Radiomen (23 page)

When I woke up a few hours later, there was a moment when I couldn’t recall whether I had to go to work or not. I felt exhausted and groggy, and was greatly relieved to finally remember that this was one of my days off this week.

I had breakfast, fed the dog and then took him for a walk. I had some qualms about leaving the apartment, but I had to get over my reluctance because the dog had to go out. He exhibited no such hesitation but patiently waited by the door for his collar and leash to be put on, as usual.

Outside, I noted that the truck that had been hiding in the alley last night was gone and so were the men who had helped me. In the light of day, everything that had happened seemed unreal. I wanted to go on feeling that way, to compartmentalize enough to not think about last night, but I wasn’t very successful. When I returned to my apartment, I finally tried going back to sleep for a while, doing my best to block out not only unwelcome thoughts but also the noise of a weekday morning in automobile alley. Today, in particular, it sounded like somebody was deliberately grinding the gears of a dozen rust buckets right outside my window, or crunching up cars in some evil car-killing machine.

I did feel a little better when I woke up again in the afternoon. I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, thinking about what I should do. Digitaria watched me, with his head tilted to the side.

Finally, I picked up the phone and called Jack. “So listen,” I said, “what are your plans for tonight?”

“The usual,” he said. “I have to go on the air later, so there’s stuff I need to go over. I’ve got an ex-navy fighter pilot who says he was tailed by UFOs a couple of times when he was doing bombing runs over North Vietnam.”

“Can you reschedule him? Play a tape or something?” I said. “I mean, what difference does it make? They’ve already fired you. You’ll be gone in a couple of weeks.”

On the other end of the phone, Jack was silent for a few minutes. Finally, he said, “Okay, Laurie. Why don’t you tell me what’s happened now?”

And so I did.

~XII~

“I
still can’t believe he actually called you,” Jack said. “Raymond Gilmartin doesn’t talk to actual
people
. Supposedly the only human beings who see him live and in living color are the celebrities. The Ted Merrill types. The hoi polloi only get to see taped messages from him now and then.”

“Well, it should be an interesting visit,” I replied.

“And you’ll really bring the dog.”

“He suggested it.”

“Well, I wish someone had suggested to me that I bring some sort of weapon. Or maybe at least left a note behind—you know, the kind of thing that says, ‘If I don’t come back, look for DNA evidence at the Blue Awareness Center on Riverside Drive.’ ”

“We do have a weapon,” I said, patting the dog’s head. We were in Jack’s car, just passing over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, and Digitaria was sitting next to me on the passenger seat. He was looking out the window, his dark eyes fixed on the passing scenery blurring into the summer twilight. “He’s already got two bad guys to his credit.”

Jack frowned. “I thought he needed some help.”

“He never stopped fighting,” I said. “It was really something to see.”

Jack and I both fell silent then. He concentrated on navigating the river of traffic and I tried to make myself as still as the dog was now, just watching the other cars rush along beside us, the lights coming on in the tall apartment buildings along the east side of Manhattan. I had no idea what was going to happen tonight but I had a feeling that cultivating an inner stillness would be helpful. Maybe that was some old hippie idea still rattling around in my head or something I’d heard recommended on some TV program about creating a better you. Either way, given the circumstances, it seemed like a useful thing to do.

It took almost as long to get crosstown from the east side to the west as it had to drive all the way from my place in Queens, where Jack had picked me up, to Manhattan. Once we reached Riverside Drive, we started looking for the address Gilmartin had given me, which turned out to be a townhouse on a quiet, curving block facing the Hudson. Miraculously, we found a place to park just a block away. Then we walked back to the townhouse, a four-story edifice of white stone with a columned portico. There was a brass plaque on the gate that barred entrance to the walkway leading to the massive front door. The plaque had no name on it, just the street address.

I pushed the button on a nearby buzzer, announced who I was, and shortly, Jack and I were let in. The front door was opened for us by a pleasant-looking young woman dressed in the kind of fashionable suit and slacks that anyone her age would have worn in any business office anywhere in the city. She led us to an elevator—an old-fashioned contraption with velvety wallpaper that barely held the three of us, plus the dog—which we exited on the top floor. As we walked down a carpeted hallway, our guide made small talk, telling us that the building had been converted from a gilded-age private home to an embassy for one of the Central American nations, which had sold it ten years ago when it had been converted yet again to serve as the New York center of the Blue Awareness; there were similar headquarters in Los Angeles and Miami. This particular building had offices, conference rooms, and a large auditorium on the first floor where seminars were sometimes held. Tonight, she said, there were no events on the schedule, but a number of staff members, like herself, were working late. And of course, she said, Raymond and his assistants were always here until all hours. There was, she continued cheerfully, always so much work to be done.

“Sure,” Jack whispered to me, when she moved a few steps ahead of us to open the door to a room at the end of hallway, “lives to be ruined, plots to be plotted . . .”

I put my hand on his arm, which I hoped he read as a signal to cut out the sarcastic remarks. I was still trying to stay in my zone of stillness; I didn’t trust myself not to have an instant reaction of hostility to anything Raymond Gilmartin had to say, but that wasn’t what I wanted. The instinct that had warned me to quiet myself in the car was now telling me to be smart about this encounter. I wasn’t at all sure what Raymond Gilmartin wanted from me, but I didn’t think I would find out by being antagonistic.

The young woman opened a door, ushered us into an office and then left us alone. Jack and I were now standing in a large room that had tall windows curtained with heavy fabric in a deep purple color. That was the only vaguely magisterial characteristic about the décor, which was otherwise very businesslike. There was a wide desk that held a computer with two screens, a leather couch, some chairs, a simple area rug on the floor bordered in the same purple as the drapes, a low coffee table that held a silver carafe on a tray along with half a dozen water glasses. Bookshelves lined one entire wall; I walked over to look at the titles and saw that several shelves were taken up by Howard Gilmartin’s novels and nonfiction writings. The majority of the other volumes focused on a host of esoteric subjects including spiritualism, mysticism, time travel, alien abduction, reincarnation, Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife and the complete works of Edgar Cayce. If these were really Raymond Gilmartin’s books, he was apparently interested in ideas that were outside the boundaries of his own religion, which I thought was somewhat surprising. In fact, the selection of books could have served as resource material for Jack’s nightly lineup of guests. I said as much to him, but he didn’t seem to like the comparison.

We were only in the office for a short time before the door opened again and Raymond Gilmartin entered the room. Another surprise—he was alone. I had expected a retinue: lawyers, bodyguards, some entourage of hangers-on. But there was no one. I also expected him to seat himself behind his imposing desk but, instead, he walked over to the couch and gestured for us to join him in this more informal part of the room.

As we arranged ourselves in the chairs and the dog settled himself against my leg, I had a moment to study the leader of the Blue Awareness. He was, I thought, in his midforties, somewhere near my age. He was thin, blade-like in his movements, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a serious demeanor. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, with a matching tie. He struck me immediately as a man without humor, an individual who exuded a sense of great calm when in reality, inside himself he could not rest. I had been feeling so edgy myself lately that perhaps I was simply identifying someone who was in the same state—although certainly, he had a great deal to do with my uneasiness, while I couldn’t imagine that I had any influence on his.

He poured us all a glass of water and then sat back against the couch. “I appreciate your coming here,” he said to me. And then he added, “I see you’ve brought a friend.”

“You know Jack Shepherd,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“Sure you do,” Jack said, with mock cheerfulness. “I’m the guy whose life you’re trying so hard to ruin.”

Gilmartin frowned. “Why would I do that?”

“I have a radio show,
Up All Night
. At least I did, until your company bought out my distributor. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately and they’ve been telling on you.”

“I can’t imagine what there is to tell,” Gilmartin said. His voice was measured, calm.

Jack wagged his finger at Gilmartin. “Oh, come on now. You people do some pretty crazy stuff. You rough up members who try to leave; sometimes, I hear, you kidnap them and keep them locked up in some reeducation camp out in New Mexico. You encourage Awares to separate from even close family who won’t join your group. You send members’ children to special schools where you teach them that everything every normal school teaches is false doctrine and only Awares know the truth about the world, which is that we’re all asleep, we believe in false prophets, the only real one being your father, Howard, who is . . . what? What is it that you people say about him? Oh yes, he’s sailing around the world solo, writing a new book, expanding on Awareness Doctrine even though he would be way over one hundred years old now. He must be one hale and hearty guy. And he’s due back soon, I hear, along with the aliens who are our true ancestors, the shadow men from beyond our universe . . .”

Gilmartin waved his hand, as if he were bored. “That’s enough, don’t you think? You don’t know anything about us. Or about me or my father. In any case,” he continued, “I don’t remember inviting you. So perhaps you might temper your behavior just a bit.”

I actually agreed with him. Jack’s outburst had taken me completely by surprise. I knew he was angry at Gilmartin, but it had never occurred to me that he would behave like this. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. If anything, I had expected him to be the voice of reason here, the grown-up, but that wasn’t how things were going. And this wasn’t at all how I wanted the meeting to begin.

But Jack stayed on the same track. After Gilmartin’s admonition, he seemed to rear back, as if he had been struck. “Listen, you jerk . . .”

“What is it you want?” I asked Gilmartin, deliberately interrupting Jack. If this meeting devolved into some kind of name-calling fiesta, I wasn’t going to learn anything I needed to know in order to get my life back to some semblance of what it had been before all this craziness started. “You’ve got my radio and the box my uncle built,” I reminded him. “Let’s just not pretend that you don’t. The horn of plenty antenna is long gone as far as I know, so I couldn’t give it to you even if I had it. There’s nothing else that connects us, so why do you keep after me? I mean, you had a pair of goons try to take my dog away from me last night. What were you going to do? Try to trade him back to me for the antenna? I told Ravenette that I don’t have it. You’re going to have to believe me because it’s the truth.”

“I would never have told anyone to do anything that would harm that dog,” Gilmartin said.

“Oh really? Two men in ski goggles came out of a van and tried to grab him.”

“That had nothing to do with me.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. There were a few things I could do at this point: get angry, like Jack; burst into tears, which part of me felt like doing; or keep going round and round with accusations and denials. None of these was a useful path to follow; none would get me any relief. So I tried something else, I tried, simply, to be human.

“Mr. Gilmartin,” I began . . .

“Raymond.”

“Okay, Raymond—just tell me how to make all this stop. How we can arrange things so you go your way and I go mine. I can’t live my life waiting for the next crazy thing to happen.”

“No, of course not,” Gilmartin said. He took a sip of water and then leaned forward. “And so you see, there is something that connects us—because we believe, as you so clearly do, that no one’s life should be chaotic and unpredictable. Once we understand our true nature and devote ourselves to getting closer to it, everything improves. Our work, our relationships . . .”

“I guess my true nature is to be a pain in the ass,” Jack said, unable to keep quiet any longer. Then he pointed at me. “And don’t think this one is a pushover, either. Still waters run deep and all that.”

I was actually beginning to find Jack annoying, and to feel that he was working against me. I knew he probably couldn’t help himself for behaving the way he was and it was probably my own lack of empathy that hadn’t permitted me—perhaps until this moment—to really understand the depth of his fury. Perhaps there were other factors at work, too, but he was still reeling from being forced off the air. It didn’t matter that he had a deal in place to relocate his show; he had been bested by people he didn’t like—and didn’t respect—and because of that, he couldn’t contain his anger.

Jack’s remark, however, had no effect on Gilmartin. He simply ignored him and continued to address himself only to me. His next comment, though, involved the other member of our little visitors group. “Your dog,” he said. “He is interesting looking. A little darker colored than they usually are. Am I right? I mean, he is a Dogon dog, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I replied. I was surprised that he had identified Digitaria’s origins. “How did you know?”