Earthly Powers

  "This," I said, "is ridiculous. I have never touched the body of a woman in my life. To suggest that I would do it to a girl, to my own grand-or great-niece. My tastes," I said mildly, good old former comedy writer Toomey, "are quite otherwise."

  "Son of Sodom," Manning cried promptly, "spawn of Gomorrah. Out of the abode of the blessed with the curse of the living God upon you. Liar and cheat, without doubt the author of filth, though thank the Lord I have never read you. Out."

  It was a fair trudge back toward the gates and the guardroom. I saw, thank the Lord, the hired car waiting outside. Behind me marched the troop of the saved, murmuring, even barking (Filth fornicator dirty sinner perhaps even limey faggot). Manning had gone off somewhere, perhaps to deliver a telephonic communication to The Times bureau in Washington. Sobbing Eve and her escort had also disappeared. Jim Swinney was there till the end. The guard had changed. It was still, however, all black. A young man with tortured eyes swung open the gate. He had his automatic pistol at the ready. The driver waited courtly by the open doors of the saloon. He had, he had told me, once been a driver for Government House, South Australia. The young black accompanied me to that door.

  He said, "I'm coming with you, man. I'm getting outta here." He pointed his gun back at his former colleagues, who pointed in return. There was no question of anybody firing.

  "In quick," I said, pushing him. He dithered and his pants were wet. The driver, glad of excitement after the long dullness of his wait, rushed to his seat and switched on the ignition. We started off on the desolate road to Los Angeles.

  "Jesus," the young black said through his terrified sweat, "you don't know what it's like back there, man."

  "I have an idea," I said and offered him a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 75

  "What," I asked Melvin Withers of the Los Angeles Times, "did you get out of him?"

  "The usual. What you'd expect. Beatings-up called the Lord's punishment. A rotational harem. He says his brother died under queer circumstances, but he can't prove anything. Nobody can. There's no point in him going to the police. Manning is very generous to the Los Angeles police. Your little black friend is in some danger."

  I had known Withers for some time, off and on. I had once given him an exclusive story about the impending marriage between the sixty-year-old actor-singer Benny Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of California brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strikes. His clothes smelt as though they were steeped in tobacco juice. His white forelock was stained with it. He breathed a heavy reek of what the Irish call blind hash (spuds stewed with onions and a spoonful of Oxo), evidence of a strange metabolism. We sat in a dark bar. "Read this," he said. He meant the file he had put on the table before me. It was too dark to read with ease. "I can't lend it." He drained a neat brandy in one. "I'll be back in about an hour. Some copy to file."

  So I squinted at Godfrey Manning's dossier over three more vodkas on the rocks. Soothing music played from the ceiling, a whole spectrum of my time, from "Darktown Strutters" to "I Could Have Danced All Night." A heavy man at the bar counter kept saying, "Yeah I guess so. They could at that, I guess."

  Godfrey Manning's career began in the town of Pring, Indiana. His parents had died in a road accident near Decatur, Illinois, and he had gone to live with an uncle and aunt. The town of Pring was a Ku Klux Klan centre where custom defied law and said that no nigger had better have the sun setting on his head if he didn't want buckshot in his ass. The uncle belonged to this organization and only went out of doors when it was time for putting a white sheet on and brandishing a fiery cross. He was not well enough to work. He received a monthly disability check from the government, something to do with his lungs and something that had gotten into them in the First World War. The aunt was reputed to have Cherokee blood. She worked in a tomato ketchup factory. Pring had seven churches, and young Godfrey, who was given to religion, attended them all, lie liked to play at being a preacher and would make boys lie on top of girls so that he could accuse them of sin. He won every biblical quiz that was going at all seven Sunday schools. He was dogmatic and fierce-tempered, but only about religion. His preferred church, after a long time of sampling, was the Pentecostal Church run by the Holy Rollers. Sick of the racism of Pring, he dropped out of its high school whose principal was a loud voice of intolerance and enrolled in a school in the bigger town of Richmond. He talked of becoming a minister of religion. He left with average grades but several Bible prizes and entered Indiana University in Bloomington. There he did badly in subjects with an exact discipline but grew famous for his gabgift. He ran a Bible study group with a hot enthusiasm that sometimes appalled, always fascinated. He married a Bloomington girl, daughter of the keeper of a cigar store, who was five years his senior, Claudine Rogers, given to religion like himself but reputedly passionate in bed. He took her to Indianapolis where, though unordained, he became a pastor at the Eastbank Church. This city, home of the national office of the Ku Klux Klan, was even less tolerant of the doctrine of racial equality than Pring, and Manning was courageously preaching this doctrine. He was jeered at during church services; dead cats were stuffed into the church toilets; NIGGERLOVER was chalked on the church wall. He became a part-time student at Butler University, took ten years to get a bachelor's degree and was finally ordained as a minister of the Disciples of the Lord Jesus. During those ten years he spent some time in the wilds, preaching to village layabouts bored with pool halls, also to college students in bars and under campus oaks, and he wrote and published at his own expense a book which I had heard of, God knew, but not seen. I could imagine its content and style.

  Sick of the dead cats on his returns to Easthank Church, he decided to start his own sect, the Children of God, in a district of Indianapolis which was changing from poor white to poorer black. On a trip to Philadelphia, he went to listen to Father Divine, dispenser of love and chicken dinners. He admired his style. He admired his total control over his flock. He admired most of all that clue to Father Divine's success faith healing.

  He continued to suffer the enmity of racists. Talking to a black brother at a bus stop he was hit by a hurled beer bottle. His wife was spat upon in a supermarket. He saw his church as a garrison besieged by a mad and dangerous world. Like all garrisons, it had to be disciplined. He achieved loyalty not through eloquence and love alone but through punishments, some of them crassly physical. He formed a kind of ecclesiastic police force. None of his congregation loved him the less for his occasional, and unpredictable, shows of violence. The Mayor of Indianapolis gave him a seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job as director of a human rights commission. He spoke eloquently on behalf of love and tolerance but had rocks thrown at him. He received telephone calls which told him to get out of town. He stuck to his convictions. His congregation grew. Money began to come in. He served one thousand free meals a week to the destitute. He bought two old buses to carry singers, auxiliary preachers or warmers-up, and cheerleaders to spread the word in the Midwest on revival tent campaigns. He began to heal the sick, or those who thought they were sick. At his temple in Indianapolis hundreds crammed in to watch him cure arthritis, toothache, dyspepsia, calcified joints, cardiac disease, epilepsy, thrombosis. A cataleptic girl was brought in and he restored her to animation, crying, like his master, Talitha cumi. One evening he called out a name and a woman stood up to say she was suffering from cancer. Manning ordered her to go to the church toilet and pass the growth from her bowels. A cloth was brought in with a black odoriferous horror wobbling on it. Cries of hallelujah and praise the Lord. Manning's enemies alleged that this was a decayed chicken liver.

  Manning preached a fiery sermon in the course of which he stated that he had received an angelic visitation in sleep. The angel had prophesied the destruction of the world by a nuclear holocaust. Fire and fallout. The seven places on the earth's surface which the disaster would not touch in
cluded the fringe of the Mojave Desert in California. There the Children of God might find their ultimate haven. And so it was to be. On May 17, 1956, Manning signed state papers making the Children of God a nonprofit California corporation. He kept in with the Californians. He founded an orphanage. He served on charitable committees. He started a fund for the families of cops slain in the line of duty. God, in both interpretations of the name, knew where the money came from, but the money was there. Manning, preaching at the Temple of the Children on Sunset Boulevard, brought local politics into his harangues as an aspect of the amelioration of a Christian society; he could sway, he could command votes. He was an admirable television performer. Bank managers and businessmen, disc jockeys and sheriffs believed in him. His choir sang and later gained a reputation nearly as great as that of the Mormon one in Salt Lake City. The coastal newspapers publicized his work. Manning went on the road with selected members of his congregation. They drove in their buses labeled GOD IS EVERYWHERE, EVEN HERE to the Fillmore and Bayview districts of San Francisco. Leaflets were like an autumn in the streets:

  GOD MANNING ... the Wonderful ... the Incredible ... the Beloved Disciple ... See the work of God in miraculous cures which in no way contradict the teachings of modern medical science. The power of the healing hand is the rarest power in the world but it is acknowledged by medical practitioners everywhere. No man's healing hand is like unto God Manning's ...

  God Manning brings you not only Christ's message--he brings you Christ's own miraculous presence. Come and see. Come and believe. Come and join, all ye that are weary and heavily laden and he will give you rest. He will give you peace, love, assurance, satisfaction ...

  Bands, dancing, gospel singing, the Heavenly Choir, sermons of divine inspiration!

  And, of course, donations.

  Stories leaked out not altogether to Mannning's credit. He alone was periflitted to eat meat. Liquor was banned but Manning had a well-stocked liquor cabinet He was on pills of various kinds. Like the prophet Abraham he took Unto himself handmaidens. Some of the disciples ran away, and some were brought back. Those who were not brought back got away from Redfern Valley as far as they could, but still feared the knock at the door in the night. The perimeter of the Home of the Children of God was guarded by armed men and fierce dogs. Manning had an escort of knuckledustered bullyboys. But those who heard him preach in public, or talk reasonably but eloquently on radio and television, were mostly convinced that here was a Savior Rarer than Radium. Some, listening to his repeated warnings of the imminence of the End of the World, said he was a nut, like folks that lunched off yoghurt, but none could deny that Christ too had warned of the impending consummation of all things. Okay, that had been two thousand years ago, right?, and it hadn't happened yet. Right, all the more reason why it might happen now. They had no nuclear fallout in those days, right? To tell people to be pure and honest and diligent and love the Lord was hardly to be construed as fanaticism. Jesus, the Pope of Rome was saying the same thing and he was real hardheaded.

  I was not happy about the gist of a sermon that was reproduced among all these clippings and handouts. Manning's text was "Fear not them that kill the body." It was man's duty to live as long in the flesh as he could, since the Divine Being had constructed that flesh and the instincts and appetites that went with it, but the true life, as the Son of the Divine Being taught, was the life of the spirit, and the spirit was what was left when the body was taken away. When it came to the crunch, like with persecution and Armageddon, the true Christian martyr rejoiced in the coming loss of the body, since now the life of the spirit could truly begin. So all Children of God must be ready any time to put off this corruptible body and endue an immortal body which was made of the stuff of the spirit.

  There was a lot of stuff in the thick folder, but my eyes hurt with the attempt at reading it in the dark. When Melvin Withers, preceded by his metabolism, came back in again and signaled for brandy at one of the cat-eyed waitresses, I said, "It's pretty well what I expected. A very American phenomenon. And I don't like it, Melv."

  "Your little black friend stripped off his shirt and showed marks which looked like they might have come from a whip. He goes on swearing that his brother disappeared one night, just like that. But he can't get any place."

  "Can't anybody investigate? A state governor's commission? The appropriate state senator or congressman?"

  "You need real proof of irregularity or crime. With witnesses all lined upLook, Ken, this is a religious organization and it's very very privileged. There's plenty of crime in the streets before the very eyes of the cops without them going to look for what might not be there. Leave God Manning alone and he shows his gratitude in-a very tangible way. He causes no trouble to the community at large."

  "I told you what he did to me. My great-or grandniece was evidently scared out of her pants-well, no, those are the only things she wasn't scared out of. Look at it from my angle elderly author of international reputation lashed out of there with very opprobrious language. I don't like it especially when I was only doing my duty. That man is bad. I fear for my grand-or great-niece."

  "She asked for it. Nobody asked her to join."

  "She's just a kid. She knows no better. I saw a lot like her. Is there nothing that can be done?"

  "I've done pieces before. I don't like the bastard and never did and I'm always glad to stick the rapier in. Only one of those pieces ever saw print, and then Manning fires broadside on with a libel suit. Settled out of court. What they call substantial damages. The big nicotine-stained finger was wagged at me." Strangely, Melvin's fingers were not nicotine-stained. Something to do with the way he held the weed. "You have to let it go, Ken."

  "I used to know your state governor pretty well in the old days. That's when he was in Hollywood and I with him. He should have been in one of my things but wasn't. If I saw him?"

  "He wouldn't do a damned thing. The cousin of his wife's sister is in there, praising the Lord. And there are certain times in our governor's life when Mr. Manning comes in very very useful. Election time, for instance. And if our governor, which he's always threatening to do, decides to aspire to the office of president--no, it won't do."

  "Where the hell does all that money come from?"

  "Astonishing how little bits mount up. Especially when there are no taxes to be paid. As they say, the Lord looks after his own. Ken, I've no spare cash. Your little black friend is literally and I mean literally spraying his pants. He has what he calls a uncle and a aunt in Arkansas. I think we ought to get him on a bus pretty soon. Can you help?"

  I stayed the night at the Beverly Wilshire. It brought Ralph back to me and reminded me of my present loneliness. I telephoned Geoffrey Enright in San Jaime. Could he meet me in the Algonquin tomorrow, ready to accompany me back to Tangier?

  "My dear, you'll never regret it. My only immediate problem is finding the money for an air ticket. No, wait. No sweat, no problem. Lubricious Labrick drew five hundred dollars from the bank this morning. I'll just take enough from his roll to get palpitant me to Fun City or the Big Apple or whatever they call it. No hurry to get to Tangier, is there? There are all sorts of things I can show you in the dirtier portions of Manhattan. My dear, we shall have a riotous time. Tutti frutti."

  It was, after the Children of God, a breath of moral sanity.

  CHAPTER 76

  "Your old pal Pope Buggery," Geoffrey said, "looks to me to be getting premonitions of his Latter End."

  We were at breakfast under the oleanders in the garden. Geoffrey, who regarded himself as a growing boy, insisted daily on eggs and rashers. I watched him indulgently tuck in, as I toyed with toast and Cooper's marmalade. He had yesterday's Daily Telegraph propped against the outsize coffeepot. Ali was no longer cooking for us. He had never much cared for cooking, and his repertoire had always been small. Now we had Hamid, who had been kicked out of the kitchens of the Miramar, while Ali had been promoted to majordomo.

  "In Moscow?" I asked
.

  "In bloody Moscow. Poisoning his borshch, I shouldn't wonder. Insinuating rare Siberian toxics into his red caviar. Addressing the Praesidium in immaculate Russian," Geoffrey improvised from the paper, "His Ballsiness was overtaken by a series of sharp stabs in the kishkas. He begged to be excused and everybody said Da da da ochin khorosho. Kremlin medicos were summoned and begged him to go easy on the brotherhood of man stuff for a bit. Taking too much out of the old bastard. Very hard work, the brotherhood of man. Heart, my dear," he said, looking up. "He has nobody to watch his heart, as I am so assiduous or is it insidious in watching yours."

  "He has Dr. Leopardi. He had Leopardi back in Moneta. He's always sworn by the skills of Leopardi."

  "Ah, but skills are not the same as love. He has nobody, poor old bar steward, to lerve him."

  "If by watching my heart you mean the kind of excursion you took me on into the ah heart of the Casbah last night--"

  "But, angelic Kenneth, you are fitter than you have ever been. You have been reawakened. You are engaging life."

  That was true. Little brown boys, kif, cantharides. A good day's work at the long novel I swore would be my last, a stiff gin and tonic before dinner, after dinner some little sexual adventure not untinged with danger. In bed the company of Geoffrey, who had taught my aging body new paths of rejuvenation.

  "And now," Geoffrey said, having drained the coffeepot, "let us lash ourselves to labor."

  We went in together. Ali was wailing some lovesong of the Atlas slopes as he polished the furniture. Geoffrey's workroom was neat and the sunlight was allayed by nylon curtains newly washed. His electric typewriter squatted ready, a pack of Effacil erasers stuck to its side. "This," Geoffrey said, "is what I wrote to that tiresome woman. Listen. 'Madam, I note your somewhat fanciful allegation that in my novel The Affairs of Men I have based a minor female character on your defunct sister. I never knew your sister, living, moribund, or defunct. Are you quite sure your defunct sister did not base her personality on that of my character? I have far too much serious work to do to engage myself in frivolities of the kind that seem to beguile what appears to me to be an excessive leisure. Get stuffed. Yours et cetera.'