by John Dalmas
He was shaking his head, remembering. "That sounds as if I didn't give a damn, as if I was pretty independent. And at the moment I thought I was. Then the reaction set in, and I left in shock, in grief. I'd been kicked out, lost my marriage, maybe my kid . . . And my eternal salvation. I still believed!" He looked at me via his phone screen, and shook his head with a small rueful grin.
We talked for two or three minutes more, then he gave me his name and his Denver address and phone number, and Gloria's address, and we disconnected. I had the phone print out the conversation, and gave it to Carlos the next day, along with my dictated write-up summarizing the case. In my summary, I left out the details of the Child Nurture Center, and Carlos said I did the right thing on that: We weren't hired to describe the conditions that Angela DeSmet's granddaughter lived in, and besides, Hamilton could have been exaggerating, although I didn't think so. As wild as the story was, something about the man made me believe him. Then Carlos faxed the report to Angela DeSmet, along with the paperwork, and transferred to her what she had coming back on her deposit.
And that, I thought, was the end of that. The Church of the New Gnosis might not be evil—after all, it had let Hamilton simply walk away—but it was ugly and unpleasant, and I was glad to be done with it.
I never imagined how much criminality I'd find connected with it, though I've had to rethink the word evil since then.
3
BUTZBURGER
It was last April, the thirteenth, that we got the real case, the case of Christman's disappearance. When a guy named Armand Butzburger came in about a contract.
He'd talked to Joe on the phone the day before, and Joe and Carlos had discussed it and decided they wanted me to do the job. I'd been raised from investigative assistant to junior investigator after I'd located Gloria DeSmet for her mother, and to full investigator after I solved the case of Arthur Ashkenazi, the twice-killed astronomer. I'd done some pretty good work in between, too, but when I picked that one apart, they decided I was a real sherlock.
So when Butzburger arrived at Joe's office for his interview, Joe called Carlos and me to come down, and introduced us.
Butzburger's a wealthy "New Gnu"—people pronounce it "New Guh-new"—a polite name for a Gnostie, which is pronounced without the G. And what he told us was that Ray Christman, the Gnostie guru, hadn't been seen in public since last October or maybe September. Within his church, Ray Christman had been a highly visible man, but now and then, for whatever reason, he'd disappear from the Campus for a few weeks or even a month or more, so for a while, people didn't think anything about it.
Then, in December, the church held its annual big Christmas event at the New Palladium in Hollywood. A really great-looking woman named Marcy Mannheim conducted the opening ceremony. Which was something Christman traditionally did. The proceedings were always taped, and the tapes sold for twenty bucks each. Every New Gnu was expected to buy one. Butzburger had brought his with him, and played it for us on Joe's wall screen.
What Mannheim said to the crowd was, "In October, Ray went to stay at the Ranch, to do concentrated research on Freed Being. And after a while"—she paused there to tighten their attention—"after a while, things began to break for him." She paused again, and the place exploded with applause and cheering. She let them clap and shout for maybe a minute, then with a motion, cut them off. Like she'd pulled their plug. "Finally," she went on, "early in December, Ray left the Ranch for a location where he could continue his work in virtually complete solitude, in an environment totally uncontaminated with activities of any kind, except for such basic matters as the preparation of meals. He has only one person with him to see to his needs. He plans to stay where he is until he's worked out the complete road, the full procedures, and the state of Freed Being is ready to deliver to the public!"
She stopped again, and for a long few seconds the place was quiet as a mortuary, as if the crowd was stunned. Then once more it exploded with wild cheering. After a few seconds of that, Butzburger turned off the tape.
"That's all of it that's relevant to my problem," he said, and looked around at us with steady blue eyes. Somehow they reminded me of the red-brown eyes of the guy at the withdrawal assistance office. "I could accept what Marcy told us," he went on. "In fact I did accept it, without hesitation. But since then? . . . Since then there's been evidence and rumor of a power struggle within the Church's top executive strata. Replete with expulsions of executives, then reinstatements and amnesties, then more expulsions. Which certainly supports the power-struggle rumors."
His eyes moved to me and stopped. "To appreciate that, you need to realize that within the Gnostic community, rumors are rare. We are not—not—a gossiping people. So this has concerned me. It's been three and a half months since the Christmas event, and nothing more has been heard from Ray, at least not publicly. And if he was around, even on a remote island in the Indian Ocean or someplace like that, he'd know, be psychically aware of, anything like a power struggle within his Church. And take immediate and effective steps to end it.
"This does not seem to have happened, and I'm troubled by it. It may seem unreal to you, but Ray Christman is the hope of mankind and the world, so I want you to find him for me, and find out whether he's all right." Butzburger's gaze fell away then. "It may be that I'm simply lacking in faith," he added slowly, "and that what I'm doing here is harmful to his cause. I'm not as—perceptive as I should be; I'm well aware of that. But I've decided." He looked back up at me, then at Joe. "I realize that this is a very difficult undertaking. It may well prove impossible. But my attorney tells me that Prudential is the best investigation firm in the country, probably the world, and very ethical. So if you're interested in the case, I'm ready to discuss an agreement."
That's when I left the room; the negotiating aspects weren't anything I needed to sit through. Prudential has a standard contract with standard clauses. Individual agreements can vary within limits, but we're expensive. That's why most of our contracts are with corporations and government agencies, especially the city and state. Documented reports would be sent to Butzburger at regular intervals and sometimes in between.
I figured he must have deep pockets, and wondered how someone like him got mixed up with something like the Church of the New Gnosis. I'd thought of it as an outfit that attracted the weak and wishful, not the strong and wealthy. I knew it had wealthy members, but to the extent I'd thought about it, I'd assumed they were playboys and playgirls who'd inherited their money. Butzburger didn't seem to fit that image.
* * *
I went to my office and started calling stuff up on my computer from the L.A. City Library, mostly articles in the L.A. Times. I read about 800 to 1,200 words a minute, maybe the most useful single skill I have, and I was getting quite an education. After about half an hour, someone knocked at my door. It was Butzburger; he wanted to know if I'd have lunch with him, his treat.
He'd already called a cab. We rode to downtown Hollywood, to Musso and Frank's Grill. It's a place where you're apt to find yourself at a table near some holo star. But we didn't; he'd reserved a small private room. He wanted to ask questions, to get a better feel for the kind of guy who'd be working for him. Until I'd finished my ranch-size prime rib, though, all he made was small talk. Then, while we waited for dessert, he asked about my earlier case involving the church. Without naming names or going into the matter of the Child Nurture Center, I gave him the picture.
"So your experience is very limited," he said.
"With the church, right. Most of what I know, I have from news articles. I was reading one of them when you knocked." He nodded. I could see he wanted to say something and was trying to decide whether he should. Or more likely how. Finally he asked for my initial view of the case.
"Usually," I told him, "we go into a case with definite evidence of a crime, and a set of additional information that seems pertinent. And work from there. This time we don't have much, which is going to make it tough. And what will
make it tougher is that the church is— It's been described as impenetrable, and that fits my experience. Mine and others'. If the church is right, and Mr. Christman is holed up in some out-of-the-way place doing his research, they're not going to give me his address. So the best way to approach it is to look for evidence of kidnaping or murder."
Again Butzburger nodded. "There is evil on this planet, Mr. Seppanen, and the Church has many enemies. People, governments—forces that want to harm it. Destroy it if they can, legally or otherwise. Thus it has to be impenetrable. Impenetrable and formidable."
There was that word again: evil. "Right," I said. "And those enemies are another part of the problem. If he's not lying up somewhere, then it seems highly probable that someone's killed him."
Butzburger's face pinched a little.
"As you said," I went on, "the church has a lot of enemies. It was born with enemies, and it's created a lot more, with lawsuits, the breaking up of families . . . things like that. There are a lot of people who'd like to see Ray Christman dead. So the opening question becomes who had the resources and the opportunity.
"I presume that Mr. Christman went around well guarded. The buildings on the Campus have guards at the entrances. That I know. At least the Neophyte Building does. And that nine-foot chain-link fence around the parking lot, with the razor wire on top, is obviously HardSteel. Plus I noticed men on the roofs who aren't up there to enjoy the view. So he wasn't all that vulnerable."
I was thinking out loud, feeling my way through the situation. "The Institute of Noetic Technology might have the necessary resources. They certainly regard themselves as the church's enemy, and when they lost that lawsuit against the church, and their appeal, they probably figured they had no further legal recourse. If they still wanted revenge, they'd have to get it some other way.
"Then there's the COGS, the Church of God in Science. Or actually its various and apparently numerous extremist groups. There's got to be some well-heeled people among them. They'd be nearly impossible to investigate, because the extremist groups don't have formal memberships. Mostly they seem to be ad hoc groups, and they're all hostile to anyone who asks questions. We can assume that various local police agencies throughout the country have moles in them, along with the FBI, but they certainly aren't going to give us any information about Christman, assuming there is any and they have it."
Butzburger was taking it pretty well. He looked serious but not upset. "My guess," I went on, "is that neither of those groups has the expertise necessary to get to Mr. Christman and kidnap him. But presumably they have the money necessary to contract the job out to some underworld outfit that does have that expertise. And it would make sense for them to contract with an L.A. mob—people who know the city. So one thing I'll do is talk to information sources in the underworld, and see what they may have heard.
"Then there are the families of converts who've broken their family ties and joined the church. Especially those who've joined church staffs. How many centers are there, worldwide? Seventy-eight?"
"Something like that."
"So the number of hostile family members has got to be large," I went on. "Again though, the only way they could get at Christman would seem to be through the underworld.
"But why would any of these want Christman to disappear quietly? It would be a lot easier to have him ambushed, or his office bombed—something like that."
I paused, examining the man sitting across from me, his face, his eyes. "I'll look into all those possibilities as best I can. But I'll tell you, Mr. Butzburger, if Mr. Christman has been kidnaped or quietly killed, it's likeliest to have been by some faction within the church. They had access to him. They knew his habits, his patterns of movement, his vulnerabilities. They could approach him without arousing his suspicion.
"You talked about a power struggle in the hierarchy. I can imagine a faction that is less interested in saving the world than in getting rich and powerful." Actually I could imagine both factions like that. "And the Church of the New Gnosis has a large income, even if the published estimates are high by a factor of ten. Maybe one of those factions feels that they could really take over if Christman was out of the way."
Butzburger didn't argue—he didn't even look as if he'd like to—and that was the end of our business conversation. All that was left was dessert. I don't think he enjoyed his cheesecake.
4
Tailed?
Back at the office, I phoned a few information sources. Most of them, though, I'd have to go out and contact personally. Almost all were loners on the fringe of the underworld, who lived with their ears open.
The best of them wasn't part of the fringe. She was on the inside—a Korean-American woman, "Miss Melanie." She was one I'd have to talk to in person. Melanie runs a large stable of expensive call girls—Asian, Eurasian, Anglo, Afro-American, and Chicanas. She even had her own clinical service. She also had the protection of the Korean mafia, probably paying for it with the services of her girls and with information the girls picked up. Information about rip-off possibilities, underworld activities—things like that. Occasionally she helped us out, for a healthy fee, with information about people or groups in competition with the Koreans.
One thing she never did though, she told me once. "Melanie," she said, referring to herself in the third person, "never does blackmail." It would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
When I'd finished my phone calls to information sources, I called up the directory to see if Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance still existed. It did. The same guy answered, and he still did business on the same basis at the same location. I told him I'd be there that afternoon, and that he probably wouldn't recognize me.
Then I had Larry, in our technical section, make me up—nothing ambitious, but misleading—and fit me out with some clothes. He darkened my complexion and my hair, and gave me brown eyes and a mustache. And a driver's license with a Turkish name. No one was going to talk Turkish to me, that was almost certain, and if I wanted to, I could swear in Finnish and pretend it was Turkish.
The makeup job didn't take long. Larry is fast. Afterward I called Tuuli, my wife, and told her I'd be home late. Probably very late. Then I went to Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, and said I wanted to know about another missing person. He agreed to give my name and number to two recent exiles, plus Fred Hamilton again; Hamilton wasn't at his old number anymore. I also told him what I'd told Tuuli—that I'd be home late. They could leave a message on my phone.
The rest of the day I spent talking with assorted bartenders, pimps, hustlers, bail bondsmen, pawn brokers, and Miss Melanie. I wasn't optimistic, but I needed to cover all the bases. I stopped at Melanie's last. She gave me tea, and we agreed on charges.
Then I drove back to the office to get my personal car. It was full night by then, though with the sky-glow from street lights, headlights, windows, and signs, night in L.A. isn't very dark. Not like Hemlock Harbor, Michigan. As I drove my car out of the company lot, I noticed another, a late-model sea blue Hyundai, stopped across the street in the entrance of the Beverly Drugstore parking lot. The driver, it seemed to me afterward, had been black, with a close beard. I paused and waved for him to pull out first; he'd been there ahead of me. But he didn't move, so I pulled out. When I turned east on Beverly, so did he, which didn't have to mean a thing; I barely noticed. But when I turned north on Fairfax and he turned too, I wondered, so I doubled back west on Rosewood; if he'd done the same, I'd have been pretty sure. But he didn't. He had the chance but continued north on Fairfax.
He could have been innocent, or he could have recognized that I was testing him. Whatever. He was gone.
5
HAMILTON
Two calls were recorded on my phone when I got home, with numbers to call the next day, a Saturday. They were from two of the ex-Gnosties, but not Hamilton. I didn't really know why I wanted to talk with Hamilton anyway. He'd been out for three years. I guess because I'd liked his frankness and intelligence when I'd t
alked with him before.
Tuuli would bawl me out for working on weekends if I didn't really have to. So I waited till she went out for groceries, then called them back. The first exile had worked on the church's in-house magazine, and simply deserted. He was totally soured on the church, but totally devoted to Christman. When I told him the missing person I was interested in was Christman, he told me he was sure that Christman was too psychic to be abducted or physically harmed! His view was that the great guru had withdrawn from the church "to punish it for its degeneracy and aberrations."
He hadn't heard anything about a power struggle, though he was aware of the rash of expulsions and cancellations. I got the impression he wasn't very bright.
The second exile was a "technical compliances enforcer," who got kicked out when he refused to coerce the San Diego church to suspend counselors for what upper management had decided were technical errors. I had no idea at all what he was talking about. My reading hadn't dealt with "technical" aspects.
He was aware of two factions, one led by Lon Thomas, president of the church, and the other by a Frank Evanson, who was "the director of technical practices." The guy was very cynical about both the church and Ray Christman, whom he considered had abandoned "his crusade" and was only interested in how rich he could get. Nothing I'd read, including Christman's book for beginners, had said anything about a crusade, either.
The guy believed that Christman was probably dead, most likely assassinated by an insider with a grudge. He didn't think that either faction would have Christman killed, even if they wanted to, because "with Christman dead, the great moneymaking machine will grind to a halt." The claim that Christman had gone off to do research, he said, was a fraud, to hide his death. "But it won't work forever. When the church doesn't come through with procedures leading to Freed Being, people will get smart and see through it, and leave."