrdom, that I have to think deep inside him was a Jew scared shitless, searching the woods for a place to run. He took swigs from a can of soda while yakking with someone his apostles had let through to serve as straight man of the moment.

Watching him go past, I'll admit to a twinge of skepticism disarmed. I would not have given a groschen for his chances of getting this far. He put me in mind of a high school quarterback whose team had no business on the same field with the pros, yet look at the scoreboard! Two minutes to go and the kid had the score tied with a chance to win. And all the bishops, rabbis, and ayatollahs on the other bench screaming at each other why they couldn't pound this shithead into the ground.

I will not here attempt to paraphrase the "God of freedom" speech. The curious may refer to Saturday's _Times,_ where it was printed verbatim, like some sho' nuff State of the Union. I will leave it to others to judge whether such paucity of thought and flatness of expression justified the Philly mob in rattling the scenery with their huzzahs. This acclaim, I believe, was not really for him. It was for the ideal (in his case the mirage) of a secular messiah: that selfless redeemer and soul's physician whose words, whose touch might heal our spiritual distemper and ennoble this earthly life. Josephson was no such savior. But he occupied the place such a one might fill, bearing enough of the stigmata to allow suspension of disbelief. "Oh, let me enjoy this," a woman pleaded when I intruded on her ecstasy for the pretender, who at that moment was hoist on shoulders like a winning coach.

If there were any heroes in the God-of-freedom tableau, it was not the over-amplified Jess, but the black-clad clergy who dropped to their knees to stop his juggernaut. That was courage. How typical that post facto editorialists castigated _them_ for irresponsibility while banging out Bachian fugues of homage to the March King. What presence of mind he had shown! Imagine, to bring all those feet to a halt with a lil ol' impromptu. But praising Jess for speechifying is like praising a billy goat for rutting. It is what he does; it is the posture he assumes when most himself.

One cleric deserves special kudos. The Rev. Jeremy Kirk edits a weekly Christian throwaway. It may be that I shall subscribe, for he is a man of kidney. His lifetime income might not equal what the Praiseworthy has invested in this one hegira. Yet Luther himself might have glowed at how he stuck his face into Jess's at the height of the oratorical fizz-bombing, startling hell out of the maestro's muscle boys, who are supposed to head off such close encounters. The boychiks display a serious flaw as a praetorian guard; they get all glassy-eyed when the boss goes into one of his oracles.

The hero's reaction to being interrupted in full croak was characteristic. He put out an arm and hugged his heckler! Those for whom he can do no wrong took this to be an act of protection, for by speaking up amidst the devotees, the Rev. Kirk had assumed some risk of getting his bones rearranged. But when it comes to public posturing, nobody can get the better of a totally shameless scene stealer. The poor fellow turned red and subsided in the hero's embrace as the ecstatic throng hallelujahed. One more peep and perchance his lips were stopped with a kiss. Still, for this day's action, I give the game ball to the padre.

Jess's orations have been praised for their brevity. Personally I find them long. It was well that a breeze was coming up, for some would surely have collapsed in the heat had not the sacrificial Christian aborted the windbag's peroration. It felt good to be spared his climactic platitudes, which you could see coming by the set of his legs, like those of a Little Leaguer determined to poke one out of the infield. The fact is, JJ's basic idea is such a smallish thing, a theological poppy seed, a pinpoint, that any elaboration becomes excess. His cake is all icing, his preachments remindful of that gift you received as a birthday joke in childhood. You know, the big one, wrapped in a carton large enough to hold a bicycle; but inside was a smaller, and inside that another; and on down to the last dumb little box containing a Mickey Mouse watch. In Josephson's last package isn't even a gift, only a card, with a single word on it: God. And let that be enough for you.

Somehow he got away with it. I talked to one of his groupies afterwards. Her emotional state was that of a girl who had just enjoyed extremely successful auto-eroticism. Talking sense to her was impossible. Damn it, her manner implied, why aren't you feeling good all over, too? Why isn't everyone? Meanwhile the holy henchmen were trying to cajole the crowd to disperse. It was over, folks, the "march across Pennsylvania." They kept repeating the phrase as if to massage it into history. Be off, they said; Jess has wrung all the publicity out of you that he wants. But it is one thing to throw a party, another to get people to leave. There were eight or ten blocks still to walk in Pennsylvania. The Delaware River is the boundary. Thousands longed to see their Moses reach his Jordan. What would he do there, _walk_ across? Having trekked this far, they were not going to miss the water music.

Presently we were moving, a million-footed beast crazed by millenarian expectations. People around me laughed and slapped backs, shook hands, home towns, and sexual preferences for all I know. Children in upstairs windows tore up coloring books and hurled the scraps as confetti. I caught a glance from a senorita with a display of fleshly goods on a windowsill that almost tempted me from my pursuit of truth. I can understand how the most devout crusader will sometimes say fuck Jerusalem, let's have a quickie.

The suspense built at each intersection. Fourth Street. Third Street. The corner signs were relayed up the line like a countdown. At length we crossed the overpass of a sunken freeway containing a traffic jam. It was evening rush hour. Commuters stared glumly up through windshields. And then the river, falsely blue, as if from a distance it might be drinkable, but spacious and restful to the eye as large bodies of water tend to be, curling across the metropolitan spikebed from left to right. Ship piers jutted out from shore. Truck traffic honked on the stevedoring avenue. Far across, blessedly distant in its urban decline, connected by the nets of suspension bridges up and downstream, was Camden, New Jersey, notable for nothing I can think of in the century and more since Whitman died there, dreaming of sailor boys.

Our crowd spilled down a final portside stairs straight out into Delaware Avenue and to hell with the traffic, let 'em honk. The police among us, suckered as usual into playing Jess's game, lined up on both sides to usher us across. But where were we going?I envisioned us toppling lemming-like into the drink. But it turned out there was a set of stone steps down to a fair-sized marina, although no marina on earth could handle this many thousands. The crew of the place must have shat green apples as the human tide foamed over the seawall. Heigh-ho, were we about to pirate their fleet and make sail for Jersey? It could have happened. A mob gets an invincible sense of truth on the march. Jess, however, had a keener idea of how many sevens can be rolled in a row. Take your chips and git, he was thinking. I could tell. A slouch gets into the shoulder, a piss-your-pants acceleration in the gait when a certain kind of winner edges toward the cashier's cage, scared that somebody bigger might take it away from him. In Faultless Peerless's case, of course, his followers wished him the perfect end to a perfect day. They screamed, they roared, they practically blew your drums away cheering as he and his coterie reached their destination. What else? - a yacht.

While the rest of us, faceless chorus of thousands going no farther, distributed ourselves along various rails and ropes, steps and gangplanks, the seawall, the street and overpasses, our hero, stepping aboard, revealed yet another facet of his mercurial charisma: Lohengrin.

Uh-huh, the fag Wagner wrote the opera about. The swan knight. Insufferably purer than you and I. The moment this prig steps on stage with his goldy locks and grim idealism, you know the only part of him that will ever stiffen is his neck. Poor Elsa, the princess who falls for this priapic dud. Pure is okay, but she is all girl and looking forward to a decent schwotzing on her wedding night. But in the penultimate moment he manages to spy a flaw in her character. The absolute trust he requires of a woman falls short of perfect and that's it, girlie. Off he flies on the back of a swan, unsullied to the last, too good for this earthly realm, his nightie unstickied by any drop of come.

What's the connection? Just this. Our own swan knight had managed to work up a certain cheap suspense as to how he would exit Pennsylvania. He had promised not to march across Jersey, yet had a commitment from the mayor of New York that he'd be allowed to orate there. What was he going to do? Drive? Take a bus? An ego like this? By his troth, no. He got piped aboard a gorgeous white seagoing craft, gaudy with brass, trimmed in teak and ebony, with lifeboats slung in the davits. "Yacht" is not too grand a term. All right, it was not J. P. Morgan size, but it had sailing masts as well as engine capacity, and judging by the number of portholes could have slept twenty or thirty. On the stern, in fancy gold letters, the name: "Harry's Swanna."

The crowd went crazy with joy that Sinless the Sailor did not have to leave town like us lesser souls. I assume the master of the vessel who gripped his hand as he came aboard was the eponymous Harry, greeting him on a rear deck as capacious as any front porch in Indianapolis. Harry looked to be a hale, white-haired, pink-cheeked septuagenarian, with a captain's cap straight out of Navy casting. A shopping mall tycoon, I was told. He seized Jess in a bear hug, shook hands with the myrmidons, but won applause from the crowd by giving Mary Mulcahy, the crusade's overripe press agent, a smooch on the kisser. At least somebody aboard had an idea of the tenderer uses of femininity.

But the cast of "Lohengrin" demands an Elsa and I had my candidate among those left on the dock. Even with her hair mussed, nose freckled, blouse and jeans ready to be picked up by the Salvation Army, you could tell this was the thoroughbred of the lot. And not piped aboard! She shot him a look that said, what gives? He returned one that said, oh dear but my chastity. Let's face it, Ellie, your boy was always going to keep his fly zipped. What, invite her to share his swan? And find himself alone with her at night in the down? Are you kidding?

So there he stood at the stern rail with his cap off (a nautical model now, white with a black visor, gold-braided) waving, mugging, and blessing the throng, who went all-stops-pulled seeing their grail knight installed on the escape mechanism. The effect could not have been better staged by your highest paid fairy scenic designer. The mellow light of late afternoon, gulls wheeling aloft on a breeze, shadows of ships and piers slanting out on the river; and right there, stage center, lit by camera flashes, Lt. Flash Flaccid, waving his cap to his adorers, who never wanted the curtain to fall. All the scene lacked was a tune to send you home humming. People wept through their smiles. Cheeks were wet, eyes transfigured. "Jess! Jess! Jess!" they squealed.

I was impressed. Not that this particular stiff, our Lohengrin of the moment, was worth it, but at the extent to which the hoi polloi crave Nietzsche's Superman. Someone who projects the illusion of being not in it for himself. Above all that. Pure of mouth and heart and with no working private parts. I believe this is the function that Jess Josephson's career has served. It didn't matter what the other supers were engaged in, standing around in their earthbound poses, so long as Golden Boy remained at the rail, casting blessings. The truth about him is less important than the truth about us. We long to believe. It doesn't matter in what; the more superficial, perhaps, the better. How did Chesterton put it? Lose our belief in God and the danger is not that we will believe in nothing, but rather in anything. The ancients conceived of the Lord; we have invented the celebrity.

Any time you think a crowd is making as much noise as it possibly can, it can always surprise you. The boat started moving from the dock and they had to hear us in Atlantic City. Harry's Swanna was bearing him away. Steam whistles blew. I checked out Elsa, half expecting the poor girl to swoon on the dock. In the opera she dies. But this one's heart was made of sterner stuff. She put on a brave smile. Her lips moved. Perhaps she said softly, "You cocksucker." Then she hitched up her pack and applauded and waved with the rest. Another night of not getting laid... ah, well.

The cheers swelled as the swan bore him away, his ship turning to the right -- make that starboard -- beyond the piers into the channel. Still waving, he grew smaller on the southbound tide, the bosom of the river the only breast that would cradle him tonight; out, out on the blue that bleached to white, to silver, under billows of gold-tinged cloud, finally to fade, melt, and be swallowed into the infinite unreal.

# 5.

"Hello?"

"You're home. I'm glad."

"Oh, I was hoping it was you."

"I called two hours ago, left a message on your machine."

"I got it when I came in."

"Then again about an hour ago, but..."

"I was in the tub. Jumped out naked as a jaybird and heard the click as you hung up."

"Mm, a beautiful picture just passed before my eyes."

"You should have been here to see it."

"But you got home all right, that's the main thing."

"Fine, really."

"No, go ahead, yell at me. It's what I deserve."

"But we'd discussed it before. I knew I wasn't coming aboard."

"But that disappointed look on your face..."

"It wasn't disappointed. I'm very careful of the looks I put on my face. It was brave resignation."

"Nobody in the group can get over my leaving you on the dock. They've lost all respect for me. I'm an outcast. The ancient mariner. They'll hang an albatross around my neck."

"But they'd have to shoot one first. And the shooter would get it around his neck."

"Good point. I'll bring it up if the occasion arises. But tell me about your trip home."

"Two easy hours on the bus - although it was crowded, by people talking about you."

"That tiresome subject."

"It wasn't unpleasant. I dozed most of the way."

"You sound sleepy now. I'm keeping you awake."

"Just pleasantly drowsy. Sprawled out in my favorite white terry robe, with a towel around my hair, turban style."

"Very pretty. Rest the phone on your shoulder. I'll talk you to sleep."

"That would be pleasant."

"I can't quit thinking about you."

"How nice that it's reciprocal."

"That's why you couldn't be here on the boat, you know. The temptation."

"My wiles are too much for any man to resist."

"I'd have to keep jumping overboard, to quench myself."

"And they might get tired of lowering the boats."

"You can appreciate the danger. But at the expense of painfully missing you. Know where I am right now? Standing in the door of my cabin with the phone at my ear, looking out. There's a bright moon."

"I can see it. My windows face that way."

"A path of light is on the water, as in a million corny pictures."

"Always pretty, though, when it's the real thing."

"The water is very calm; glass; we're still in Delaware Bay. Far out ahead, to the left, is a lighthouse, with the beam sweeping."

"Warning: rocks."

"Tell me what you did when you got home. Bring me up to date."

"Well, let's see... First, emptied the mailbox. Stuffed. Mostly with junk. I won't look at it till morning. Then opened my refrigerator, with trepidation, expecting smells. But lucky. I'd left it practically empty. Then took all my tattered clothes from the road, every stitch, except one - that little nothing of a dress, as a souvenir - and threw the whole mess down the trash chute."

"Good riddance."

"Then shampooed the critters out of my hair under the shower. Then filled the tub ten inches deep with the most deliciously warm water and a pinch of bubbles, and had just sunk down to a heavenly soak... when the phone rang."

"What a brute I am. Sorry."

"Now tell me about life aboard ship."

"It seems very healthy. Fresh air. Exercise. Wholesome food. Harry shanghaied a crew from somewhere."

"And you, poor thing, after so many weeks on sandwiches and pizza. What did they serve for dinner?"

"Some sort of fish. Very tasty. And side dishes. Ice cream for dessert, I think."

"There you go, wearing me out with details."

"It was a good dinner; no one asked me to speak."

"And you didn't feel hurt?"

"I'm like you. It didn't show on my face."

"And after dinner? Any social life?"

"I'm trying not to notice. From envy. Harry and Mary, for instance, have been seen holding hands."

"Shocking."

"Now they've herded everyone into the saloon. I can hear jazz records being played."

"What do you make of that?"

"Recreation, I suspect. At least I don't have to look at it."

"Do you know what? I've never seen you having fun."

"Actually that's the part I'm good at."

"I'm glad. I don't want to be on the heights all the time. I want to be ordinary, conventional. With children around, calling me Mummy. And a man across the table, with a day's beard, reading the sports page, and every now and then grunting something at me."

"I believe I could handle that."

"... Who will say, 'Come out and give me an opinion on some houses we're building.' And not because I'm asking, because you really want to know."

"I believe I really will."

"Do you know what I've been thinking in this apartment I've become so attached to? With its books, pictures, furniture - that none of it, not a scrap, is worth a damn without you. That it could all go down the chute, job, career, everything, to go anywhere in the world with you. On foot. Barefoot."

"Don't say that. It's..."

"Yes?"

"I'll have to jump overboard and quench myself."

"Oh don't. They might not realize it with the music on."

"And while you are tearing up life and career, here am I racking my brains trying to figure out how to run a homebuilding company from an apartment in Manhattan."

"You would! You would say that..."

"Don't. I've never heard you cry. I didn't want..."

"From happiness, can't you tell? I think... sometimes... this is too much happiness. Fragile. It can't last."

"No, it's the right amount of happiness. Strong. Well put together. And will last."

"I worry about you all the time."

"I'm surrounded by a human fortress."

"Do you have to speak in Wall Street?"

"It's the right place."

"The wrong place! You're pushing your luck. I have this awful feeling... we'll never be together."

"I have the opposite feeling. We're inevitable."

"No, you don't. I've seen fear in your face. Any moment, expecting a bullet..."

"It shows, does it?"

"Now you're joking. But I love you, blast it! Don't I have any rights in the matter? This really is ego, you know!"

"Yes, maybe, some of it."

"Oh don't agree that it might be. I'm nagging you! I'm horrible. You're so independent, so brave, and will attach yourself to a nag, a common scold."

"Actually it's sort of flattering. You would like me to come out all right."

"All right, he says! Soon I'll be blubbering again."

"And me so far away. I would dry every tear with a kiss."

"No you wouldn't. I'm ugly when I blubber. A hag."

"I would kiss every tear away and restore your matchless beauty."

"Oh, if something happens to you..."

"Nothing, nothing."

"Will you tell me what is so bloody important to say in Wall Street?"

"Maybe I'll tell them which way the market is going."

"Oh why aren't you here? Right here in this bed beside me?"

"Soon."

"I don't believe you."

"Believe, believe."

"Oh let me hang up and cry. I have a need to cry. No, don't... I don't want your voice to go away. I like it beside my ear."

"If I woke up at three in the morning, unable to get a certain woman out of my head, and rang her up out of a deep sleep, would she be angry, do you think?"

"You won't wake her up. She'll be lying here weeping."

"The more tears I would have to kiss away."

"She will wear you out with tears."

"And I her with kisses."

"Oh, hang up and let me blubber. But no... not yet..."

# 6.

**Transcript: City Hall Press Conference, New York**

**2 p.m. Saturday, August 16**

Mayor: Thanks, everyone, and good afternoon. Please be seated. I have a short announcement on a matter of urgency, then I'll be glad to take questions. As you know, Jess Josephson, the religious... well, I don't know what to call him, the religious performer, I guess ( _laughter_ ), plans to come to Wall Street on Monday for an outdoor address. Now, no city in the world is more dedicated to freedom of expression than we are. But we all know how congested the financial district is on a business day. It's simply ill-advised from a public safety and traffic standpoint to bring any additional crowd in there, much less on a...

Reporter: You do it for ticker-tape parades.

Mayor: Wait, let me finish. But since you brought it up, ticker-tape parades are as rare as hen's teeth anymore, and they go down Broadway, which is a much wider thoroughfare. There's no comparison. And when they do occur they're scheduled in advance, barricades go up, everyone knows the rules, and there's minimum disruption. A whole different kettle of fish. Now when I met Mr. Josephson last week in Pennsylvania, I thought I had an agreement with him not to march into New York...

Reporter: He's honoring that. He broke up the march.

Mayor: Technically, yes, he's sticking to the letter. But he also seemed to be making good faith efforts to hold down his crowds at that point. As you know, it got all out of hand in Philadelphia yesterday; the city was brought to a standstill. I've been on the phone with the mayor there and it was a real mess. So we're offering Mr. Josephson a location more conducive and historically famous for free speech. Namely, Union Square.

Reporter: He's been there.

Mayor: Yes, but that was months ago. Now he's acquired much more notoriety. We're offering a police escort, first-class security, a sensational opportunity that will give him a fine showcase but also save the city a lot of traffic and congestion headaches. We conveyed our offer to Mr. Josephson personally earlier today by telephone at sea. He's on a sailing yacht off the Jersey coast. He asked permission to think it over and promised an answer by four this afternoon.

Reporter: What if he says no?

Mayor: Common sense and the many advantages we're offering tell me he'll say yes.

Reporter: Can we ask questions now?

Mayor: Seems to me you've been asking them. ( _Laughter._ )

Reporter: We hear the City Hall switchboard was lighted up like a Christmas tree last night. With protests and threats if Josephson brings his show here."

Mayor: I don't know anything about threats.

Reporter: Well, could you discuss the security problem?

Mayor: I haven't referred to a "security problem." And the point is, just talking about it, I don't have to tell you, stirs up a potential contagious effect. I hope none of you will refer in your reports to our Times Square incident of some years back or the Boston Marathon case.

Reporter: Could it be the city is letting a few crank calls spook you into extreme security measures?

Mayor: Not extreme, far from extreme. Reasonable, I'd say.

Reporter: But when the guy walked from one side of Philadelphia to the other yesterday without a scratch?

Mayor: With plenty of scratches, from what I understand. Hundreds of clergy tried to block his way with their bodies and one upset individual hauled off and took a punch at him; I saw it on TV, and it was one long traffic jam all day. All we're saying is that from many standpoints, security being only one, Union Square is the sensible option.

Reporter: Mayor, would you rather he just stay away? I mean if you had your druthers...

Mayor: Well... ( _laughter at the hesitation_ )... no. We're the world's crossroads of ideas. Josephson himself recognizes that. That's why he wants to speak in New York so badly. I don't blame him.

Reporter: Have you heard from the K.K.K.?

Mayor: We would not move one inch in response to anything from that sleazy quarter.

Reporter: Any Muslim threats? Or Christian militias? Or Ultra-Orthodox Jews?

Mayor: I haven't used the word "threats." But anyone could call anonymously, saying anything.

Reporter: Is it conceivable that a relatively small number of pranksters...

Mayor: What? Sorry... Hold it a minute. ( _Motions to aide.)_ Yes, yes, bring it over. Here, I've just been handed this message, have no idea what's in it. I'll read it aloud. Quote: Your Honor, I've done Union Square. Wall Street has special significance worldwide. Thanks for your concern but trust you to honor commitment. All best. Jess Josephson.

Reporters ( _several at once_ ): Now what, Mayor? What next?

Mayor: Well, there's a stubborn guy! We'll... we'll just have to give this more study. Monday is still two days away. We'll have some people in to talk.

Reporter: Will you go for an injunction?

Mayor: At this point all options are on the table. We'll see. Frankly I'm surprised. I figured him for more judgment.

Reporter: When will you let us know?

Mayor: In plenty of time... No, no more questions. Okay, thanks. See you around.

( _The mayor 's press conference concluded at 2:16 p.m. EDT._)

# 7.

"... That burst of cheers you heard was the crowd's greeting to Jess Josephson as he stepped down on the East River pier near the foot of Wall Street. And very fit and tanned he looks, too, after three days' sailing off the New Jersey coast in ideal summer weather. I could take some of that myself, Dave... reporter David Davidson on the scene at the pier in lower Manhattan."

"The police are already predicting a crowd in excess of fifty thousand, Bob. I'd anticipate more, considering all those who normally have business in the area and others lined up along the famous financial street that Josephson intends to walk. It's interesting to speculate how much this throng - oh, they cheered again as he threw his nautical cap back to someone on deck - how much this crowd exceeds the one that welcomed George Washington when he arrived, in March 1789, for his inauguration as first president of the United States. We tend to forget, this was the nation's federal capital then... There, more cheers! Jess is waving and smiling at the crowd from within his entourage, all wearing the Wall Street uniform, no more cross-country hiking duds, but conservative business suits. Jess's is a light gray pinstripe, with white shirt and blue rep tie. Interestingly, one of his party, who met him on the dock rather than debarking from the yacht, is wearing the skullcap, full beard, and black attire of Orthodox Judaism, in what promises to be a hot day, ninety degrees forecast... And there's the mayor now! Just got out of his limo, shaking hands on the dock, the mayor and Jess Josephson pumping hands enthusiastically; smiling; chatting, although we of the media are cordoned off too far to hear what they're saying."

"And maybe it's a good thing, Dave. Jess, as we know, defied the mayor's very public plea that he preach in Union Square, traditional site of soapbox oratory in this city, thinking that security could be better contained there. Jess replied no, Wall Street or nuttin'."

"Ha ha."

"Yet there's the mayor pressing the flesh and smiling for the cameras. And this comes after that surprising, apparently spontaneous greeting of other ships in the harbor, pennants flying, whistles blowing as the splendid yacht 'Harry's Swanna' dramatically and unexpectedly _sailed_ past the Statue of Liberty."

"No question about it, Bob Thomas in our broadcast booth, Jess has a knack for dramatizing himself, arriving under full white sail, although the craft had plenty of engine capacity. Irresistible television pictures. Whetting the appetite of New Yorkers to come on downtown and see what the excitement is about. Who would have guessed that a homebuilder from Pittsburgh..."

"Indeed, a _carpenter_ , people point out, with an obvious parallel in mind..."

"Yes, but we have to call this carpenter what he is, a sophisticated businessman, multi-millionaire, and self-promoter. Nevertheless, to have the audacity to buy out a major Manhattan sports arena last spring..."

"The _hootspah,_ New Yorkers would call it."

"... To proclaim a religious crusade - or would it be an anti-religious crusade? - and go on from there to confrontations with Ku Klux Klan elements in his native western Pennsylvania... a cross-burning in his front yard... then to be burned out of his palatial farmhouse; and taking to the road on foot across Pennsylvania."

"No amount of money could have bought the publicity."

"The march certainly drew the eyes and ears of the world day after day to what he was saying, Bob, for good or ill. No religious personage in history has been able, through mass media, to communicate with so many people."

"It boggles the mind, Dave. Consider: how many could possibly have heard Jesus of Nazareth, the man, directly? Or Moses, Mohammed, Buddha? Compare that with millions, billions of Jess-watchers via TV."

"It makes you realize Bob, that what may once have been unthinkable, the toppling of all the world's religions, is not, in the communications age, so very unthinkable. Which is not to say that Jess has done it, or could do it."

"It's a sobering thought, though, and..."

"But there! The Josephson entourage is now beginning to try to make its way slowly through a great press of people, cameras, microphones, bodyguards, police, tourists, celebrity-seekers, paparazzi, and bystanders, who will certainly take up the width of Wall Street..."

"Which everyone who has ever been to the financial district in downtown Manhattan knows, Dave, would make the average residential street look like a boulevard. It's not much wider than a respectable alley, following the original city wall of old New Amsterdam."

"Yes, Bob, legend has it that the crooked line of the street was laid out by a cow ambling across the narrow tip of the island, then essentially agricultural."

"But now, Dave Davidson, we'll leave you as you hustle west along that fabulous cowpath to get closer to where Jess Josephson is due to speak when he gets there - which now looks like an hour at least - and go to one of our other reporters in that crowd: Peggy Harris... Peg, are you there?"

"Righto, Bob, in a festive, almost ecstatic throng. Sophisticates though they be, New Yorkers like to feel that the world's famous will beat a path to their door. As the song goes, if you can make it here, you'll make it anywhere."

"What's the star attraction think of all this, Peg?"

"Nobody can get close enough to ask, but judging by the grin on his face as he waves to the crowd, he's hugely enjoying it. And of course the crowd itself grows by the minute, and grows noisier. Cancel all early estimates. The financial district seems determined to give Jess Josephson the biggest, loudest reception he's ever had, not even counting the smiling faces and waving flags in upper windows of office buildings."

"What about the security threat, Peggy?"

"Sorry, Bob, could you repeat? This clamor..."

"The security threat?"

"No question about it. There's always a tendency to let your guard down in scenes of festivity. The police mood is very serious; all sorts of surveillance for bombs can just be assumed. For the first time, news media are barred from getting close enough to Jess to ask questions. They don't want anybody whose face is unfamiliar to his innermost circle to get in there. And of course not all the crowd is happy."

"How do you mean?"

"Here and there - we've turned into Wall Street proper now, walking westward, keeping up as well as we can - and we're seeing some definitely hostile faces, a minority to be sure, along sidewalks, some raising fists and shouting. No sir, he's not a favorite with everyone by any stretch. Did my mike pick up that mass exclamation? A placard just got raised above heads on the south sidewalk to our left. It says: 'Jess's New Math: God Equals Zero.'"

"Has he seen it, Peg?"

"Yes, apparently. He gave a little shrug, smiled, and waved to the people holding it up. But there's another. I'll bet we start seeing a lot of impromptu expressions of creativity. This one says, 'Jesus Saves. Jess Spends.'"

"Ha ha, something to think about there."

"Oh, that cheer you just heard? Whee, this is fun! - the first appearance of ticker tape floating down from upstairs office windows. There! Jess is waving to people fifteen and twenty stories up. It makes me dizzy just to look up while walking along in this terrific crush and din. I bet we'll see more ticker tape, and this isn't an official parade."

"Which would be down Broadway in any case, wouldn't it?"

"Correct, Bob, but of course there's no way the mayor wanted an official welcome today."

"And no way the stuff you see falling is, literally, ticker tape, which in the age of the computer and telecommunications is as obsolete as the buggy whip."

"Oh... ha ha, I'm enjoying this. Everybody is. All I can say is, the paper-shredders must be working overtime this morning. I imagine all those offices have cartons full of waste newspapers and computer printouts that they run through the shredder for celebrations."

"Our monitor, Peggy Harris - and maybe we can see better than you can, right there in that blizzard - shows Josephson waving to the crowd with confetti in his hair, shredded paper on his shoulders, in his circle of security people. Where's it all going to end, do you think?"

"Today's walk or the Josephson movement, Bob?"

"Take 'em one at a time."

"Well, today's walk will proceed another six or eight blocks to the corner of Broad and Wall streets, arguably the most famous financial corner in the world, photographed countless times. It's the picture you see in your mind's eye when you think 'Wall Street.' I'm sure there's already a crowd there."

"Our monitors show it building up very steadily."

"The monumental, pillared structure you're probably looking at is the New York Stock Exchange; and across Broad Street from it..."

"Which is, of course, a _narrow_ street."

"... Ha ha, is the Morgan Bank; then catty-corner, the Bankers Trust; and across from that, catty-corner to the stock exchange, Federal Hall: the old so-called Sub-Treasury, the site of Washington's inauguration. In these cramped streets, I think we can assume, the end of the Civil War was celebrated, and World Wars One and Two."

"And don't forget the financial panics and crashes, not celebrated but certainly observed, by huge crowds in Wall Street. In fact, the most persistent rumor we hear about Jess's insistence on speaking there is that he's finally ready to go for a major financing: A cool _billion dollars_ for a worldwide full-court press against every religion on earth."

"Well, the street version of that ranges all over the lot, Bob, from a modest hundred million to five or even _ten_ billion. A billion doesn't go that far anymore. On the other hand he could just be thinking, hey, where else can you get a ticker-tape parade?"

"Ha ha. Reporter Peggy Harris, we're going to leave you for a moment down there in that multitude of, I'm sure now, well over a hundred thousand, to speak to a guest in our broadcasting booth: the Reverend Sydney Sagel, of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Welcome, Pastor Sagel."

"Thank you and good morning."

"It was your churchyard that was vandalized last week in a pitched battle after you permitted the Josephson marchers to camp there overnight. Would you bring us up to date, sir?"

"Gladly. A tremendous outpouring of public support began the morning after the incident: volunteer craftsmen, laborers, members of my own congregation and others, gathered to clean up the churchyard, repair and re-erect fallen gravestones and so forth. All this is a heartening expression of good will far overbalancing the negative nature of the vandalism itself. I saw, and see, God's hand in it."

"Do you see, to be blunt about it, Pastor, God's hand in the Josephson movement itself?"

"No, that of course would be saying too much. But we in the church must make it our business to draw good from it. Its effects should not be totally negative. Jess is forcing theology to speak again to the common man and woman. Does God hear us, they ask? Jess brings such questions to the fore, knocking at the door of the churches, demanding answers that will satisfy not merely doctors of theology but the man in the street."

"Are you saying the movement is a positive thing?"

"I am saying we should draw positives from it. We in the church have grown complacent and even intellectually lazy. But a vacuum always gets filled. A corrupting, godless pursuit of material things and pleasures takes the place in people's lives that religion ought to hold. The truth of Christ must re-awaken -- to a new logic and confidence in battle, the rescue of our entire society. And with the challenges posed by Jess - and, I'm afraid, far more violently, by radical Islam - I believe it will."

"Thank you, Pastor Sagel, in the booth with us, and for another view we go to the House of the Almighty, in Opa-Locka, Florida, where evangelist Johnny Deus is an old foe of Jess Josephson's. Reverend Deus?"

"Yessuh, right here. G' morning. I'd have to agree with Rev'nd Sagel there on two points. One, that Christianity has gotta become much, much more militant and _will_ in response to the Josephsonite challenge (although I'd call it Satan's challenge) and two, that there's just tremenjous reservoirs o' Christian support out there. All it needs to bring it out is somebody comin' in with demolition in mind, like in your churchyard, sir, and in my church. Our television ratings and revenue inflows have skyrocketed since the dirty stunt that got pulled on us."

"For which, if I'm not mistaken, you brought suit?"

"Yes, but had to settle. We realized his high-priced legal talent would keep us tied up in appeals for years, distractin' us from the Lord's priority, _which is savin ' souls._ The negative side, the deeply negative side of this mischief (just to give it equal time) is the uncounted number of souls this Josephson devil is draggin' with him to perdition."

"Gentlemen, we'll get back to this discussion but meanwhile, back to Wall Street and reporter Peggy Harris."

"Yes, Bob, right here. As you might be able to see by monitor, the crowd has increased very considerably towards Broad and Wall streets, still two or three city squares away, in a veritable storm of ticker-tape confetti, which _could_ be completely spontaneous..."

"You sound doubtful, Peg."

"Well, the scuttlebutt is that it is not spontaneous, that some of the Josephson millions have been spread among the upper floors of the financial district to, shall we say, provide an incentive for this colorful welcome. We can't get very close but... but wait... I think here comes Mary Mulcahy, his press aide, out from the inner security circle... Reporters shouting at her...Let's pick this up."

"Mary! Mary!"

"Keep walking, I don't want to fall behind."

"Mary, what's he going to say here today?"

"I'm as much in suspense as you are. Stay tuned."

"Why was he so insistent on appearing in Wall Street?"

"He'll probably go into that. But his instinct was right as usual. Look at this crowd. The police are talking a hundred thousand. And we're not there yet."

"We can see there's a lot of extra police in this crowd. Can you...?"

"Sorry, gotta go. I just came over to say enjoy it, everybody. And out there in the country, I bet you'll hear a terrific speech."

"Peggy? Peggy Harris? Here in the network booth..."

"As you just heard, Bob... but wait, a lot of media are gathered around a Christian clergyman... let's pick this up."

"What's your reaction to all this, Pastor Kirk, who has followed this movement, we understand, from the beginning?"

"I'm not a pastor, just a struggling Christian editor, a would-be truth teller trying to clean up after Jess. Which ain't easy. _(Laughter.)_ But yes, practically from Day One. But keep walking, I don't want to fall behind. My reaction? Unadulterated horror. I mean at the entertainment value, _the show biz,_ that can be made of godlessness. Jess is rolling 'em in the aisles, friends, at the deconstruction of all values. America is at risk here, Western civilization as we know it."

"Why has he come to Wall Street, do you think?

"Crowds, ticker tape, media. He'd do a strip-tease if it brought attention. ( _Laughter._ ) Seriously, look at the pattern..."

"Father, could you speak up a bit. Lots of background noise."

"Glad to, but I'm not a priest... I was about to say, Jess loves to cloak his deism (frankly, I call it atheism) in patriotic associations. He would have spoken at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but our massed clergy checked him there. Now it's Federal Hall here, at the feet of the Washington statue. He keeps reaching for images of the Founding Fathers as if they agreed with him. And it's false, false! They were _practicing Christians_ almost to a man; who wrote and spoke time and again of the centrality of religious values to our national life. They merely opposed the establishment of any _one_ religion by Congress, a source of confusion to this day..."

"Bob, Bob, in the broadcast booth?"

"Yes, Dave, back to reporter David Davidson in Wall Street."

"Some man-in-the-street comments here from a group of Orthodox Jewish bystanders on the sidewalk. These people seem really upset."

"Okay, hang on there, Dave, and don't leave us, folks. We'll be back in a moment for the continuation of this special report, "Messiah in Wall Street," live coverage as history is made. But first, these brief commercial messages..."

***

"Pete! Pete!"

Microphones again. A reporter was shouting at Winslow. He thought: _We shouldn 't have allowed the media so near. That's Jess for you; too easy; give them something; make them happy. Then everything becomes fun and games and you forget the one percent who'd blow your brains out._ But microphones were in front of him and he had to smile; he brushed paper scraps away. The upper windows of buildings were pouring confetti, and just as easily, he thought, bullets. The background noise was tremendous: _a shot wouldn 't be heard._

"We have a report that Jess is here to raise a billion dollars," the reporter shouted. "The big score, at last."

"What for?" Winslow said, more curious than angry for once.

"To launch the movement worldwide."

"Nothing to it," he yelled at the mikes advancing in front of him. "It's already launched worldwide, haven't you noticed?"

"What's he in Wall Street for, then?"

"Maybe for this!" he gestured at the confetti like a farmer saved by rain. "He never asks for money. Wouldn't take it if offered."

"When's it going to run out, Pete?"

"What, the money?" ( _Or the luck,_ he thought.) "I don't know. Maybe today." He heard laughs around him, a rarity; the media seldom found him entertaining.

A group of black-clad Jews on the south sidewalk made malevolent gestures for the cameras. _Shaking their damn fists: what the hell 's to feel happy about in that?_ Police stood in front of them with arms stretched out. _To hold them back from what? Celebrating? And back there, a gaggle of gays and lesbians: how the hell had Jess offended them? And skinheads and militia idiots in uniforms. No doubt Muslims, too. Without the cops we 've got a riot here._ A short distance beyond, a bald, monkish man was pumping a crude sign. It said: "You found the address, Satan!!! Wall St also hates God!"

"How about the anger in this crowd?" a reporter asked.

"How about it?" Winslow snapped. _Too quick, too defensive,_ he cautioned himself. "You're always going to get a minority. They have rights. But look at most people. They love him. This is great." On the roof of a relatively low-rise building, just ten stories, he saw cops silhouetted against the sky, scanning for snipers and suspicious packages. _A lot of good they 'll do up there._

The microphones grew tired of him. They left to feed on Mary Mulcahy, who had moved outside the inner ring of assistants and police, with her elderly boyfriend padding along behind like a Saint Bernard. She looked okay, Mary: a lot less fat on her, decked out in a blue blazer, white skirt, and low black heels. Very seaworthy she looked. Harry the mall man must have had two dozen outfits hauled on board, and a seamstress, to make sure he had her fitted.

Even if things went well today (and Winslow was far from confident they would; the intensity of hatred in some onlookers reminded him of faces along streets in Baghdad), he would need all his wits about him. Maybe the luck of the movement really had run out. Maybe at last the enemy had Jess, or himself, in the cross hairs, just waiting... Last night aboard ship Jess slapped him on the back. "You've been great, Pete," he said. Past perfect tense. Meaning, it's over. Winslow had found him far forward, facing the wind, alone as usual: perhaps rehearsing today's speech; more likely thinking about _her_ (in the intervals when they weren't burning up the ship-to-shore telephone). The right-hand man could not remember Jess spending so much time phoning. Not that the Flying Dutchman cared, lucky old stud. With all the other comforts of home he now even had his Mary aboard. Winslow too missed a woman. "Olive would have loved this cruise," he said, by way of commiseration with Jess. Easy swells slapped the ship's bow and reminded him of the sound, sometimes, of belly on belly. Far to port, the Jersey resorts over the horizon threw a glow on the clouds. His wife would have leaned on his shoulder and whispered, "C'mon below."

This morning at the East River dock, Winslow noticed that Maggie Deland never stepped within ten yards of Jess. He guessed that this was on his orders, to keep her out of harm's way. She stood back from the mayor's entourage, the press, police, the crush of followers and publicity hounds. She had dark glasses on; Winslow wondered what her eyes would look like. "When this is over," one of the assistants, Ed Jensen, had remarked to him, "I wouldn't want to be the Army and Navy trying to keep those two apart."

Less welcome to the right-hand man were two other faces encountered on the dock. "No more falling down, Jeremy. I'll step on you myself," he menaced the Rev. Mr. Kirk. To Judah Iskaritz he said with a smile, "The bad penny's back, I see." The rabbi-journalist found little wit in this greeting. _He thinks I hate him for a Jew,_ thought Winslow, when it's only so damn _much_ Jewishness, the caricature. _Why look the way your enemies want you to look, and despise you for looking?_ Judah seemed jumpy and furtive, out of place in the circle around Jess, who was the only one glad to see him. He put his hairy face close to Jess's and shouted in his ear (or Winslow thought he heard, echoing advice he himself might have given): "Don't speak today... begging you!" A stab of literary recall hit him... _Caesar... the Ides of March._ But today's soothsayer only received a slap on the back as cameras zoomed in on the two of them. _The wrong image,_ Winslow thought for the hundredth time; _it 's not a Jewish movement!_ But a half-hour later, seeing cadres of furious Jews, he thought it was not a bad thing that one of the sect walked beside Jess, tacit evidence that members of the faith needn't feel they'd be contaminated by contact. _Maybe later I 'll be thanking him,_ the ex-marine told himself.

Mary Mulcahy felt a pat on the shoulder: Harry's way of letting her know he was keeping up. How touchy-feely he was. It was amusing in a man of seventy-four, father and grandfather a dozen times over by his deceased wife. _Not that there 's anything seventy-four about him in the amorous way,_ she thought. Glancing over her shoulder, she had to laugh. Father Sunshine! Every half minute he raised the cap from his senatorial white curls and waved as if the cheers and confetti were for him. Which they damned well might be. At breakfast aboard ship he had winked about a "surprise" that friends in Wall Street were planning. He looked born to parade, in a captain's cap, double-breasted navy blazer, and white slacks. Mary guessed that onlookers thought he might be Jess's father. She always loved being mistaken for his mother.

"Hey, Mary!" a reporter shouted. "What about the rumor Jess is paying for the ticker tape, that it isn't spontaneous?"

"Where the helldja get that?" she said, then remembered to smile. _Shouldn 't swear, damn it! Might be on live._ It was not the first time she had been asked this. _God, did Harry pay for the "surprise?" She wouldn't put it past him._ "How do you buy confetti anyway? By the ton?" she fobbed it off.

"How about the story he's here to raise a billion?"

"Strike two," she said. _On that I could take an oath._ "Money's never been the answer. Changing minds is." She smiled at the non sequitur but liked its ring of authority. All of a sudden a dozen mikes were in front of her. She glanced over at Jess, enjoying himself, a boy at the circus, waving to crowds, never focusing on the haters behind police lines - _God, his own Jews among them! -_ occasionally checking on the progress of his girl, who was keeping up, making her way along the crowded sidewalk to the left, past revolving doors of office buildings. She had dark glasses on, a powder blue suit, pearls, a single strand, the chic New York career woman again, and no doubt worried sick about him. Meanwhile he, in midstreet, looked reasonably surrounded and protected. His hair was snowed with confetti; spirals of shredded office paper clung to his suit.

"What do you expect him to say today, Mary?"

"He always surprises me," she said, pleased to be able to evade in style, without quite lying. She flicked away a bit of confetti that had glued to her lipstick.

"Mary, where does Jess go from here? We haven't heard of any plans after today?" It was a network anchor man, covering the event personally, stamping it with his importance. Confetti dusted his excellent crown of blow-dried hair.

"We haven't announced any, Brian," she said, flattered despite herself to be addressed by name in his on-the-air baritone. "We take things one day at a time. All across Pennsylvania and of course especially a day like this."

"How would you, who've seen so many cheering crowds by now, rate a response like this?"

"A-plus-plus. But this is little old New York. I knew they'd turn out for a real hero."

"Police are estimating perhaps two hundred thousand."

"It wouldn't surprise me. They won't be disappointed."

"Could you ever have foreseen this as a young Catholic girl in a convent, Mary?"

_Personal!_ Her expression froze for a moment. Then she smiled. He had done some homework, which also was flattering. "Not in a million years," she said. "Life is full of surprises. For me it keeps getting better."

She hoped that Harry, walking behind her, heard that. _Just let his kids and grandkids like her!_

Maggie Deland was unnerved by the antagonism along the sidewalks, the angry undercurrent to the cheers. _How can so many hate him?_ she thought; a minority, yes, but not a negligible minority. She passed a priest brandishing a crude placard: "Jesus Saves, Jess Damns!" A black flock of Jews, all hats and beards, waved fists and shouted brutal things in Yiddish, like growling bears. Poor Judah in the middle of the street, the only obvious Jew in Jess's circle, looked pale, sick, ready to weep in frustration and embarrassment. But he was a help out there, she felt, his physical presence signifying that Jess need not be anathema to believers; he wasn't pork, wasn't Hitler. _Why so furious, Jews? Lighten up,_ she thought. She studied the man she now felt fated to love: grinning like a boy, waving, smiling, ignoring hatred as he did vile language, perhaps not even registering it, his glance sliding past infuriated faces to focus on smilers and wavers. His hair was white with confetti, like tiny blossoms. He seemed to grow more beautiful in her eyes. She had often imagined him naked, a Greek athlete striding the arena in victory, or a matador marching into a bullring to the blare of bands, proud, slender, virile, what every man must long to be; and in that role fated to risk death on behalf of lesser men, to satisfy their envy, which the mass of men discharge in cheers, pretending to rejoice in a hero's escape. _Something unspeakable in this mob wants him slaughtered, would rejoice in it,_ she thought; _why? Because greatness is a reproach. He demonstrates the possibility; makes us realize how far below the standard we fall._ He waved at infinitesimal heads in upper windows and at thrown puffs, like puffs of smoke, that became showers of paper descending. But at any of those beehive cells of anonymity, someone could be sighting a rifle. _We 'll never be together,_ she thought again, that thought which repeatedly stabbed at her; _this is my punishment..._

Si Pickering spoke into a tape machine. His first duty was to protect Jess. That got ninety-eight percent of his attention, or so he told himself. But otherwise he recorded impressions, speeches, interviews. He had already mailed twenty-four reels of tape, numbered chronologically, from the road. Another eleven reels were in his knapsack on the Dutchman's yacht; plus the one now turning in his machine and seven more in his pockets. These would be the basis for his future writings on the Josephson movement. And if he, Pickering, should get killed? Well, he had the macabre thought that the tapes might have marketable value for his mother and sister. The final one might even record the shot.

_" Some pretty good banners popping out of windows," he spoke into his mike. "I'll read some." 'Jess, We Take Stock in You!!!' Three exclamation points. Stretched between two windows five stories up on one o' these buildings. People notice it and laugh when a funny one comes out. There's one not so pleasant: 'Welcome, Satan! Wall Street Also Discounts God.' It's brandished on a corner by a crazy. And another: 'Come walk with Jess; Hell ain't far.' Kinda like that. And another: 'At last, a Jew the Arabs can love!' Cryptic. Gotta think about that one. Query: are signs on our side wittier than signs on their side? I'd guess ninety percent of the crowd is with Jess. But don't let your guard down, Colonel, never trust them Yankees. Poor Judah, walking beside Jess on the other side of me, worried as hell at the Jew gangs. I see his lips moving. Maybe he's telling the brethren to get lost. Maybe he's praying. Just caught a reflection off a window way up high to my right; blinding; what if a bullet came outta there? Never see the miscreant. Always keep the sun behind ya, Colonel! What am I feeling at this moment? Describe your feelings. Scared? No. Elation? More like. The astronaut effect. Ticker tape raining down, cheers, sunshine, even in this narrow street, a few minutes before noon. It's grand to be a hero. Worth a few years of life. Even to walk beside a hero. In his ambiance. Emergency, call an ambiance! I'll have to work that line in sometime. Look at that sign: 'Here Today Hell Tomorrow!' Sobering. There's another. 'An atheist by any other name smells as shit!!' Hey, that's public indecency, free speech or not. But nobody's making the son of a bitch pull it down. Who knows, maybe the TV cameras are even broadcasting it. What's happened to good taste? Jess looks right past it. Could it be he's a little obtuse? I've speculated on that before. I know he's intelligent. But there are times I reckon only a real dense guy would be pulling all this mischief. Courting sniper fire and bombs. Holding his woman at bay. Spending his bankroll on an idea of God. Although if he pissed away five million on a Malibu house with sculptures around a pool, eight bathrooms and a private movie theater, nobody would think twice. Didn't Jesus tell us all to do just that? Give away all your worldly goods. Somehow I don't think he had Jess in mind. It could be there's a screw loose in our peerless leader. Yet keep in mind, here is a Jew-boy from the neighborhood just five months from nobodyhood in a ticker tape parade, his name circling the world. Bishops and rabbis tremble at his coming. A really smart guy like me would never have dreamed it. And I am walking in his footsteps, you'll notice, not he in mine... Oh!"_

A collective gasp was heard. The crowd around Jess Josephson in the middle of the street recoiled. There was convulsive movement, agitation, and in the next moment laughter. A young man in a stock exchange jacket, mad for an autograph, or on a dare, had darted in among the assistants, police, and media and reached the hero's side. He held a sheaf of paper and a pen, which could as easily have been a gun. The cops nearly clubbed him. Jess involuntarily started, then laughed and scribbled something on the fool's paper. "A goddamn stock prospectus!" Maggie Deland heard someone say. Judah Iskaritz's bearded face turned white. Peter Winslow barked into a bullhorn: "No autographs, folks! He's here to speak!"

Maggie caught a glance from Jess, searching for her among the crowd on the sidewalk. She waved a hand and forced a smile. He winked. She thought: _When will this nightmare be over?_ Near her a television reporter, walking through massed bodies, was intoning into a microphone as a camera advanced before him, "Federal Hall is less than a block away now... live coverage of the Jess Josephson march up Wall Street..."

# 8.

The conditions for speechmaking were awkward. Jess Josephson had promised not to enter government property. His plan was to stand on the public sidewalk at Broad and Wall streets, using the best - that is, the northeast - corner, occupied by the Federal Hall museum. It is a famous location, marked by a Greek Revival portico, a steep stone staircase spanning the breadth of the building, and a heroic statue of George Washington, two or three times life-size. A Josephson assistant had brought a wooden crate up from the pier, intending to place it overturned on the corner, soapbox-style.

A police official was not happy with these arrangements. At the last moment he declared the corner "too exposed." ("Shootable from too many directions," Si Pickering translated in his tape.) By agreement with Federal Hall officials (and personal approval, on an open phone line, from the Secretary of the Interior in Washington) a revised decision was announced. Josephson would be permitted to speak from the steps in front of the hall. This would shield him better, the building itself cutting off potential lines of fire from the rear, and police could concentrate their attention forwards. The orator would lose the fullest radius of audience, but there was compensation in being able to stand higher and more prominently. Thousands were cut off from seeing him, however, those who had assembled on Broad Street along the flank of the hall. Many of these jostled southward for a better view but some walked away in disgust. A surprising many stood stoically in the side street; they never would be able to tell people they had literally _seen_ Jess Josephson's final public appearance but they were a part of it in a physical sense, although having to hear everything over loudspeakers and portable radios. Television, radio, and Internet media were broadcasting the event live.

While the adjustments were being made, Josephson, who stood in an open space of about four or five feet on the sixth stone step, to the left of the Washington statue, waited with a portable microphone in hand. "You should be in the movies," a woman with frizzed hair shouted from below, waving a hand loaded with rings and bracelets. He grinned and her eyes rolled in delight. Another woman shrieked: "Have I got a daughter for you!" His shrug signified that anything was possible; people applauded. A sign splashed on a bedsheet was unfurled from a window six stories up to the left, and there was booing at the impoliteness. It said, "Another Black Monday in Wall St!!" At least a dozen signs easily could be read from the Federal Hall corner. Most were welcoming. "Bullish for You, Jess!" said one. Another: "Thanx for Going Public." There were strained efforts to be clever, manglings of grammar, and bad puns. "The Jaws That Refreshes" drew enough groans to be considered a success.

Someone yelled from below the steps: "Hurry up, Jess. Just a half-hour lunch break."

"I won't take it all," he said through his microphone.

"You put the market up eighty points," a stockbroker called out.

He said, "I should have bought last Friday."

Balloons of red, white, and blue were waved, as were plastic orange lilies; a souvenir version of the symbolic flower of the march had been worked up for street vendors. The noise level was high. In the midst of the crowd, most of whom were in shirtsleeves, a street band played ragged Dixieland, marred (not that it mattered) by unrelated tooters and fiddlers, these musical fragments adding to an air of festivity. To pass the time, people would shout pleasantries, rarely an unpleasantry, to the star attraction up on the steps, hoping for a personal glance. A voice cried out: "Let's hear Jess, yess!" Others impatiently took it up, making a chant that swelled to a demand, with rhythmic hand-clapping. The breeze had died, the street felt very hot.

Peter Winslow was unable to rid himself of thoughts of assassination. _Start speaking,_ he thought. The size of the crowd astonished and appalled him. A policeman nearby said, "A quarter-million easy." People stood shoulder-to-shoulder from the foot of the stairs; many were _on_ the stairs, practically in touching distance. Their faces cascaded straight down and across the street to the wall of the Morgan Bank and for a full block to the left; also to the right, up through the much-photographed sunless passage towards the black spire of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street. Trucks and buses could be seen moving in the sunlight on Broadway in front of the church. Every nearer space looked packed with people; likewise south on Broad, faces, faces, till the crooked street angled out of sight. Above, too, the windows of the Stock Exchange at the right, between its columns, were filled with faces, as were windows that had sightlines from distant skyscrapers. To Winslow's eye the blocky shapes formed a rough-hewn amphitheater. Squads of three and four cops manned the roofs of the Morgan and the Exchange. Many had telephone head-sets on; they peered down at the crowd and scanned around at rooflines and windows, looking, looking. Other officers of the law were deployed on the Federal Hall stairs in an upper ring above Jess. His closest shields were his own people, Winslow, Mary, and the crowd assistants; plus a horde of TV camera people who had been allowed to stand on the normally blocked-off stone pedestal of the Washington statue. Some in the crowd would have climbed the steps to circle around behind the speaker where news media also clustered, but police barred them. Several young children were boosted from shoulders onto the camera platform and even higher, to the base of the statue, where they clung to the legs of the Father of his Country or sat swinging their feet. No one tried to stop them. Television producers liked the picture.

Josephson raised his microphone. His other hand went up in a greeting that also conveyed the idea of a call to order. There were hushing noises. TV and radio reporters spoke their final phrases. In the cessation of sound an opportunist interjected: "Give 'em hell, Jess!" People laughed. "Beware he does!" cried the Rev. Jeremy Kirk with all his strength from the bottom of the steps, but his voice was unamplified and it only startled people near him as a stale effort at wit. _Speak! Get on with it! The faster in, the faster out,_ Winslow said to himself. The paper shower had stopped, but bits of confetti drifted on puffs of air. The star attraction brushed some from his hair. It was full noon, the sky barely feathered with clouds.

"I came to Wall Street..." Jess Josephson began but was forced to stop there. The utterance released a wave of cheering, as if the declaration of his arrival was official and deserved acclamation. He smiled and waved, then turned to wave all around, to the people in the street below and the windows above. The faces of everyone around him creased in smiles. Mary Mulcahy and Harry Kaufhoffer had tears in their eyes _: their boy!_

"I came to Wall Street," Jess began again, and the cheering would have resumed but he spoke through it. "... Because here ideas stand or fall," he said. "You are the marketplace. You are the judge of ideas that work or do not work. And over time, I think, you do a good job of it." His voice crackled from loudspeakers and was broadcast by countless radios. It seemed to fill the street spaces and reverberate from columns, windows and walls.

"Some people read what we have been doing as an ego-trip. Or a cult. A swindle. A scam. Well, I think I have come to the wrong place if I have brought those things. I imagine Wall Street has a pretty good nose for crooks. Or phonies. Or fools." The people in front applauded this acknowledgement of their acumen and of the speaker's duty to be straight with them or be gone.

"I came with a practical idea," he said. "An idea that makes sense for our time; that gives a rightful place in the modern mind to God. But the churches can't handle it, Wall Street. There is nothing in it for them. Institutions of the past aren't up to it. And yet belief in God - a sensible idea of God - would lead to a better, safer, more prosperous world. I mean _a world that_ _wastes less_ - of life, work, thought, and love."

Maggie Deland, standing in the middle of the street, packed among bodies, lost in the mass, nevertheless felt that his glance found hers on the last word.

"But this is an idea that doesn't need me, Wall Street, as much as it needs you. Your judgment, your power of decision-making, your instinct for the future."

"Here it comes," said a cynic near Maggie. 'The fund-raising pitch."

"I've carried the idea as far as I usefully can," said Josephson, his voice filling the streets. "The world is not going to hear anything more from me after today."

A gasp swept the crowd. Voices cried out: "No! No!" A woman screamed. Police officers started and tensed. "Thank you, Jess!" Jeremy Kirk shouted, clapping hands overhead purposely to catch the speaker's eye. Mary Mulcahy, though she knew this was coming, could not suppress a sob; Harry Kaufhoffer patted her shoulder. Judah Iskaritz said to himself, " _Gott se danke. "_ Others also audibly thanked God, no great compliment to the speaker. A man with a loud voice cupped his hands: "Don't quit, Jess! You've got 'em on the run!"

Josephson put up a hand. "Let me tell you why," he said.

"Wantsa be talked out of it," said the cynic near Maggie.

"Because I'm unintentionally stirring up my own brand of hatred..."

"No, no!" people shouted.

"... And because there's danger of a personality cult. Let's quit mixing up the idea of God with me or anyone else. That causes no end of mischief. Stick with the real thing - one God. I am nothing special. Just a guy." Some in the crowd laughed. _Just a guy,_ Maggie Deland smiled, _how will I keep up with this run-of-the-mill guy?_

_Quitting, quitting!_ Judah Iskaritz said to himself, overjoyed. _Just get out of here, Jess. Get out, alive._

"The idea, if it has any merit, is independent of me," the speaker went on. "And not original with me. It's already here in the marketplace. In science. In the attitudes of millions, probably most of _you,_ who haven't quite built a belief system on it - that there simply is a God! We sense that and want it, yes. The question is: Can we found our lives on this uncluttered base of belief, without all the sectarian divisions, superstitions, illusions and terrors? My answer is yes."

"No! Not enough!" voices shouted. There were clergy, passionate fundamentalists and born-agains in the crowd. "No, no! Chaos!"

"A thousand times no!" bellowed Jeremy Kirk with surprising volume for a small man. Hand cupped at his mouth, he caught the eye of Jess Josephson on the steps above him, and the incorrigible one threw him a wink.

But "Yes!" cried others. "Yes!" shouted Peter Winslow and the boys, and a hundred voices took it up, then a thousand. The ayes and nays tried to outshout each other. A police official tapped Josephson on the shoulder: "Talk, man, talk!" Fists were raised. The crowd sounded like a kennel in alarm.

Jess tried to speak. "I ask..."

But people were chanting, "Yes! Yes!" and rhythmically clapping.

"Don't let it get away, Jess," Winslow said in his ear.

"I ask you... I ask you to consider it, Wall Street," he said in a raised voice. "I ask you..." Aware that he had resumed speaking, people hushed others to hear. "... To apply your experience," he said. "Old ways of thinking, and of doing business, are always being made obsolete. That's the law of the marketplace. If true in trade, science, finance, why not in religion? Why _not_ a twenty-first century concept of God? One that is in line with the real experience of millions who do not - _do not -_ want to see moral standards thrown over - and most emphatically do not want to see people car-bombed over differences about God! _(Cheers.)_ To wipe out _that_ evil ought to be the priority of our time. ( _Louder cheers.)_ We can do better than these primitive religions we've got! How many other two-thousand-year-old concepts are you backing these days, Wall Street?"

The line drew laughter but he did not seem to want it. He followed quickly with: "How many business plans would you give the time of day to, based on thinking that pre-dates science, technology, practically all of history; and still regularly sets people to hating each other from childhood on, that starts wars and keeps them going endlessly - yet you're told not one sacred 'i' or 't' can be changed or God won't tolerate it?"

He shook his head and continued in a gentler tone. "Change is painful. There's a nostalgia for familiar ways... memories of church, holidays, Christmas and Hanukah, a sense of security we had as children. But when a system stops performing, when it no longer reflects the real world, in fact does a lot of damage, then something's going to come along, Wall Street. The vacuum won't last. A healthy society requires, and people do want, God!"

"Tell it, Jess!" an enthusiast shouted.

_Quitting, quitting, I 'm hearing his last speech,_ Judah Iskaritz said to himself. _In a few moments he 'll be safe. Let him go. Don't delay him. Let him go with his Maggie and have joy of her, and children. Some day may I not hope to see him in_ shul, _a strong man with a_ tallith _round his shoulders and sons at his side?_ Without realizing it the rabbi smiled. He thought of his own children someday to be, the best friends of Jess Josephson's children. Then came a dark thought. _Do they realize? Do these thousands realize what he is telling them? That he is walking away from it. Those out there who would do him harm..._

"And how is this need going to be filled?" the speaker continued. "There's no shortage of products, Wall Street. Lots of garbage out there. Cults and false prophets, doomsdays and reincarnations, worship of 'earth mothers,' faith healers, New Age nonsense... even witchcraft and Devil worship. All rubbish! Wrong! Wrong as can be! The real God, the Creator Whose work is all around us, gets lost in such confusion."

The crowd applauded but Judah Iskaritz found the noise distracting, infuriating. It might mask a gunshot. No one would know till they saw a spurt of red... Jess falling. The rabbi looked at the crowd assistants, Si, Ed Jensen, Norm Braun, listening to the speech. _They 're enjoying, not watching! Even the police._ He poked at Peter Winslow with an elbow. "We're dropping our guard," he said. The right-hand man nodded and scanned his troops with a frown.

Now the crowd applauded again. What had Jess said? Judah missed it. _But better to miss it! Am I here to be entertained?_ He looked around more critically. Countless windows had sightlines to the Federal Hall steps. Police officers stood on roofs but what good was that? Would they parachute? _Look at all those windows... any killer with a telescopic sight... and not a thing to be done about it. Hopeless! No way to stop a shot from up there..._ Judah became analytical. Standing within a few feet of Jess, he realized that the slightest error in aim might kill _him._ Or any of the others. Yet he had no fear, none at all. If his end was inscribed, so be it. He found himself strangely indifferent. A bullet or bomb that could not be stopped was not worth a scrap of thought. Therefore the calculation became simpler, the equation purified. He must focus on what was manageable: a danger that could be _effectively_ blocked. If such there were, it would not be from above: no, but from below, in the crowd before the steps, the sea of faces white, brown, and black, looking up...

Peter Winslow came to a decision. After much deliberation it had become clear. Anything else was stupidity, and it was urgent to quit being stupid. _The moment Jess stops I take the microphone, call a news conference tomorrow, here, on this spot that he has imprinted in the world 's mind, to announce the continuation, with the Nicholson funds. Let Jess make today's news. Tomorrow...God help me!_

"... And after all of life's knocks," Jess was saying, "imagine telling an investor, 'Walk through that door over there; everything's beautiful on the other side.' But you never get to see what's behind there. Them's the rules. It says so right here, in this prospectus I've got." People laughed. "What would you say, Wall Street, to somebody with a deal like that? I know what you'd say. You'd say, 'Get out of here, swindler!'"

"Yeah! Damn right!" people in the crowd said.

"You'd say, 'You're in Wall Street now, Bub. We weren't born yesterday.' And you'd be right. Because God is no swindler." He bunched a fist for emphasis. "What you see is what you get. This universe. This life. And the stirring, which is in all of us, to make it better. Don't ask for more! Be fair to God. Be grateful for the chance we each have to be here."

_How could I choose?_ Judah Iskaritz asked himself. Upturned before him were thousands of faces in the only effective field for action: the crowd massed on the steps and downward and out, across the street to the building wall. The assassin - _assume an assassin! -_ would have to have a gun, a knife, or his body strapped with explosives. _He 'd want to come closer, as close as possible, only inches away, as with Rabin, Kahane, and the Kennedy brother._ Judah peered at the faces. _So many... How to choose!_ The crowd erupted in laughter at something Jess had said. They applauded. _At what? What difference does it make?_ He wasn't listening. The microphoned voice was unintelligible. There was a roaring in his ears, a blur at the edges of his vision. Blue sky above, men on rooftops, distant windows with signs hanging - all indistinct. But in front of him, directly in front, he was able to read faces with uncanny clarity. Each face distinct and differentiated: a man with a mole beside his nose; a woman with rose eye-shadow; three foreign sailors off a ship; Jews in black on the Morgan sidewalk; Maggie Deland nervously touching her pearls in the middle of the street, _so beautiful, so fearful, but he is quitting,_ shiksa, _to be with you._ Judah thought, _Give me the eyes of an eagle._ He wished to see, as on the floor of a forest, the one significant movement of rodent or reptile. He peered at the field of faces. He seemed to be able to take in twenty at a time, a hundred, a thousand, to survey them with the eyes of an eagle, and he saw - a movement. _A beard... a yarmulke... moving forward..._

"But maybe I'm wrong," said Jess Josephson. "I might have it wrong, Wall Street. No investment is a sure thing."

_A yarmulke! Could a Jew be out to kill him? And in the name of Judaism?_ Rabbi Iskaritz rejected such a horror. Yet his eagle's eyes fixed on that moving skullcap and beard. Once, years before, he had been rowing on an upstate lake and his eye was drawn to a crease on the surface; strange; a floating twig? It passed alongside his oar and, looking down, he saw the snout, raised to breathe, of a thing that froze his blood: a water snake.

"So if against all my instincts," said the microphoned voice, "God really does have a heaven for the faithful..."

_Like a serpent through water he comes,_ Judah Iskaritz thought, _not in a straight line, but moving to left... to right...careful not to disturb people listening. Unconsciously they part, yielding to his mass threading through. They are concentrating on what Jess is saying. But why should this fellow, a Jew, be so intent to approach? Can he want to shake hands?"_

"And hell for people like me who can't see the logic of that," Josephson said, "so be it. But I'll tell you this..."

Judah Iskaritz wrenched himself away from the speaker's side. He did not hear Peter Winslow's grunt of surprise. _My God,_ thought the ex-Presbyterian, _was he offended at that?_ The rabbi-journalist descended a step, then another, pushing through people listening. Two cameras had to shift. Someone swore at him. No matter. A hammer was striking his heart. His hands trembled. But his eyes were those of an eagle. In strong sunlight his focus penetrated through massed, shifting shoulders and heads, to a single moving beard and yarmulka.

"If hell it is," Jess Josephson said, "when I get there I'll do my best to get word back to the rest of you. I figure..."

A gust of laughter passed. Judah Iskaritz ran into a tall man in shirtsleeves who was laughing and applauding and who blocked his way. The rabbi put a hand to his mouth. "Sick," he said. "I'm sick." The man yielded. Others parted. He lunged forward. _Beard! Yarmulka! Where?_ Sunlight dazzled him. A child on someone's shoulders kicked both feet and waved a flag. Distraction! _Don 't lose him!_ Judah nearly sobbed in panic. He reached out desperately. Over shoulders and between heads he reached - and with the talons, too, of an eagle

"I figure I owe you that much," said Jess Josephson, and the crowd laughed again.

In that instant Judah Iskaritz ran into his prey. They bumped bodies. The rabbi felt a mass strike his chest from within the other's coat. "Outta the way!" the man said. He was inches shorter but more powerfully built, a stevedore in scholar's clothing. His eyes widened in rage and astonishment. What, this clumsy Jew, this _klutz_ should bar his way, interfering, instead of turning around to listen like the other fools?

"Didn't you hear him say he was quitting?" Judah screamed in the fellow's face. He had to make himself heard above a roar of the crowd at something Jess had said.

The man pulled his head back. His face darkened, eyes bulging in their sockets. "Outta my way!" he growled again.

Judah seized him by the lapels. "Quitting! Quitting!" he repeated, unsure whether he could be heard through the noise of the crowd, the ringing in his ears. He had a sudden intuition (or hope): _This is no Jew. A militia Christian? A Muslim? Some wear beards. Anyone can find a yarmulke._ "No Josephson after today!" he shouted. "Can't you hear?"

The man put a hand over the rabbi's face furiously, contemptuously, and pushed him away; while his other hand reached into the breast of his jacket as if by reflex. _Oh God, a bomb vest?_ thought Judah in panic.

"I'll add one more thing," Josephson said, his voice carried by speakers and a thousand radios. "If hell there is, if that is how God has set it up, which I don't for a moment believe - He does better work than that! - " He smiled in mid-sentence and there was a boom of laughter.

Judah Iskaritz clutched with the talons of an eagle at the stranger's beard. He pulled. Masses of hair tore off in his hand. _What? False?_ At the same moment he felt a blow in the ribs. No pain, just a blow, but a substantial one; like a punch deep in the ribs that would be followed by agony an instant later. Such a blow should have been heard but was not. Or else it was swamped in the crowd's roar to what Jess was saying. Judah somehow formed the analytical thought that a bullet in this way was superior to a bomb; it made no noise; hence miraculously no pain. He felt proud of this coolness in combat, in contrast to his antagonist, not six inches away from him, the man's ugly mug contorted in rage. There was blood on the fellow's cheek. _Was the beard real, then? But it came off like a stage beard...perhaps his superhuman strength on adrenaline..._

"If hell there is," Jess repeated, "let it be on me. What's the use of more? I don't need company..."

The man thrust Judah Iskaritz away. The rabbi saw a rip in the other's jacket, where the bullet must have come through. He pointed, but no one paid attention. "Assassin!" he shouted, or thought he shouted. No one seemed to hear except the accused. The word was swallowed up in noise. The fellow gaped down at his torn coat and at Judah's chest. Then he turned with a snarl and began battering through the people behind him. He pushed them aside as they, scarcely aware, gazing forward at Jess Josephson, cheered and applauded. "Stop him!" Judah Iskaritz tried to say but no sound came out. His chest felt heavy and his legs light, which was strange but convenient. With a fantastic nimbleness he charged into the path the assassin was clearing in front of him, before people's bodies could flow back in. He reached toward the man's back, but no longer with the talons of an eagle. His hands felt soft, unable to grasp. _The fellow 's vest might still be filled with explosives_, he wanted to warn, _but I kept him from getting close. I stopped him..._

"No, I don't need company," said Jess Josephson. "If I have misled anybody, let it be on my head."

Maggie Deland stiffened. _Would he take all the sins of the world on himself, in as personal a sacrifice as Jesus? To_ _offer so much? The punishments of God on him alone, and the rest of us off the hook?_

But something wonderful happened. A person in the crowd (no reporter later could establish whom) yelled, "I'll be with you, Jess!" Others took up the cry. They raised their hands. "Me too! And me!" The chorus grew to thousands, Maggie included. "I'll be with you, Jess!" they shouted. "I'll be with you!"

The offer of the multitude to share hell with him, if hell it should be, filled the streets. From windows a new rain of confetti was released, fluttering down in the sunlight as the cry arose, "I'll be with you, Jess!" Through tears Maggie saw him up on the stone steps catching her eye, acknowledging her own cries, and raising his hand to say one thing more.

"I don't..." he said into the microphone. "I don't want to pretend to be such a hero, or a fool. I think God makes better sense than that. And the modern mind, open to every new finding of science, deeply needs Him. At bottom that is what I believe. God, if we get Him out of the trap the religions put Him in, is no trickster, no myth or monster. _He and His Creation make sense._ Always have, always will."

There was a tremendous roar. Peter Winslow slapped Jess's back. Office workers spilled more paper out of windows and shook flags. Jess Josephson waved a hand and seemed to be saying, "Good-bye," but no one heard the word in the redoubled cheering. Cameras crowded forward up the steps; others came down from in back, panning over the crowd. A blonde office worker near Maggie murmured, "The greatest, just the greatest... greatest..." An elderly stockbroker in shirtsleeves jumped up and down like a boy.

"Stop him... stop him!" Judah Iskaritz implored as he ran. But only a whimper came out of him. No one was paying attention. He tried to catch the assassin; he gave it a good try. But the fellow with the mangled beard and torn jacket got farther away and people flowed in behind him like water and barred his pursuer, staring strangely at _him_ , as if he harbored some fanatical rage against the fellow trying to escape his clutches, possibly a money dispute between Jew and Jew. He began to feel embarrassed, conspicuous. Everyone was having such a good time; why should he spoil things? And now it was all behind him, the roars of the crowd, the steps of Federal Hall. He seemed to be slowing down, walking, limping in deep shade. He had run a city block, two blocks, he wasn't sure, well past the crowd, south on Broad Street (which of course was a narrow street, which was funny). He thought, _Maybe somewhere in the world is a Narrow Street that is wide...as the Jordan, called a river, should be wider than a creek but is not._ Now he was out of breath. It was time to take stock. But his head felt so light, or was it heavy? Both! As after the four cups of wine at Passover. _Someday I will have Jess at my Seder, and adorable Maggie, converted to Judaism, a true Jewish mother... a real Seder... Jess whose life I saved, prevented from being martyred..._

Josephson was surrounded by microphones. "Not one thing more to say," he said, shaking his head. "I'm all out, really."

Jeremy Kirk grinned in Peter Winslow's face. "Let me enjoy the revelation again. He is actually quitting?"

Winslow looked at him without irritation, solemnly, in awe of the commitment he himself faced. "God is finished with him," he said in the din, "but not with me."

Kirk's smile hardened. "I'll take that trade any day, Peter."

"He has changed the world, Jeremy."

"Pshaw! His name is writ on water. You forget how brief is the modern attention span. What you needed was a martyr and what you got was a celebrity. In a month the world will forget he existed."

A reporter shouted at Josephson, "What's next for you, Jess?"

The new retiree smiled. "Nothing public."

"C'mon, give us a clue. What'll you do?"

"What I do. Build houses."

"No movie career, television, politics?"

"None of that ever made sense. Look at all the boredom I'm saving you."

"Do you have any money left, Jess?"

"A little bit."

"How much?"

"No, really," he put up a hand, "you don't want to hear any more from me. Let me introduce Peter Winslow. One of the best. He's got something important to say."

Judah Iskaritz pressed his left elbow against his ribs. Now, yes, it was throbbing. He had stepped into a side street, practically an alley, dark and cool. Maybe he should not have left Broad Street, where pedestrians would certainly pass. The thought came to him: _I should have help._ He leaned back against a building wall. _Feels good._ He looked around, saw trash bins, fire escapes, backs of buildings. _No one may come..._ It felt good, though. The wound must not be serious, a broken rib or two, the pain bearable, nothing to be alarmed about. _Blood?_ Yes, there was a wetness inside his shirt and down one leg; it felt cold. _So sit. Rest. Right here on the ground? Why not? A little dirt... cigarette butts..._

With his back against a wall he slid down and got his legs out from under him. _Ah, better. The blood must be drying: a strange wound, thank God, already healing. I will sit quietly without moving. Jess, my friend, best man I have ever known, shall I confess to you one day that it was I who saved your life and killed your idea? That for one moment I was the instrument of the Almighty; that in His wisdom He decided you should live and your foolishness should die, just go away, get out of here, quit pestering Him._

Judah had to laugh, which hurt. In all his life he had not done such a perfect thing, never stood so correctly in the right place and time with the right thought in his head. It confirmed his faith in God, Whose Name he now desired to magnify and sanctify. Tears of joy filled his eyes _. Someone will come for me, yet this might be my last moment; what a privilege to realize it, and without fear..._ In an elation such as he had never known he began to whisper, _" Shema Yisroel..." Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One..._

"Where is Judah?" Jess Josephson asked Mary Mulcahy. Reporters were crowded around Peter Winslow now.

"I think he wandered away while you were speaking."

"Insult!" But he was smiling. "If you see him, tell him I said good-bye and will be in touch."

"When are we going to see you again, Jess?" Harry Kaufhoffer asked, his arm around Mary Mulcahy's waist.

"Set a place for dinner Friday. Make it two places." He embraced them both and kissed Mary's wet cheek. "What a friend you have been," he told her. "No way could we have gotten this far without you."

Maggie Deland stood by the stone pedestal that still swarmed with camera people. The outer crowd was dispersing now; back to work; lunch break over; yet hundreds surged onto the steps to surround him, touch him, receive a moment's glance from him. He evaded reporters as well as he could, shifting them onto Peter Winslow for some sort of announcement; not that they didn't have plenty of story already, more than enough. She stood with her hands clasped before her in a pose unconsciously virginal. She saw him shake hands with the assistants, hug Mary and the Dutchman.

And now he was walking down the steps, cameras and microphones still hovering like gulls, though he tried to wave them off, shaking his head, smiling, moving down the steps. Her heart pounded; she felt breathless, as if riding a wave that was cresting, rushing forward, about to break. She became conscious of people's stares and felt herself blush. "The girlfriend," someone said. Then he was beside her, the expression on his face appearing radiant in her eyes. His arm circled her shoulders. In her ear, softly, not for public consumption, nor for the hearing of a single other person, he said, "Let's get married."

Mary Mulcahy watched them from the steps. "Best-looking couple I ever saw," Harry Kaufhoffer said at her side. Jess and Maggie walked out in the street, their arms around each other's waists. Cameras ran in front of them, but they did not seem to notice or care; they kept moving. Mary watched through a film of tears. "Don't go," she said half-aloud. But in the swim of her vision the two joined, became one, and disappeared in the crowd.

END

# About the author

Jack Markowitz is a veteran journalist and business editor. Over the course of six decades he has reported millions of words for newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and his native Pittsburgh and written or collaborated on non-fiction books and magazine articles. He continues to do a weekly business column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
