Here's another chapter from "The Baptized." I'd also like to encourage both the curious and anyone/everyone else out there to let me know what they think of it and its (apparent, to date) themes so far. I will get back to you, honest. I can be reached at mosleynovelist@gmail.com. Thank you and have a wonderful Spring and, if you celebrate in this fashion, a very rewarding Passover or Easter as well..

Chapter 4

I suppose I should thank you, Lord. It’s a lot of money. It’s something to do.

So here we go. This goes beyond mere gratitude, after all.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be….

No, it’s not working. Let’s start again.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. If I take this job, if I take Alec Walling’s money, does that obligate me? To him?  To You? How can I best serve you, my Lord? Shouldn’t that be the real question? Is shredding to shit the pathetic-sounding story of one of your servants by another, one of the humblest, going to do any good? Is making the Lapotaires seem ridiculous to the world at large, to the so-called intelligentsia, to the non-believers out there, going to amount to a hill of beans compared to the feelings they clearly arouse among people who reverence your name every day? Simple as they may be by my standards, as silly as they seem to act  -  with the Reverend Almon Floyd Fielding and his minions leading the charge out there in Lancaster County  -  don’t they deserve something better than my scorn?

Yes, Lord, the truth is, as if You didn’t know, I’m beginning to think, once I research thoroughly and file my report to Walling, which pro forma will debunk his niece and her prop of a shrink and spouse, that I should also write this up as a book. As a case study of credulity among what H.L.Mencken called the “boobosity.” It will sell. It will have my prestige behind it, Pulitzer Prize winner strikes again. And I will thus probably make a shitpot of money. The New York Times Book Review will love it, especially if I couch my disapproval behind sympathetic-sounding clucking that “these poor people” aren’t taken seriously enough by the rest of us more enlightened souls. I will hit the talk shows, Matt Lauer will squint and try hard to understand my arguments, I will shake up people’s mornings and I will show up in any independent bookstore or Barnes & Noble that’ll have me.

But how does that benefit You? Will it help Your purposes? Does dumping on your believers, no matter how coarse they may seem to be compared to say, upper-class Episcopalians, help the ultimate cause here? The First Cause?  And would a rip-roaring, trend-chasing magazine journalist from someplace like “Rolling Stone” or “Entertainment Weekly” even care about these things? So why should I?

Our Father, am I doing the right thing? I’m sleeping better, yes, I’m benefiting my daughter’s family and its future, I’m actually looking forward to getting up and going out the door lately.

But I’m not happy about it. If this is doing the Lord’s work, it sucks. I am going about my Father’s business, but with great, roiling unease.

Still, there’s always the money.

I was walking the streets of Clermont, New Jersey, the very suburb that Marianne Lapotaire nee Walling had identified as the epicenter of Satanism in New Jersey as she was growing up, when something very interesting occurred. Something hardly “Satanic” in nature, but surely indicative of declining standards of politesse in one way or another.

A motorcyclist, bearded, grossly overweight, in greasy denims with a long grey braid tied up by several rubber bands in neon-bright colors bouncing behind his back, went by on his Harley-Davidson, and as he did a police car passed going the other way.  The cyclist was wearing on his head, presumably to existing state and federal highway safety codes, a helmet that just 20 years ago would have been dismissed by most sane citizens as strongly resembling one worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII, all it was missing was a Waffen SS rune on one side and a divisional badge on the other, perhaps for the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment. Today, of course, as what you might surmise was evidence that Hitler has truly won even if it took him lo! all this many years since his death, both the US armed forces and SWAT cops wear the same kind of helmet. So fascism crept in through the back door, through its most logical adherents and armed enforcers. Sieg style.

And the cyclist gave the police car “the arm” as he passed, clearly, in no uncertain terms. And he grinned as he did it. And the cop in the cruiser didn’t so much as blink, he didn’t put on his flashers and wheel round to give chase, he didn’t even yell an obscenity back. Instead, he pulled over near where I was walking, got out and walked into a convenience store to buy a bottle of Poland Spring Water.

I looked him over. He was tall, good-looking in a kind of blandly predictable way and probably too young to have ever even had a father who’d been in WWII, had also probably never been in the service himself, looked like he’d be happier at an arena rock concert as a screaming patron than as a security guard confiscating bottles, cans and cameras. And his shoes weren’t shined, unlike the Harley-Davidson which had just gone by which had gleamed brilliantly in the muggy Jersey sun. He came out of the store and as he opened his water bottle he smiled and nodded hello to me. I felt no safer for his feigned affability, and I had no difficulty picturing this young cop in his own Wehrmacht-style helmet should there be cause to call out the local tac team in Clermont.

I was tempted, however, to go up to him and to empathize, to start by saying something like “I saw what just happened, Officer, and back in my day…” But then I realized, this is my day, it had been ‘my day’ since the 60’s and back then was when I started noticing a general lack of respect towards the police. The more education among their critics, the more dismissive said critics were of the police as a sociological force. The less educated, of course, the cruder the comments about the cops, too. But given my socio-economic level, where I’d worked, what I’d done for a living, who  my friends were, antipathy towards cops was both endemic and systemic. And on a warm Jersey afternoon, it had all boiled down to some scumbag on a motorcycle sneeringly telling a cop to go fuck himself. I wasn’t sure this quite constituted progress.

It had been over a month since I’d landed in Clermont and made it my base of operations, since I’d sublet a one-bedroom garden apartment, since I’d started asking questions, since I’d gotten the go-ahead, of sorts, from Philippe and Marianne.

And I had learned, fundamentally, nothing more than they’d put in the book.

The neighbors in the area I’d spoken to, to be sure, all remembered the Wallings. As a lovely, loving family. And Marianne as an especially lovely girl, a little reserved, but friendly enough, with a genuine complement of friends. She’d gone to the local high school, worked on the yearbook, was in the French and drama clubs (that might have been a clue right there), had even been a cheerleader through her junior year when she’d quit to try and focus on her grades for college. There was definitely nothing in the prosaic public record to suggest a future Satanic priestess in training. Nor, in the former family home which a wildly talkative local real estate lady had shown me while assuring me it was “priced to sell” (and it was, by Philippe and Marianne), was there any evidence that there’d ever been any pentagrams painted on the cellar floor or that the den walls had been painted with murals of orgies full of slobbering suburbanites swiving each other in every conceivable formulation.

When I’d asked the real estate lady where the orgies Marianne had realized in therapy that she’d witnessed had occurred, she tittered, played nervously with the clunky “ethnic-style” necklace composed of beaded discs that hung round her neck and matched her earrings. “Well, there is a hot tub out back on the deck, but it apparently needs some work. Not a lot, perhaps, but at least some checking out by a spa professional. It hasn’t been used in years, that I know.” She smiled, sensing a selling point.

The thought of those bubbling waters awash with sperm and spermicide somehow repulsed me, although Marianne and Philippe’s book had never mentioned a hot tub. The thought of hopping into such a tub with the local real estate lady, who’d pointedly and coyly mentioned both her “three years ago yesterday” divorce  and her proficiency at cooking Thai food as we were talking back in her office, was even worse.

“I’m sorry, home spas just aren’t my thing. I’m not even sure that homes are anymore.”

“Well, I’m sure we can find something if we keep looking,” the real estate lady, whose name tag identified her as ‘Jan Van Peenen Muntz’ so I knew she hadn’t changed her name back post-divorce, replied. “So we’ll just keep plugging at it.” She put on her plucky suburban real estate face, I scowled back.

“Look,” I said, “how come this house isn’t moving? It’s big, it’s on a nice-sized piece of land and it’s got a certain notoriety.”

Jan Van Peenen Muntz frowned. “The taxes in town are high, the commuter trains are crowded. Some people consider those things drawbacks. But compared to the great school system, the easy commute into Manhattan, the sheer variety of ethnic restaurants in town, I say buy! And buy now!” She smiled widely and I suddenly found her very attractive, could imagine finding her sexy.

“But of course I always say buy,” she added.

“But the notoriety?”

“You mean the book?” She peered intently at me. “It was a best-seller, and even some of my lady friends read it, but those things never happen in real life, they’re just out of the Middle Ages or something, I honestly never hear people talking much about the book’s ridiculous claims here in town, and I’d never heard talk about the devil in town before the book and I’ve lived here 26 years, since even before I was married.” She decided that needed some explanation, so she bit her lip and continued. “David and I lived together a bit before we tied the knot. In an apartment, while we looked for a house. Because this was the town we’d chosen, it had everything. It was what young people did back then,” she concluded by way of apology.

“And then at some point you learned Thai cooking.” I smiled at her. It was a guess. A good guess. Well, you’ve got to do something if you’re out of the local Satanist loop, I figured.

She brightened. “Yes, that’s it. Although we do have two very fine Thai restaurants in town, and one of them even specializes in Thai-French cooking. It’s fusion cuisine.”  Another selling point, she apparently felt.

“One of the great, beneficent legacies of colonialism, no doubt, this fusion of culinary styles.”

“Well, Clermont is a great town to raise your kids in, it’s multicultural.” And she was totally clueless. But appropriately, resolutely, perky.

It went like that, or close to it, with so many people I talked to. I got nowhere. Yes, people remembered Marianne Walling, such a nice family. Quiet but nice, and wasn’t it a shame that her parents died of cancer within months of each other sometime after Marianne’s book had made those outrageous charges? And they also remembered Dr, Philippe Lapotaire before he’d “run off with” his patient Marianne  -  “run off with,” despite its archaicism, was, amazingly, slightly more common usage around Clermont than “had an affair with” or even “fucked in contempt of the normal marriage bonds” - had dumped his wife and two kids, gotten divorced and remarried. He’d been a very good therapist, the consensus ran, had done a lot of good for people with assorted drug and family problems. A nice guy, an even nicer wife and kids, and as soon as the divorce went through she’d sold her house in town and moved to nearby, and probably even more upscale, Millburn. It was all just so weird, so crazy, people told me, and then she meand Marianne and he, meaning Philippe,  had to go and write that damned book, why the hell couldn’t they just have been happy screwing each other without also screwing over their families and by extension their town and their longtime friends and neighbors?

And that was about it. It was certainly about what I’d expect people to say in a town that had been blasted in print, with millions of copies supposedly sold, as Beelzebub’s New Jersey HQ. What else could they say? The book had been a distinct unkindness visited upon wonderful Clermont, someone actually said to me. Well, if putting you on the mental map of so many Americans can be termed an “unkindness,” okay. Myself, I thought it was pretty neat, gave kids something to brag about to roommates when they entered college, allowed them to brag that they actually hailed from hell’s New Jersey outpost.

I’d had one ominous-sounding call from Alec Walling, beginning with him blandly inquiring “How’s my report going?” And I’d told him it wasn’t going quite yet, and he made sympathetic noises and told me to stay in touch and that my $100,000 retainer check had in fact gone out that very day, but that “It would be nice to hear regularly from you. Regularly and reliably.”

I’d also spoken on the phone to Marianne and Philippe twice in the last few weeks  - their corporate entity was named, quaintly, “Satanic Awareness, Inc.” and had a suite of offices in downtown Philadelphia, although the happy couple returned my calls from “on the road” both times  -  and they’d, logically enough, asked me what else did I expect? Had I never theorized about community collusion, they needled, about people who most likely weren’t themselves Satanists covering up anything deleterious that could affect real estate values? Or drive away qualified school teachers from the local system? That would so besmirch Clermont, home as it was, after all, to literally thousands of writers and people in the media industry? So fundamentally, they’d laughed in my face. Which I rated as a most un-Christian sort of response.

Anyway, there seemed to be so little of real substance in the book. Memories. Just memories, the recovered kind, and we all know how shaky they can be. And there was nothing in the book that really explained to me why a respected shrink would suddenly go off the deep end professionally and throw it all away by having an affair with someone who, no matter how fetching she genuinely was, sounded otherwise like an unregenerate loon. I mean, if you told me that you could guarantee I’d make a pile of money by writing such a book, yes, I’d do it myself, especially since Marianne was so bloody striking. But that was the point, that no one sane could make such a guarantee.

And then I asked myself, well, who the hell ever said God was sane? And He was certainly wired in enough to things to make such a guarantee.

Only one thing in the book, in fact, even raised semi-questions in my feverish but quite greedy little mind. Marianne had claimed that at age 8, she’d fled some kind of Satanic ritual, had run screaming down local streets and straight into the emergency room of the local hospital, where she’d been treated for burns. At that time, so her book claimed, the police had come to interview her. But they wound up believing her parents’ story that she’d burned herself somehow fooling around in the kitchen and she was released back into their custody in those pre-wariness about child abuse days.

Interestingly  -  maybe I mean unsettlingly  -  hospital records indicated that Marianne Walling had in fact been treated for unspecified reasons at age 8. But those records were scanty since the local hospital had been folded years ago into a larger, national sort of operation, and they certainly said nothing about Marianne showing up in the ER in a white robe and wearing an upside down cross made out of some heavy black metal round her neck, as her book claimed. Even the company she’d claimed had been her family’s health insurer at the time, whose own records should have indicated both diagnosis and treatment, along with when payment for same had been made, had conveniently been merged out of existence long ago; their successor company told me, politely but firmly, that records for that time from but one of many since-absorbed companies were deep in storage, probably under some mountain in Utah heavily guarded by fanatical Mormon descendants of Brigham Young’s very own hyper-loyalist and gun-happy Danites,  was my guess, and thus no longer available. And naturally the hospital chain had no idea, since personnel records didn’t go back that far, who the ER personnel on duty that evening when Marianne was 8 might have been, although they did assure me that no one from that era was still on the payroll.

And there everything lay. Nowhere.

I eventually moaned about all of this to the one sympathetic listener I’d met so far in Clermont, a police lieutenant named Carl Doyle. He was sympathetic but unhelpful, someone who’d cautioned me right away that “Nothing that the Lapotaires claim in their book can be verified through police records. But then you’d hardly expect devil worshippers to have a lot of purposeful contact with the cops, now would you?”

I shook my head. I liked Doyle, who listened to me, so he said, because he cared about his city. Coming from a family where his grandfather had been Chief and his father had been the Captain of the Detective Bureau and his brother had been a county Prosecutor’s Office narc who had in fact been killed in the line of duty in a still-unsolved killing resulting from a drug buy gone bad, this made sense. Doyle, who resembled the actor Treat Williams and had a nice, cheery manner, was someone who was always more than happy to “talk Clermont” with me, as he put it.

“Even if it’s sometimes a struggle to keep a house here with the local taxes so high,” he told me over coffee in his office, “it’s worth it. I believe in Clermont. I believe in taking part in its daily life and in helping make it better. Both me and my wife graduated from local schools and she even went to the local state university branch for her teaching degree. Our three kids go to local schools and seem to be doing well. It’s a good life. I enjoy helping maintain it for others as a policeman.”

H leaned over his coffee. “Yes, John, we have our share of scumbags. You just haven’t noticed too many of them yet. But Clermont is also, and damn well remains, a pretty good town. A bit full of itself at times, I’m sure you’ve read all those self-congratulatory stories in the local weekly paper about our artists and our cultural groups and the rest of that suburban liberal bullshit, but basically a good place to live in. And I hope my kids feel the same way when they’re grown and decide where to live themselves. And I hope that then they can afford to live here, because as I keep saying, hey, taxes are a bitch and the county and the Feds and the state too all have their own arms in.”

“You sound happy here. I must strike you as an interloper, someone here to bring chaos.” I’d informed him of the circumstances of my employment, although not of its actual price.

He shook his head. “Not as an interloper,” he said, eying me steadily up and down with what I’d have to characterize as his ‘cop face.’’ “But, rather, as someone who might bring some order to this whole sad situation that stems from one lousy book. Think of it. We’ve been checked out peremptorily at best by the tabloids, by the TV boys and girls with ironclad hair, by the magazine hacks. Nobody looked real hard or deeply, nobody gave us a clean bill of health. Instead, at best, they stood outside either the old Walling house or this police station and said, well, who really knows? But a well-regarded reporter, someone with your kind of professional credibillity, this would help. Someone like you, who really knows, who’s known to believe in God, who doesn’t sneer outright at these things, John, you can clear stuff up like nobody can.”

This was giving me more credit than I really deserved. Still, it was nice.

“Which is why I want to really help now.”

“But you have helped.” I thus doth protested too much.

“Not enough. You know what you really need to make your inquiries?”

“What?”

He grinned. “Well, you don’t need a well-meaning local cop who really can’t afford to endanger his job any more than he already has by helping you. John, you do understand that the boys upstairs, the local brass, the last thing they want is a spotlight of the kind you’re carrying in your pocket to be shined on Clermont, yes?”

“Then what do I need? What do I really need here?” This was my Rubicon. Right here. Alea jacta est est est est. God fucking help me.

He looked both sincere and smarmy for a brief moment, like so many preachers of so many faiths I’d met in my life.“You need, for want of a better term, a ‘good bad guy,’ someone who can, well, bend the rules. Maybe even ignore them altogether. Someone who has nothing to do with ‘good’ Clermont, either, someone sort of on the outside but also always knows the score and how to rearrange it if necessary.”

“And do you have someone like that in mind?” Yes, I was curious. Not hooked yet, but curious.

“Yes I do. He’s a Demon. He claims to be a retired Demon, but I’d still rate him as a Demon.”

“A demon certainly sounds appropriate here, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to avoid contact with the legions of hell if possible. You’re kidding, right?”

He made a playful, ‘mannish’ swat at my head. “I love how dumb you journalists can be at times,” Doyle said with apparent conviction. “John, when I said a Demon, I meant one with the ‘D’ upper case. A member of the motorcycle gang of that name. Bikers, you know? Vroom, vroom? Fuck ‘em and leave ‘em?”

“You mean like Hells Angels? That would be appropriate for this matter but….”

“It’d be more than appropriate, John, it’d be perfect for your purposes. His name is Richard Colangeli”

“Is he at least a good demon?,” I asked, reluctant in my own head to use the capital D.

“Oh, he’s the best. He’s very, very good at what he does.”

“And what do Demons do?” I was willing to go with the capital letter if it’d make Doyle happy here.

“Whatever people like you and me are scared shitless to do, and I do mean whatever.”