Smoke

about The New Day.”

Lydia leaned forward. “Did you join?”

“She took me up to Riverdale and I met some of the members at this old house off of Broadway behind the train yards.”

Lydia nodded. “We’ve been there. Mariah or Marilyn-her real name was Michele LaForge-had that address on her driver’s license. We received information that a black SUV was seen waiting outside the bank for Lily as she closed all of her accounts. That vehicle was registered to Michele LaForge.”

He nodded. “I see,” he said. He looked at some space on the wall behind Lydia. Maybe imagining Lily at the bank, with Michele waiting outside.

“So what happened at the house?” asked Jeffrey.

“I’ll tell you what. It’s a powerful message. They make a lot of sense. They tell you that everything you’ve been taught will make you happy is exactly the opposite of true. Possessions, the craving for more possessions, attachments to unhealthy relationships, media-generated low self-esteem, chronic busyness are elements of the deep sense of despair so many people feel. Most people are completely divorced from themselves. I really related to it, considering how I was feeling when I left Monica. And how none of the things I’d done to make myself feel better had helped.”

Lydia nodded. The message was powerful, because it was so deeply true. But The New Day was only using that truth as a hook for desperate people… not to help them, to own them.

“After meeting with her friends a couple of times, Trevor Rhames sent for me. We talked for hours. I told him things about myself, about my life, that I had never told anyone else.”

“Did you drink the tea they gave you?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Yes, I did.”

“We had it analyzed,” said Jeffrey. “It contains a very mild tranquilizer. Nothing that would knock you out and nothing that you would notice more than, say, if you’d taken a cold medicine. But it makes you very relaxed, very receptive to suggestion. A psychiatrist might prescribe it before a session of hypnosis.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. Because, you know, they never force you to stay. You can always leave when you want to, at first. But the more often you go back, the more you talk to Rhames and the other members, the less you want to go each time, until finally you find yourself staying at the dorm.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “If you stayed, you were given a job the next day, something easy like dusting or emptying wastepaper baskets. They gave you a clean set of clothes, this cotton tunic and blue jeans, a pair of flip flops. You feel so peaceful, so relaxed… but it’s more than that. It’s like this low-grade euphoria. You’ve found the way. Then it was the next day and the next day.”

A kind of a half-smile had spread across his face as he remembered the experience. He’d moved up in his chair and leaned into them. He looked back and forth between their faces.

“But you left eventually,” said Lydia.

He nodded.

“I saw something that frightened me,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “I saw horrible things. I was cleaning floors and I walked into a room filled with computers and closed-circuit monitors.”

He put his head in his hands.

“I saw it, too,” said Jeffrey. “The people in restraints, on feeding tubes.”

“Their heads shaved, their eyes open in terror,” he said, his voice low. The room had taken on a kind of hush and no one spoke for a moment.

“What did you do?” asked Lydia softly.

“I stopped drinking the tea,” he said, giving her a small smile. “Suddenly, the euphoria was gone and I felt like a prisoner, even though ostensibly I could leave at any time. I realized that I had told them virtually every intimate detail of my life. I had told them every mistake I ever made and, believe me, there were some big ones.”

He released a shuddering sigh that seemed to come from deep inside of him.

“I was afraid then, afraid to leave. But when Rhames asked to see me, started talking about my turning assets over to The New Day and entering the ‘cleansing’ phase of my initiation, I realized that the whole thing was just a scam, just a way to steal people’s money. I got mad. I flipped out.”

“How did Rhames react?” asked Lydia.

“Very calmly,” said Samuels. “I was ranting and screaming and he was just sitting. We were in this room with the door locked. It was dim, so he flipped on a light that sat on his desk and he slid this file over to me. I took it and opened it.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at the blank space on the wall behind Lydia.

“What was in it?” she asked finally.

“Everything,” he said. “Everything about me, about Monica, about Lily and Mickey. There were copies of my tax returns, medical records, account numbers. It was a complete dossier.”

His breathing came quickly now, labored and slightly raspy. “He said to me, ‘It’s too late, my friend. You’ve shed this life. It belongs to me now.’ I told him to go fuck himself and I walked out of there. No one stopped me. I went back to Monica. I didn’t tell her about The New Day. I begged her to forgive me. She let me move back in and promised to work on our marriage but no guarantees. I changed all my bank accounts and was terrified for a few weeks. I called some of the guys that used to work for my security firm and I asked them to hang around me and Monica, Lily and Mickey. After a few days with no incident, I started to think everything was going to be all right. And for a while, it was.”

He laughed a little at his own stupidity.

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just go to the police and tell them about The New Day?” asked Lydia.

He laughed again; it sounded hard and angry like the bark of a dog. “With what they knew about me? Not an option.”

“What did they know about you?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not falling for that again.”

Lydia looked at him and thought he had the aura of a kite with its line cut, as if there was nothing to hold him to this world.

“Then slowly,” he said, “they started to take my world apart.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “First, I was notified that I was being audited by the IRS for the period of fifteen years during which I owned the security firm. My tax attorney who’d been with me since 1980 told me, ‘Hey, buddy, don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.’ I was relieved. He was a powerful guy, had a way of making problems disappear, if you know what I mean. The next night, he was mugged and died from a gunshot wound to the heart. All my records disappeared from his office.”

“So what happened?” asked Jeffrey when he didn’t go on.

“Nothing yet. I had copies of everything here at my house. My meeting with them is scheduled for next week.” He smiled quickly.

He slumped back down in his chair, as if he’d been drained of all his energy in the telling of his tale.

“Then Mickey committed suicide, and Lily disappeared. Monica was nearly psychotic with grief, medicated to the point of catatonia. I was alone, on the verge of losing everything. Still part of me refused to believe that The New Day was behind it. Part of me believed it was punishment for my selfishness, my foolishness, all the crimes and sins of my life.”

“When did you come to believe differently?” asked Lydia.

“When you came to see me, started asking me about The New Day.”

“Is that why you went there?”

“I went there to make a deal.”

Lydia frowned at him. “What kind of a deal, Mr. Samuels?”

He shrugged. “I have something he wants. He has something I want. I proposed a trade.” Again he fell into silence. Then, “You know what’s brilliant about Rhames is that he doesn’t break you completely. He took Mickey. How? I still don’t quite know but I have an idea. But with the death of my son, he showed me what he was capable of doing. Everything else he just left dangling. He knows that once a man is without hope, once he has nothing to