women were moving along with her. They rounded a corner and headed down a wide hall to what Benoit knew to be the great hall of Grand Central Station. Not twenty feet away, three of the other brown hats hurried off to various destinations of Gaudet's choosing. There were shops along either side and the man veered into a jewelry shop and then stepped through a door that was opened barely a foot, allowing entry into the side of a boarded- up storefront. About twenty feet before reaching the door, Benoit brushed a display and purposely dropped the transmitter. Sam had warned her that at the first enclosure they would probably check her for transmitters.
After Benoit had entered, and before the man closed the door, a woman dressed exactly as Benoit slid past her and then backed out through the same door Benoit had just entered, yelling, 'Je dois juste aller pisser.' Benoit was amazed at the resemblance.
It would look to an observer exactly as if Benoit had stepped into a closed-to-the-public area and then backed out.
They stopped and a man with a wand went over her body checking every beep. They took the gun from her purse. Cigar man led her back through a construction site that was at the moment without any workers and through a back door into a narrow hall that ran behind all of the shops. They walked down the hall about two hundred feet and came out in the back of a store in a tiny office area. There the man left her, but not until he had shown her into a small bathroom. There were fashion magazines here that Gaudet enjoyed. Unlike some men, he liked looking at women in clothes, un less he had his knife and was able to cut them off personally. She was grateful that they had chosen a bathroom as the waiting area. She began to flip through a magazine, but the tension in her broke her concentration; her mind always went back to Gaudet and her upcoming encounter and the words that she would use, and the way she would use her body. After an hour had passed, a woman came and opened the door.
'I'm sorry, but I need to search you for transmitters.'
Benoit was used to being searched and even the rubber gloves and the body cavity search did not irritate her. But it worried her because she wouldn't have anything in a body cavity unless she had done it intentionally, and that was a strong indication that Gaudet no longer had complete trust in her.
'I need to search the handbag,' the woman said. Benoit pulled out the lipstick and other cosmetics, credit cards and cash.
She wondered if the woman had any inkling about Gaudet. Maybe she had met Trotsky, but probably she dealt with a contractor who had never met or even spoken to Gaudet. The woman left and Benoit returned to the bathroom and waited another hour. At the next knock on the bathroom door, she found a small, slender man in a rumpled sport jacket, with shaggy brown hair that hadn't been trimmed in a good while.
'For the next part of your little excursion, you will need to get in this,' he said, pointing to a large crate mounted on a dolly. He seemed grim; she decided he would make a good undertaker.
There was a ladder and she assumed correctly that she would need to enter the crate from the top. Fortunately, there was another ladder down the inside and a chair, and she found that she could sit inside the crate with about the legroom of an economy-class airline seat. There was even a light to read by and another array of magazines.
The man closed up the crate while she flipped nervously through these fashion magazines. For about ten minutes there was complete silence and then the crate began to move. Then it stopped. She surmised that they were making a final check for any sign of a tail.
The stress was a pressure inside her that felt like it could explode. Trying to undo evil, it turned out, was much harder than doing it. There was a suspense in reaching for the light that did not exist when wallowing in the darkness. Sam had warned her about that. Always she had relied on her own strength plus nothing and rejected any spiritual dimension to life as the invention of the crackpots who wanted to exploit the weak. It was one of the few things about which she and Karl Marx could have agreed. The opiate of the masses was a perfect description. But since her time in prison, new pos sibilities had begun to occur to her. Spring had hit a body blow to her mind and spirit.
She had never been to the Tiloks' Universe Rock, and nothing in her family's Catholic past had ever melded with her soul. The Catholic tradition was barren for her, perhaps because at age twelve she had been required to attend as a means of occupying her time. But in her childhood there had been a beautiful valley down which the Loire River flowed. An old orchard grew there. It was quiet and fragrant in summer and near the castle of Villandry. Although Benoit knew the castle had been built by a sixteenth-century finance minister, she imagined that royalty would have taken picnics in the nearby orchard and perhaps fallen in love there.
Spring had asked if she could visualize it to the point that she could feel the experience of it, and she had said she could. Once she felt the peace of that valley, she was told to remember the eyes of her mother in a close moment. Even though her mother died when Benoit was nine years old, there were many such moments with her mother and she could place herself back in those times. Spring told her that if she could concentrate totally on the peace of that valley, and if she could remember the eyes of her mother and feel that love, then that was the beginning of her we pac maw. As she learned to explore it, she could take in more than her val ley and more than her mother. She could eventually take in all valleys and all mothers, and she could be at peace in the gravest adversity. Spring told her that when the threat was the greatest, she could become the center of a sphere of that energy so that she could be surrounded with her we pac maw.
This was the beginning of Tilok meditation for the sweat lodge as taught by the Spirit Walkers of the Tilok tribe and now the Talths, since Sam's grandfather had been the last Spirit Walker. Benoit wondered whether, after prison, she needed such gimmicks to survive the coming experience with Gaudet. Sam swore to her that the Spirit Walker meditation was sufficiently powerful that she might survive, even prevail over, a man like Devan Gaudet.
A year before, Benoit would have instantly dismissed this exercise as the purest form of religious bullshit. Then she had begun examining her life and its value. She had ex plained her inner pilgrimage to Sam and he seemed to understand-at least to the extent that he believed her.
Although engrossed in her meditation, she was aware that there were about twenty minutes of jostling of the crate and then about a forty-minute ride in a truck, followed by another twenty minutes of jostling before it seemed that she had arrived. She could tell by the talking and the work on the top of the crate that she was about to be let out. When she climbed out, she saw small glass panes, dark woods, and older but elegant-looking draperies. She was obviously in an upper range courtly hotel with old world styling. There was a man beside the crate who had the appearance of age.
'Is that you, Devan?'
He nodded. 'You will recognize my voice, as well as my eyes.'
When she climbed down from the crate, she pressed herself to him without hesitation and gently stuck her tongue in his mouth, being careful not to kiss vigorously in order to ensure that she did not disturb his makeup. She put her loins to his as she had commonly done more than a year previous. But Sam's cautions were heavy on her mind.
Don't compromise yourself. Try everything else and something will break.
Still, it was hard not to slip back into ways that would make Gaudet comfortable, put him at ease, and then fill him with desire so that she could begin to persuade him, and to loosen him up. It was hard to be a butterfly.
'God, I missed you so.'
'You were never this enthusiastic,' he said when she let him up for air.
'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.'
'So does abstinence.'
'I can't believe that you involved yourself in this cha rade.'
'Occasionally I'm like one of those gamblers that can't resist a chance. Besides, I never really taught you disguise well enough that I could be sure that you would do it to my satisfaction. We have to work fast.'
Gaudet went to work laying out a silver gray wig, makeup, glasses, and a change of clothes.
'Where are we going?'
'To what they call upstate, the forests, there is a lake… We have a little time.' She could sense his eagerness for intimacy and his weird kind of sex.
'Devan, there is something I want more than anything. Temporarily I want it even more than I want you.' Gaudet stopped with the hairpiece.
'What is that?'
