Alchemy’s call interrupted Moses and Jay’s leisurely breakfast at the Saturday morning Venice farmers’ market. He was calling from the Santa Monica Airport before jetting to Arizona for an impromptu meeting with Vulter. He anticipated Moses’s question. “I am not partnering with her.” He needed Moses to meet their lawyer Kim Dooley later that day at his apartment, not the offices or Jay’s apartment. “Things are happening fast and more is going to happen. See you tomorrow. And don’t be late. Don’t be late.”
While waiting for Dooley, Moses paced in his small living room. He stopped by the mantelpiece that held Hannah’s menorah and his father’s medal, constant reminders of his reconfigured identity. He still called himself a secular Jew, but the changes in his identity manifested themselves in the most unexpected ways — when he heard the subtle anti-Semitic slurs that popped up too often, he rebutted them with the authority of the outsider instead of the defensive stance of the “victim.” He’d always wished he could tell his mom about the meeting with Teumer. She’d be proud. How lucky he felt that she raised him. At least he didn’t have to explain the wild complexities of Persephone’s birth to Hannah and why she would be, but couldn’t be, a grandmother. Most of all, he hoped he had finally lived up to Hannah’s expectations that he act like a mensch.
Dooley was all business and no questions allowed. The documents she presented named Moses chair of the Nightingale Foundation board — replacing Alchemy — and assigned him, along with Alchemy, as cosignatory of its financial disbursements. He was also named cotrustee on Persephone’s and, astonishingly, Salome’s trusts. He was removed from all official positions with the Nightingale Party. Moses assumed the CAA investigation necessitated the suddenness of these changes.
Louise Urban Vulter, with her sunbaked freckled skin not covered by makeup, hair not in its typical bun but in a ’50s-style pageboy, and dressed “Arizona” in jeans, flannel shirt, and cowboy boots, greeted Alchemy as he deplaned from a private jet at the Scottsdale airport. She seemed a bit taken aback; he was looking less and less like a youthful and fearless Apache warrior and more like a ravage-featured, once proud Indian now confined to the Whiteriver reservation. Nobility and optimism did not guarantee success — in fact, more often the opposite occurred on the political battleground.
On the ride in her Range Rover to the Scottsdale Gun Club, they resumed their friendly barb-tossing rivalry. Vulter chided him because his love of shooting didn’t stamp out his desire to ban so many types of guns. He kidded her back, asking why any true hunter needed a semiautomatic weapon. The talk turned serious when they arrived at her private parking spot and stood face-to-face outside the car.
“What’s so important you had to fly to Arizona to take target practice for an hour?”
“You took the CAA assignment, right?”
“Can’t tell you anything about it.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. You received a report saying Miranda Wright and I had sex when she was only fourteen and she got pregnant and I paid oodles of cash to cover up the affair and her abortion.”
The corners of Vulter’s mouth twitched ever so slightly. She tilted almost imperceptibly back on her boot heels, forcing a glacial expression.
“Thank you.”
“Alchemy, for what? I can’t help you.”
“You can lie but you can’t hide …”
“… When you’re standing naked at my bedside …” Vulter laughed, blushing, as she sang an off-key version of the line from “Eight Is Just Enough,” on which Absurda and Alchemy shared the lead vocals.
“Louise, why’d the IRS and your committee stop looking into Godfrey Barker and his church?”
“Who says we were?”
“Fine, you weren’t. Who most wants to discredit me so I go away?”
She shrugged.
“C’mon, play along.”
“The desperate and strategically shrewd mainstream Democrats. I got the same scared types in my party.”
“Exactly. Barker gets big funding from Hollywood Dems. Louise, I’m going to help you. Next week you will receive some damning information on Mr. Barker and his associates. Use it wisely.”
“To what do I owe this honor?” She leaned forward, coyly provocative.
“I’d like you to quash the upcoming subpoena on my brother. And don’t tell me it’s not happening.”
“It is and I seriously doubt I can stop it. There are people on that committee who don’t trust me because of my relationship with you. Fact, if news of this meeting gets out — not good.”
“For either of us. I don’t understand why you need to subpoena Moses. Or Sidonna Cherry, for that matter.”
“Let me put it this way: You’ve stood naked by many a bedside. And yet, truths remain hidden. And mysteries still abound.”
BOOK FOUR
I spin so ceaselessly
Or did I lose my sense of gravity …
Some strange music draws me in …
81 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2018)
The Magic Mountain
The party began under a cloudless sky, another ideal seventy-six-degree SoCal January day, the kind that inspires envy in the rest of the world and lures millions, who too often disregard the unwritten warnings of man’s covenant with nature.
Valets took the guests’ cars, and an experimental solar-powered van shuttled everyone up the hill. Thirty tables with ten chairs each, and four outdoor TVs dotted the grounds: two tuned to the game, one playing Horse Feathers and the other North Dallas Forty. Twenty solar-powered heaters would warm and illuminate the area next to each table if, as the sun set, a slight chill entered the air. This spread qualified as modest in high-end L.A. circles, where $25,000 events were rated bowling alley worthy. The waiters circulated outside offering appetizers, and inside were two banquet tables filled with main courses. Everything was organic and locally grown or raised, except for Twinkies and pigs in a blanket, which were a concession to those with a Mindswallow-style palate. Apocalypse Now blared in the small screening room while the game played on a large-screen TV in the living room.
Jay and Moses, among those who were allowed to park up the hill in the driveway, arrived at kickoff. Moses’s transformation from professor to boss did not subdue his feelings of fraudulent outsiderness in any large gathering. He understood that the currencies of the cliques that formed this party were money, fame, and power. Beauty and intelligence were commodities, bought and sold like art or SpaghettiOs. He couldn’t help feeling more like a SpaghettiO in this menagerie of famous faces and heavy hitters, who, on the surface, appeared as an anachronistic mix of old and young, staid and hip, all brought together by the catalytic bond of Alchemy.
With balletic grace, Alchemy glided among the guests: Euge Baltzer, aging metal rocker of the band Samureye; Romy Milton, granddaughter of a major pet food mogul and sex tape “star”; Chipper Ronan, machine tool heir and aspiring screenwriter; riteplay.com founders and Nightingale Party supporters Frieberg and Loo, who donned football jerseys with DIGITAL DRUID printed across the back. Laluna — in a low-cut powder blue San Diego Chargers jersey, blue-and-white-striped leggings, orange high-top sneakers, black hair growing longer — locomoted aloofly about as the marginally engaged hostess of the festivities.
Moses and Jay chose a table at the outskirts occupied by some of the younger guests who worked with the party or foundation. Moses looked at the Insatiables crowd: Lux and his wife Sue, Andrew, Kim Dooley, and two of the Sheik brothers. He zeroed in on the group fawning over Crouse and Barker. He and Jay exchanged glances while listening to two of his Nightingale “kids”: “Crouse sure is pretty.” “Yeah, pretty stupid to be hooked up with that Swami Barker.”