"Very poetic," the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith responded dryly.
' 'And you might want to get someone over there to take care of the residents."
"I am making arrangements for the patients."
Remo sighed. "Knowing you, you're trying to sell the terminal cases on squandering their last days and life savings on the Folcroft three-meal-a-day plan."
Smith said nothing. The organization for which they
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both worked operated under the cover of Folcroft Sanitarium. Although he had a virtually unlimited budget for clandestine operations, Smith insisted on running Folcroft as a business.
"I knew it!" Remo said.
"If there is nothing else to report, I suggest we sever this connection," Smith said tightly.
"There is just one more thing," Remo said. "About a hundred TV reporters saw me off that Coffin woman. I suggested they shoot me from the left. I think that's my better side. So if you tune in at about six-thirty tonight, you should see me on the news. And just so you don't think I hogged all the limelight for myself, I mentioned your name at least three dozen times."
Remo slammed the phone down, not even waiting for a response. Placing his hands on either side of the squat upright phone stand, he ripped the entire booth from the pavement and sent it skipping down the street like a flat rock on a placid pond.
"Connection severed," he announced to the empty night.
Chapter Three
Esther Clear-Seer couldn't believe her luck.
She had been in the religion business for nearly twenty years and in all that time she had never experienced a genuine miracle until the day late last summer when Mark Kaspar showed up on her doorstep.
The Biotechnics stock deal had pulled in nearly five hundred thousand dollars in three days before the little man had instructed her that it was time to pull out. She had wanted to let the money ride, but Kaspar had been firmly insistent and, reluctantly, she had acquiesced.
The next day the bioengineering company had gone down in flames after a patent dispute with a larger pharmaceutical conglomerate. By then Kaspar had dumped half the cash in a five-hundred-acre parcel of land abutting the Ranch Ragnarok property, thus doubling the Truth Church's real-estate holdings, and invested the balance in a relatively safe soft-drink company. The money didn't explode like the initial investment had, but its value continued to grow stead-ily.
Which was just fine with her. If there was one thing Esther Clear-Seer could appreciate, it was the enrichment of Esther Clear-Seer. Especially if she didn't
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have to do anything to earn it. The land, however, was another deal entirely.
When she first learned about the property purchase, she had marched angrily over to confront Kaspar and to explain to him, in no uncertain terms, the Ranch Ragnarok pecking order.
The Truth Church ranch had been established by Esther on the grounds of a former industrial complex, and Kaspar and his silent female friend had moved into one of the many vacant cinder-block buildings that was set apart from the communal buildings where the rest of the faithful worked and lived.
As Esther approached the large building, she noticed a strange cloud of yellow smoke rising from the central chimney.
She sniffed the air like a hound on the scent of a fox. A smell like rotten eggs wafted through the afternoon breeze.
What was he cooking?
Esther stormed over to the building.
She had barely raised her hand to knock before Kaspar called out for her to enter. It was as if he anticipated everything. Shrugging, she pushed the door inward.
There was a communal fire area in the center of all Truth Church disciple buildings, and in this one, Kaspar had started a modest blaze out of sagebrush and broken fir twigs.
Over the flames he had set up some kind of staggered scaffolding system out of heavy barbecue cooking grates. A long pan of water shivered on the lowest rack. The water boiled relentlessly, bubbling up against the heavy stone bottom of Kaspar's mysterious
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urn, which he had placed on a thick steel grate above the pan.
The lid was off the urn now. Esther caught a glimpse of a granular yellow substance just below the rim.
Kaspar's female companion sat on a simple wooden stool next to the fire, her frail arms stretching a blanket up over her head. The woolen blanket caught the noxious yellow fumes that poured freely from the ancient urn, and the girl inhaled greedily as if it were steam from a vaporizer.
The rotten-egg smell was stronger in here. As Esther studied the glazed look on the girl's face, she assumed that the yellow smoke was some kind of narcotic.
Kaspar was seated in a plain wooden chair, stoking the fire with a simple metal rod. He looked up wordlessly at Esther Clear-Seer, fixing her with his dead-serpentine regard.
Esther's smoldering anger was quenched by the unexpected strangeness of the scene within the building. She pointedly ignored the girl, who was gulping ecstatically at the smoke issuing from the pot, and focused her attention on Kaspar.
' 'Why did you buy that damn land?'' Esther asked.
"There are hot springs on the property," Kaspar explained.
"I already knew that," Esther told him. "That's why I didn't want it."
"The springs are crucial to our venture."
Esther hesitated. "How crucial?"
"They will make the difference between success and riches, and abysmal failure."
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"Well, okay," Esther said grudgingly. "Just check with me next time."
Kaspar nodded agreeably. "Of course," he said.
And that was that.
What could Esther say? The strange little man deferred to her nearly every time she challenged him, and even when he didn't—as in the real-estate matter—he didn't strike up a bold or defensive posture. He merely stated his position quietly, almost subserviently, and half the time Esther walked away thinking she had come to the same conclusion herself.
Besides, the money Kaspar brought in was nothing to sneeze at. To Esther Clear-Seer, any business partner who swelled the coffers of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth and asked for next to nothing in return was the business partner for her.
The property Kaspar purchased had once housed a modest crop-dusting and stunt-flying business back during the 1930s. Today the only visible sign of that long abandoned enterprise was a rusting corrugated tin hangar squatting at the far end of a sage-covered, crumbling concrete runway. Kaspar had gone to work, refurbishing the structure and altering the basic design of the vacant building into a sanctuary for special worship.