The Puppet Master

emptied out her checking account at Pacific Grove—so while she was in Australia, she bought 'soul salvage' and 'spiritual enlightenment,' a couple of counseling levels. When she got back to L.A., she was broke.' He grinned ruefully. 'And a dedicated Gnostie, like her husband.'

'They kick her out too, did they?'

He chuckled. 'She was on the Board of Review that kicked me out! She'd decided her husband was an evil person who was trying to drag mankind the rest of the way into ruin by harming the church. Right after that she filed for divorce. I tried to get custody of our baby girl, but no luck. She already had a would-be stepfather lined up for her. Gloria is Gloria Hebner now.'

Angela DeSmet was not going to be thrilled. 'What's your daughter's name?' I asked him.

'Spirit,' he said. 'Nice, eh?'

'How do you raise a kid on ten dollars a week?'

He grunted, and smiled a small wry smile. 'You don't. In L.A. the staff lives in, and the church raises their kids. More or less. Unmarried staff members sleep in double- and triple-deck bunks in dorm rooms. Married staff couples get a small room to themselves in an old dorm wing, and share a coed community bathroom with about twenty others. Fun. Especially when the plumbing screws up, or someone uses newspaper for toilet paper, and a commode floods. That happens quite a bit, because you have to provide your own toilet paper, and sometimes you're broke. Lots of weeks we didn't get that ten. Five maybe, or nothing.

'The children live in another building, on a floor called the Child Nurture Center. You get to see them during 'parents' hour'—that's actually for half an hour after supper—unless your supervisor decides there's something more important you should be doing.'

He was rambling. I let him.

'The Child Nurture Center is really bad. Complaining about it got me in trouble more than once. It's dirty, for one thing. A goddamn roach nest. And most of the time the kids have head lice. Twice a year, before the semiannual inspection by the County, the church assigns a bunch of parents to clean the place thoroughly and delouse the kids. The rest of the time, the church gives it bottom priority, because time and money spent on it don't produce income.'

'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.