by John Dalmas
* * *
The chills still hadn't gone away entirely as I walked to my car.
7
A TAIL VERIFIED
As I drove away, all I could think of was how crazy people could get in the grip of religious fanaticism. By the time I got back to my office, I'd gotten things at least partway into perspective again, but there were some things I wanted to ask Hamilton about.
As soon as I got back, I keyed Hamilton's office number. He was busy; his secretary said he'd call back at lunch time. So I keyed the number Molly Cadigan had given me for Doctor Winifred Landau Sproule. Sproule had turned off the vidcam on her phone, leaving me to guess what she looked like. She sounded too young to be a veteran of the Noeties in their prime. We only talked for a minute or so, but I got a mental image of someone slim and blond and beautiful. She gave me an appointment for 9 a.m. the next morning. Then, so I wouldn't be talking to her cold, I keyed the library and called up an article on the life of Leif Haller, serialized by the L.A. Times in 1990, updated and published as a small book twelve years later. The writer had done her homework, traced Haller's roots and talked to scores of people who'd known him before he got famous.
It was one of the more interesting lives I've read about.
* *
Leif Haller
The Early Years
Oscar Leif Haller, founder of the Institute for Noetic Technology, was born on Valentine's Day, 1930, on a farm near Opdal, Wisconsin, to Britta Augustsdatter Haller and Johan Ola Haller, Norwegian immigrants. Among his peers, the child would insist on being called "Leif"; he despised the name Oscar, and rarely even used the initial.
Almost from the beginning, Leif Haller was an energetic dynamo, but not hyperactive. His schoolmates would remember him as always in control of himself, and generally of the situation. For even as a child, a child smaller than most, he had charisma. In the one-room country grade school he attended, he was a leader, full of ideas, and able to dominate in his boyhood disputes.
He matured early. He was shorter than average, of medium frame, and sinewy muscular. By age fifteen, despite his youth, he was locally renowned for the amount of heavy work he could do in an hour or a day. By his sixteenth birthday, Haller was in trouble with three different families regarding their daughters. This seems to have been less a matter of adolescent horniness than of a desire, a need, to dominate.
But he was already careful in matters that could seriously complicate his life. He impregnated none of the girls he entertained in the back of his father's 1938 Chevrolet sedan; he had an older youth buy condoms for him.
He excelled in class from the beginning, through his high intelligence, his energy, and his determination to be superior. He read voraciously. At age thirteen, in the tenth grade, he read his new history textbook on the evening of his first day, and claimed never to have looked inside it again. No one doubted him. His memory was remarkably responsive. He got an A in the course, as he did in every other course he took. Math he did with only quick and partial homework, enough to get the feel of procedures, and earned a perfect score on almost every quiz and test.
In high school he did not participate in sports, although he'd been outstanding in playground sports in grade school. He was small, of course, and there were a lot of chores to do on the farm. And as he told at least two friends, he'd outgrown athletics. Instead he read his way through the village library. Beginning when he started high school at age twelve, he'd go home from school at four o'clock, do chores, including milking several cows by hand, eat supper, and often bicycle five miles of gravel road back to Opdal, to the library. Sometimes he was the only person there besides the librarian. He'd return the books he'd borrowed at his last visit, usually six or eight of them, browse the shelves for an hour, and start home with another load. In winter, when the gravel road was snowy, he'd jog or ski in, if he couldn't borrow his father's car.
Years later he'd be remembered as the first person in Opdal school to use a book bag—an old skier's knapsack.
Among much else, he read H.G. Wells' Outline of History; the books and essays of Elbert Hubbard; and of all things for a boy in an ethnic farm community, the Harvard Classics. Norwegian was the language at home, and he read Ibsen in the original Dano-Norwegian. He read Nietzsche and Kant, Freud and Jung, Kierkegaard and Swedenborg, Ramakrishhna and Yogananda. He read Plato and Alfred Korzybski. Intellectually further afield, he even read Heinrich Harrer and Alexandra David-Neel on Tibet. The librarian in Opdal was delighted to have a young reader with such an avid desire to learn, and through interlibrary loans, ordered whatever he requested that her shelves did not have.
Perhaps most impressive of all, for someone so young, he became the devotee of none of the great men whose books he read. He read critically, absorbing and analyzing, gradually evolving his own basic cosmology, his own metaphysics. Listening to ex-schoolmates reminiscing on his boyhood, one might wonder if he hadn't been born with his philosophy and metaphysics. The closest thing he had to a real confidant was Morten Jacobsen, an older was three times promoted. But business success was not what he was looking for. The experience was useful, as was the modest investment portfolio he acquired, but after two and a half years he quit, having arranged employment as a staff assistant to Congressman Harvey Lingdal of Wisconsin.
The congressman might not have hired the energetic youngster if he'd known of Haller's association with witchcraft on Long Island, in a coven that ritually used drugs and hypnosis in an era when drug use was rare. Haller and his Long Island friends saw witchcraft as a way, or hopefully the way, to expand their individual powers. Hypnosis and drugs were tools in their witchcraft.
Leif Haller had no more intention of climbing to power via a political ladder than he'd had in doing it via the stock market. Later he'd tell friends he took the job for the knowledge, experience, and insights it could provide. He was already fixated on becoming the world's most powerful man by other means: He intended to develop psychic powers to go with his remarkable intelligence.
By the time he moved to Washington, he was already disenchanted with witchcraft. It's not clear how much he'd ever really expected of it. After his Long Island experience, he still considered that there was validity in some of its principles, but he'd concluded that the subject was based too largely on erroneous theories, and too cluttered with superstitions, to be useful as it stood.
Besides, it is clear that he planned to build his own system. He would write that its two branches, theory and practice, would grow simultaneously and in parallel, practices being based on theory, with further theory growing out of experience with practices.
The Making of a Guru
Haller soon found his job as a congressional staff assistant too demanding on his time; sixty- and eighty-hour weeks left far too little time for study and experimentation. So after five months he left the capital and went to Los Angeles, there to try his hand at applying the procedures he'd concocted.
The first thing he did was grow a beard—a rarity at the time. It's been suggested he grew it to camouflage his youth, but more likely it was to project a specific image. People who'd known him as early as his university days say he looked more mature than his years. While he grew his beard, he worked as a warehouseman for an auto parts chain. Finally, suitably bearded, he rented a tiny office on Melrose Avenue, and opened for business as a mystic counselor, under the name Swami Suvarnananda; suvarnananda in Sanskrit meaning Bliss in Gold. (Haller's humor could be sly or broad; in this case it was both.) For a time he made a sparse living at best, perhaps converting investments to cash when necessary. Some of his clients were deeply troubled; some had little money, but needed repeated counseling sessions.
He regarded these as necessary learning projects, and tried to see them through to successful conclusions, continuing to work with people who could no longer pay. Later he would say that it was during his Swami period that he refined his cosmology and his theories (he called them "the laws") of the soul and mind, as well as his b
asic principles of counseling.
With experience and a modicum of success, he moved to a better office, shared a secretary with a chiropracter, billed himself as Dr. Karl Mogens, psychoanalyst, and affected a cultured Danish accent. The diplomas on his wall, he once said, were the best that money could buy. As the good doctor, he had numerous rather impressive successes, and through word of mouth developed a profitable practice. Within six months he'd moved to a still nicer office, with a secretary of his own.
In working out his early procedures, Haller borrowed heavily from the work of others. He was influenced by Freud's early work in regression, work done before Freud became fixated on sex as the key to the psyche. And by Jung's work. Though Haller rejected Jung's concept of archetypes, he adapted his use of the psychogalvanometer in compiling and evaluating, with the patient, lists of psychologically charged words as a wedge and lever in analysis. He was also strongly influenced by Alfred Korzybski and Edgar Cayce.
Some of these works he'd read in his teens, others in the UCLA library. Later he would mention reading case histories of idiot savants. There is no evidence that he borrowed any practices from witchcraft.
It seems clear that his tenure as a swami and bogus Danish analyst was the first project in a long-term plan. It also seems clear that the plan was to culminate in himself as superman, surrounded by an expanding corps of supermen who would be subordinate to himself. The phase after the swami/Mogens phase was the establishment of the Institute for . . .
There was a knock at my door. It was Carlos, with some questions about a case I'd handled earlier. As he was leaving, Hamilton called; it was his lunch break. "Is this a good time?" I asked him. "It may take twenty or thirty minutes."
"Go ahead," he said. "What you're doing is more interesting than eating at Hannery's. If necessary, I'll catch a sandwich and juice from the snack machine later."
I told him what Molly Cadigan had said about the leaders of the church believing in Ray Christman's theories on reality and the alternative futures of mankind—some kind of doom on the one hand and presumably a golden age on the other, with the church being the difference. That they were scared because Ray wasn't around to feed them new procedures and keep the thing going; that basically they were fanatics who might go off the deep end if they thought someone was going to show that Christman was dead.
"Does she have something there?" I finished. As I said it, I remembered what Hamilton had told me about a hole in his own life, a sort of pointlessness, since he'd left the church.
It took him a minute to respond. "She has a point. Three kinds of people get to the upper echelons of the church. One kind is cynical predators. Another is dedicated fanatics. I'm not sure which kind Lonnie Thomas is; some of each, maybe, incompatible as they seem. And the third kind is people who honestly believe but don't behave like fanatics, people who can get things done and who can get others to get things done, in spite of confusion and stupidity.
"As for their running scared . . . With due respect to Molly, I doubt it. Worried maybe, but not scared. They've been without Ray Christman for about half a year now, and I think they've probably gotten used to the situation. And I saw no evidence that Ray was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born unto a virgin. What he did, other people should be able to do, especially when they have his lead to follow. I suspect that before long they'll start coming out with new procedures they've invented themselves, and say that Ray sent them. And the faithful will cheer themselves hoarse, and start transfering credits to pay for them.
"Whatever; Molly's point is well taken. If I were you, Martti, I'd be careful not to let the church know what you're interested in."
We disconnected then, and I sat there sorting out who I'd told. Nobody in the church. The biggest danger seemed to be that Armand Butzburger might get a guilty conscience and unload it on his confessor or whatever they have.
* * *
At quitting time I got in my car and drove east down Beverly. I'd only gone half a block when I saw a guy behind the wheel of a parked DKW sport coupe. I'd have sworn it was the same guy I'd seen that morning across the street from the Neophyte Building, but wearing a white soft cap now—a cap like a lot of merchant seamen wear, with a small, snap-down bill and a button on the top. And it occurred to me that someone didn't need to drive the same car all the time. Suppose he'd been hired by the church. He could take a different car every time out. He'd parked it nose-on to a loading zone, where he could pull out quickly. And sure as hell, he did.
So I drove east all the way to LaBrea, catching sight of him pretty often, then south, and pulled into a parking lot at a Denny's. I went inside, and walked right through the kitchen and out the service entrance, with the chief cook yelling at me. Then I slipped around the side of the building and peered over the shrubbery. I could see the DKW in a bank lot across the street, where the driver could watch for me driving out.
I waited till the light at the intersection turned red, stopping the traffic flow, then I trotted out and across the street, hand inside my jacket on the butt of my Walther 7.65mm.
The DKW backed, U-turned, and burned rubber out another entrance. There was no question at all about it now; I'd had a tail. And he knew that I knew. I watched his disappearance with a big rock in my stomach.
8
Winifred Sproule
My wife is self-employed, a professional psychic with a reputation that lets her charge fairly big fees. Psychics have been big in L.A. since the plagues at the turn of the century, and the business is growing. Anyway, while Tuuli isn't awfully busy, she makes a good income. Generally she arranges things so she can sleep late—commonly till nine. By which time I've been at the office for an hour, which means I either fix my own breakfast or eat out. Most often I eat at Morey's Deli, down the block from the office. It's not that I don't like to prepare meals; I just don't like to eat by myself. Besides, there's less traffic earlier.
But on the day of my appointment with Winifred Sproule, I ate at home. I was trying to make up for all the fat, chocolate-frosted doughnuts I'd eaten at Molly Cadigan's the day before, so what it came down to was low-fat cottage cheese, Rye Krisps with nothing on them, and slices of raw turnip (try raw turnips; they're mildly sweet), all washed down with a big glass of Altadena Dairy's real churned buttermilk.
I can enjoy a meal like that without getting carried away. Probably because it's not sweet and not salty. Some foods send me into a feeding frenzy. Chocolate! God!
The only thing wrong with breakfast that day was, I had the TV on to the morning news. Which featured a trashing. Trashers had damn near destroyed a senior citizens' center in Burbank the night before. After disabling the alarm system, which had taken some know-how, they'd poisoned the shrubbery and lawn, slashed and hacked the furniture, knocked holes in the drywall, spray-painted obscenities . . . and waited till they were ready to leave to break the windows; the noise would bring the beat cops.
The police estimated the trashers must have carried out the whole thing in under ten minutes. As if they'd drilled it. Something like that always rouses a terrible urge to homicide in me. Which scares me, because I almost always carry a gun. I imagine myself shooting half a dozen of them, gut-shooting them, then going around kicking the wounded, busting ribs and stuff like that. Bad stuff. It makes me remember . . .
So I turned off the TV and did the drill my therapist gave me after mom and dad were killed, to settle me down. It usually only takes a minute or two. Then I went down to the parking level, got in my car and left.
The Hypernumbers Institute is in Bel Air, of all places, on a little goat-trail street called Chikaree Lane that snakes along the top of a ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains. I went the back way, via Mulholland Drive and Beverly Glen. I hadn't realized the neighborhood was a security neighborhood, but Dr. Sproule had let the gate guards know I was coming, so my Prudential ID got me through.
The institute sprawls along the upper slope, with a great view across Stone Canyon to the west. A rambling, two
-story building with cedar siding, it could easily pass for some holo star's western-style mansion. Tall Mexican pines shade it, while rhododendrons stand guard. The receptionist called and told Sproule I was there, then gave me directions to her office. Somehow I'd expected to see students trooping through the halls or standing around drinking coffee, chatting. Instead it was quiet. The few people I saw looked as if they had things to do.
Winifred Sproule's office was on the second floor. Most of her west wall consisted of sliding doors, one-way Klearglass that opened onto a balcony with view. They were open when I walked in, open to birdtalk and a warm April breeze. Sproule had gotten up when I entered. I'd visualized her pretty well—blond, slim but well-built, and all-round good looking. Also elegant, in spite of, or maybe because of, the short, slit, Singapore skirt. The kind of elegance you see in old 2-D movies with European leading ladies. Dietrich. Garbo. She could easily have passed for the proverbial thirty-nine, but I judged she'd be in her late forties. That seemed like a minimum, if she'd been a high-ranking Noetie while Leif Haller was still alive and publicly active.
"I'm Martti Seppanen," I said.
She gestured. "Have a seat, Mr. Seppanen." She sat down herself. Elegantly. There was no desk between us; it faced a side wall. She was only about five feet from me, close enough to make me edgy at first. The office wasn't that small, and I was strongly aware of her crossed legs, which were elegant too.
"You said you're investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. For whom, may I ask?"