Criminal Karma (11 page)

“He’s got lots of things,” she said, moving her slim body closer to Baba and linking her arm through his gorilla appendage.

“Does he have them, too?” I said, nodding at the robed girls.

Her lip curled. “They don’t even know where they are.”

“So he’s got them good.”

Baba didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. His thick-lipped
smile slowly morphed into a frown, like an iron bar being bent by a strongman. In what looked like a warning, he clamped his hand over the girl’s where she held his hairy forearm. His large fingernails were professionally manicured and coated with clear polish. Hers were bitten to the quick.

“Come and see me, my intelligent friend,” he said.

“Why?”

“I can help you.”

“With what?”

“Whatever you need.”

“Like I said before, I’m fine.”

“Come anyway,” he said, unwavering. “We have most pleasant times.” He rolled his eyes up and to the right as he said that, as if looking over his shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was feigning an ecstatic state or indicating the girls behind him.

“Maybe I will.”

He gave me a final nod, heavy as a pail of quarters, and led the blond girl away, south along the boardwalk.

“Ya look like Baby Huey!” Reggie yelled after him.

A guy I hadn’t noticed before who was walking behind the robed girls shot a hard look our way that Reggie didn’t notice. He was dressed in designer jeans and athletic shoes. A short-sleeved black knit shirt was stretched tight across his muscular chest and shoulders. There were India-ink tattoos on his forearms. He reminded me of the inimitable Jimmy Z.

Chavi watched Baba and his entourage as they walked away, with Ozone drifting along in their wake.

“What’s your take on that guy?” I asked Chavi.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. His aura changes, so it’s hard to see. He is either a saint or a devil.”

She went back into her booth and began to spread out her tarot cards on a table draped in red cloth.

Reggie and I walked over to the fire ring, where he flipped the sizzling steaks and poured on Worcestershire sauce.

“I’ll kick his fat rat ass if he’s not careful,” he said.

Two hours later
, Reggie and I descended the wobbly wooden steps in front of the flophouse and walked north along Pacific Avenue. It had been dark for an hour and the neon-lit street was pleasantly lurid as the coast geared up for a Saturday night that would last till dawn on Sunday. Traffic was heavy, with some light horn honking and occasional catcalls and whistles. I just hoped they weren’t whistling at us. Like all picturesque seaside cities, Venice and Santa Monica had a thriving gay community, evidence that homosexual men have good taste in real estate.

We crossed Pacific at Westminster and strolled inland along that quiet residential avenue.

“Whudaya think Baby Huey charges for a wrestling match with one of them chicks in the nightgowns?” Reggie said.

“You think he is pimping them out?”

Reggie gave me the half-exasperated, half-disgusted look. “Get real,” he said. “You know good and well he is.”

“They could be legitimate devotees.”

“Yeah, and I could be the Lone Ranger’s horse, but I’m not.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Just remember, we aren’t going over there to get laid. We are going to try and find out where those diamonds are so we can steal them, fence them, and stuff our pockets full of money.”

At Sixth Street, we went two blocks north to Broadway, also residential, despite its glamorous name. The ashram, a converted Queen Anne mansion, was a block farther inland, at the corner of Broadway and Seventh Street. A fiftyish couple who looked like former hippies who had settled down to some lucrative artistic occupation came around the corner from Seventh and preceded us up the walk to the front door. It was standing open, pouring yellow light into the night.

It was forty-five degrees, cold for Los Angeles, and the foyer was cluttered with jackets and scarves hanging on pegs and piled on wooden benches along the side walls. Dozens of pairs of shoes were lined up beneath the benches. I sat down and pulled off my Reeboks. Reggie grumbled about the custom but took his boots off, too. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he hid them in a corner beneath a red scarf.

“I don’t want anyone heisting them,” he explained.

Beyond the foyer, a wide hallway led to a staircase that went up to the second floor. A narrow hallway beside the staircase continued to the back of the house. To our left as we entered was a small bookstore and gift shop, where half a dozen people, including the prosperous hippies, were milling around, talking and laughing. Next to the shop was a library with closed French doors. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held hundreds of old books. A brown leather couch and two armchairs faced a cold fireplace.

I was still going back and forth in my mind about Baba Raba. When I saw the gowned girls on the boardwalk, I had the same thought as Reggie: temple prostitution, or something in that ZIP code. Many legitimate spiritual teachers have come to America from India, true holy men with more insight into the nature of reality and purpose of human life than a Hilton ballroom packed full of Baptist clergymen or Catholic bishops. But plenty of fakirs have come, too, and some of the good ones have succumbed to corruption in America, whirled up in a tornado of materialistic sensations and temptations that ashram life in India never prepared them for. And the
corruption always seems to center on sex. So the sweet, submissive girls made me suspicious. But now I was having second thoughts.

The Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings had a cozy, spiritually comforting vibe that I recognized from other venerable ashrams I had visited. If Baba was a con man, he was not a fly-by-night. The collection of esoteric books in the library and the energy that hummed in the fiber of the building would have taken years to accumulate.

The meditation room was to our right as we entered. It had probably been the formal living room. Through the open French doors, I saw twenty-five or thirty people who had staked out their spots near the front, sitting with eyes shut on prayer rugs or cushions. One of them was Evelyn Evermore. She was wearing a white designer sweatsuit and had her hair tied back in a ponytail with a red ribbon. She sat in an unstrained lotus position with her spine straight and her shoulders relaxed. Baba Raba or someone else had given her good training. The palms of her lovely hands rested on her knees, thumbs pressed against the outside of her index fingers, other fingers extended upward, forming the
ahamkara mudra
, which counteracts fear and anxiety. I felt a twinge of fear myself at the sight of her, a guilty echo of the botched robbery at Indian Wells, but I was relieved to see her, too, since I didn’t know for sure who had the diamonds.

“Check it out,” Reggie said, nudging me with his elbow. I turned and saw the blond girl coming down the stairs, looking even more desirable than she had on the beach. Her hair was damp as if she had just bathed, and she was dressed in a white robe like the ones the flower girls had worn. As she came toward us down the hallway, it crossed my mind that she might not be wearing anything beneath the robe, an erotic supposition that she confirmed in part when she stooped to pick up a flyer that had fallen on the floor by the library door. The robe, which had buttons from navel to throat, was fastened only halfway up. As she bent gracefully to tidy up the ashram, I had a clear view of two white breasts with small dark nipples.

Glancing up, she caught both me and Reggie looking but didn’t seem to mind too much. She gave us a half smile that was a delicious blend of tolerance and contempt as she brushed past us into the bookstore. I wondered if she had done it on purpose.

“He’ll be down in ten minutes, Ganesha,” she said to a young man who was sitting on a stool behind the cash register, reading a paperback copy of
the Bhagavad Gita. “Let’s close the shop and get everybody into the meditation room.”

“Okay.” He stood up from the stool. “It’s time to go into the meditation room, folks.
Satsang
will begin shortly.”

He was wearing the traditional orange robe of Indian monks that symbolizes the spiritual fire in which all worldly ambitions and attachments have been burnt up. But the longing gaze he bestowed on the girl as she turned away from him made me think a few pesky embers of desire were still glowing somewhere in his tofu-fed frame. As he herded the people out of the shop, the girl locked the cash register and put the key in a drawer behind the counter. Even with her as a distraction, I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t lock the drawer.

“Did you see those nipples?” Reggie cackled in my ear, as the girl moved around the shop, snuffing out candles and turning off the lights. “She better not come close to me in that getup or I’ll be snapping at those things like a trout at a mayfly.” He had gone fishing when he was a Scout, too.

Stepping into the hallway, the girl turned her back to us to close the shop’s glass-paned doors, showing us the shape of her cute little behind through the thin cotton cloth of her robe, giving me unspiritual urges.

Turning around, she looked me in the eye, as if she knew what I was thinking. Her blue irises sparkled and there was a hint of a smile. Two latecomers were taking off their shoes in the foyer. Behind me, someone rang a bell in the meditation room, a single pure note that lingered in the atmosphere like a color wash.

“What’s the routine, babe?” Reggie said, thrusting himself into the situation.

The girl turned her head slightly and gave him a look that would have silenced most men. Reggie not only bore up under it but grinned through his grizzled beard and mustache.

“The routine?” she said, haughty.

“Yeah, we gonna sing hymns or square dance or what?”

“Baba will give a short talk from the Gita and then there will be forty-five minutes of silent meditation.”

“That don’t sound too exciting,” Reggie said. “Why don’t me and you go in the back parlor and you can give me some personal instructions.”

“Hah,” she gave a short, harsh, but not necessarily unfriendly laugh. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“Depends on the bush,” Reggie said.

He got another laugh. Though her features were delicate and she was making an effort to speak in a refined manner, there was something working-class about the girl’s frankness and the way she held her body. She didn’t seem to be offended by Reggie’s crude approach.

“You have to come a couple of times before you get private lessons, pal,” she said.

“How ‘bout if I go out and come back in a couple of times?” Reggie said, lowering his voice to a growl. “That count?”

When the blonde laughed again, I figured Reggie was going to do what he usually did and snag the girl before I had a chance to make a move. Sometimes I hated the guy.

“Whudaya say, babe?” he said, taking a step toward her, as if to crowd her down the hallway. “Can a stranger get some lovin’ in this church?”

“Whoa, big boy,” the girl said, holding her arm straight out and putting her palm against his chest like a running back stiff-arming an opponent. “You can probably get some loving if you play your cards right, but not from me. Is that what you guys are here for?”

“That’s what I’m everywhere for, sweetheart,” Reggie said.

“Yeah, I see that. How about your friend? What’s his story?” She nodded her head sideways, glancing over at me.

“Whudaya mean?” Reggie snapped, disconcerted to feel her attention shifting away from him.

“You two are completely different types,” she said to me. “Why are you here?”

“Baba Raba invited me,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I couldn’t resist.” We were looking into each other’s eyes again and something between us dilated.

“I’m glad,” she said, and I felt a warm glow in my cold heart. Then, as if catching herself, she added indifferently: “Baba will be pleased to see you.”

“Shakti! It is time for
satsang!”
It was the lad in the orange robe, standing in the door of the meditation room. He sounded a little peeved, either because the girl was putting God behind schedule or because she was talking to us instead of sitting beside him on an embroidered cushion.

“Relax, Ganesha,” the girl said. “I’m going to get him right now. And don’t call me Shakti. My name is Mary, same as it’s always been.”

“Baba said you are called Shakti now,” Ganesha whined. “He knows the best name for each of us.”

“You and your friend need to go in and find a seat,” the girl said to me, and then went down the hall toward the staircase. Reggie had been demoted. I was the primary and he was the secondary.

“Hurry up, you two,” Ganesha said to us. “Everyone needs to be seated when Baba comes.”

Reggie bumped the would-be swami with his shoulder as we went past him into the dim room.

“Watch where you’re going,” Ganesha said in an angry whisper.

“You watch it, or I’ll stick one of those candles up your ass!” Reggie said.

The lights had been
dimmed and the air was mystic with the scent of sandalwood incense. The candles Reggie had made reference to were flickering on the altar. I took two small round pillows from a pile in the corner and sat down on them. It had been years since I practiced hatha yoga, but I was still able to contort my legs into a lotus position without actually screaming out loud. Sitting on two pillows took some of the strain off my knees.

“Where’s the chairs?” Reggie asked in a stage whisper after watching me make a pretzel out of myself.

“They don’t use them for meditation,” I said. “Grab a couple of cushions and sit down.”

People around us stirred and cleared their throats, giving us a subtle spiritual signal that we were disturbing them.

Reggie piled up three cushions and plopped down on them, sitting
American Indian–style, with his thick legs crossed but not locked into the lotus position.

Ganesha closed the double doors, which had cloth draped over the glass on the inside, and sat down on the floor by the wall, showing his relative enlightenment by not using a cushion.