Lloyd stood up, then helped Nagler to his feet and pointed him toward the sofa. When Nagler was seated, he studied his face. He looked like a man about to enter the gas chamber who didn't know whether or not he wanted to die. Knowing that the bliss/death part of the worshipper had the edge and possessed the potential to produce lucid answers, Lloyd quashed his impulse to bludgeon Nagler into grief/life. Sighing, he sat down beside the ravished young man and stabbed in the dark. "Havilland isn't really dead, Bill."
"I know that," Nagler said. "He was here this morning with-" He stopped and flashed a robot smile. "He was here this morning."
Lloyd said, "Finish the thought, Bill."
"I did. Doctor John was here this morning. End of thought."
"No. Beginning of thought. But let's change the subject. You don't really think I'm a policeman, do you?"
Nagler shook his head. "No. Doctor John told me that there was a three percent leak factor in our program. I know exactly what the leak was-it came to me while I was chanting. You're an Internal Revenue agent. I paid Doctor John's phone bills while he went skiing in Idaho last December. You checked the records out, because you're with big brother. You also cross-checked my bank records and the Doctor's, and saw that I sent him a big check last year. He probably forgot to report it on his tax return. You want a bribe to keep silent. Very well, name your amount and I'll write a check." Nagler laughed. "How silly of me. That would leave a record. No, name your amount and I'll pay you off in cash."
Lloyd gasped at Nagler's recuperative powers. Five minutes earlier, he had been a groveling mass. Now he held the condescending authority of a plantation owner. A "horror movie" and the wrecked equipment in the back room were the dividing points. Thinking, Break him, he said, "Didn't it surprise you that my partner knew enough to sing you that song?"
"No. A song is a song."
"And a movie is a movie," Lloyd said, reaching into his pocket. "Bill, it's time I came clean. Doctor John sent me to test your loyalty." He held out the mug-shot strip of Thomas Goff. "I'm the replacement for the old recruiter. You remember this fellow, don't you? There's a guy on Doctor John's program who looks just like him. I know all about the meetings at the house in Malibu and how you bought the house for the Doctor and how you pay the phone bill. I know about the pay phone contacts and how you don't fraternize outside the meetings. I know because I'm one of you, Bill."
First grief, then bliss, now bewilderment. Lloyd had kept his eyes averted from Nagler, letting him feast on Thomas Goff's image instead of his own. When he finally reestablished eye contact he saw that the man had fingered the mug-shot strip to pieces and that his spiel had turned him into clay. Feeling like a bullfighter going in for the kill, Lloyd said, "I also lied when I said that Doctor John said that your movies were shit. He really loves your movie work. In fact, just today he told me that he wants you to both star in and direct the script he's working on. He tol-"
Lloyd stopped when Nagler's grief took him over. "Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum."
Lloyd thought of Linda and got up and walked toward the den and the telephone. He had his hand on the receiver when a tap on his shoulder forced him to jump back, turn around, and ball his fists.
It was Bergen, looking eerily sober. "I couldn't find any I.R.S. papers," he said, "but I did find our pal's diary under his bed. Renaissance weird, Hopkins. Fucking gothic."
Lloyd took the morocco bound book from Bergen's hands and sat down on the desk. Opening it, he saw that the first entry was dated 11/13/83, and that it and all the subsequent entries were written in an exquisitely flourished longhand. While Bergen stood over him, he read through accounts of Havilland's "programming," picking up a cryptically designated cast along the way. There was the "Lieutenant," who had to be Thomas Goff; the "Fox," the "Bull dagger," the "Bookworm," the "Professor," the "Muscleman," and "Billy Boy," who had to be Nagler himself.
The entries themselves detailed how Havilland ordered his charges to fast for thirty-six hours, then stand nude in front of full-length mirrors and chant their "fear mantras" into tape recorders, until "subliminal dream consciousness" took over and led them to babble "transcendental fantasies" that he would later sift through for "key details" to translate into "reality fodder." How he paired them off sexually at the "Beach Womb," interrupting the couplings to take vital signs and "stress readings"; how he forced them to kill dogs and cats as "insurance against moral flaccidity"; how the "Lieutenant" interrupted their REM sleep with late night phone calls and brutal interrogations into their dreams.
Alternately using the first person "I" and the third person "Billy Boy," Nagler described how he and Doctor John's other counselees were pimped out to wealthy people who advertised for "fantasy therapists" in privately published and circulated sex tabloids, the weekend "lovemaking seminars" often netting Havilland several thousand dollars, and how the "beach womb groupings" were taped and transcribed by the "Lieutenant," who sometimes served as the "Chef "-concocting mixtures of pharmaceutical cocaine and other prescription drugs that the Doctor would administer to his counselees under "test-flight conditions."
Lloyd leafed full-speed through the diary, looking for incriminating facts: names, addresses and dates. With Marty Bergen hovering beside him and Nagler's muffled chanting coming in from the living room, he felt like the sole outpost of sanity in a lunatic landscape, the feeling underlined by the fact that the diary contained no facts-only narrated disclosures peopled with coded characters.
Until an entry dated the day before jumped out at him:
Helped set up movie equipment at the Muscleman's house in the Hollywood Hills. Doctor John supervised. I showed him how to operate the camera. I hope Muscleman won't break anything. He scares me-and he looks more and more like the Lieutenant these days.
The entry was followed by a blank page, followed by the diary's concluding entry, dated that morning. Lloyd felt an icepick at his spine as he read,
It's not real. They faked it. You can fake anything with new camera technology. It's a fake. It's not real.
Lloyd shoved Bergen aside and walked back to the movie room and searched among the upended equipment for film scraps, finding three strips of celluloid wedged underneath the editing machine. Running them through the machine's feeder-viewfinder, he saw four close-ups of a woman's white nyloned legs, a long shot of a mattress on a carpeted floor and a blurred extreme close-up of a broad-chested man with what looked like an L.A.P.D. badge pinned to his shirt.
The icepick jabbed his heart. Lloyd thought of the white-stockinged nurse that Richard Oldfield had brought to his house twenty-four hours before. The knife twisted, dug and tore, accompanied by a deafening burst of patria infinitums from the living room.
Lloyd walked toward the sound, finding Nagler still in his mantra pose and Bergen standing beside the fireplace, pouring bottles of liquor over the acrylic "firewood" on the grate. "Long-term interrogation, Sarge," he said. "It won't do to get tempted. What's next?" His ghoul grin had become a feisty smirk, and for one split-second Lloyd found a beacon of sanity.
"I'm leaving, you're staying here," he said. "I have to check on someone. Then, if she got my evidence, I have to take our friend's guru out. You stay here and watchdog him. Hang by the phone. If I need you, I'll ring once, then call back immediately."
"I want in on the bust," Bergen said.
Lloyd shook his head. "No. Just having you here could cause me lots of grief, and I'm not risking my job or you any further." He watched Bergen's smirk go hangdog. "What are you going to do when all this is over?"