Keeper of the Flame Read online

“Pardon me, friend, I didn’t intend to sneak up on you.” It was the older guy of the trio, the one with the grey hair. He had his hand stuck out. “Willie Sizemore, investment advisor.”

  I stood up, still a little shaky from the guy’s stealth arrival. “Crang’s my name.”

  “Just thought I’d introduce myself,” Sizemore said. He had a salesman’s manner, the kind of guy whose big smile and unctuous tone came as part of the package. “You’re new to Heaven’s Philosophers if I’m not mistaken. And I rarely am about new visitors.”

  “First time I’ve dropped by.”

  “May I ask what attracted you to us?”

  Sizemore was nosy, though so far not offensive about it. He was pretty good-looking for an older guy except for the deep gouge on the right side of his head running from the temple down to a spot behind the ear. The gouge looked as permanent as the Grand Canyon.

  “I might be keen on exploring ecclesiastical issues,” I said. “Maybe your Reverend Alton Douglas has something to offer in that line.”

  “Indeed he does,” Sizemore said, apparently thrilled with my explanation. “But keep in mind there are members of our group who offer advice and services of many sorts.”

  “In your case, it’s financial investments, I take it.”

  “Fifty years in stocks and bonds,” Sizemore said. “Haven’t lost a client yet.”

  He gave a little chuckle, and handed me a card from a small leather case.

  “If you ever feel dissatisfied with your present investment strategy,” Sizemore said, “all you need to do is give me a ring.”

  We shook hands again, and Sizemore returned to his meaty buddies.

  The three of them got refills and carried the cups of coffee up the curving staircase on the left side of the lobby. Their heels on the marble made storm-trooper clicks in the lobby’s emptiness. When they reached the top, I heard the opening and closing of a door. Then all went quiet.

  In the silent lobby, I got off my bench and walked over to the coffee shop.

  “It’s nice the way you brew the Paraguay,” I said to the barista. “Very tasty.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” the kid said, looking modest about it.

  “The Reverend Douglas in this afternoon?” I asked. “You happen to notice?”

  The kid gave me a blank look.

  “Alton Douglas?” I said. “The minister who runs Heaven’s Philosophers?”

  The kid brightened up. “Oh, you’re talking about Al?”

  “I guess I am if that’s how you address him.”

  “He’s, like, relaxed as far as religion,” the kid said, a big smile on his face.

  Geez, that irritated me, the verbal construction where the speaker didn’t complete the phrase. Should I correct the kid’s grammar? Or just let it go? I opted for straightening out one possible casualty to improper verbal constructions.

  “You mean,” I said, “‘as far as religion is concerned.’ Or ‘as far as religion goes.’”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” the kid said, looking like he was addressing a person of limited comprehension. “Al is relaxed about that.”

  I abandoned my educational efforts. “Al’s in, is he?”

  “In his office upstairs,” the kid said, “but, like, most afternoons, meetings go on up there.”

  “Meetings with the three gentlemen who just went up?”

  “Them and probably others, but what happens and who meets I don’t know anything about,” the kid said. He was growing cautious. “What’s it to you exactly?”

  “Maybe I’m thinking about discussing ecclesiastical issues with the Reverend,” I said. If the explanation worked with Willie Sizemore, it ought to go over with the kid.

  He shrugged, but otherwise had nothing more to offer. I put my empty mug down on his counter, nodded, and walked out to my car.

  According to my just conceived plan, I figured to wait in the Mercedes until the population in the church building had thinned, then I could carry out some creative snooping. I sat behind the wheel, noticing something I’d missed earlier. The church had a fairly large parking lot behind a row of thick trees separating the lot from the building. No attendant was on duty in the lot, and no machines for payment were visible. Four cars occupied slots. That could be one for Reverend Al and one each for the three guys who were having coffee in the lobby. But that was only a guess.

  While I was pondering vehicles and parking, an American-built car, big but not an SUV, pulled into the lot. Two guys got out, one extra-large in size, but neither of them running to the type of the two big lobby guys. The extra-large specimen was shaped like John Candy, and wore a white summer suit. The other much less hefty and had on an unbuttoned cardigan in an unappealing maroon shade. Both passed my car, presumably on their way to the meeting in the church. I snapped photos of the two. I was getting good at the surreptitious paparazzi thing.

  In the next ten minutes, two more cars and six more guys of different variations of extra-large arrived. Counting the three guys who were on the premises when I arrived, that made a total of eleven people meeting upstairs in the Reverend Al’s quarters.

  That seemed to be the end, and then things got quiet in the parking lot.

  I clicked open my iPhone. A text from Fox had arrived.

  You poaching my clients now, Crang? The one you’re asking about you’re welcome to take. You might remember him from the case you were briefly involved in. The guy’s mouthy. Thinks he knows more law than his counsel. Good riddance if you want him. Name’s Robert Fallis, known to one and all as Squeaky. He’s the guy on the left in your picture. The older guy is unknown to me though I suppose he could be Squeaky’s type.

  Fox

  P.S. I walked Squeaky on the fraud charge. Your guy in the case got convicted under other counsel, if memory serves.

  Fraud? Could something of that nature be the subject of the meeting in the Reverend Al’s office? Was it what Squeaky Fallis and his colleagues practised under religious cover provided by Heaven’s Philosophers? Was it all that simple? Fraud had a close relationship to extortion. Was the Reverend blackmailing Flame as the front man for the heavies he could be closeted with at that very minute?

  I texted my thanks to Fox, got out of the car, and walked down to a variety store on St. Clair. I bought the Toronto Star, the National Post, and a Mars bar. Back in the car, I ate the Mars bar and read the Star’s four sections, skipping nothing except the woman columnist on the op-ed page. She was a scold. Scolding is not a good attitude in a columnist. I looked at my watch. An hour had gone by.

  I got into the Post, all the way to their own op-ed woman scold, when the guys from Heaven’s Philosophers began strolling down the street from their meeting. I counted all eleven of them. They cleared out the parking lot, and I opened my car door.

  It was time to do something sneaky.

  Chapter Eight

  I was a half-dozen strides from the entrance to Heaven’s Philosophers when the Reverend Douglas came out the front door. It had to be him. He was a trim guy, youthful for someone past fifty. There was an all business cut to him, but with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, he wasn’t sweating it any. He headed east on St. Clair, the direction that took him away from me.

  I waited until he got a block up the street before I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. I stepped into the lobby. Both the copy shop kid and the barista had closed operations and departed. The travel guy was still in business, talking on the phone and consulting something on his computer. I chose the flight of marble stairs on the right side of the lobby, out of the travel guy’s line of vision, and climbed 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 through it. Not a soul to be seen.

  I took time to relax my shoulders. They’d been tensed up during the pissing escapade. I stretched my arms, and congratulated myself on the run of good luck.

  I reached for the knob on the door that led into the church’s main auditorium. The knob didn’t budge. My luck had hit reverse.

  Reverend Al had locked me in the office.

  Chapter Nine

  I go
t out my iPhone and punched Maury Samuels’s number.

  It gave four rings before Maury picked up.

  “This isn’t a good time, Crang,” he said. Maury never bothered with hello when the name on his phone’s screen was somebody he knew.

  “You’re the man for a rescue job I need done, Maury,” I said.

  For decades, Maury made his living as a break-and-enter specialist, the guy who went into hotel rooms while the guests were asleep in their beds. But three or four years earlier, crowding seventy, Maury hung up his Bally shoes. Bally, he once told me, was a brand that practically guaranteed no squeaks in the leather. Sound-free footwear was essential to a B&E practitioner. Maury quit the business, but retired or not, he could still pick the lock on any door.

  “I’m making my shrimp dish,” he said on the phone. “It’s special for my friend Sal.”

  “Tell him he can come with you,” I said. “Probably find it educational.”

  Maury’s sound of small disgust came down the line. “You’re thinking I got a guy named Salvatore over here for a shrimp dinner?”

  “It’s somebody with a different given name?”

  “It’s a different sex, for crissake,” Maury said. “I’m cookin’ for my lady friend, Sal, which is short for Sally.”

  “Okay, let me pitch the job to you in different terms,” I said. “During all your time breaking and entering, did you ever go into a building given over to religious observance?”

  Maury paused. “You talking about a cathedral?”

  “Smaller size but same principle.”

  “No, I never did a church,” Maury said after another pause. “This place of yours, it’s got gold, art work, frankincense and fuckin’ myrrh?”

  “Couple of original oil paintings.”

  “Not that I’m thinking in terms of loot.”

  “You’re retired,” I said. “But consider the challenge.”