Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

But here, at least, here she felt at peace and welcome and loved. Everyone said good morning, even people whose names she didn’t know, courtly gentlemen and polite young men and lovely young women and hovering mothers and sweet old white-haired women. Maxine Blake was dressed all in white, wearing an ornate hat that looked a little like an upside-down bucket with white tendrils coming out of it and encircling it like rings around a planet. She threw her arms around Audrey, pressing Audrey to her enormous bosom, bringing her into a cloud of perfume and warmth and love. “God is good,” Maxine said.

“All the time,” Audrey responded.

The service started a good twenty minutes late. “Colored people’s time,” the joke went. The choir, dressed in their magnificent red-and-white robes, marched down the aisle clapping and singing “It’s a Highway to Heaven,” and then they were joined by the electric organ and then the trumpet and drum and then Audrey joined in along with most everybody else. She’d always wanted to sing in the choir, but her voice was nothing special — though, as she’d noticed, some of the women in the choir had thin voices and tended to sing out of tune. Some had spectacular voices, it was true. The men mostly sang in a rumbling bass, but the tenor was more off-key than on.

Reverend Jamison started his sermon as he always did, by calling out, “God is good,” to which everyone responded: “All the time.” He said it again, and everyone responded again. His sermons were always heartfelt, usually inspired, and never went on too long. They weren’t particularly original, though. Audrey had heard he got them off the Internet from Baptist Web sites that posted sample sermons and notes. Once, confronted on his lack of originality, Reverend Jamison had said, “I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter.” Audrey liked that.

Today he told the story of Joshua and the armies of Israel fighting the good fight, battling five of the kings of Canaan for the conquest of the promised land. About how the kings played right into Joshua’s hands by joining the battle together. About how it wasn’t the Lord who fought the battle, it was Israel. The five kings tried to hide in a cave, but Joshua ordered the cave sealed up. And after the battle had been won, Joshua brought the kings out of their cave, out of their hiding place, and humiliated them by ordering his princes to place their feet on the kings’ necks. Reverend Jamison talked about how there’s no hiding place. “We can’t hide from God,” he declared. “The only hiding place from God is Hell.”

That made her think, as it had so many times, about Nicholas Conover and the graffiti that had been repeatedly spray-painted on the interior walls of his house. No hiding place.

That could be frightening, as no doubt Conover found it to be. No hiding place: from what? From a faceless adversary, from a stalker? From his guilt, his sins?

But here in church, “no hiding place” was meant to be a stern yet hopeful admonition.

In his most orotund voice the reverend recited from Proverbs 28: “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.”

And she thought, because every single one of Reverend Jamison’s sermons was devised to mean something to each and every one in the congregation, about Nicholas Conover. The king hiding in his cave.

But no hiding place. Andrew Stadler had been right, hadn’t he?

Reverend Jamison cued the choir, which went right into a lively rendition of “No Hiding Place Down Here.” The soloist was Mabel Darnell, a large woman who sang and swayed like Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson put together. The organist, Ike Robinson, was right up front, on display, not hidden the way the organist usually was in the other churches she’d seen. He was a white-haired, dark-skinned man of near eighty with expressive eyes and an endearing smile. He wore a white suit and looked like Count Basie, Audrey had always thought.

“I went to the rock to hide my face,” Mabel sang, clapping her hands, “but the rock cried out, ‘No hiding place!’”

Count Basie’s pudgy fingers ran up and down the keys, syncopating, making swinging jazz out of it, and the rest of the choir joined in at the rock and my face and cried out and no hiding place no hiding place no hiding place .

Audrey felt a thrill coursing through her body, a shiver that moved along her spine like an electric current.

And the instant the choir had finished, while the organ chords still resounded, Reverend Jamison’s voice boomed out, “My friends, none of us can hide from the Lord. ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man’” — his voice rose steadily until the sound system squealed with feedback — “‘hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.’” Now he dropped to a stage whisper: “‘And said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’”

He paused to let the congregation know that his sermon had concluded. Then he invited anyone in the congregation who wished to come up to the altar for a moment of personal prayer. Ike Robinson, no longer Count Basie, played softly as a dozen or so people got up from their pews and knelt at the altar rail, and all of a sudden Audrey felt moved to do it too, something she hadn’t done since her mother’s death. She went up there and knelt between Maxine Blake and her enormous rings-of-Saturn hat and another woman, Sylvia-something, whose husband had just died of complications from liver transplant surgery, leaving her with four small children.

Sylvia-something was going through a terrible, terrible time, and what did Audrey have to complain about, really? Her problems were small ones, but they filled her up, as small problems will until the big ones move in and elbow them aside.

She knew she had allowed her anger at Leon to fester inside her, and she recalled the words from Ephesians 4:26–27: “Let not the sun go down upon your anger: Neither give place to the devil.” And she knew it was time to let go of that anger and confront him once and for all.

She knew that her hurt and disappointment over Jack Noyce might never heal, but it would not get in the way of her doing the right thing.

She thought of that poor little daughter of Nicholas Conover, fumbling at the piano, that beautiful needy face. That little girl who had just lost her mother and was about to lose her father too.

And that was the most wrenching thing of all, knowing that she was about to orphan that little girl.

She began weeping, her shoulders heaving, the hot tears running down her cheeks, and someone was rubbing her shoulder and consoling her, and she felt loved.

Outside the church, in the gloomy daylight, she took her cell phone out of her purse and called Roy Bugbee.

The throaty growl of a car coming up the driveway.

Leon? No, Leon’s car didn’t sound that way. Out catting, Leon was. And on a Sunday. She felt a swell of resentment, of resolve.

She parted the sheer curtains in the front parlor. Bugbee.

His leering grin. “Finally decided to do it, eh?”

She invited him into the front parlor, where he took Leon’s chair and Audrey sat facing him on the couch. Bugbee’s foot jostled something, and a couple of brown glass bottles clattered.

He glanced down. “Hitting the sauce, Aud? Pressure getting too much for you?”

“I don’t even like the taste of beer,” she said, embarrassed. “So what’s up?”