the stairs silently, going over the marble at a good clip, feeling like a fleet fellow in my Nikes.
At the top, a balcony was designed to lead people around to the right. I went that way, and arrived at a pair of double doors. Inside, rising two storeys, was a church — the kind of church imagined by Ikea. The benches and walls were done in light brown–finished wood, each seating place on the benches equipped with a fitted cushion in red and yellow. The rows of seats would accommodate at least a couple hundred worshippers. Or maybe “students” was the correct term for adherents to Heaven’s Philosophers. Up above, two large skylights flooded the room with bright good cheer. Down below, there were no crosses, no listing of hymns, no conventional Christian symbols of any sort; there was no pulpit at the front, though there was a lectern with a mic in the middle of what might otherwise be called the altar.
The only decor, conventional or otherwise, consisted of two extra-large painted portraits hanging on the back wall and looking down on the congregation. On the right, the subject was a tall, slim, Christ-like figure with long hair, a beard, and an expression somewhere between melancholy and caring. The man in the portrait may have resembled Jesus, but he wasn’t quite Him. Maybe one of the disciples? He wore a contemporary suit, off-white shirt, and no tie. In the other portrait, the subject was definitely Buddha, plump and bald, looking jolly and aware, wearing a white T-shirt and grey track pants.
Below the portraits, there was a door in the wall. I walked over and gave the knob a twist. The door opened, and I stepped into the room on the other side. It was good-sized, with a conference table close to the wall on the left. At the moment, ten or eleven chairs stood at odd angles around the table, and several empty white china mugs from the coffee bar downstairs sat haphazardly up and down the length of the table. At the table’s far end, there was a MacBook just like mine.
The room’s other major piece of furniture was a desk. It took up position beyond the conference table and closer to the centre of the room. A matching MacBook sat on the desk along with a small Canon printer, some scattered papers, and a pair of ballpoint pens. This had to be the Reverend Al’s working centre. On the chair at the desk hung a jacket, also no doubt the Reverend’s. The jacket told me I had no time for dilly-dallying.
The floor was covered in thick Oriental carpets. I stepped across a couple of them to check behind the two doors in the wall to my right. One was a closet, the other a bathroom complete with walk-in shower. The bathroom had a stark look, done in black and white: white fixtures, black everything else — black towels, black toilet cover, black glass at the sink, black plastic curtain drawn across the shower. I went back to the desk and tried the drawers. Nothing of recognizable interest in any of them except possibly in the one on the upper left. It was locked.
Sitting at the Reverend Al’s desk, considering all options, I opened the Mac laptop. It was in sleep mode. The Reverend was making it easy for snoopers like me. I passed up on his emails and went straight to Documents. There were dozens of them. I clicked on the most recent, and found myself reading something that had the feel of a sermon but wasn’t exactly what I would call a sermon. More like a dissertation. It came with a title, “The Teaming of Buddha and John of the Revelations.” John must be the other guy in the paintings on the wall of the big room next door. That solved one small mystery. I sped through a few of the dissertation’s pages, just enough to tell me I’d learn nothing about the Reverend Al’s connection to the Flame Group and the eight million bucks. I put the computer back in sleep and moved to the computer on the conference table.
It was in sleep too. I went to Documents. There were eleven of them, all titled with somebody’s name. Two names I recognized, Robert Fallis, old Squeaky himself, and William Sizemore, the investment advisor. I opened the Fallis document. The screen flooded with rows of numbers, with dates and other names listed beside each number. Some names were corporate, some individual. The entries made no sense that I could fathom. I thought about printing out the document, but it ran to twenty-two pages. The Reverend Al might interrupt me in mid-printing. I clicked back to the names on the other documents. Sizemore and nine more people, all guys. These were probably Squeaky’s colleagues at today’s meeting, but beyond that hunch, I didn’t have enough information to make a stab at identifying the gentlemen.
I put the MacBook back in sleep and got more comfortable in the chair. Looking across the room, I noticed a small window at shoulder height, opening into the audience side of the auditorium. I walked over and peeked through the window. The Reverend Al probably used this peephole to check the crowd before he made his entrances for the Sunday services that the kid barista mentioned. Peering out the window, my mind mulled over the possibilities for Heaven’s Philosophers liturgies.
In my dozy meditation, it took an extra millisecond to register the swinging open of the auditorium’s main door. Reverend Al had returned for his jacket. He was now striding down the centre aisle at a crisp pace. I got on my tiptoes and shot across the office into the bathroom. I closed the door gently and put my ear to it.
In a whole minute of listening, I didn’t catch a sound. For all I knew, the Reverend could be walking across the floor as I strained to listen. He might be headed for the bathroom. He might open the bathroom door while I was standing there.
I moved deeper into the bathroom, back on tiptoes, and slipped behind the black shower curtain. Ideas filled my head about techniques for silent breathing. Was I doing that now? I couldn’t tell. I imagined that I could hear my heart pounding. I concentrated harder. Damn, it was my heart. I was sure I could actually hear it. Would the Reverend hear it too? Did he take regular showers in here? At the moment, the shower was bone dry.
The bathroom door opened. Apparently the Reverend needed the facilities. But which one? Dear god, surely not the shower.
The toilet seat went up. The going-up sound seemed to have a quick double click, as if the two seats went up, top and bottom. Two seats meant a piss. Or was I imagining things? Wishful thinking?
The next sound was of urine hitting water. I hadn’t been thinking wishfully. The Reverend was taking a piss.
It was a hell of a piss. A powerful shot into the bowl. The guy really needed to relieve himself, his prick projecting what sounded like a rope of urine.
Prick, pecker, dink. The penis had a lot of synonyms.
The Reverend pissed on.
Cock, dong, schlong, wang, wiener, member, Johnson, Peter. I thought of other possibilities among given male names. Rod was one, an upper-case Rod or a lower-case rod.
Maybe Reverend Al had downed a gallon of the barista’s Paraguayan. His urine was still going at full strength. Or maybe he had a doctor who prescribed pills that bring on several pisses a day, part of the treatment for a disease. I couldn’t remember which one. But Reverend Al, the little I’d seen of him, didn’t look like a guy with a disease. Whatever the reason, he kept on firing pee.
Shaft, wand, love stick. Those names implied an erect penis. Lot of naming possibilities there. Third leg, one-eyed monster, soldier, dagger….
All of a sudden, it was quiet on the other side of the curtain. The Reverend’s piss didn’t just dwindle to an end. It stopped dead, from a tumult to zero in an instant.
The toilet flushed. The toilet seats clunked down. Water ran in the sink. Reverend Al was washing up. The water ceased running. The bathroom door opened and shut.
Reverend Al had vacated the bathroom. Was he leaving the entire premises? I waited fifteen minutes, then came out from behind the curtain and eased open the bathroom door a crack. The office looked empty enough to encourage further inspection. I pushed the door all the way back. Nobody in sight. The jacket was gone from the Reverend’s chair. I hustled over to the peephole and looked
