“And . . . ?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, when you dumped me—”
“Hattie, I never dumped you. There was nothing to dump. We were not an item.”
“Yet.”
“OK, yet,” he said. “That’s fair. But you have to admit there had been no commitment or even an expression of a commitment.”
“There had been plenty of signals, Rayford.”
“I have to acknowledge that. Still, it’s unfair to say I dumped you.”
“Call it whatever you want so you can deal with it, but I felt dumped, OK? Anyway, all of sudden Buck Williams looked more attractive to me than ever. I’m sure he thought I was using him to meet a celebrity, which also happened. I was so grateful for Buck’s introducing me to Nicolae.”
“Forgive me, Hattie, but this is old news.”
“I know, but I’m getting somewhere. Bear with me. As soon as I met Nicolae, I was stricken. He was only about as much older than Buck as Buck was older than I. But he seemed so much older. He was a world traveler, an international politician, a leader. He was already the most famous man in the world. I knew he was going places. I felt like a giggling schoolgirl and couldn’t imagine I had impressed him in the least. When he began to show interest, I thought it was merely physical. And, I admit, I would have probably slept with him in a minute and not regretted it. We had an affair, and I fell in love, but as God is my witness—oh, Rayford, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t use those kind of references around you—I never expected him to be truly interested in me. I knew the whole thing was temporary, and I was determined to just enjoy it while it lasted.
“It got to the point where I dreaded his being away. I kept telling myself to maintain a level head. The end would have to come soon, and I really believe I was prepared for it. But then he shocked me. He made me his personal assistant. I had no experience, no skills. I knew it was just a way to keep me available to him after hours. That was all right with me, though I was afraid of what my life might become when he became even busier. Well, my worst fears were realized. He’s still charming and smooth and dynamic and powerful and the most incredible person I’ve ever met. But I mean exactly to him what I always feared I did. You know the man usually works at least eighteen hours a day and sometimes twenty? I mean nothing to him, and I know it.
“I used to be involved in some discussions. He used to bounce an idea or two off me. But what do I know about international politics? I would make some silly statement based on my limited knowledge, and he would either laugh at me or ignore me. Then he came to where he never sought my opinions anymore. I was allowed little playthings, like helping develop this restaurant and being available to greet groups touring the new Global Community headquarters. But I’m merely window-dressing now, Rayford. He didn’t give me a ring until after I was pregnant, and he still hasn’t asked me if I would marry him. I guess that’s supposed to be understood.”
“By accepting his ring, did you not imply that you would marry him?”
“Oh, Rayford, it wasn’t nearly that romantic. He merely asked me to close my eyes and stick out my hand. Then he put the ring on my finger. I didn’t know what to say. He just smiled.”
“You’re saying you don’t feel committed?”
“I don’t feel anything anymore. And I don’t think he ever felt anything for me except physical attraction.”
“And all the trappings? The wealth? Your own car and driver? I assume you have an expense account—”
“I have all that, yes.” Hattie seemed tired. She continued. “To tell you the truth, all that stuff is a lot like what flying was to me. You quickly get tired of the routine. I was drunk with the power and the glitter and the glamour of it for a while, sure. But it’s not who I am. I know no one here. People treat me with deference and respect only because of who I live with. But they don’t really know him either. Neither do I. I’d rather he be mad at me than ignore me. I asked him the other day if I could go back to the States for a while and visit my friends and family. He was irritated. He said I didn’t even have to ask. He said, ‘Just let me know and go ahead and arrange it. I’ve got more to do than worry about your little schedule.’ I’m just a piece of furniture to him, Rayford.”
Rayford was biding his time. There was so much he wanted to tell her. “How much do you talk?”
“What do you mean? We don’t talk. We just coexist now.”
Rayford spoke carefully, “I’m just curious about how much he knows about Chloe and Buck.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. Smart as he is and well connected as he is, and for as many ‘eyes’ as he has out there surveilling everything and everybody, I don’t think he has any idea of a connection between you and Buck. I have never mentioned that Buck married your daughter. And I never would.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think he needs to know, that’s all. For some reason, Rayford, he trusts you implicitly on some things and not at all on others.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“What have you noticed?” she asked.
“Being left out of the plans for the Condor 216, for one,” Rayford said.
“Yeah,” she said, “and wasn’t that creative of him to use his office suite number as part of the name of the plane?”
“It just seemed bizarre to be his pilot and to be surprised by new equipment.”
“If you lived with him, that would not surprise you. I’ve been out of the loop for months. Rayford, do you realize that I was not contacted by anyone when the war broke out?”
“He didn’t call you?”
“I didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. I heard him on the news, just like everyone else. He didn’t even call after that. No aide let me know. No assistant so much as sent me a memo. I called everywhere. I talked to every person in the organization I knew. I even got as far as Leon Fortunato. He told me he would tell Nicolae that I called. Can you imagine? He would tell him I called!”
“So when you saw him at the airstrip . . . ?”
“I was testing him. I won’t deny it. I wasn’t as eager to see him as I let on, but I was giving him one more chance. Wasn’t it obvious I spoiled his big appearance?”
“That’s the impression I had,” Rayford said, wondering if he was wise in surrendering his neutral role.
“When I tried to kiss him, he told me it was inappropriate and to act like an adult. At least in his remarks he referred to me as his fiancée. He said I was overcome with grief, as he was. I know him well enough to know there was no grief. I could see it written all over him. He loves this stuff. And regardless of what he says, he’s right in the middle of it. He talks like a pacifist, but he hopes people will attack him so he can justify retaliating. I was so horrified and sad, hearing about all the death and destruction, but he comes back here to his self-made palace, pretending to grieve with all the heartbroken people around the world. But in private it’s like he’s celebrating. He can’t get enough of this. He’s rubbing his hands, making plans, devising strategies. He’s putting together his new team. They’re meeting right now. Who knows what they’ll dream up!”
“What are you gonna do, Hattie? This is no kind of life for you.”
“He doesn’t even want me in the office anymore.”
Rayford knew that but couldn’t let on. “What do you mean?”
“I was actually fired today, by my own fiancé. He asked if he could meet me in my quarters.”
“Your quarters?”
“We don’t really live together anymore. I’m just down the hall, and he visits once in a great while in the middle of the night—between meetings, I guess. But I’ve been a fairly high-maintenance girl-next-door for a long time.”
“So what did he want?”
“I thought I knew. I thought he’d been away long enough that he just wanted the usual. But he just told me he was replacing me.”
“You mean you’re out?”
“No. He still wants me around. Still wants me
to bear his child. He just thinks the job has passed me by. I told him, ‘Nicolae, that job passed me by the day before I took it. I’ve never been cut out to be a secretary. I was OK with the public relations and the people contacts, but making me your personal assistant was a mistake.’”
“I always thought you looked the part.”
“Well, thanks for that, Rayford. But losing that job was a relief in a way.”
“Only in a way?”
“Yes. Where does this leave me? I asked him what the future was for us. He had the audacity to say, ‘Us?’ I said, ‘Yes! Us! I’m wearing your ring and carrying your child. When do we make this permanent?’”
Buck woke with a start. He had been dreaming. It was dark. He turned on a small lamp and squinted at his watch. He still had several hours before his appointment with Moishe and Eli at midnight. But what had that dream been all about? Buck had dreamed that he was Joseph, Mary’s husband. He had heard an angel of the Lord saying, “Arise, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word.”
Buck was confused. He had never been communicated to in a dream, by God or anyone else. He had always considered dreams just aberrations based on daily life. Here he was in the Holy Land, thinking about God, thinking about Jesus, communicating with the two witnesses, trying to steer clear of the Antichrist and his cohorts. It made sense he might have a dream related to biblical stories. Or was God trying to tell him that he would find Tsion Ben-Judah in Egypt, rather than wherever it seemed the witnesses were sending him? They always spoke so circumspectly. He would have to simply ask them. How could he be expected to understand biblical references when he was so new at all this? He wanted to sleep until eleven-thirty before taking a cab to the Wailing Wall, but he found it difficult to fall back to sleep with the weird dream playing itself over and over in his mind. One thing he didn’t want to do, especially with the news of war coming out of Cairo, was to go anywhere near Egypt. He wasn’t much more than two hundred miles from Cairo as the crow flew anyway. That was plenty close enough, even if Carpathia had not used nuclear weapons on the Egyptian capital.
Buck lay back in the darkness, wondering.
Rayford was torn. What could he tell his old friend? She was clearly in pain, clearly at a loss. He couldn’t blurt that her lover was the Antichrist and that Rayford and his friends knew it. What he really wanted was to plead with her, to beg her to receive Christ. But hadn’t he already done that once? Hadn’t he spelled out to her everything he had learned following the vanishings, which he now knew as the Rapture?
She knew the truth. At least she knew what he believed was the truth. He had spilled his guts to her, Chloe, and Buck at a restaurant in New York, and he felt he had alienated Hattie by repeating what he had said to her earlier that day in private. He had been certain his daughter was embarrassed to death. And he had been convinced that the erudite Buck Williams was merely tolerating him. It had been a shock to find that Chloe took a huge step closer to her own personal decision to follow Christ after seeing his passion that night. That meeting had also been a huge influence on Buck.
Now he tried a new tack. “Let me tell you something, Hattie. You need to know that Buck and Chloe and I all care very deeply about you.”
“I know, Rayford, but—”
“I don’t think you do know,” Rayford said. “We have all wondered if this was the best thing for you, and each of us feels somehow responsible for your having left your job and loved ones and gone first to New York and now to New Babylon. And for what?”
Hattie stared at him. “But I hardly heard from any of you.”
“We didn’t feel we had a right to say anything. You’re an adult. It’s your life. I felt my antics had pushed you away from the aviation industry. Buck feels guilty for having introduced you to Nicolae in the first place. Chloe often wonders if she couldn’t have said or done something that might have changed your mind.”
“But why?” Hattie said. “How did any of you know I was not happy here?”
Now Rayford was stuck. How, indeed, did they know? “We just sensed the odds were against you,” he said.
“And I don’t suppose I gave you any indication that you were right, always trying to impress you whenever I saw you or Buck with Nicolae.”
“There was that, yes.”
“Well, Rayford, it may also come as a shock to you to know that I had never foreseen becoming pregnant out of wedlock either.”
“Why should that surprise me?”
“Because I can’t say my morals were exactly pristine. I mean, I was close to an affair with you. I’m just saying I wasn’t raised that way, and I certainly wouldn’t have planned to have a baby without being married.”
“And now?”
“The same is true now, Rayford.” Hattie’s voice had flattened. It was clear she was tired, but now she sounded defeated, almost dead. “I am not going to use this pregnancy to force Nicolae Carpathia to marry me. He wouldn’t anyway. He’s not forced by anyone to do anything. If I pushed him, he’d probably tell me to have an abortion.”
“Oh no!” Rayford said. “You’d never consider that, would you?”
“Wouldn’t consider it? I think about it every day.”
Rayford winced and rubbed his forehead. Why did he expect Hattie to live like a believer when she was not? It wasn’t fair to assume she agreed with him on these issues. “Hattie, do me a big favor, will you?”
“Maybe.”
“Would you think about that very carefully before you take any action? Would you seek counsel from your family, from your friends?”
“Rayford, I hardly have any friends anymore.”
“Chloe and Buck and I still consider you our friend. And I believe Amanda could become your friend if she got to know you.”
Hattie snorted. “I have a feeling that the more Amanda got to know me, the less she’d like me.”
“That just proves you don’t know her,” Rayford said. “She’s the type who doesn’t even have to like you to love you, if you know what I mean.”
Hattie raised her eyebrows. “What an interesting way to say that,” she said. “I guess that’s the way parents feel about their kids sometimes. My dad once told me that, when I was a rebellious teenager. He said, ‘Hattie, it’s a good thing I love you so much, because I don’t like you at all.’ That brought me up short, Rayford. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” he said. “You really ought to get to know Amanda. She’d be like another mother-figure to you.”
“One is more than enough,” Hattie said. “Don’t forget, my mother’s the one that gave me this crazy name that belongs to someone two generations older than me.”
Rayford smiled. He had always wondered about that. “Anyway, you said Nicolae didn’t mind if you took a trip back to the States?”
“Yeah, but that was before the war broke out.”
“Hattie, several airports are still taking incoming flights. And as far as I know, no nuclear-equipped warheads landed on any major cities. The only nuclear radiation fallout was in London. You’d want to stay out of there for at least a year, I should think. But even the devastation in Cairo didn’t have radiation associated with it.”
“You think he’d still let me go back to the States soon then?”
“I wouldn’t know, but I’m trying to get back there by Sunday to check on Amanda and to attend a memorial service.”
“How are you getting there, Rayford?”
“Commercial. Personally, I think carting around even a dozen or fewer dignitaries is extravagant for the Condor 216. Anyway, the potentate—”
“Oh, please, Rayford, don’t call him that.”
“Does that sound as ridiculous to you as it does to me?”
“It always has. For such a brilliant, powerful man, that stupid title makes him sound like a buffoon.”
“Well, I don’t really know him well enough to call him Nicolae, and that last name is a mouthful.”
“Don’t most of you church types cons
ider him the Antichrist?”
Rayford flinched. He never would have expected that out of her mouth. Was she serious? He decided it was too soon to come clean. “The Antichrist?”
“I can read,” she said. “In fact, I like Buck’s writing. I’ve read his pieces in the Weekly. When he covers all the various theories and talks about what people think, it comes out that there’s a big faction who believes that Nicolae might be the Antichrist.”
“I’ve heard that,” Rayford said.
“So you could call him Antichrist, or A.C. for short,” she said.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t go in for all that cosmic war between good and evil stuff anyway. I wouldn’t know if a person was the Antichrist if he was staring me in the face.”
He’s probably stared you in the face more than anyone else over the last couple of years, Rayford thought.
“Anyway, Hattie, I think you should ask—for lack of a better title—Global Community Grand Potentate Nicolae Carpathia if it’s still all right that you take a brief trip home. I’m taking a Saturday morning flight that will arrive nonstop in Milwaukee at about noon Chicago time the same day. From what I understand, there’s room in the big house of a woman from our church. You could stay with us.”
“I couldn’t do that, Rayford. My mother is in Denver. They haven’t suffered any damage yet, have they?”
“Not as far as I know. I’m sure we could book you through to Denver.” Rayford was disappointed. Here was a chance to have some influence on Hattie, but there would be no getting her to the Chicago area.
“I’m not going to ask Nicolae,” she said.
“You don’t want to go?”
“Oh, I want to go. And I will go. I’m just going to leave word that I’m gone. That’s what he said last time I checked with him. He told me I was an adult and should make these decisions for myself. He’s got more important things on his mind. Maybe I’ll see you on the flight to Milwaukee. In fact, unless you hear otherwise from me, why don’t you assume my driver will pick you up Saturday morning. You think it would be all right with Amanda if we sat together?”