Boyfriend from Hell (21 page)

“And for how long exactly did you know you were arriving?”

“I was just going to have another airport stopover and we wouldn’t get to see each other, but I rearranged things.”

“Stopover for?”

“Stockholm.”

“You’re cracking an international cult that smuggles Volvos.”

“Ronnie—”

“How long is the Stockholm portion?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“Will I see you then?”

“You can see me now, I’m going to be here overnight. I did rearrange things.”

“I can’t see you tonight. We’re having a food binge from Arthur Bryant’s, Kansas City. Would you possibly like to come?”

“Absolutely.”

“You would?”

“Hey, Ronnie, I’m a regular fella.”

Bob arrived bearing his treats, cheerful. He was momentarily deflated when Nancy informed him Ronnie invited Richard Smith. Bob recovered and said, “I’m not going to let that iceman ruin the evening.”

His friends arrived, Mitch Karras, thirty-two, a belly-out, there-is-never-enough-beer guy, five feet eight, in jeans, with Sally Burns, a secretary in the law office where the men worked, thirty, a round, five-foot-three brunette with bangs, a substantial bosom, and a chronic giggle. She came to a dead stop when Richard entered in his blazer, white sports shirt, jeans, loafers. Bob wanted to help Nancy and Ronnie in the kitchen, reheating the food, setting everything out, so he didn’t have to deal with Richard and make small talk, a task left to Mitch and Sally in the living room. Richard asked what they did for a living. Sally defined herself as working in Mitch’s office. Mitch declared he was a bankruptcy lawyer specializing in real estate entities.

“I’ve never met anyone who did that kind of work. What are you working on just now?” Richard asked with the suggestion in his voice that indicated he hadn’t the least interest in the answer.

“A mall in Utica that went south,” Mitch said, and, rather than risk that he was being put down by this good-looking man whom his girlfriend was staring at with an I-can-dump-this-guy-in-no-time look, chose to get the spotlight off himself.

“And you?”

“I’m a writer and a lecturer on cults and on satanism.”

“You are?” Sally said. “Wow!”

“Why don’t you help the ladies?” and Mitch nudged her to get up and she left the room reluctantly.

Mitch determined the man had no interest in him and he had no interest in Richard and they just sat silently until something else happened, the serving of the food.

They feasted on the chicken and ribs, Sally sufficiently diverted that she stopped ogling Richard and resumed giggling. Bob asked them to rate the barbecue with other barbecue and they agreed the barbecue wasn’t very good in New York. Mitch once ordered some mail-order from Georgia that was outstanding and he ate it in New York; that didn’t make it New York barbecue. This was at the top. “Surely the best
take-out
chicken and ribs,” Bob said brightly.

Ronnie observed the way people were eating. Despite their care, food stains were getting on clothing; not so with Richard, who ate without a mishap. Richard Smith, refined in every setting, even while eating barbecue, recalled to her the unflappable WASPs in the John Cheever short stories she read in college.

They went from the merits of their barbecue to general small talk and eventually to the war in Iraq and the left versus the right, all the while Richard choosing not to contribute. He didn’t ignore the participants, his eyes followed the speakers, he had nothing to say. At one point Ronnie asked, “What do you think, Richard?” to include him and also curious as to what he did think and he answered, “I’m just interested in what the others are saying.”

Not an admirer of Richard’s, Bob was feeling competitive with him because of Richard’s very silence; it appeared he wasn’t participating because the talk was beneath his consideration.

“Richard, you’ve been pretty quiet,” Bob said.

“I enjoy hearing you all.”

“This isn’t exactly for your enjoyment.”

“Bob!” Ronnie said in a reprimand.

“Nothing here appeals to your intellect?” Bob continued, undeterred.

“I’m not looking for an argument.”

Richard had a slight smile on his face and this had been his expression for some time, infuriating Bob, certain Richard was patronizing them.

“Waiting for more information to reach you up there? Did I get that right?” Bob said, contentiously.

The smile on Richard’s face vanished.

“There’s a trivial quality to your little discussion, as though it really matters,” Richard said in a superior tone of voice and continued in that tone. “The expression ‘permanent government’ comes to mind, the idea that whatever the party in power, a standing bureaucracy still exists; the functionaries in governmental agencies, the countless decisions made by people you never hear of, sometimes small decisions in the governmental scheme of things that affect some people’s lives more than anything accomplished by elected officials on the left or the right, the grinding, relentless, compartmentalized apparatus, sitting there beneath whoever is president like a disembodied heart pumping, and here’s what you don’t accommodate in your sincere discussion of the political scene,” he said with bite verging on contempt. “If you step back far enough so that you’re not looking at an individual election or even the time of a party in power, you would see this landscape that so interests you is nothing more than the ‘permanent politics’ of a nation, and it grinds on, whoever the players, with overlapping alliances and allegiances so that you get individual companies and individuals at companies contributing to both parties at the same time, and doesn’t that tell you something about the sameness of the so-called opposing forces? And you get cyclical wars that fall on the watch of either of the major parties—Vietnam was an elective war and that was the Democrats, Iraq is an elective war and that’s the Republicans. But there’s another vantage point, out there, farther out, the perspective you might have if you were in space observing the essence of the blue, milky orb sitting in the vast universe, and you might, if you happened to have the imagination, recognize the larger, fundamental issue is not who is president of the United States, or which party is in power, but the larger, infinitely larger, conflict between God and Satan, the one a prior power, the other a counterpower, both creating consequences from the belief of people in their powers, and that conflict is what determines ultimately lives lived, the quality of those lives, the fate of those lives, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, nation to nation, with people more affected by the great, nearly unimaginable conflict between the light of God and countervailing darkness of Satan than by your banal politics. God and Satan. Now there’s a conflict that interests me, pal.”

Seething, Bob went into the kitchen and Mitch also went in to help as people scurried about, ill at ease with the tension. Nancy took Ronnie aside in Ronnie’s bedroom.

“We were supposed to have a fun evening. That was almost violent, what he did to Bob. Bob was foolish, he baited him. Still—”

“I know. Could you bring Bob in? I want to apologize.”

Nancy retrieved Bob, who was still furious.

“I’m very sorry. He talks … professionally. He’s an authority and it looks like he doesn’t have that integrated into his personal life very well.”

“I’ll say. Ronnie, only my affection for you, and possible criminal proceedings, prevented me from punching him out.”

Mitch and Sally left, Nancy and Bob withdrew to Nancy’s room, and Ronnie came in to Richard in the living room.

“That was astonishingly rude. Are you so undersocialized you have to obliterate somebody like that?”

“I should’ve just kept quiet.”

“Keeping quiet is how we got there. Not participating is condescension and people were feeling it.”

“I’m like a racehorse. Put me on the track and I run. He got into me, the bell went off, and I ran. I hope I didn’t get you in trouble with these people.”

“These people are my friends. Nancy and Bob love me. I’m willing to bet they don’t love
you.”

“I was making a point that seemed to have gotten lost in the personal drama. I believe there is a greater struggle than anything on the political scene.”

“I got the point, Richard. With people in a room, you don’t have to lecture. There’s something called being conversational if you’re in a conversation.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“I sure am, Professor.”

She was inclined to cap the night, send him home. Richard’s superior, competitive attitude was a pin in the balloon of Bob’s party, and yet Richard would be gone the following day, she had not seen him in a while, she wouldn’t see him for another two weeks, and she left with him. She had to have his hands, his lips on her, she had to have him inside her.

I
F HE REARRANGED HIS
schedule to include seeing her when he was going to be between cities, if he exhibited concern for her, to not allow gaps of time to intrude so blatantly on their relationship that they reached a tip point, if he wanted, perhaps needed, to be with her and would be back in New York in a couple of weeks and this was a bonus, a chance to steal time together that he went out of his way to arrange, then this was probably not the time for a major confrontation, not after they went back to his apartment and she spent the night followed by breakfast in their place, in their little morning-after ritual. She could see an argument being made that having a place that was theirs for breakfast was romantic, even an ordinary coffee shop, the idea of it was romantic; except he was so impossible with Bob that she was still annoyed with him the next day and not inclined to let him go off to Stockholm with his smile and his blazer without extracting some solid information.

“You’ll be back—”

“In two weeks.”

“And why exactly are you going?”

“There’s a new Internet magazine called
Behavior.
Doing a piece on a man named Piers Larssen, a behavioral scientist. He’s been studying whether there might be a genetic predilection toward cult participation, examining people who gravitated to cults, their ancestors, and the ancestors’ behavior. Sounds a little dicey to me, but he has a lot of data, and wants me to meet with people—”

“And after that, you’ll be traveling to where, for how long? Just curious. I would like to book my fall season, figure out how available I am.”

“I would never presume, given the way I travel, to expect an exclusive relationship, Ronnie.”

“You’d expect me to sleep around?”

“I don’t mean that.”

“Oh, then it’s about
you
sleeping around? Should we talk about that, whether my sleeping with you in any way means you should only be sleeping with me. Or is that something I shouldn’t presume?”

“You’re still angry about last night.”

“I don’t see where last night is what we’re talking about.”

“What I’m saying is I just wouldn’t presume anything for myself about your exclusivity to me—at least until now.”

“And what does ‘at least until now’ mean?”

“This is a little premature, but when I’m done with this piece, which should be a little after Labor Day, I’m pretty sure I’m doing a new book for Antoine. Not on the Munich cult. Something else entirely. It would need some travel, here and there around the States, but I’d be writing it
in
New York and I’d just be here much, much more of the time.”

“Really? Richard Smith settles down, more or less.”

“That’s right.”

“And what’s the subject of this book?”

“Satanic ritual abuse. The conspiracy theories. The known facts. Is there a network? What does exist? There’s a slight, only a slight bit of an overlap with material you might cover, but this is the whole ball of wax on whether people are out there, or under there, allied in secret groups, looking to take over our children, sexually abusing them in cult rituals, spreading their word, looking to move in on our institutions, as some of these theories claim.”

“A little sensational for you, isn’t it?”

“Let’s say it’s a bit more box office than I usually go for, but if the conspiracy theorists are sizable in number, and I suspect they are, then it’s a major subject that’s been operating sub rosa. And if there’s nothing there, then I get to write about why the conspiracy theories got started in the first place, what need it fulfilled, what kind of people believed in them.”

“Sounds like you have it either way; a conspiracy exists and this is it, or it doesn’t, and this is why people thought it did. I do like the writing in New York part.”

“So do I. By the way, I’m sending Bob a bottle of excellent cognac with an apology.”

“Okay.”

“I may turn out to be an all-around good guy, after all,” and he smiled, handsomely; the best-looking man in any restaurant he walked into was the best-looking man in a neighborhood coffee shop at nine in the morning.

The detectives continued to work the list of cult members, looking for any possibility that could possibly lead to a possibility. Mike Gabler, a former cult member who lived on West 139th Street, had been arrested on a charge of spousal abuse. His wife claimed he tried to choke her in the middle of an argument, a charge she later dropped. This was a flag to the detectives; Cummings was strangled, this member of the cult choked his wife; they weren’t getting any better connections to the crime.

Carter and Greenberg buzzed on the intercom of a three-story walk-up and after an unintelligible exchange over broken wires, walked up to the top floor. A hulking man, late thirties, six feet tall, nearly three hundred pounds, in a filthy Belle’s Auto Repair work shirt and filthier jeans, with unruly blond hair, massive neck, tattoos up and down his arms, was standing at the door when they came to the landing.

“You buzz me?”

“Mr. Gabler?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Police department,” and Carter flashed his badge.

“She dropped the charges. Don’t you people check?”

“This isn’t about your wife,” Carter said.

“Ex-wife. We’re getting a divorce.”

“This is about Randall Cummings.”