"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."