The Fourth K

And Irene would never stop talking, she achieved a kind of ecstasy when she talked even of the most ordinary things. Unlike Jatney, she found her life, ordinary as it was, altogether meaningful.

Sometimes when she was carried away and dissected her emotions for a full hour without interruption, he would feel that she was a star in the heavens growing larger and brighter and that he himself was falling into a bottomless black hole that was the universe, failing and falling while she never noticed.

He liked too that she was generous in material things but thrifty with her personal emotions. She would never really come to grief, she would never fall into that universal darkness. Her star would always expand, never lose its light. And he was grateful that this should be so. He did not want her company in the darkness.

One night they went for a walk on the beach just outside Malibu. It seemed weird to David Jatney that here was this great ocean on one side, then a row of houses and then mountains on the other side. It didn't seem natural to have mountains almost bordering an ocean. Irene had brought along blankets and a pillow and her child. They lay on the beach and the little boy, wrapped in blankets, fell asleep.

Irene and David sat on their blanket and were overcome by the beauty of the night. For that little moment they were in love with each other. They watched the ocean, which was blue-black in the moonlight, and the little thin birds hopping ahead of the incoming waves. "David," Irene said, "you have never told me anything really about yourself. I want to love you. You won't let me know you."

David was touched. He laughed a little nervously and then ' "The first thing you should know about me is that I'm a ~ en-Mile Mormon."

"I didn't even know you were a Mormon," Irene said.

"If you are brought up a Mormon, you are taught that you must not booze or smoke or commit adultery," David said. "So when you do it you make sure you are at least ten miles from where anybody knows you." And then he told her about his childhood. And how he hated the Mormon Church.

"They teach you that it's OK to lie if it helps the Church," David said.

"And then the hypocritical bastards give you all this shit about the angel

Moroni and some gold bible. And they wear angel pants, which I have to admit my mother and father never believed in, but you could see those fucking angel pants hanging on their clotheslines. The most ridiculous thing you ever saw."

"What're angel pants?" Irene asked. She was holding his hand to encourage him to keep speaking.

"It's sort of a robe they wear so they won't enjoy screwing," David said.

"And they are so ignorant they don't know that Catholics in the sixteenth century had the same kind of garment, a robe that covers your whole body except for a single hole in it so you can screw, supposedly without enjoying it. When I was a kid I could see angel pants hanging from the laundry lines. I'll say this for my parents, they didn't buy that shit, but because he was an elder in the church they had to fly the angel pants." David laughed and then said, "God, what a religion."

"It's fascinating, but it sounds so primitive," Irene said.

David thought, And what the hell is so civilized about all those fucking gurus who tell you that cows are sacred, that you are reincarnated, that this life means nothing, all that voodoo karma bullshit. But Irene felt his tensing and wanted to keep him talking. She slid her hands inside his shirt and felt his heart beating furiously.

"Did you hate them?" she asked.

"I never hated my parents," he said. "They were always good to me."

"I meant the Mormon Church," Irene said.

David said, "I hated the Church ever since I can remember. I hated it as a little kid. I hated the faces of the elders, I hated the way my mother and father kissed their asses. I hated their hypocrisies. If you disagree with the rulings of the Church, they could even have you murdered. It's a business religion, they all stick together. That's how my father got rich. But I'll tell you the thing that disgusted me the most. They have special anointments and the top elders get secretly anointed and so they get to go to heaven ahead of other people. Like somebody slipping you to the head of the line while you're waiting for a taxi or a table in a popular restaurant."

Irene said, "Most religions are like that except the Indian religions.

You just have to watch out for karma. " She paused a moment. "That is why I try to keep myself pure of greed for money, why I can't fight my fellow human being for the possessions of this earth. I have to keep my spirit pure. We're having special meetings, there is a terrible crisis in Santa Monica right now. If we're not on the alert, the real estate interests will destroy everything we've fought for and this town will be full of skyscrapers. And they'll raise the rents and you and I will be forced out of our apartments."

She went on and on, and David Jatney listened with a feeling of peace.

He could lie on this beach forever, lost in time, lost in beauty, lost in the i

She was telling him about a man named Louis Inch, who was trying to bribe the city council so that they would change the building and rental laws. She seemed to know a lot about this man Inch, she had researched him. The man could be an elder in the Mormon Church. Finally Irene said, "If it wasn't so bad for my karma, I'd kill the bastard."

David laughed. "I shot the President once." And he told her about the assassination game, the Hunt, when he had been a one-day hero at Brigham Young University. "And the Mormon elders who run the place had me thrown out," he said.

But Irene was now busy with her small son, who'd had a bad dream and waked up screaming. She soothed him and said to David, "This guy Inch is having di

David said, "I'm not worried about my karma, I'll shoot him for you." They both laughed.

The next night David cleaned the hunting rifle he had brought from Utah and fired the shot that broke the glass in Louis Inch's limousine. He had not really aimed to hit anyone; in fact the shot had come much closer to the victim than he had intended. He was just curious to see if he could bring himself to do it.

CHAPTER

18

IT WAS SAL Troyca who decided to nail Christian Klee. Going over testimonies to the congressional committees of inquiry into the atom bomb explosion, he noted Klee's testimony that the great international crisis of the hijacking took precedence. But then there were glitches; Troyca noticed that there was a time gap. Christian Klee had disappeared from the White House scene. Where had he gone?

They wouldn't find out from Klee, that was certain. But the only thing that could have made Klee disappear during that crisis was something terribly important. What if Klee had gone to interrogate Gresse and Tibbot?

Troyca did not consult with his boss, Congressman Jintz; he called

Elizabeth Stone, the administrative aide to Senator Lambertino, and arranged to meet her at an obscure restaurant for di

On their first date, initiated by Troyca, they had come to an understanding. Elizabeth Stone beneath her cool, impersonal beauty had a fiery sexual temperament, but her mind was cold steel. The first thing she said was "Our bosses are going to be out of their jobs in November. I think you and I should make plans for our future."