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magnificent
    terraced garden that fell away from her hilltop house. It was such a beautifully, skillfully
    landscaped setting that one wouldn’t guess that the hectic Beverly Hills business and
    shopping district lay not too far away, awakening for a day of commerce and traffic.
    Her gaze went down to the pool.
    His name was Jamie, her secretary had reported.
    Beverly watched him as he guided the pool sweep through the lime-green water. His
    back was damp with sweat; sunlight played on the tanned muscles. His long blond hair,
    drying from his swim, fell down to his shoulders Viking-like. And the jeans were too
    tight. She wondered how he could even move in them. He had the kind of rear end that
    girls seemed to go for these days—round and saucy.
    “Sorry!” came a breathless voice behind her. “Got stuck on the San Diego Freeway!
    Again!”
    Beverly turned to see her secretary, Maggie, come hurrying in, a purse slung over her
    shoulder, her arms full of papers, one hand clutching an attaché case.
    “No rush,” Beverly said with a smile. “We have a few minutes yet.”
    “I swear it’s a conspiracy,” Maggie mumbled as she reached for the telephone console.
    Punching the button for the kitchen, she said, “Every morning the traffic gets worse and
    worse. I would swear that I am seeing the same stalled cars blocking the same lanes—. Hi,
    kitchen? This is Maggie. Send up some coffee, would you please? And a chocolate Danish.
    Thanks.” Maggie Kern, at forty-six, was plump and intended to stay that way.
    As she shuffled papers on the desk and continued to mutter about a conspiracy on the
    part of the bus company to get people to ride the bus—“The same cars stalled every day,
    I swear it, just to tie up the freeway”—Beverly looked down again at the young, blond
    pool-maintenance man.
    “Ah!” Maggie said when the coffee and Danish arrived. She clicked on the TV set;
    Beverly immediately turned away from the window and went to the velvet sofa. The two
    women sat, both shoeless, staring at the screen.
    They watched the Good News Hour every day before starting work. Even when Beverly
    had to travel and they were flying over the country in her private jet, or when they were
    in a hotel room in another city, they always spent the first hour of the day watching the
    Reverend.
    Prostitution and pornography were his main targets, but he had also produced a
    shockingly graphic antiabortion film. He organized raids on adult movie theaters, sent
    Bibles and zealous young preachers into the darkness of Forty-second Street, Hollywood
    Boulevard, and Polk, and, like Beverly Highland, had been instrumental in getting
    Playboy magazine off the stands in convenience stores.
    If elected president, he had promised, he was going to clean up America.
    The guitars and the Good News Singers belted out a lively hymn, and then he
    appeared, marching onto the set and literally shouting to his TV audience, “Brothers and
    sisters, I have Good News for you!”
    There was no doubt about it, the man was positively magnetic. He breathed power,
    like some fire-breathing dragon. One felt his heat come right through the glass of the TV
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    Kathryn Harvey
    screen. His voltaic spirit seemed to pour out from his energetic body. It was no mystery
    why the Reverend was so popular, even among nonbelievers. He was a salesman, pure and
    simple. A newsman had once commented wryly that GN’s electrifying founder could sell
    kangaroos to the Australians. But what the Reverend sold was God. God, and decency.
    And the main target of today’s sermonic attack was a magazine called Beefcake, sup-
    posedly a magazine for women but which, because of its photographs of nude men in
    seductive poses, was reported to be a favorite among gays. “I take my Good News today
    from Paul’s letter to the Romans,” the Reverend shouted out across America. “And Paul
    said that because men are such fools, God has given them over to do the filthy things