We both said yes. He put on a red-laquered percolator with something written on the side in a foreign language, Icelandic I suppose.
"So," he said, looking me over, "v'at do you vant from me?"
I told him I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. That the Institute of Noetic Technology, or people inside it, were suspect, and I wanted to know more about it. A woman named Molly Cadigan had suggested I talk to him, had said he might be more up to date than she was. That I'd read a Times article on the institute, dated 1993, and a brief biography of Leif Haller which had information about the institute as it had been years ago. And that I'd talked with Winifred Sproule.
"Vell," he said, "I ain't much more up to date than that. But I'd be surprised if the institute vas up to getting Christman killed. If any individual Noetie vas, it vould be Haller himself."
"And he's dead," I said.
"Do you know that?"
That stopped me. "According to his biography," I answered, "he died of the Great Flu in December '99, and was buried in a mass grave near Eau Clair, Wisconsin." I looked at the circumstances that would have prevailed then. I didn't know how big Eau Claire had been, but big enough to be a well-known name throughout the region—forty or fifty thousand maybe. That mass grave would have been one of many for Eau Claire, each with maybe a hundred or even five hundred bodies. There'd have been no autopsies, no embalmings, little if anything more than an identification by whoever discovered the body or brought it in. Even my home town, Hemlock Harbor, had mass graves, and it only had some four thousand people before the Flu—twenty-eight hundred afterward. They bulldozed a trench, lined the bodies out in it, limed them heavily and covered them up.
I changed tack. "As a psychic, does it seem to you that Haller's alive?"
"I don't get anything vun vay or another on that."
"Do you get anything on who's responsible for Christman's disappearance?"
He stood silent for a minute, frowning, then grunted and shook his head. "Nothing on that either. How long has he been missing?"
I gave him a rundown on what Armand Butzburger had told me. Meanwhile the coffeepot had been perking, and when I'd finished, Sigurdsson got up and poured three mugs. I had mine with honey and cream, the cream out of a little oak-veneer fridge built into his oak bookcase. He didn't have anything to say till he'd served all three of us.
"So he has been missing probably since October. More than six months. Then I vould guess he is dead. But that's only a guess. And considering v'at the church is like, I vould guess that somevun or some group inside it killed him."
"I don't suppose it would do me much good to interview Lon Thomas?"
Again he grunted. "From v'at I've heard, he vouldn't give you an interview. And if he did, v'at makes you think he'd tell you the truth?"
"I consider myself pretty observant about things like that. I think I'd know if he was lying."
"Don't be too sure. I vas never in the church, but I have friends that vere, three or four of them that vere pretty high up. Thomas is sharp—maybe not intelliyent, but sharp—kvick, avare. And he came up through their PR division. The people in public relations there do lying drills till they can say anything to anyvun, straight-faced and vithout blinking."
My first reaction was, it sounded like a myth, the kind that can grow up about a mysterious organization or secret government agency. But even as I thought it, I realized it was possible, and might well be true of an outfit like the Gnosties. I nodded. "Who are these three or four people you mentioned? I'd like to talk with them."
"There vas three of them. Two died in the plagues. The other vun you already talked to: Vinny Sproule."
"Ah."
"So," he said. His eyes, I'd thought, were gray. Now I decided they were blue. They looked into me, steady and disconcerting. "There is something else you vant from me. V'at is it?"
"Dr. Sproule mentioned a couple named Vic and Tory Merlin."
His gaze never changed, he didn't nod, his eyebrows didn't arch. He simply said, "O-oh?"
I hadn't intended to say what I said next. It just sort of blopped out. "She told me that Christman's ideas came from them. That he simply adapted them for teaching and application."
"She is right about v'ere his ideas came from. His ideas about reality and people and how to help them. But Christman did more than adapt them. Overall he changed them. Not on purpose, I don't think. He didn't fully understand them. He changed importances, left important things out . . . Made a dog's breakfast out of them, if you vant to know. Except the easy stuff, the beginning stuff. He got that pretty good."
"Could you tell me how to get in touch with the Merlins? Give me their phone number?"
He pursed his lips. "Tell you v'at. I'll give them your number, and tell them v'at you're interested in. If they vant, they can get in touch vith you."
* * *
And that's as far as I got. Sigurdsson turned his attention to Tuuli, and they talked for a few minutes while I sat there like a lump. If he'd been forty years, or maybe even thirty years younger, I'd have been jealous. Tuuli gave him her card, and he talked about the Merlins, whom he called the most powerful psychics he knew of. Then he buzzed his wife, and she came in, a really good-looking lady in her sixties, I judged. Probably twenty years younger than her husband. She and Sigurdsson and Tuuli had a good time yakking for another half hour, but I had things on my mind, and didn't add much to the conversation.
I needed to talk with Lon Thomas. I'd been afraid of it, afraid of him, been holding the idea down, mostly refusing to look at it, telling myself he wouldn't say anything useful. After a few minutes we got up, shook hands and left. As we drove away, Tuuli was full of the evening, full of having had a conversation with Olaf Sigurdsson! And of how friendly and charming Laura Sigurdsson had been. She was so full of it all that at first she didn't seem to notice I was only half with her. When she did notice, she laid a hand on my arm.
"Thank you, Martti," she said softly in Finnish. "Thank you for taking me along."
I hadn't had much choice; Sigurdsson had almost ordered it. But she wasn't expressing thanks; she was expressing affection. Love. She didn't do that a lot. Of course, lots of times I wasn't very loveable; I was inconsiderate and unreasonable, and took too much for granted. We both did, as far as that went.
I'd turned onto Mulholland Drive by then, headed east. We came to a place—a public overlook—with a great view of the billion lights of the San Fernando Valley, and I pulled off the right of way into one of the diagonal parking slots there. Then we just sat holding hands and looking. We didn't even neck. I can't say personally what L.A. was like in the smog years. But with Arne Haugen's geogravitic power converters powering everything from cars to cities, from desalinization plants to transmountain water pipelines, L.A.'s got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Especially at night, from the Santa Monica Mountains.
We'd been there about three or four minutes when a Buick pulled up behind us, blocking us in. Both of us stiffened; I thought of the guy who'd tailed me. I had my 9mm Glock in the door pocket and my 7.65 Walther under one arm. Presumably Tuuli had the little .25-caliber Lady Colt I'd given her in her shoulder bag. There were at least four guys in the Buick. Three piled out with wrecking bars and hammers in their hands. Trashers. Two of them came to my door and one to Tuuli's, all of them grinning, probably high on something.
My window was open—Tuuli had run hers up—and one of them stuck his face in. "Hey! You!" he said. "No fucking in the car! Unless you're gonna pass it around!"
Now I knew which one was the ringleader. The others laughed at his wit until I pointed my Walther at him. He backed away quickly, both of them did, but not any quicker than I keyed the door open and stepped out.