“I think I’ll have another drink. Want one?”
She gripped his upper arm to prevent his turning away. “You can’t infiltrate a cult, John. You’re obviously under a lot of stress in your personal life right now. It wouldn’t be safe for someone in your condition. You should take some time off instead. I can write you a medical excuse.”
“Forget it. Don’t need one. Need a drink.”
“You’re forcing me to go over Switzer’s head.”
He laughed. “Too late now, Doc. You’ve already taught me how to infiltrate Earthbound. By the time you get the brass to say or do anything, I’ll be inside that cult, and you—of all people—should know I’ll be untouchable after that.”
She sighed. “Perhaps you’re right. So tell me, what is this all about for you, really? Why infiltrate Earthbound yourself? Need to run away from your problems for a while? Is that it?”
“Maybe that’s part of it.”
“What else, then? What else are you after?”
“Daryl Finck.”
John vanished instantly and Berkeley flooded back when a small splash of hot coffee landed on the tabletop near Marilyn’s elbow. She glanced up. A short, acne-scarred redhead stared down at her. Twenty or so. Embroidered blue jeans with no belt and a green tank top with no bra, despite drooping, water balloon breasts.
“Crowded,” the young woman said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Go ahead.” Marilyn returned to her newspaper.
“My name’s Aura, by the way. Hey, love your button!” She meant the one pinned to the strap of Marilyn’s purse, the one saying:
I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur
. “Totally righteous!”
Marilyn folded up her newspaper, at the same time unleashing her most welcoming smile.
The eyes are a dead giveaway
, she thought. Glassy and protuberant, they threatened to pop right out of the poor girl’s head, a disturbing effect of malnutrition and sleep deprivation and, for the moment, over-acting, because it was Aura’s job to seem enthralled with her new acquaintance.
Thirty minutes later, following an animated discussion on mink farms and baby seal hunting and how pretty Marilyn was and how much Aura admired Greenpeace and how smart Marilyn was and the cute guy with the earring sitting in the corner and how funny Marilyn was and environmental deforestation and how
real
Marilyn was, Aura invited her to a big cook-out that evening in Marin County, an event to raise environmental consciousness.
“Starts in just an hour, in fact!” Aura said.
Marilyn pretended she had other plans, but when Aura persisted, agreed to go. She phoned SFPD from the restroom before dumping her cellular in the trash—as it didn’t fit the homeless character she was playing—and returning to Aura at their table.
Together, they walked outdoors, into the waning California sunshine, and turned east toward Derby Street, where Aura’s jeep awaited. The predator prattled on about an ozone hole over Antarctica, while Marilyn’s heart threatened to pound a hole through her chest.
With its convertible top down, the jeep sped across the Golden Gate Bridge, moving north. The steady roar of wind silenced all conversation. From the passenger seat, Marilyn fixed her gaze on the dying sun and a sky blushing the color of salmon.
Having arranged to be found by the cult—seemingly plucked from the streets of Berkeley—she would not fall under suspicion, but with John Richetti the situation might be different. He in no way resembled a typical cult recruitment target, which had forced him to take the more direct, but more suspicious approach, by attending a monthly clean energy fair in San Rafael run by Earthbound not only to sell products to environmentally conscious yuppies, but also to troll for new recruits. It was Saturday now, the day of the fair, and she wondered how John was progressing.
What if he fails? And I end up inside this cult alone? We never planned for that.
Damn that Captain Switzer for rushing into this operation! For standing by John Richetti!
The jeep crossed the bridge into the upscale hippie haven of Marin County and climbed toward a pair of slate gray traffic tunnels dug side-by-side into the face of a mountain. Twin psychedelic rainbows, one painted above each opening, formed a pair of zany eyebrows that seemed to cajole the arriving travelers to leave their hearts in the 1960’s.
Half an hour later, Aura turned the jeep into Point Reyes National Seashore, rolling to a stop in the Bear Valley Trailhead parking lot. About two-dozen vehicles were scattered about, including a pair of pavement-crunching RVs. Aura clicked open her door.
“Campsite’s a short hike from here.”
“Oh,” Marilyn said, despite knowing instantly that she’d been fibbed to. She’d hiked Point Reyes many times before and knew the nearest campsite—the nearest sanctioned one, at least—to be a mile away. She knew too of another parking lot much closer to it.
The mile-long hike had to be the opening stratagem in what would be Aura’s secret campaign to discourage Marilyn from leaving the cook-out early. A long, arduous journey by foot would make the idea of leaving early seem foolish to the average person. “You might as well stay,” Aura would say. “You’ve come all this way.”
It was a common gambit cults used in trying to extend the exposure of the people lured to their events. The intent was to take a full swing at each innocent head. The Moonies held parties in which guests were asked to remove their shoes before entering the house. The purpose of removing the shoes had less to do with Asian custom—the cult’s leader hailing from Korea—and more to do with preventing hasty retreats.
Aura and Marilyn left the Bear Valley Trail for the gently ascending Sky Trail, where bay trees soon arched above their heads. The leaves smelled wonderful, some of nature’s pot-pourri.
“I like this trail,” she said.
“So do I,” Aura said. “Hiking’s the best. Don’t you just love it? Don’t you?”
“Yes, love it.” For the time being, she would find Aura effusively agreeable, no matter what Marilyn herself had to say. Aura would be mirroring her interests and attitudes as closely as possible, trying to establish a strong rapport, if not preternatural communion.
Half a mile into their hike, beneath the fading gleams of twilight, a white-capped ocean bay winked at them through a break in the trees. They emerged from the forest into the tall grass of a rolling meadow roughly the size and shape of a soccer field. About ninety yards ahead, in a flat corner of the meadow, stood a colony of tents.
“Here we are at last!” Aura said. Approximately thirty tents congregated at the site, canvass sculptures of variegated size and geometric shape: dome tents, cabin tents, umbrella tents, A-frames. Their only uniformity was in their color, each environmentally pleasing, an inconspicuous gray, tan, or green.
Marilyn tried estimating the number of people at the site, but it wasn’t easy. Bodies milled constantly between and amongst the tents, appearing, disappearing, re-appearing. She put the number at somewhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred.
As Aura and Marilyn neared, ten or twelve men and women playing Frisbee on the outskirts of the colony ceased their game and formed a giddy welcoming committee, bounding out to meet them in the wavy, Chardonnay-colored grass.
“Hi, Aura,” said a shirtless young man wearing cut-off jeans and a layer of sweat. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Marilyn!” Aura said.
“Hi, Marilyn!” said the group, one after another.
“Hi,” she said, adding a shy little wave. The greeting ceremony continued with Aura introducing each of them individually to Marilyn by name.
“Hey, love your button!” said Andrew, the stocky one. He pointed to the strap of her purse. “I’d rather go naked than wear fur too.” His comments—every syllable, it seemed—echoed from the mouths of the others.
The cult’s focus on her button, she knew, would continue unabated for the rest of the evening. The reason was due to a classic mind persuasion technique known as
love-bombing
. Find anything remotely unique about the potential cult recruit and say how much you love it. Meanwhile, hang on every word. Agree with anything and everything the potential recruit says, no matter how disagreeable. Smile, touch, even caress—if you think you can get away with it.
Love-bombing exploited the reality that people take pleasure from positive reinforcement of any kind, no matter how insipid.
“C’mon,” Aura said to Marilyn, patting her shoulder. “Let’s meet some more people.”
On cue, the Frisbee tossers bounded back to their positions in the field, waving and shouting energetic farewells. Aura and Marilyn waved back.
In the center of the camp site, tents formed a rough circle around a huge, crackling fire pit, where meat-less fare simmered, boiled or barbecued. Chili and cilantro tickled the air.
The spot was crowded, and the people mingled as if at a cocktail party, only blue jeans, hemp shirts, and hiking boots were the preferred attire, and drinks arrived in brown paper cups. Aura introduced Marilyn to more friends in quick succession.
“Love your button!” she continued to hear—almost without exception.
“I’d rather wear fur than hear one more person tell me that,” Marilyn said finally, slipping a bit out of character.
“You’re funny,” Aura said, beaming.
Of course you’d say that
, she thought.
You’d say the same thing if I spit on your face
.
Darkness fell, bamboo torches flickered to life, and a snaking line formed for dinner. From her place in the queue, Marilyn spied John Richetti at the food table, filling a plate. When he was done, he turned and strode in her direction. He was two or three days unshaven, his scalp hair unwashed for at least as long. Chewing tobacco bulged one cheek. He wore the blue denim, black leather, and steel chain accoutrements of a biker, and that pot belly really sold the disguise.
As he passed by her without a glance she noticed a tattoo on one of his flabby biceps muscles—a large heart broken in two, above the word,
Susan
. Was the marking fresh or old? Permanent or temporary? Who was Susan?
“You know him?” Aura asked when Marilyn turned back around.
“Who?”
“The biker you were staring at.”
“Oh, no!” she said. “I, uh, just liked his tattoo.”
Playing the part of someone else felt just as freeing as he’d remembered it from the old days, John thought. He barely missed his ciggies and his scotch. He didn’t miss himself much either.
He sat cross-legged on the ground, eating beside Ben, a goateed cult member about half his age, and his personal handler for the evening, that was clear by now. Nearby, he could see the crudely shorn head of the psychologist.
She’d made it this far. But if she kept pulling rank amateur moves, like gawking at him, he would have to take her out, blow her cover somehow, without damage to his own, without her suspecting, or there’d be hell to pay, back in San Francisco.
Ben elbowed him. “Look. The entertainment’s starting.”
From a makeshift plywood platform, a slim man with a bushy mustache introduced himself with a wireless microphone. He was dressed oddly in a tan safari suit with a pink bandanna around the neck and a lone white ostrich plume protruding from his safari hat.
“Hi, folks, I’m Bob Marsh, and I hear some of you are wondering about my attire. It’s just that anywhere outside the Castro district is a big adventure to me!” It was a reference to the gay central station of San Francisco, and it drew laughs.
Bob proceeded to mix more gay humor with dire statistics on global warming, his Jello-jointed wrist slapping a wooden pointer at an endless supply of charts and graphs.
“Mother Nature’s getting hot flashes, folks! And that’s why she’s been in such a bitchy mood lately!”
Laughter followed every joke, funny or not, thanks to the programmed cult members and to the love-bombed guest-recruits, by now eager to please.
Between jokes, Bob’s global warming-related numbers never failed to induce alarmed cries and oohs and loud grumbling. The forced, creepy feel of a bad TV infomercial pervaded.
The canned atmosphere gave John déjà vu. Scenes much like this one had been common inside the People’s Temple, which was something he hadn’t remembered since childhood. He’d blocked it out, spent decades avoiding—suppressing—what he’d come here to confront.
The People’s Temple, Geary Street, San Francisco, 1978
“
Why is Mommy sucking on that man’s pee-pee, Daddy?” They were seated in a second row pew, not far from the strange sight on stage. His mother, wearing her Sunday dress, because it was Sunday, had dropped to her knees in front of a tall black man, a stranger to John, who wore a dark suit and tie with his pants unbuckled and unzipped and his pee-pee growing hard, like John’s would too sometimes, only he never knew when or why.
“
You know better than to call us ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy,’ John. She’s ‘Susan’ now, and I’m ‘Tony.’ ”