They were obviously ready to protect that wet red carpet with their lives, if the need arose. The one on the right had the kind of face that suggested that he hoped the need would arise, and sooner rather than later: fat, downturned lips, a short thick pug nose, and two stupid little eyes lurking close together under a bony brow-ridge that I thought had been eliminated from the gene pool several million years ago. The other one just looked dumb.
As I crossed the street and set foot on the squishy red carpet, I decided on the dumb one. I didn't know whether I'd get a big smile, a salute, or a demand for a password, but whatever it was, I preferred not to get it from someone who was clearly upset that fate hadn't made him a Shi'ite Muslim with a lot of opportunities to die for something he believed in.
What I got from the dumb one was a burp, redolent of burger and onion, and a halfhearted attempt to open the left-hand door for me. I beat him to it without dislocating my shoulder, pushed it open myself, and went inside.
The sad old lobby arched dark and dirty above me. Spots of damp dotted the carpet and tainted the air. A few people came and went, looking businesslike. Above the long reception counter at the far end of the room hung a whopping color photo of Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth. A pin spot dangling from the ceiling picked it out and made it dazzle. It was the only bright thing in the room.
When in doubt, as my mother always says, look like you know what you're doing. I nodded briskly to the two women at the counter and went to the elevator. The doors squealed open with a shrill plea for oil, and I pushed close door and stood there for a moment, thinking.
There were six floors above me and one below. A sign on the elevator wall obligingly informed me that the second floor was the Listening Centre, quaint British spelling and all, and that the third and fourth were Church Offices. Five and six were labeled Residence Halls.
There was no label for the floor, presumably a basement, below me. There was no way to get there, either. One could go up simply by pushing a button. To go down, one needed a key.
That narrowed my options. They were further narrowed by the fact that I had no plausible business in the Church Offices and no interest in the Residence Halls. I pushed two and made a clanky ascent.
The doors opened on a narrow hallway illuminated by bare bulbs plunked into what once must have been elaborate sconces. A young man seated behind a desk that faced the elevator looked up at me incuriously. The sign in front of him said listening centre. The young man was pudgy and unhealthily white, with a dirty-looking fall of straight brown hair sloping across his forehead in a way that made him look like a latter-day member of the Hitler Youth.
'Room twelve,' I said, hoping that there was one and that the number was high enough to place it around the corner and out of sight.
He pushed a register at me, tossed back the little fringe of hair on his forehead with a fat index finger, and held out a pen. 'Down and to the left,' he said. 'Name and time, please.'
ALGY SWINBURNE, I Wrote. ELEVEN-FORTY.
He swiveled the register around again and crossed out the time. 'Eleven-forty-four,' he said with severe satisfaction, writing it above the scratch marks. 'Your watch is slow.'
'My gosh,' I said, setting it ostentatiously, 'it certainly is. Is Listener Simpson around?'
'She'd be in the studio now, wouldn't she?' He'd probably been a smartass since he was four.
'The studio?'
'The television studio,' he explained with a hint of weariness. 'She's working the noon broadcast.'
'Of course, she is,' I said. 'Boy, there are days when I don't know my own name.'
He looked down at the register. 'How could you forget a name like Algy?'
'I can try,' I said. 'And thanks.'
'For what?' he said, genuinely puzzled.
'Just an expression.' I trundled off down the hall.
Most of the room doors were firmly closed. No ghosts of Doheneys or Barrymores, swathed in floor-length ermine trench coats, paced the hallway. For that matter, no one paced the hallway. The Listening Centre was obviously not the place where church members went to pace. I made it all the way to room eight without having to look businesslike.
The door to room eight was open.
I glanced back at the winning youth behind the desk. He had his back to me, probably gazing balefully through his forelock and trying to guess what kind of idiot the elevator would next deliver into his day. I went into room eight.
All remnants of the Borzoi's past glory had been resolutely swept away. The inevitable picture of Angel and Mary Claire hung in glorious color on one wall, but the furniture seemed to have been chosen for its drabness: a folding metal chair in front of a Formica card table, facing another folding metal chair. A sleek contraption that looked vaguely like an aluminum carton of cigarettes sat precisely in the middle of the table. It was bolted down. From the side of it facing the chair near the wall protruded a tangle of wires that terminated in a pair of thick cuffs. The cuffs sported electrodes, round and black, about the size of eye patches. The side of the contraption facing away from the cuffs and the electrodes featured an on-off switch, something that suggested a volume control, and a couple of dials. It could have been one thing and one thing only: a lie detector. Crude, but probably effective.
A door at the end of the room led to a bathroom. The entire place smelled of cigarettes and sweat. The cigarettes were just cigarettes; the sweat was probably fear. For that matter, the cigarettes were probably fear too. The little machine didn't look very forgiving, and it wasn't hard to imagine the anxiety of being hooked up to it and asked questions about the most intimate aspects of your life. I'd once been scared half to death by a psychiatrist, and at least I could lie to her.
I sat on the metal chair nearest the wall, where I figured the person who was being Listened to would sit. I picked up the cuffs: Velcro snaps clasped them together. I put one idly around my left wrist and sat there thinking about Sally Oldfield sitting in a room like this one, pouring her heart out to someone she'd never met, someone who nodded and smiled encouragingly and watched the dials. Sally Oldfield, fresh out of Utica, New York, and lost in the city, looking for the key to her life in the eyes of a stranger. Telling that stranger something very dangerous.
Peeling off the cuff, I looked at my recently reset watch. Twelve noon. I didn't think I wanted to see much more of the Listening Centre. Unless I was very wrong, it was just more of the same.
As I got up, my attention was caught by a sudden pop and whine from the television set sitting on a little table behind the Listener's seat, right where the-the what? the Talker? the Listenee? — would have been forced to look at it. Cartoons? The soaps? News of the World? Alistair Cooke? None of them sounded very likely. And none of them, so far as I knew, had the power to turn on sets automatically, although I was sure that somewhere some producer was working on it. I sat back down as the screen came to life.
I was watching something called 'Celebrity Corner,' if the large sparkly sign hanging on the back wall of the set was to be believed. On chairs that looked much more comfortable than anything to be found in room eight, three familiar-looking people sat smiling into the camera. One of them was Skippy Miller, one was an actress whose name I couldn't remember, and the third was an anemic-looking young man with shoulder-length hair. The other two chairs were occupied by Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth.
'… sharing gains,' Mary Claire was saying. 'Not all of them, of course,' she added with a smile. 'We've only got an hour.'
The three celebrities beamed. Angel looked slightly fuddled, as if she wondered why she wasn't in school. 'Clive,' Mary Claire said to the anemic-looking young man, 'why don't we begin with you?'
'Wul,' he said delightedly in an accent that was pure Midlands English, 'why don't we, then?'
'Now, you're an extremely successful young man,' Mary Claire said. Clive gestured in a self-deprecatory fashion. 'Gold records, fans all over the world, a promising movie career.' She consulted a small card in her hand. 'Homes in Los Angeles, London, and the Bahamas. What kind of gains could the Church deliver to someone like you?'
'Meself,' Clive said promptly. 'And that's the important thing, in't it?'
Depends, I thought.
'Of course it is,' Mary Claire said coaxingly. Clive nodded. Mary Claire smiled. Clive smiled back. 'Um,' Mary Claire said. She wasn't very good at this. 'You told me, just before we went on the air, a very interesting story about how you found the Church. Would you share it with our viewers?'
