The nice clean sheets in the hotel room no longer looked nice or clean. Whatever I drank before falling into a stupor had sweated out again. I smelled as bad as I felt. Some memory from long ago slid away back where dreams come from, and I lay still, working at waking up.
After lolling about like that for a few minutes, I rolled out of bed and navigated toward the bathroom. One hot and cold shower and a shave later, I felt ready to make a phone call.
Pulling the business card out of my wallet, I set it next to the telephone and punched out the combination of numbers and letters. If the HWHY was some sort of mnemonic, I had no idea what it was for.
A female voice as pert and crisp as sunrise over the mountains said, "Forty-nine forty-nine. May I held you?"
"Is this the church?" I asked with a small degree of surprise. A church with an answering service?
"Church, sir?"
She must get darned few calls for them. "Uh… the St. Judas Church."
"Oh," she said with a pleasant tone. "One moment." The phone went silent.
I waited. A cigarette eventually found its way to my lips and got lit. Halfway through the smoke, a man's voice crackled onto the line. He had that sharp-edged bite that one would expect from a tough businessman, not from someone connected with a church. At least, not a with a nonevangelical church.
"Who is this?" he demanded, as polite as a gunshot.
"A fellow believer," I said in a simpery voice. "A traveler on the path to understanding. A humble seeker after-"
"Cut the crap-I'm a busy man. Are you the guy that knows Joey Moreno?"
I stumbled over a thought. He'd caught me off guard with that one. "Knew Joey," I said. "He got iced last night."
It was his turn to pause. The silence on the other end was thick enough to lean against. After a moment, the voice spoke.
"How'd it happen?"
"Shot. In my office. I found him there."
"Did you by chance have anything to do with it?"
"Probably. He knew me too well."
Another pause. "That's a good answer. A very good one. Honest. I like that. Look, pal, I think I know what you're up to from what Joey told me. And I suspect that there's big trouble brewing because of it. And not just for Joey or you. This may have serious repercussions. Serious. I think we could both benefit from a talk."
He gave me an address on the eight hundred block of South Broadway. I told him I'd meet him in a couple of hours and rang off.
I ground out the cigarette and thought hard. It might be a setup. Whoever killed Joey could have planted the card on him. I loaded up my Colt and shoved it into my waistband holster.
The best way to find a trapper is to hang around His traps…
In the middle of the east side of the block sat a squashed sort of building jammed between two other equally squashed buildings. A sign in the window hung at a careless angle.
Checks cashed hereRubber stamps made to order24 hour legal formsMaps to the stars's homes
A three-by-five card-browned with time-was stuck to the window beneath the larger sign. The cellophane tape was likewise brown, curling away from the card and cracking in places. The card had two words and an arrow pointing upward at an angle.
CHURCH UPSTAIRS
I headed upstairs.
The steps looked as though they would creak as loud as bullfrogs in heat. I ascended slowly, touching only the outermost edge of every other step. It took awhile, but I reached the top of the staircase making as much noise as a foggy night.
The landing had been swept, at least, and the closed door had a small, engraved plastic sign.
ST. JUDAS CHURCH OF HOLY TRIBULATION AND TAX EVASION
I listened at the door. Voices beyond spoke casually. I liked that. I could hear every word. I liked that even more.
"If God is dead," asked a pleasant male voice, "what have people been getting at Communion?"
"A Guest Host." This voice was deep and gruff-the voice on the telephone. "Can we get back to work?"
"Okay. How's this one-`Bored with the Lord? Feast with the Beast!'"
"Catchy," the deeper voice replied, "but we need something that'll really inflame them. I want you to escape within three inches of your life."
The other man laughed. It was a warm, exuberant laugh. "You'd be happier if I were torn apart and martyred. That would give you some publicity."
"Don't think I might not prefer it. How about this-you could explain that all good Christians should actively support the Beast and the Antichrist because the Kingdom of God won't return until we've had a thousand years of tribulation. After all, if it's in the Bible, it's God's prophecy. And any good Christian can see the necessity of allowing God's prophecy to proceed. Hence, the most blessed Christians are the ones who put the Antichrist on the throne of the world."
There was a long pause. "Nah," said the higher voice, "too subtle."
I tickled my knuckles against the door. A couple of paint flakes stuck to my skin. I brushed them off as the door slid open.
I stood eye to eye with a beautiful man.
I couldn't call him handsome-his features weren't rugged enough. I couldn't call him pretty, because he looked in no way delicate. He was beautiful, that's all. And I'm not that kind of guy, either.
He looked at me with eyes the color of a morning sky near the ocean. They gazed intently, yet not disturbingly so. His hair was a mass of ringlety waves that curled down to his shirt collar. To call the curls blond would be to call gold a "yellowish metal." They shone, even in the dimly lit room, like the "yellowish metal" glows in bright sunlight. His face looked as though its expression could change from sardonic to dead serious with just a turn of his lips. At the moment, he was sardonic.
He scanned me with a grin. "Welcome to the holiest of holies-the church of He Who Would Turn the Last Supper Into a Friar's Roast." The grin was a beautiful grin-it didn't belong in this dump.
The room in which he stood was nothing more than a fifteen-by-twenty office. One dingy window looked out on a brick wall. What light the room had came from a pair of flyspecked bulbs overhead that burned uncovered. It gave the place all the hominess of a prison cell. Or maybe a prison library.
Shelves constructed of bricks and boards strained under the weight of books against every wall. There might have been fewer books in this room than in the home of Theodore Golding, though only because the sloppy, warped shelves could not reach all the way to the ceiling without danger of toppling. They looked as if a well-fed flea could have knocked them down.
In the center of the room-on a rug that had as much pile on it as a piece of burlap-sat a plain white altar with a man perched on top.
"Let the guy in," the man said in a tough, husky voice. "He doesn't need the spiel."
Adonis stepped aside. I stood in the doorway without moving. The man on the altar sat cross-legged, studying me. His thick, muscular body barely permitted the contortion.
He wore a suit that had been through three recessions, a depression, and maybe a panic or two. Someone such as he must have been around when they coined the word burly. Two beefy hands hung from his sleeves like chunks of rock laid across his lap. His face looked like a Teamsters' strike.
"You know Joey, right?" Bulldogs have barked more politely.
I pulled out a cigarette and made a big deal of lighting it.
"Knew," I said for the second time that day.
"I knew him, too." A little grief flickered in the man's eyes. Not much, but it seemed real enough. He unfolded his legs and got his arms in position to slide off the Formica cube. He stepped toward me, a much shorter man than I'd expected. He stared up at my eyes. Straight ahead, he'd have been gazing at my Adam's apple.
"Take the man's hat, Tom."
"That's not necessary," I said, blowing smoke in Tom's direction.
The beautiful face didn't wrinkle its nose or emit any prissy noises. His dreamlike blue eyes blinked twice, and a muted laugh snorted out of him with the sound of a distant drum.
I kept my hat on because I didn't want my current abstract hairdo to detract from my image.
"Your name's Dell Ammo," the short bear said. "Your business license lists you as a P.I.-which I don't suppose means Perfect Initiate-and I hope we've both proven we're tough and cool and can get down to brass tacks."
"You haven't proven much yet," I said. I was feeling wise. The smart guy. Dell Ammo-hard man.
Shortly after his fist connected with me, I was relocated to the hallway. He'd aimed for my solar plexus and hadn't missed. I made the sounds a drowning man makes and clutched at my guts. My right hand reached instinctively toward my waistband.
Seeing that, he turned to stroll back to his altar.
"Tough guy," he said through the thick buzz in my ears. "Has to pull heat at the first jab." He climbed up on the altar and folded his beefy legs with a yogi's agility.
I staggered back inside, feeling less the smart guy.
"Joey and I were friends in Berkeley," he said. "I was a right-wing conservative sort. Buckleyite. He was a Trotskyist. We met once when we both happened to be beating up some Larouchites. We found other interests in common and became friends, sort of. Over the years, he started reading a lot of Russian literature. I started reading Christian heretic and Gnostic writings. Joey got hooked on Tolstoy, started edging toward religious pacifism. One quarter, I see him come to class in a priest's getup. He'd quit the Trots to join the Russian Orthodox Church. Changed his major to religious studies. Same as Tom here."
Tom laughed. It wasn't quite the musical laughter of Apollo or whomever, but it had a note of carefree joy in it.
The grizzly voice continued. "Joey's folks were Mexican Catholic, so you know how they greeted him at home. When he came to L.A., he started working in the barrios. I don't know how he met you."
"We got drunk in a bar together once," I said. "He dragged me home."
"He was good conversation, Ammo. Same as Tom here. Good conversation is hard to find. Joey had a good mind-muddled sometimes, maybe a little naif…" He looked down at his hands.
I used the silence to scan the room for an ashtray. The butt ended up on the floor, ground beneath my heel.
Tom looked at me with a resigned smile.
"Joey apparently respected you." The fellow's voice had taken on a soft, far-off quality. That he knew me but didn't bother to give me his name was beginning to annoy me. His face, which looked as if it had been used to tenderize sides of beef, lost its tough, street wise edge. "He was worried about you after a couple of big boys from his archdiocese paid him a visit." He shifted his weight around to take a grunting breath.
I closed the office door, though direct experience indicated that it wouldn't prevent eavesdropping.
"Anyway," he continued, "I suppose you'd like to know that they grilled him about you. That they asked rather pointed questions about your degree of faith, whether you believed in God or in Satan."
"So?" I asked. "Maybe they were checking the answers I gave on my application to Sunday school."
"You're like most people, Ammo. You think priests and bishops and rabbis and the like sit around praying and absolving people of the sins they've devised to instill guilt. Forget it. Religion is a con game like any other. It relies on efficient information gathering. You'd be surprised how well a confessional works for purposes of extortion."
"Even those they don't literally blackmail get shaken down," Tom said through a grin. "Who can resist throwing a few bucks toward someone who implies that you'll roast in hell for an eternity if you don't pay up? Certainly a far worse fate than any court or scandal sheet can threaten."
"Most people," I said, "seem willing to defer their punishment that long." I pulled up a dirty folding chair to sit on. "Get to the point. You knew Joey. Somehow he got dead in my office. What's that got to do with you and me?"
"Relax, Ammo," the guy on the altar said. "We're on the same side. I think." He pointed a thick index finger at me. "You're trying to find a way to expose religion as a hoax, and you're on some sort of a track that's got a certain group of powers-behind-the-throne scared out of their gowns. Enough for them to put a tail on Joey. Enough to kill him."
"So they kill him and don't wait around for me? As deduction, that stinks."
"Maybe something bigger scared them off. I was watching the news last night. Some fun happenings around Hollywood. More than usual, wouldn't you agree?"
He slid off the altar to walk over to where I was sitting. We were nearly eye-to-eye now. He looked me over, circling the chair. He peered at the scalp showing below my hat. He nodded approval at the wounds.
"Maybe you are a tough guy after all. Not many people go up against the Ecclesia and survive two warnings." He caught my frown of incomprehension. "Ecclesia," he repeated, "with an impressively capital E. You won't find it in any reference book, even the ones that are fairly replete with information about Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati and other small-time conspiracies. Anyone you ask either won't know or will deny its existence. In religious circles, though, gossip circulates and leaks. They have their own unique conspiracy theories."
"Do they?" I asked, as raptly interested as I could be without stifling a yawn.
He poked at the still-swollen lump that served as a souvenir of my night escapades outside Auberge. Something dull throbbed through my body to ache against the newer bruises and slashes under my hat.
"The Ecclesia-" was about all he got out by the time my hand whipped around to sweep up under his chin. I had to crouch in the chair to reach that low. He sat with astonishing speed, landing on the floor with a thud that I thought would bring us crashing down into the shops below. He stared blankly forward, his hands useless by his sides.
I stood to look at Tom.
Adonis looked worried. It was an admirably beautiful worry. Michelangelo spent years trying to sculpt that kind of worry.
"Fine way to treat one another," I said to Tom. "We haven't even been formally introduced."
"Randolph Corbin," came a voice as thick as library paste. One hand massaged his jaw, the other extended upward, palm open. He leaned forward. I grasped his hand and pulled. My knuckles were sore from the punch, and his grip didn't help matters.
"Call me anything but Randy, and we won't cause each other trouble." He shuffled unsteadily to the white cube and leaned his bulk against it. It skidded a bit, dragging part of the rug with it. He shifted about to gaze up at me. I must have scored a hit on the button the way his round chin was getting rounder.
I felt bad about doing that. His face didn't need any more workouts.
"The Ecclesia," he continued, as though he'd just stopped for a breath, "is a loose association of high-level bishops, rabbis, imams, roshis, and various other shamans who have a vested interest in maintaining the power of religion. Organized religion. The kind that accumulates revenue. They consider any threat to the philosophical foundations of any faith to be a threat to all. They leave the lip service concerning holy wars to the lower echelons. In the same manner as the U.S. and the Soviet governments, they recognize that the pretense of being enemies is necessary to justify their mutual existences. Fear and hatred of the rival religion keeps the peons in line. The Ecclesia is securely entrenched. They've got the wealth of a dozen faiths to play with, and they're not interested in people who rock the boat."
He leaned toward me. "And you've got them worried, Ammo. Why?"
I smiled. Easing back in the chair, I pulled out another coffin nail and tapped it against the pack. Silently.
"They're sure as hell not concerned about me," Corbin said. "And look what I'm preaching." His arm swept about to encompass the room. "The Word of the Beast. The heretical absurdity that a true Christian should labor to bring the Antichrist to power so that God's prophecies can-finally-come to pass."
He frowned. "No one's ever so much as dropped me a nasty note. A couple of decades ago, when some researchers proved that Jesus had been rescued from the cross and lived to sire a child with Mary Magdalene, did the religious establishment even sniff? The book was a best-seller. Did the faith of millions come crashing?"
"Let me guess," I said. "No?"
"No. Even the revelation that the Death and Resurrection never happened bothered no one. Yet you-you they kill for." His fist pounded against the altar. "What's your angle, mister?"
I smiled. "Jovial old Jehovah is at the top of a hit list and I'm the torpedo."
Tom burst out laughing. Corbin stared at me. His chin was growing purplish. He didn't laugh.
"Don't get funny, Ammo."
"You seem to think I'm having a less than humorous effect."
"God's just one of a lot of ideas, Ammo. It's a metaphor for conscience-for the all-seeing eye that watches your actions and won't let you escape their consequences. God doesn't exist where you can track Him down and kill Him. You'd have to kill an idea."
"I'm hearing echoes," I said. "Deja vu. I've heard all this before. Yet someone must think it's possible or I wouldn't be drawing a paycheck."
Corbin shook his head. Tom smiled again, saying, "Ghostbusters make a lot of money ridding homes of entities that don't exist. Someone wants you to exorcise the Holy Spirit. Better check your client's psychiatric record."
I didn't have to. I already knew it was pretty wobbly.
"Look, Ammo." Corbin spoke softly. "God is a concept deep within most all of us that exists for a lot of reasons-fear, guilt, hatred. Sometimes even genuine worship and joy. It's other-directed, it's aimed outward from the self. When one is compelled to appease an all-powerful thing whose purpose is beyond human understanding, the stress causes severe psychological damage. In fact, the degree to which one achieves the good is the degree to which he or she defies the dictates of God. Or, I should say, what some people say are the dictates of God." He waved a hand about. "It's all just a way to keep people enslaved. To keep them from thinking, daring, or rebelling."
"Bravo," I muttered around my cigarette. "A brilliant new hypothesis."
"Not much of what I say is new," Corbin admitted, his face as pleasant as flat beer. "It just isn't repeated enough." The idea that one can live without God, or that He's a cruel hoax, or an age-old political tool is so alien to most people that they consider it a sin even to think about it."
"Perhaps," Tom cut in, "if you started grabbing people on the street, dragging them into alleys and hypnotizing them, you could get into their subconscious minds to pluck out the concept."
"Deprogramming?" It sounded like hard work.
Tom shrugged his suitably well-formed shoulders. "Well, not the sort that some church kidnappers practice. They simply reprogram in a traditional God to replace a socially unacceptable God. You'd have to leave them without any deep-seated theistic concepts."
"And there are as many concepts of God," Corbin added, "as there are human beings."
"And," Tom chirped, "you'd have to destroy the concept in everyone at once. Otherwise it might re-emerge and God would live again."
"Not only that"-Corbin strode around the room like a hyped-up fight promoter-"you'd have to provide enough intellectual ammunition to prevent people from backsliding. Something to battle their doubts with. Thought, after all, is the enemy of faith."
"You could use television. It's been used to hypnotize the masses for half a century." Tom was enjoying this as much as Corbin.
The stocky man ran his fingers along his chin. Touching the sore spot made him wince. He glowered at me. "TV's no good. Doesn't reach all the people. You've got to lower everyone's brain waves into a theta dream state all at once. As if they were dozing off. Yet leave in enough alpha wave state to enable them to alter their gestalts."
"Same as the ancient initiation rituals."
He smiled at Tom. "Hmm. Isn't that so…" He nodded in my direction. "Know what we're talking about?"
"Alpha, theta-it's all Greek to me."
"Haw. Haw. Funny man. We're talking about brain wave frequencies." He looked at me with his small, buried eyes and shook his head. "A tough guy like you wouldn't care, would you?"
"I'm not tough. You said so yourself. I'm just a soft, sensitive guy who can't take rejection."
"Take a walk and never come back."
"I presume this concludes our audience?"
Corbin glared at me. "I've given you a warning and offered you my help-"
"Is that what it was? Sounded like a lecture to me." I headed toward the door.
"And you refused to come clean. Whatever you're trying, Ammo, you're up against stiff opposition. You can't do it alone."
"We all die alone," I said. "To kill, the only partner I need is my target."
"You're looking in all the wrong places."
I kept walking.
Tom stopped me with one lovely hand on my arm. "You can't leave without asking why he calls this the St. Judas Church."
"Watch me."
Tom was insistent. His fingers tightened with surprising strength around my arm. The friendly smile never left his lips. "Because all the apostles betrayed their Lord, but only Judas felt bad enough about it to kill himself."
"Gee," I said, grasping Tom's wrist and squeezing until I felt cartilage grind, "and all these years I thought Judas should be a saint because he was instrumental in granting God's greatest wish."
"Wish?" Corbin said.
"To feel what it's like to be human. To feel what it's like to die."
Corbin's jaw dropped as far as it could in its condition. Score one for me. Tom laughed.
I took one last look at that beautiful face and turned to go. His voice carried down the steps as I departed.
"How's that for meeting your theological match?"
"Forget him. We've got work to do."
The sound of Tom's laughter followed me onto the hot L.A. streets.