I arranged with Patrick Mooney to have his sister in Queens, a full-figured woman named Rosalyn, come in and finish the job of reconstructing my wrecked home. She arrived an hour and a half later, and was hard at work when I left. I also agonized over the police-report issue, but finally decided to forgo the bother. Lou was right: It would be a two-hour ordeal of futility. Besides, I had better things to do with my time. I was going to return the favor of an information-gathering expedition.
Alex Goddard had said he'd be absent from Quetzal Manor-who knows for how long-and this time around I was going to do the place right, the next step in my undercover research. The first, and main, thing I wanted to do was explore the new high-tech clinic that sat nestled in the woods across from the old building. Everything about it was the exact opposite of a "Manor." Not a shred of New Age "spirituality," just a lot of digital equipment and ultrasound and… what else? Chief among my questions: What was behind that big, white door?
Maybe I was being impulsive, but I was completely wired and the truth was, I wasn't going to sleep till I knew a lot more than I did. And if I went late tonight, Sunday, I probably wouldn't have to deal with Ramala.
I called Roger Drexel, my unshaven cameraman, and asked him to come up and meet me at Applecore. It was Sunday and he was watching the third quarter of a Knicks game and into his second six-pack, but he agreed. After all, I was his current boss.
All I really wanted was his Betacam and some metal tape, which would be broadcast quality. (I'd wanted to do it yesterday, but now the time had definitely come.) We met at the office, and he unlocked the room with the camera gear and loaded in a fresh tape. With any luck, he made it home for the end of the game.
I then had a sinful cheeseburger and fries at a Greek diner two blocks down the avenue. It was my idea of a courage- bolstering indulgence.
My watch read six thirty-five and daylight was waning when I revved my old Toyota and started my northbound trek back to Quetzal Manor. When I was passing the George Washington Bridge, the first drifting flakes of a freak late-season snowstorm began pelting my windshield. Good I thought, turning on my wipers, the less visibility, the better. At least I believed that till the road started getting slippery and I had to throttle back. It was only then I realized I'd been pushing eighty on the speedometer, passing a lot of cars. Lou's warning not to go anywhere alone was still filed in the back of my mind but I kept trying not to think about it. Sometimes there are things you've just got to do.
The highway grew more treacherous the farther north I went, but the traffic was thinning out and by the time I reached the turnoff to Quetzal Manor, total darkness had set in, in addition to which the paving was covered with at least an inch of sparkling-new pristine snow.
As I eased up the roadway, my headlights made the trees around me glisten with their light dusting of white, like frosting on the tips of a buzz cut. I switched off my lights as I made the last turn in the road but not before catching a glimpse of Quetzal Manor, and I must confess to feeling a shudder, of both anger and apprehension, run through me as I watched its magisterial turrets disappear into the snowy dark.
I parked my car at the back of the lot and retrieved the flashlight I'd brought, a yellow plastic two-battery model. I hadn't realized there'd be snow when I left home, so I was just wearing some old sneakers, but they'd do. I then sat there in the dark for a long minute, listening to the silence and thinking. The first thing was to find out if anybody was guarding the place. The next was to get some video of the new building.
I grabbed the bag carrying the Betacam, tested my flashlight against the floorboard, and then headed up the snowy driveway. I marched straight through the open arch that was the front door, and I was again in the drafty hallway where I'd met Ramala Saturday morning. It was empty and dark now, no lights anywhere, not even out in the courtyard beyond. The stony quiet-no music, no chants-felt unnatural, but it also suggested that Alex Goddard's adoring acolytes were safely tucked away. Early to bed… you know the rest. So maybe I really had come at the right time.
A chilly wind was blowing in from the far end of the hallway, and I felt like I'd just entered a dank tomb, but I tightened my coat and pressed on. When I got to the end and looked out, the snowy courtyard was like a picture postcard. And completely empty.
All right, I thought, move on to what you came for.
But when I turned and headed back down the hallway, toward the entry arch, I caught a glimpse of a furtive form, dark and shadowy, lurking just outside. Shit! I froze in my tracks, but then the figure stepped inside, wearing something that made me think of Little Red Riding Hood, like a tiny ghost in a cowl.
It was Tara, Alex Goddard's spacey waif, who was moving so oddly, I thought for a moment she might be sleepwalking.
She wasn't, of course. She'd just been out strolling around the driveway in the snow. I soon realized she lived her life in something resembling a trance, as though she were a permanent denizen of the spirit world. For her it was a natural condition.
"It's so beautiful like this," she mumbled dreamily, as though we'd been in the middle of a lifelong conversation. "I just love it." Her voice was barely above a whisper, but in the silence it seemed to ricochet off the stone walls. "I want to take them out, show them God's paintbrush. Will you help me?"
"Take who out?" I asked, immediately deciding to go with the moment.
Finally she looked directly at me and realized whom she'd been talking to.
"You were here before. I tried to give you herbs to help you, but then he came and…" Her voice trailed off as she walked back through the portico and out again into the drifting snow. Then she held up her hands, as though attempting to capture the flakes as keepsakes. "I so want to show them. They've never seen it before." She glanced back at me. "Come on. Let's do it."
As I followed her out into the drifting white and across the parking lot, the accumulation of snow was growing denser, enough now to start covering the cars, but still, something told me the flurry was going to be short-lived. I took a long, misty breath of the moist air and clicked open the case holding the Betacam, readying myself to take it out the minute we got inside.
Well, I thought, maybe I've gotten lucky. She was headed for the new clinic, which was exactly where I wanted to go. It was nestled in the trees, up a winding pathway, and as I slogged along I could feel the snow melting through my sneakers.
When we got to the front door, large and made of glass, she just pushed it open.
"We never lock anything," she declared, glancing back. "It's one of our rules."
The hallway was dark, silent, and empty except for the two of us. Still, I felt a tinge of caution as we entered. At some level this was trespassing.
"Come on," she said, casually flipping a switch on the right-hand wall and causing the overhead fluorescents to blink on. "He's away now, and everybody's in bed. But I'll bet they're still awake in here. It's a perfect time."
I didn't feel anything was perfect, but I did know I wanted to learn what was behind the door I'd seen when I was leaving. It was at the end of the hallway, wide and steel and painted hospital white. And, sure enough, that was exactly where Tara was heading.
She just kept talking nonstop, in her dreamy, little-girl voice. "We've got to try and make them understand it's okay. That it'll be just for a minute."
She shoved open the door without knocking, and my ears were greeted by the faint strains of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," one of my favorites. For an instant I was caught up in the music, a poignant moment drawing me in.
The room itself was spacious, with a row of white bassinets along one side and subdued lighting provided by small fluorescent bulbs along the walls. It was, I immediately realized, a no-frills nursery. Alongside the bassinets were tables with formula and boxes of Pampers and Handi-Wipes. Two short women of indefinable nationality-they looked vaguely Asian-were in attendance, and at the moment one was facing away and bouncing a baby on her shoulder. Her infant looked like a boy-or was that just my imagination?-and I felt my heart go out. The light was dim, but I could tell he was a gorgeous sandy-haired kid plump and peachy, so sublime in his tender vulnerability as he gazed around with eyes full of trust. He was staring directly back at me and before I could stop myself, I gave him a little wave and wrinkled my nose. He stared at me a second then responded with a tiny smile. Hey, I thought, I've got the touch.
"Come on," Tara said ignoring the women, "let me show you. They're all so beautiful."
By then my eyes were adjusting to the subdued light, and as we walked down the middle of the long room, I confirmed my assumption that the bassinets next to the tables all contained infants. I'm no expert on babies, but I'd guess they were all around six weeks old maybe a couple of months at most.
This is the nest, I thought. Ground zero. Kevin and Rachel were both probably in this room at one time too…
"Aren't they wonderful?" Tara was saying, still in her squeaky, spaced-out voice.
I was opening the Betacam bag when the first woman, the one holding and lightly bouncing her little boy, absently put her hand under his quilt, then spoke to the other in deeply accented English.
"He's wet again."
It was the first words either of them had uttered. Then she turned to me in exasperation, assuming, I suppose, that I was one of Alex Goddard's flock. "And I just changed him." Again the accent, but I still couldn't identify it. She made a face, then carried him over to a plywood changing table in the center of the room.
I felt a great baby-yearning as I moved over beside her, but she was behaving like a typical hourly wage-earner, glumly going about her job, and I just stood there a moment, vainly wanting to hold him, then turned back to Tara.
"Where do all these children come from?"
"Ramala says they're orphans or abandoned or something. From overseas or wherever." She sighed. "They're so perfect."
She was completely zombied-out. It felt like talking to a marshmallow on downers.
"But how, exactly, do-?"
"People bring them here." She seemed uninterested in the question, just plunging on as she wandered on down the line of bassinets.
I'd finally come to my senses enough to take out the Betacam, though the light wasn't actually enough to really work with, certainly not broadcast quality.
She stopped and picked up one of the infants out of its bassinet, then turned back to me, her eyes turning soft as she hugged it the way she might a small puppy. "Isn't this one cute? I'd so love to have him."
Was she on some kind of drug that suppressed curiosity? I found myself wondering as I panned the camera around the room. There must have been at least twenty bassinets, all just alike, wicker with a white lace hood. A couple of the babies were sniffling, and the one Tara had picked up now began crying outright, much to her annoyance. The room itself smelled like baby powder.
"And then what happens?" I asked finally, zooming in on one of the women.
"What happens when?" Now Tara was twirling in a circle, humming futilely to the shrieking child. "You mean, after they come here?"
"Right." God, getting answers from her was making me crazy.
"The girls here take them to their new mothers." Her eyes had turned even more dreamy as she lightly bounced the bawling bundle she was holding one last time, after which she returned it to its bassinet. Then she gazed around the room. "It's so sad to see them leave."
Did Paula and Carly get their babies that way? I found myself wondering. Probably, but it was one more thing I'd neglected to ask.
"Come on," Tara continued. "Let's take some of them out. He makes the nurses try and speak English around the children, but they don't really know much. Maybe you could figure out a way to, like, explain-"
"Tara, I don't think taking any of these babies out into the snow is a very hot idea. Not tonight. Maybe in the morning." Stall her, I thought. She's completely out of it. Then I looked at the woman changing the baby. Sure enough, I was right. It was a boy.
"But I want to." Tara turned crestfallen. "To show them how beautiful-"
"Well, I don't speak whatever language they're speaking," I said, cutting cut her off. "I'm not even sure I could make it sound reasonable in English. So you'll have to do it without my help."
Then I turned to the woman who'd been changing the baby.
"Do you know where this child came from?" Why not take a shot?
She just stared at me, alarmed, then turned away. Nothing. She clearly wasn't going to tell me anything, even if she could. She and the others were just cheap hired help, probably illegal immigrants without a green card and scared to death for their jobs. They weren't going to be doing an in-depth tell-all to anybody.
I thought about the situation for a moment, and decided I'd seen what I came to see. This was pay dirt. Alex Goddard was running a full-scale adoption mill, just as Lou had suspected. He was collecting beautiful white babies from "overseas or wherever," and selling them here at sixty thousand a pop.
Which went a long way toward explaining why he didn't want Children of Light to be featured in my film. And the Guatemalan colonel who'd just trashed my home was almost certainly in on the operation. Alex Goddard might be a New Age miracle worker rediscovering ancient Native American herbal cures, but he also was running a very efficient money machine.
Still, the big question kept coming back: Where did he get all the babies? To extract any more information about that from Quetzal Manor, I'd have to break into an office somewhere, and I wasn't quite up to that yet. I didn't have the nerve of Colonel Jose Alvino Ramos.
"Tell you what, Tara, I think I'm out of here." I was returning the Betacam to its bag. Nothing I'd shot was remotely broadcast quality, but I did have proof of what was going on. My "undercover" investigation was making some headway.
"Okay." She sighed her expression increasingly glazed.
I took one last look around the room, at the row of bassinets, then gave her a parting pat and headed for the exit.
"Look," I said turning back as I reached the door. "Don't say anything to anybody about me being here tonight, okay? Can we just let it be our secret?"
"Sure, whatever." She shrugged absently. Like, why not.
"And Tara, do yourself a favor. Get out of this place."
"But there's nowhere else I can go," she said sadness in her eyes. As I slowly closed the door, the last thing I heard was the sound of the Beethoven sonata dying away.
What a day… and night. As I walked down the hallway carrying the camera bag, I tried to process my new information. I'd just seen some of the most incredibly lovable babies ever. That part of it was a beautiful experience, one that pulled at my heartstrings more strongly than I'd ever imagined something like that could. The part that troubled me was, the babies were so alike, so fair, and… they all could have been perfect siblings for Kevin and Rachel.
No, I told myself, surely that was my imagination. Though they did look amazingly related…
As I moved across the parking lot, I thought I saw a movement in the shadows just inside the entry archway, a quick change in the pattern of dark. Was it Ramala or one of the girls, I wondered, or was it just my paranoia?
Keep walking, I told myself. Lose yourself in the snow. The only way they can stop you from exposing this racket now is to kill you.
When I got back to my car, I gazed up at the imposing turrets of Quetzal Manor one last time, wishing there was enough light to film them, and collected my thoughts. Was the story about the babies being orphans or abandoned children or "whatever" really true? I didn't believe it, not for a minute.
But as Carly Grove said, Alex Goddard could "make it happen." The problem for me was, he wouldn't tell me where he got the children, and nobody I'd talked to so far seemed to want to know, not really.
I wanted to know.