Flicker (61 page)

“How do you know that?” Sharkey asked in great surprise.

“You've been there,” I reminded him. “Didn't you notice?”

“Well, see, they sort of met me in the parking lot. I didn't get to see too much of the place.”

“Believe me. I visited one of their branches in Europe. Their world headquarters as a matter of fact. Grim was the word. So while I think the T-shirt is darling, it might not go over very well with the nuns and priests. You do want to make the right impression.”

Jeanette looked worried. “But I have nothing else.”

I looked across at Sharkey. “Do you have anything in the car she might wear?”

“Dig around under the seat there,” Sharkey told Jeanette. “You might find something.”

And so she did. A treasure trove of ratty old clothes, mostly female, mostly underwear, bras, panties, slips, some ominous-looking leather garments … perhaps a decade's worth of Sharkey's romantic trophies. Finally, among the lingerie, Jeanette found a small, frilly, but reasonably tasteful blouse. It was none too clean, but she judged she could make do with it. Not bothering to ask me to turn around, she tugged the T-shirt over her head, then paused to ask, “Do you think I will need …?” She had fished up a rumpled brassiere and was dangling it fastidiously before me at arm's length like a small dead animal. She was doing quite nicely without one at the moment.

“I think not,” I answered, noting the garment's grubbiness. Relieved, she let it drop and proceeded to pull on the salvaged top.

Sharkey, having to catch what he could of Jeanette's quick change in the rearview mirror while he negotiated the twisting road, reached across the seat to give me a dig in the thigh. “So you two know each other
very
well.”

The road east from the coast highway switchbacked up steep ravines taking us farther and farther from the beach. Distantly, between the hills, we still caught peekaboo views of the cool Pacific, but the motionless air around us now crackled in the bone-dry September heat. The sun had crisped the scrub and brush into tawny brown tinder that looked eager to burn at the least excuse. The winding road finally produced a signpost that read “St. James the Martyr School” and pointed the way into a small, eucalyptus-lined arroyo. Some three
miles more of snaky road brought us to a sturdy, wire-mesh gate with the school's name above it. Below the name, in small letters, were the words “Founded by the Holy Order of the Orphans of the Storm, 1923.” Below that, a small plaque read “Black Bird Productions.”

There was an intercom box mounted on the fence. I left the car to press a button, got a clipped response from a male voice, identified myself, and, at the buzzer, pushed open the gate. We followed a gravel road around and down to where it ended in a small parking lot beside a low redwood building. “This is where I met Dunkle last time I was up here,” Sharkey said. “Never got any farther in.”

A security guard looked out a window and frowned. “I heard there were two people comin',” he observed gruffly.

“I brought my lady friend,” I said.

He eyed us disapprovingly, but waved us out of the car. “I'll call ahead and let ‘em know in the big house.” Then he gestured to two children, a boy and a girl—ten-year-olds, I would guess—who were waiting for us in the lot. Each was leading a horse, one spotted, the other chestnut. As we left the car, Sharkey called my attention to the fact that we were sharing the lot with a rather unlikely vehicle: a dusty black van decorated on sides and back with garishly painted mushroom explosions. Over the paintings lay a barely decipherable psychedelic script that I made out to read ENBC. “Check that!” Sharkey said, clearly very impressed by what he saw. When I signaled ignorance, he explained, as if I should know, “It's the Stinks. That's their buggy.”

Jeanette looked to me for clarification but Sharkey answered. “The Extinction Now Boys Choir. Real biggies. What're they doing here?”

The two children motioned us to follow them. Leading their horses, they took us down a dirt bridle path.

“Are you pupils here?” I asked them as they led us off.

“Yes, sir,” the little boy answered shyly and then said nothing more.

The two were dressed alike. They wore broad-brimmed straw hats, gray shorts, and white T-shirts. Above the breast pocket their tops bore a small, now familiar, emblem: the Maltese cross. Their lightweight uniforms were a merciful concession to the heat. The costume I'd seen in Zurich would have been oppressive under this sun. But while their dress was different, their demeanor displayed the same disciplined cheerlessness. They trudged beside us in silence, eyes down, their expression almost morose.

After several moments, I asked, “Do you study movies?”

The girl said, “He does,” nodding at her companion.

“What about you?” She wagged her head. “No movies? What then?”

After a pause, “Physics,” she said.

“Physics? They teach that too at the school?”

“Only basic,” she answered. “For advanced, I have to go to Copenhagen.”

“And when is that?”

“Two years yet.”

The children were leading us toward a shaded cluster of buildings behind a high stake fence. Beyond that in the distance, there was a large, rambling redwood house and a barn. Still farther up the hillside, I could see a few cattle grazing and some children dressed the same as our guides, riding or walking horses. The overall feeling of the place was ranchlike, so very different from Zurich.

“Is this all there is to the school?” I asked.

“The school's over there,” the boy said. He gestured toward the hills east of us. “You have to ride to get there.”

“And what's this?” I asked, indicating the buildings ahead.

“That's the guest house,” the boy said, pointing to the structures behind the stake fence. “And that's the studio.” He pointed at the more distant house and barn. “It belongs to Simon.”

“All that just for Simon?”

“So he can make his movies.”

“That's a lot of space for just one pupil, isn't it?”

They both looked up at me, their faces wearing the same astonished expression. “Simon's not a pupil,” the girl said. “He's a prophet.”

“A prophet?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

The girl shrugged, as if there was nothing more she could add. “A prophet …”

Sharkey gave me a skeptical look. Under his breath, he murmured, “I don't think his flicks make a profit.”

Ahead, where the path branched, there was an open stone structure surrounded by flowers. It looked like a wayside chapel. Inside stood a piece of marble sculpture. A sign beside the chapel pointed toward the right to “St. James the Martyr School” and left to “Administration and Guest House.” We paused to view the sculpture before taking the left fork. It was a pseudomannerist rendering of a three-man group, the sort of kitschy imitation of Michelangelo one might expect to see at Forest Lawn. If the style was unimpressive, the subject
matter was plain repulsive. The central figure was a bearded man on his knees. He was stripped to a loincloth, revealing an excessively muscular torso covered with welts from a terrible scourging. The only other item he wore was a large Maltese cross hung about his neck. The man's hands were bound behind him; there was a chain fastened to a manacle at his throat. Two masked and robed figures huddled near him. One held the chain, the other was forcing a brand down upon the man's forehead: the letter X burned deep into the brow. The kneeling man's face was twisted in pain.

“Wow!” Sharkey said. “Here's a man with real problems. What's it all about?”

The girl answered, “It's St. James. His martyrdom.”

“Who are the two mean guys?” Sharkey asked.

“Inquisitors.”

“Heavy,” Sharkey commented. “Never wanna get in trouble with Inquisitors.”

Jeanette remembered enough of her Catholic schooling to ask, “But St. James, he was stoned to death, no? Long before there was the Inquisition.”

The girl wagged her head. “Not that St. James.”

“Then which?”

“St. James of Molay.”

Sharkey picked up on the name at once. “Hey, that's the Templars' main man.”

“Grand Master of the order, in fact,” I added. I recalled coming across the man years before in a book Sharkey had once lent me. “Condemned for heresy.”

“Then he cannot be a saint,” Jeanette protested.

“I told you, they aren't Catholics.”

At the base of the statue was a phrase Gothic-lettered in medieval French. Jeanette worked out the translation.

Living or dead, we belong to the Lord.
Glorious be the victors, happy the martyrs!

She gave a last wincing glance at the sculpture before we turned away to follow the children. “It is a hideous thing for children to see.”

I agreed, but I wasn't surprised to find such a work of art on the premises, not after touring the chapel at Zurich. The orphans' taste
ran to atrocity. They were a people whose history was written in their wounds.

Some ten yards farther along toward the guest house, I broke the silence to ask the boy, “Do you help Simon with his movies?”

He said, “Not yet. The senior students get to help him.”

“With the editing and lighting, things like that?”

The boy nodded.

“Do you like Simon's movies?”

“Yes. The parts that teach, I do.”

“Teach about what?”

His voice dropped. “The true God.”

We had reached the fence. Behind it, I heard what sounded like people frolicking in a pool. Laughter and splashing. The boy pushed open the gate, indicating we were to enter, but averting his eyes. Then he and the girl mounted their horses and turned quickly toward the hills. The scene that greeted us behind the fence was hardly what I expected to see at an institution run by the Orphans of the Storm. Attached to a large stone-and-redwood house was a sumptuous cabana that opened out on a huge ice-blue swimming pool. In the water was a gang of boisterous adolescents, three girls and a boy, all of them sporting wild punk hairstyles. They were gushing a stream of obscenities as they splashed and dunked one another. One of the girls was doing without a bathing suit.

“I think I could have worn my T-shirt,” Jeanette whispered to me. I gave her a bewildered shrug.

On the far side of the pool sat a small group of people. One was another punky youngster whose head was sprouting tufts of multicolored hair. Beside him sat a neatly groomed man in his thirties. With them were an older man and woman wearing lightweight versions of the clerical garb I'd seen in Zurich, but without the concealing bonnets. The well-groomed man rose to greet us, going first to Sharkey, who in turn introduced him to me as Len Decker, Simon's agent.

“Oh, hardly that,” Decker corrected him. “Just the school's business manager.”

Decker then introduced us to the older couple he'd been sitting with. The man was Brother Justin, the director of St. James School and chairman of Black Bird Productions. He was stooped and balding with weasely little eyes behind small, square spectacles. Shaking my hand and Jeanette's warmly, he assured us that he was delighted we had come and promptly introduced the woman who had risen to greet
us. Sister Helena, we learned, was mother superior of the orphanage. She was small and intense, wearing her gray hair skinned back severely from her pallid face.

Sharkey, all the while, had been preoccupied eyeing the kid across the pool, who hadn't so much as glanced our way. “Isn't that Bobby Pox?” he asked Decker in an awed whisper. Decker said it was. “Far out!” Sharkey gushed. “I thought that was his van in the lot.” Offering Brother Justin and Sister Helena a quick nod, he rushed us off toward the bored youth as if he were the object of our visit. “It's Bobby Pox, man,” Sharkey announced again, clearly puzzled by my lack of enthusiasm.

I vaguely recognized the name. A rock singer who was doing an effective job of poking his finger in the public eye. Rock was not a world I followed. I couldn't have explained the difference between New Wave, Heavy Metal, Maximum Rock … or which of these variations on witless cacophony Bobby Pox represented. But his notoriety had oozed out of the pop music subculture and penetrated the daily news. I associated him with riots, drug busts, and sundry public outrages. He was the sort of professional juvenile delinquent who was growing steadily more prominent on the youth scene—though now that I saw him up close, I could tell he was obviously well out of his teens, perhaps as far along as his mid-twenties. But then, I might have been deceived about his age by the several jagged scars that blemished his brow and cheeks. Some of these I saw were tattoos, but not all. When we were introduced, he offered neither Sharkey nor me a hand to shake, but only a minimal surly nod. His glance loitered, however, on Jeanette, a gaze of undisguised lust that lingered until I could very nearly feel her blushing beside me.

The people in the pool weren't introduced and showed no interest in our arrival. In due course we learned that the females were “Bobby's girls,” and the youth who was cavorting with them was Bobby's drummer, an entity with lightning bolts tattooed on his cheeks and a phosphorescent Mohawk hairdo. His name was Humper. Just Humper. I had no idea why these people were here. I wished they weren't. Their presence unnerved me. But not Sharkey, who, as proprietor of the Catacombs, had come to regard himself as an honorary teenager. He proceeded to fawn over Bobby Pox as if he might be the Mozart of our time. While he moved in on Pox, I did my best to draw Brother Justin and Sister Helena off to one side, keeping Jeanette close to me.

“I recently visited your headquarters in Zurich,” I told Brother Justin, trying to level my voice just above the racket in the pool.

“Dr. Byx has been in touch with us,” Brother Justin replied. His voice was tinged with a Germanic accent. “We invited you here on his recommendation. He was most impressed with your scholarship.”