"Why do the parents put up with it?"
He grimaced. "They believe the church is out to save the world from an evil conspiracy. Sacrifices are necessary."
There was that word: evil. I told him the thought that had come to me in the Saints' Deli. He grinned lopsidedly. "There's individual evil in the church, sure, but the major problem isn't evil, it's ignorance and incompetence taken to a whole new level by incredible arrogance."
He went on to tell me more about the Child Nurture Center—a gross story of filth, mismanagement, and neglect. That spring, the ages one-to-six section was down to just two nannies; the rest had run away, deserted. Just two nannies, each working alone on a twelve-hour shift, taking care of rambunctious, undisciplined little children plus some babies in diapers; about thirty in all. After several days, one of the two remaining nannies disappeared—grabbed her own kid and took off.
"Somehow," he told me, "the one nanny who was left held on for more than thirty hours alone—no sleep, no meal breaks—until one of the Central Chancery execs showed up, an arrogant twenty-year-old little bitch named Janie Blitz. Some parent had come to get her kid for parents' hour, and complained, so Janie came storming over. Gloria and I had just come back with Spirit, and we saw the whole thing. Instead of getting help for Trudy, Janie started raising hell with her, actually screaming at her, because the place was such a mess. 'Look at that!' she yelled, and pointed. 'You're so fucking lazy, you can't even put the lid back on the fucking diaper pail!'
"That's when Trudy broke. She was a big strapping girl, and had a juice pitcher in her hand. First she threw the juice in Janie's face, and before Janie could stop sputtering, bonged her on the head with the empty stainless-steel pitcher. Then she grabbed her by the hair and threw her down. After thirty hours without rest, she must have been running on fumes, but right then she had the strength of a Kodiak bear, and when Janie hit the deck, Trudy started kicking her.
"Gloria was shrieking obscenities at Trudy by then, and trying to help Janie, which tells you something about what Gloria had become. But I held her back. When Trudy got tired of kicking, she took a diaper pail, half full of dirty diapers soaking in detergent, and emptied the whole mess on Janie, then jammed the pail on her head.
"That's when I got hysterical. I laughed myself nearly sick, then let go of Gloria and left the building. I should have walked right on off the Campus, but—" He paused, shook his head. "I was too brainwashed. I hate to use the term, it's been politicized for so long, and the meaning's so vague and stretched out of shape. But it's the best term we've got.
"Within the hour, Janie and Gloria had reported me to the Morals Police, for not rescuing Janie or letting Gloria try. And for laughing, the ultimate insult. The next day they held a Board of Review, and offered me a chance for restitution and correction: I could volunteer to serve on the SRC—that's the Spiritual Reclamation Crew, which I won't try to describe—and when I got out I'd be assigned as a nanny. Or I could be expelled—kicked out. I told them to kiss my ass."
He was shaking his head, remembering. "That sounds as if I didn't give a damn, as if I was pretty independent. And at the moment I thought I was. Then the reaction set in, and I left in shock, in grief. I'd been kicked out, lost my marriage, maybe my kid . . . And my eternal salvation. I still believed!" He looked at me via his phone screen, and shook his head with a small rueful grin.
We talked for two or three minutes more, then he gave me his name and his Denver address and phone number, and Gloria's address, and we disconnected. I had the phone print out the conversation, and gave it to Carlos the next day, along with my dictated write-up summarizing the case. In my summary, I left out the details of the Child Nurture Center, and Carlos said I did the right thing on that: We weren't hired to describe the conditions that Angela DeSmet's granddaughter lived in, and besides, Hamilton could have been exaggerating, although I didn't think so. As wild as the story was, something about the man made me believe him. Then Carlos faxed the report to Angela DeSmet, along with the paperwork, and transferred to her what she had coming back on her deposit.
And that, I thought, was the end of that. The Church of the New Gnosis might not be evil—after all, it had let Hamilton simply walk away—but it was ugly and unpleasant, and I was glad to be done with it.
I never imagined how much criminality I'd find connected with it, though I've had to rethink the word evil since then.
3
BUTZBURGER
It was last April, the thirteenth, that we got the real case, the case of Christman's disappearance. When a guy named Armand Butzburger came in about a contract.
He'd talked to Joe on the phone the day before, and Joe and Carlos had discussed it and decided they wanted me to do the job. I'd been raised from investigative assistant to junior investigator after I'd located Gloria DeSmet for her mother, and to full investigator after I solved the case of Arthur Ashkenazi, the twice-killed astronomer. I'd done some pretty good work in between, too, but when I picked that one apart, they decided I was a real sherlock.
So when Butzburger arrived at Joe's office for his interview, Joe called Carlos and me to come down, and introduced us.
Butzburger's a wealthy "New Gnu"—people pronounce it "New Guh-new"—a polite name for a Gnostie, which is pronounced without the G. And what he told us was that Ray Christman, the Gnostie guru, hadn't been seen in public since last October or maybe September. Within his church, Ray Christman had been a highly visible man, but now and then, for whatever reason, he'd disappear from the Campus for a few weeks or even a month or more, so for a while, people didn't think anything about it.
Then, in December, the church held its annual big Christmas event at the New Palladium in Hollywood. A really great-looking woman named Marcy Mannheim conducted the opening ceremony. Which was something Christman traditionally did. The proceedings were always taped, and the tapes sold for twenty bucks each. Every New Gnu was expected to buy one. Butzburger had brought his with him, and played it for us on Joe's wall screen.
What Mannheim said to the crowd was, "In October, Ray went to stay at the Ranch, to do concentrated research on Freed Being. And after a while"—she paused there to tighten their attention—"after a while, things began to break for him." She paused again, and the place exploded with applause and cheering. She let them clap and shout for maybe a minute, then with a motion, cut them off. Like she'd pulled their plug. "Finally," she went on, "early in December, Ray left the Ranch for a location where he could continue his work in virtually complete solitude, in an environment totally uncontaminated with activities of any kind, except for such basic matters as the preparation of meals. He has only one person with him to see to his needs. He plans to stay where he is until he's worked out the complete road, the full procedures, and the state of Freed Being is ready to deliver to the public!"
She stopped again, and for a long few seconds the place was quiet as a mortuary, as if the crowd was stunned. Then once more it exploded with wild cheering. After a few seconds of that, Butzburger turned off the tape.
"That's all of it that's relevant to my problem," he said, and looked around at us with steady blue eyes. Somehow they reminded me of the red-brown eyes of the guy at the withdrawal assistance office. "I could accept what Marcy told us," he went on. "In fact I did accept it, without hesitation. But since then? . . . Since then there's been evidence and rumor of a power struggle within the Church's top executive strata. Replete with expulsions of executives, then reinstatements and amnesties, then more expulsions. Which certainly supports the power-struggle rumors."