The Paper Grail Read Online Free Page B

crisp one-dollar bills that might have been his. She tucked them away finally and irretrievably into her pocket, turning away into the courtyard without a backward glance.
    She hadn’t gone three steps, though, when a horn honked. Without thinking she looked back at the alley, where the limousine accelerated slowly past the mouth of the courtyard. The driver was bent across the front seat, waving out the open passenger window. He shouted a parting obscenity which somehow involved eating. Mrs. Lamey closed her ears to it just a second too late, continuing across the courtyard and resolutely listening to nothing now but the
tap, tap, tap
of her shoes on concrete, blocking out the whole filthy world round about her.
    There was a breezeway at the corner of the courtyard, opening onto another small, winding alley that ran steeply uphill. At the top she crossed a small parking lot and went in through the side door of a white concrete building with red letters on the sideproclaiming itself to be the “Whole Life Mission.” Below that, in italic lettering, was the legend “The Church of the Profiting Christian.”
    Inside the church the air was heavy, still, and musty. The building was bigger than it appeared to be from the street, and Mrs. Lamey walked through the nave, past rows of empty pews built of wood-grain Formica. She peered into the empty sacristy and then into an adjacent chair-lined room, also empty of people, and containing a glass-fronted, water-filled tub. Heavy-looking television cameras and big reflecting lights hung from the ceiling and stood in the corners. She went on, pausing to knock on an office door and listen at the cloudy glass window. A sign on the door read, “Reverend White, Ministry Office.” There was nothing but silence inside. Reverend White, apparently, was somewhere on the second floor.
    She climbed a stairs and with a key from her purse let herself into a kitchen. Beyond it was a corridor with rooms leading off to either side. There was the smell of carbolic acid and alcohol in the air now, and the floors were tiled in white linoleum. A chrome pole on wheels stood in the corridor, hung with an IV bottle and with plastic tubing and clamps. Through one open door she glimpsed a gurney and a surgical table. A thrill of fear and anticipation surged through-her, and she was struck with the notion that in the air of that room her destiny hung like a rain cloud.
    She knocked twice on the window of the next door down, then pushed the button on an adjacent intercom.
    “Who is it?” asked a man’s voice.
    “Heloise.”
    The door opened an inch and a man peered out, as if to ascertain whether it was really Mrs. Lamey standing in the hallway or somebody playing a trick. Satisfied, he smiled broadly and waved her in. He wore a white coat over a red shirt and black trousers. His patent-leather shoes matched his shirt. “Heloise!” he said, as if he’d been waiting for this moment for weeks. “I half expected you wouldn’t come.”
    “Well, I’m here, Reverend,” she said sarcastically. “Let’s get this over with.”
    “It would be better to call me ‘doctor.’ I’m a minister downstairs, a doctor upstairs.”
    “An abortionist, maybe. ‘Doctor’ is a weighty word.”
    He shrugged. “I don’t perform abortions anymore, actually. I was an abortionist when it was illegal and more profitable. NowI perform elective surgery—reconstructive surgery, mostly.”
    Mrs. Lamey made a face, imagining what he meant despite herself.
    He grinned at her for a moment and then put on a serious, bedside, medical-man face. “It’s a fact,” he said. “People come to me from all over the city. Up from Los Angeles, too. Men and women both. In fact, half a block up the street, at a bar called the Cat’s Meow, there’s a dancer who owes her entire career to me. You’d be surprised what people will pay to see. Enormous breasts are a dime a dozen in North Beach. People are tired of that sort of thing.