The four last things sg-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "She was a channel," Dr. Wilburforce said. "She had an amazing receptivity. Alon spoke through her whenever he wanted. At the beginning, it was random. Later, when he began to understand that it was more, um, productive to do it when the members of the Church were gathered, he popped up mainly during the formal Revealings. Other than the fact that she channeled Alon, she was a perfectly normal little girl."

  "Is this on the level?" Eleanor asked.

  Wilburforce looked affronted. "Absolutely," he said. "I'm a doctor. Do you think I'd participate in anything that wasn't aboveboard?"

  We all let that pass.

  "Does Angel, the new Speaker, have a personal physician?" I asked.

  "A nonentity," Sister Zachary said. Her tone would have curdled cream.

  "Does this nonentity have a name?" I asked, knowing the answer.

  "Certainly," she said. "Richard Merryman."

  "You don't like him," I said.

  "That's neither here nor there," she said airily. "He's not Hubert Wilburforce."

  He certainly wasn't. On the whole, I thought that Wilburforce, a good old-fashioned fraud if ever I'd seen one, was less dangerous than Merryman. "What percentage of your Congregation," I asked, "is made up of people who've left the Church?"

  "Half," Sister Zachary said promptly. "The others are new seekers after truth."

  "Among the people who've come to you from the Church," I said, "was there one named Sally Oldfield?"

  "Yes," Dr. Wilburforce said.

  "No," Sister Zachary said.

  "We seem to have a difference of opinion," I observed.

  "The answer is no," Sister Zachary said. "We never knew her."

  "I was thinking of someone else," Dr. Wilburforce said apologetically. "Someone with a similar name. What was her name, dear?"

  "Sarah Elder," Sister Zachary said promptly.

  "And Sarah Elder is alive and well? I could talk to her if I wanted to?"

  "If you could find her," Sister Zachary said. "She's no longer with the Congregation."

  "No forwarding address?"

  "I think she moved to Denver."

  "Or maybe Boulder," I said.

  "Maybe," Sister Zachary said. "Whichever, she's not here."

  "What about Ambrose Harker?" This time their bewilderment rang true. "Or Ellis Fauntleroy?"

  "What a dreadful name," Wilburforce said. "His parents must not have wanted children."

  "He's never been here either," Sister Zachary said.

  ZERO, Eleanor wrote in her notebook. Then she drew little candles around it. Eleanor always doodled candles. I dithered over whether they were phallic symbols or symbols of hope. Eleanor maintained that phallic symbols were symbols of hope.

  "You said the Church had new leadership," I said. "Who are they? All the public sees are Angel Ellspeth and her mother." Wilburforce goggled helplessly at Sister Zachary. Sister Zachary shook her head tightly. Wilburforce began to search for a match.

  Eleanor rose to an inspiration. "We know there are lawyers," she said. "You told us the Church was litigious. There are lawyers, aren't there?"

  "Sweetheart," Sister Zachary said, "lawyers are the whole banana."

  Chapter 12

  The lawyer's name was Meredith Brooks. Like Ambrose Harker, or Ellis Fauntleroy, for that matter, he had two last names. Unlike Ambrose Harker, he was who he said he was.

  And then some.

  Brooks, Martin, Soames, and Pearce occupied every square foot of a cloud-catching floor in Century City. In addition to the Waspiest name I'd ever seen on a lawyer's shingle, Brooks, Martin, Soames, and Pearce had the most medieval furniture.

  "Good God," Eleanor said, shaking off the rain as the elevator doors whispered closed behind us, "where are the monks?"

  A long, polished refectory table stretched down the middle of the waiting room, ornamented solely by a large brass urn that could have held the ashes of every saint whose name ended with a vowel, but which now was host to a spray of oversize, slightly carnivorous-looking flowers that had undoubtedly been picked only hours earlier from the slopes of some Pacific volcano. A warlike stained-glass window, bejeweled with flapping banners and knights in combat, gleamed at us. Wooden pews, ripped untimely from an English cathedral, lined the walls. I flipped up one of the seats and found a hand-carved wooden gargoyle goggling at me on its underside.

  "Charming," Eleanor said. "And very popular in the Middle Ages. Let's hope it's not a metaphor: the beast beneath the brass and polish."

  I let the seat fall. The brutish, leering face with its protruding tongue had unnerved me. "Beasts and lawyers in the same place?" I said. "You must be kidding."

  A big brass-faced grandfather clock at the far end of the reception area began to chime ten.

  "There's nobody here," Eleanor said, sounding only slightly less nervous than I felt. "Why isn't there anyone here?"

  "Good morning," someone said behind us on the stroke of ten.

  The occupants of the towers of Century City are almost uniformly white, and I hadn't expected her to be black. She was also beautiful and she had the self-possession you see only in the truly virtuous and in deeply corrupt politicians. She was wrapped seamlessly in a form-fitting neon-blue dress made of something that had to be silk.

  "We're here to see Mr. Brooks," Eleanor said. She may have been apprehensive, but you'd never have guessed it.

  "You're the ten-o'clock," the black woman said. "Miss Chan from the Times and Mr. Swinburne. Are you related to the poet, Mr. Swinburne?"

  "He was my great-uncle," I said resignedly.

  The woman smiled. "Into whipping, wasn't he?" she asked. "I read somewhere that the only thing he preferred to a rhymed couplet was a bare bottom and a nice flexible whip."

  "It's not hereditary," I said. "I'll take a rhymed couplet any day."

  "Over a bare bottom?" the woman said.

  "I always recite a rhymed couplet over a bare bottom," I said grumpily. "Don't you, Miss Chan?"

  "No," Eleanor said. "I'm usually the bare bottom."

  "So was Swinburne," the black woman said. "Mr. Brooks is on the phone to New York at the moment. I'm Marcy, by the way. Would either of you like coffee?"

  We both declined.

  "It'll just be a moment," she said. "I'll let him know you're here." She turned to go. "By the way, Mr. Swinburne," she said, "what couplet do you usually recite?"

  " 'What light through yonder window breaks?' " I improvised. " 'It is the east; and Juliet is the sun.' "

  "That doesn't rhyme," she said accusingly.

  "Bare bottoms distract me," I said. "They make it hard to tell what rhymes."

  "I'll bet they make it hard, at any rate," she said with a sudden white grin. "I'll be back in a sec." Eleanor giggled.

  A wide black patent-leather belt hung low on Marcy's slender hips. Dangling from it was a thin black rectangle of metal about the size of a television remote-control unit. She pushed one of the buttons on it with a tapering vermilion-tipped finger, and a door slid open in front of her. She shimmered through it, as iridescent as a hummingbird, and the door closed behind her.

  "Pretty neat," Eleanor said, still giggling.

  "A glorified garage-door opener," I said. "And don't push this Swinburne shit too far."

  "Oh, Algy," she said. "You should be proud of your heritage."

  "Fine," I said. "Next person we see, you can be Edna St. Vincent Millay's granddaughter, and we'll see how you like it."

  The door at the end of the room opened again and the woman called Marcy came back in. "Mr. Brooks will see you now," she said. "If you'll just follow me?" We did.

  The main counsel of the Church of the Eternal Moment was as shiny as a potato bug; he shaved so close it looked like he'd had electrolysis. Sitting behind a dark, massive desk, he looked up at us through lashless slate-gray eyes under pale little eyebrows. A bit further down he featured a nose that brought Richard Nixon's to mind, with a little cleft in its tip, a characteristic a friend of mine used
to call a facial fanny. Below that were a fatty, pursed little mouth and three clean-shaven chins that suggested an escalator of fat running down to the knot in his bright red tie. He was the first balding man I'd ever seen who looked like his forehead was advancing rather than his hairline receding. He wore a dark, perfectly tailored suit with an almost imperceptible charcoal stripe. From the cuffs of the jacket protruded shiny little hands, the right ornamented by the discreet glow of a class ring. Unexpectedly, a fat gold-link bracelet was tucked sloppily into his left cuff, above a thirties-vintage gold Rolex on an alligator strap. Rain drizzled through the picture windows, wrapping the hills in gray. He didn't bother to get up when we entered.

  "Yes, yes," he said, in answer to nothing. "Come in and take a seat. Time's short, I'm afraid." We sat, and he made an expansive gesture in the general direction of the beautiful black woman. "Marcy," he said peremptorily, "no calls. Give us fifteen minutes." She closed the door behind us and he crossed his hands on the desk and regarded us. Head-on, he looked much younger than his sixty years; he had the smooth, unlined face of the truly selfish, the face of a man who had never wasted a moment's serious thought on another human being.

  "Ah, Miss Chan," he said. "I'm an admirer of your book."

  Eleanor assumed vanity and preened. "I'm surprised you've read it. A man as busy as you are."

  "Actually, I haven't," Brooks said pleasantly. "My people looked it up for me."

  "Then how do you know you admire it?" I asked. I already didn't like him.

  "I admire anything that gets America up off its ass to toughen up." He rubbed his chin lovingly with his left hand, the one with the gold bracelet tucked up its sleeve. "The America of our fathers, or make that our grandfathers, wasn't soft. If it had been, we wouldn't be here today. You must be Mr. Swinburne."

  "I suppose so," I said.

  "What an improbable name," he said. "It must have taken some getting used to."

  "We can get used to anything, given time, Meredith. How long did it take you to get used to the fact that people expected you to be a girl?"

  He wasn't about to get upset with a mere reporter. "Touche," he said with a studied chuckle. He was the first person I'd ever heard say it out loud. "When I was younger, people did expect me to be a girl. I suppose it's progress that now they expect me to be a woman. So," he added, getting down to business, "what is it?"

  "I think you know what it is," Eleanor said. "It's a newspaper article. Or, perhaps, a series of articles." She managed to make the alternative sound faintly threatening.

  "On the Church," he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  "Yes."

  "How did you get my name?"

  "It kept coming up," I said, "in the course of our investigation."

  "You are the Church's primary counsel, aren't you?" Eleanor asked.

  "That's no secret," Brooks said, with a reserve that suggested that he very much wished that it were. "But I'd like to know who's advertising it."

  "We can't disclose our sources," Eleanor said.

  "How nice for you." Brooks's tone was a trifle acid. "You pop up in my office at ten o'clock on a Monday morning, with barely two hours' notice, and you won't tell me what you already know or whom you've been talking to."

  "It's called privileged communication," Eleanor said. "Actually, I believe lawyers are its prime beneficiaries."

  "And shrinks," Brooks added, rubbing his chin again. "Although reporters don't really have the same protection that doctors and lawyers do, even considering the First Amendment."

  "Do you have a problem with speaking with us?" Eleanor said.

  "My dear," he said, baring a row of uneven teeth, "if I had a problem with speaking with you, you wouldn't be here. Most people wait weeks to see me, and you've waited barely a hundred and twenty minutes."

  "Then let me rephrase the question," I said. "Why are you afraid of us?"

  Brooks's smile got a little broader. "Don't flatter yourself. I understand the media, that's all. I know that a good story outweighs all ethical considerations, and I know that ripping the living flesh off a religion is generally considered to be a good story. It doesn't matter how many people are being helped by the religion or how many will be devastated by its destruction, the only point is that it sells papers. Jackals," he said mildly. "Most members of the press are jackals." He smiled disarmingly. "Present company excepted, of course."

  "Who runs the Church?" Eleanor said bluntly.

  "The Speaker, of course. And her mother, I suppose."

  "No," Eleanor said. "They may be responsible for doctrine, but that's not what I mean. Who controls the finances?"

  Brooks folded one hand placidly over the other. "I have no idea," he said.

  "Who negotiated the purchase of that hotel downtown?" Eleanor said, playing one of the cards Chantra had given us.

  "Hotel?" Brooks said, the picture of surprised innocence. "You know more about the Church's business than I do. I'm not a real-estate agent. Why ask me?"

  "We're talking about millions of dollars. They must have had legal help."

  "I'm sure they did," Brooks said prissily, "but it wasn't I. This is way outside my line."

  "And the television studio?"

  "Same answer. I don't do real estate. But even if I did, what's wrong with a religion purchasing property? What's wrong with a religion having a television studio? I hope you'll forgive my being presumptuous, but it seems to me that you've already drawn your conclusions and all you're looking for is confirmation. Well, I'll provide it. Yes, the Church makes money. You seem to feel that's wrong. Why shouldn't it? Do you think Americans are drawn to organizations that are financial failures? Would we help more, or fewer, people if we were to declare bankruptcy?

  "You're out of touch," he continued. "What Americans want from a religion today isn't sanctuary for their souls through eternity. It's success in life, this life, that people want now. The afterlife was a powerful image three hundred years ago because life on earth was, for most people, brutish, grueling, and short. Well, that's not true anymore. For people today, the majority of white people at any rate, life is acceptable-but it could be better. It could be more materially successful. The Church of the Eternal Moment works because it is successful. If it didn't work, if it were a financial failure, it wouldn't have any followers. The more real estate the Church owns, the more hours on cable it can buy, the more the people who want success for themselves will believe in it. The more they should believe in it. The Church doesn't hide that. On the contrary, it flaunts the fact. Every win for the Church is a win for the worshipers. If the Church can't take care of itself, how can it take care of the faithful?" He gave his chin a triumphant massage.

  "So it all comes down to bucks," I said.

  "Mr. Swinburne," he said, "if that really is your name, which I find difficult to believe, please don't pretend a naivete you don't really possess. What, in contemporary American society, doesn't come down to bucks? Money is the common denominator. Get rid of everything else, and what's left is a desire for material success. The Church of the Eternal Moment has never promised anything but success in this lifetime. We're not ashamed of it. We're proud that we have the key. If you printed this interview word for word tomorrow morning, we'd have five thousand new applicants by noon. And you know what? We'd satisfy them. They'd get what they came for." He stopped rubbing his chin and glanced at his watch.

  "Seven minutes," I said. "How many dollars? What's the Church's annual income?"

  "It supports itself. As a religion we don't have to give precise income figures to the IRS. I'm certainly not going to give them to the media." He rubbed his chin again. "Period."

  There was a moment of silence.

  "Money aside," Eleanor said, "you're saying that the Church provides no guidance on the eternal questions."

  "And what are those?" Brooks asked.

  "Life, death. Heaven, hell. Eternity. Anything that helps people relate their lives, whatever it is that they have to endure
, to something more, um, permanent, something that helps them put life and death into some kind of perspective, something that suggests that people do more than just eat and excrete and procreate and die."

  "Isn't that enough?" Brooks said. "Especially if you have a good time doing it?"

  "No," Eleanor said. "It's not. For Dale Carnegie, maybe. As a self-help manual for the shortsighted. But it's not a religion, at least not as I understand the term."

  He shrugged. "I don't really care how you understand the term."

  "In what regard is the Church a religion, other than its tax-exempt status?" I asked.

  Meredith Brooks tilted his head back daintily and laughed. It was a laugh Hubert Wilburforce could have learned from, a lilting, melodious, manicured little laugh, five light, tripping steps down the scale of mirth. I hadn't heard anything like it since La Boheme.

  "Now let's hear you cough," I said. "This should be in the minor."

  The laugh subsided into a complacent smirk. "Tax exemption for religions, as I'm sure you remember from school, is just a manifestation of the separation between church and state, which is absolute-to use the exact words of the California Supreme Court-'no matter how preposterous the belief.' It may relieve you, though, to know that we pay for our tax-exempt status. We have Internal Revenue camping on our doorstep eighteen hours a day. Even if we don't file returns."

  "Poor you," I said. "The Church is a business."

  "What's the L.A. Times!" Brooks said. "Amnesty International? Greenpeace? The League of Women Voters? The Times, like all newspapers, clings frantically to its First Amendment rights in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. And then they devote their hallowed pages to lingerie ads and half-baked exposes. Please. We're all adults here, even though Miss Chan's I.D. would probably be checked in any bar in town. The Church is completely candid about what it offers and what it delivers. You can pretend any kind of piety you like for your readers, but in this room it doesn't wash. If you'll excuse a lapse into the vernacular, give me a break." He shifted around in his chair and pressed something under the desk.

  "You're not a religion," I said. "What are your annual fees from the Church?"