Criminal Carma Read online

  Baba was providing a nice lunch for his karma yogis. Arranged at one end of the long, rectangular table were big bowls of cole slaw, potato salad, and a green salad with romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, black olives, and feta cheese; platters of cheddar and Swiss cheese sandwiches made with thick whole-wheat bread and garnished with avocado, tomato, and bean sprouts; bowls of fresh fruit and shelled nuts; a big tray of some kind of baked whole-grain desert; and pitchers of water, lemonade, and sassafras tea.

  When Mary came down the wooden steps with another tray of dessert, the eyes of every man in the yard followed her, some openly, with approving smiles and nudges, others surreptitiously, glancing and looking away and glancing again, trying to capture her image in their minds or hearts or groins.

  “Where is Baba?” Ganesha asked her as she set the tray down.

  “How should I know?” Mary said. “I don’t run the ashram.”

  Ganesha made his pained, apologetic face once more. “Would you please see if he is going to come down? Everyone is hungry.”

  Mary walked away without a word, across the yard and back up the steps into the kitchen. So it wasn’t just me she was being rude to.

  The people in the backyard eyed the food while carrying on conversations about yoga, yard maintenance, and local politics that rose from murmur to emphatic discussion and died down again, punctuated by bursts of laughter.

  After about ten minutes, Walt called out from across the yard, “Ganesha, we’re starving, man. When do we eat?”

  Ganesha looked at the kitchen door, then up at the second-floor windows of Baba’s bedroom and shook his head.

  “Right now,” he said decisively. “I guess Gurudev is occupied. Let’s gather around the table and join hands.”

  As the group encircled the table, Johnny came up on my left side, Evelyn on my right. I had no consciousness of Johnny’s hand, concentrating on the touch of the fine feminine instrument I had first noticed in the lobby of the Oasis Palms Resort Hotel. Even as it rested quietly in mine, returning gentle pressure with gentle pressure, Evelyn’s hand was articulate and exciting.

  Of one accord, everyone bowed their heads and closed their eyes. Ganesha chanted the sacred syllable om, drawing it out for thirty seconds or so as everyone joined in. Twice more the welded circle chanted with a single resonant voice the sound that is said to have ten thousand meanings. Afterward, we stood in silence for another minute, ears ringing, before a simultaneous squeeze of hands signaled the end of the meditation.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw that everyone else was grinning, too.

  “Dig in,” Ganesha said. “You’ve earned it.”

  As people formed a line to get at the groceries, Mary came out the kitchen door and down the steps, looking angry. As she stalked past me, I reached out and snagged her, grasping her bare arm with my hand, which was still glowing from the eloquent touch of Evermore’s smooth skin.

  Mary jerked her arm away, whirling to face me, then calming slightly when she saw who I was.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I was just going to say you can cut in line in front of me if you want to.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. I couldn’t tell if that meant “No thanks, I don’t want to join you in line” or “No problem, I don’t mind that you touched me.”

  As I watched her face for a clue, she looked up at the back of the house. Following her azure gaze, I saw Baba Raba looking down from one of his bedroom windows. The casement window was cranked open and he was visible from the middle of his thick hairy thighs on up, wearing his dhoti and a bent iron frown.

  Mary lowered her eyes to mine, smiled, and then slid into line in front of me. There were additional impulses but I kept my hands to myself as we edged forward. When we had our food, she linked her arm though mine and led me to the bench in the rose garden, glancing up once at Baba, who still loomed like a dark demigod above the picnic. I wondered if he recognized me and regretted his invitation.

  “You still want to take me to the beach?” Mary asked when we sat down.

  “I sure do.”

  I didn’t care if she was using me to make a point with the guru. It gave me an opportunity to sit close beside her, with our thighs touching. When we came to dessert, she let me feed her a piece of the coarse sweet cake, taking it from my fork delicately with her lips and tongue, chewing it slowly while looking me in the eye, occasionally blinking her fairy eyelashes. When I tried to feed her a second piece, she laughed and pushed my hand away.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up, then we’ll go.”

  Everyone pitched in to straighten up the yard and put the food away, with Ganesha and Mary supervising.

  “You’re really having a good day, man,” Johnny said as we moved one of the picnic tables back where it belonged.

  After lunch, some of the volunteers left and some returned to the jobs they had been doing, scraping paint or pulling weeds. I was waiting for Mary by the kitchen steps when Evermore walked up and handed me a card with her name and address written on it.

  “When do you think you can come by and take a look?”

  “I’m booked up next week,” I said. “But I could stop by tonight if you are going to be home.”

  “Super!” she said. “Make it around six-thirty.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mary kept me waiting for fifteen minutes, either because she was tied up with Baba or to test her power over me. When she finally came back out, her subtle smile made up for the wait. I don’t know if she was truly beautiful or just very pretty, but I sure liked her looks. Her body was perfect from my point of view, occupying the midpoint between a too-skinny fashion model and a too-voluptuous Playboy bunny. She looked as wholesome as the girl who lives next door on Sycamore Street and sings in the church choir, raising a soprano hosanna to the heavens, and as experienced as the girl who sleeps with the prime minister when his wife is in the country.

  “What are you grinning at?” she said, giving me a little shove.

  “Take a guess,” I said.

  As we walked down Broadway toward the ocean, I tried to sort out my mixed motives toward Baba’s delectable blonde. I was powerfully attracted to her, so much so that I was in danger of thinking more about how to get into her pink pants than how to find the pink diamonds. At the same time, when I reminded myself that the necklace was the true object of my tratakum, the thing I should be focused on as if it were a blip on a radar screen on the eve of Armageddon, she seemed like a good potential source of intelligence, someone who could fill me in on Baba’s operation, if I could gain her confidence.

  “Did you know these streets used to be canals?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where we are walking right now was water sixty years ago. All the streets in this area were canals until they filled them in during the nineteen thirties and forties.”

  “Why did they fill them in?”

  “Lack of imagination,” I said. “They were silting in and overgrown with weeds. It was simpler and cheaper for city hall to turn them into streets than to repair and maintain them.”

  “Wow, that’s interesting. I never heard anyone mention that before. You know a lot of stuff, don’t you?”

  “I pay attention,” I said.

  “I bet you do.”

  Whatever Baba had done to annoy her had shifted her attitude toward me to some degree. She was trying on a girlfriend persona, seeing what it would be like if I were her man, feeling for where my buttons were.

  “Ganesha told me you fixed the roof,” she said after a little while. “He said it seemed like you knew what you were doing. It’s cool that you know how to do stuff like that. So, are you really in the construction business?”

  “Kind of,” I said, not wanting to lie to her any more than I had to. She let the ambiguity pass.

  The boardwalk was packed with a typical
Sunday-afternoon crowd out to enjoy the atmosphere and entertainment. A “silver man,” wandered down from the Santa Monica Promenade, was doing his robot impression in exchange for dollar bills proffered by wide-eyed little kids pushed forward by their parents. A gang of hip-hop acrobats was bouncing and spinning and flipping in front of a suitcase-size boom box that made my chest reverberate as we strolled by. A man in a harlequin costume was swallowing swords.

  The breeze had shifted quarters and was now blowing inland off the splashing water, carrying the exhilarating scent of the sea and seeming to impart the energy of the ocean to everything along the shore, putting a three-dimensional kaleidoscope into motion. Palm trees stirred, sparrows twittered and hopped, basketballs thumped and banged on the courts, boys and girls whizzed past on wheeled devices, pennants flapped, seagulls skimmed, and the homeless shook their silvery cups. Cappuccino machines hissed as sweet foam boiled up like the waves where they curled and creamed on the beach.

  We stopped at a counter along the boardwalk to have Cokes.

  “Oh, that is so good!” Mary said. “I know it’s not healthy, but I love soda. It is one of the things I miss living in the ashram.”

  We were sitting on old-fashioned stools with metal bases and round vinyl-covered tops, sipping our Cokes through straws like two high school kids on a first date.

  “So Baba allows prostitution at the ashram, but not soda?”

  “Lighten up,” she said. “It’s not prostitution, not exactly.”

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Magdalene Order?”

  “No.”

  “You know what tantra is, though, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Okay, what is it, then?” She used her taunting tone as if she didn’t believe me, but I think she just wanted to hear my definition before continuing her explanation.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “It’s fucking for God,” she said.

  I laughed out loud, and a Sikh drinking tea at the other end of the counter turned his turbaned head to look at us.

  “What?” she said. “Isn’t that what it is?”

  “Yes, that is a great definition. I kind of knew that’s what it was, but I couldn’t have put it so neat.”

  She gave me a dazzling smile then, young and happy. I reached out to put my hand on hers, but she pulled her hands back into her lap before I could touch her.

  “Let’s hear your definition,” she said.

  “Tantra is when a man and a woman engage in sexual intercourse to achieve a sense or state of union,” I said, looking deep into her fairy eyes. “Instead of making love selfishly for physical pleasure and to gratify the ego the way people usually do, tantric lovers do it to transcend the ego. Becoming one with the other person is like practice for becoming one with God. Just what you said. It is a way of breaking out of the bounds of the little, socially constructed self and becoming part of something larger and better.”

  “You really know this stuff, don’t you?” she said, trying out the admiring-girlfriend mode again.

  I shrugged. “So, where does the Magdalene Order come in?”

  “Mary Magdalene was the chick in the Bible that Jesus saved from being stoned to death for sleeping around,” she said. “Baba says she wasn’t a hooker because she was a bad person but because she was full of love and didn’t know what to do with it. He says everyone is like that underneath, but society suppresses it and makes it into something bad if people express it without permission. Jesus saw all the love that Mary had inside her and chose her for his companion. Then she found the right focus for her love and helped Jesus do his thing.” She spoke in an excited enthusiastic manner, proud of her esoteric knowledge and something more.

  “How did she help him?”

  “Through tantra.”

  “You mean she slept with him?”

  “Yeah. She helped him find God, like what you were saying.”

  “This is what Baba teaches?”

  “Sure. I know it’s not what they say in Sunday school, but it kind of makes sense, you know?”

  “And that’s what the girls at the ashram do?”

  “Kind of. Baba says most of the men that come to the ashram aren’t ready to find God, but that the girls are helping them by healing their hearts. He says everyone is wounded because they haven’t received the love they need and deserve and that that’s what’s wrong with the world. That’s why people are so angry and mean. He says the Magdalenes’ unconditional love helps the johns feel better about themselves and become better people.”

  “But it’s not unconditional.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t the men have to pay to have sex with the girls?”

  “Yeah, but they have plenty of money. They are all important people, big businessmen and politicians. I’ve seen some of them in the newspaper. And Baba uses the money for a good cause.”

  “Where does he get the girls?”

  “I don’t know. They were all there when I came.”

  “What do they get out of it?”

  “Baba says they grow spiritually by giving love.”

  “Does he have sex with them?”

  “Why are you asking so many questions about this? Are you trying to figure out how to get laid up there? Because it’s not hard if that’s what you want.”

  “I’m not trying to figure out how to get laid. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on over there. Operating a string of call girls out of an ashram, no matter what you call them, doesn’t fit with what I know about Vedanta. I don’t want to start taking classes there if it is really just a whorehouse.”

  “So what if they are whores?” She spit the word back at me angrily. “What’s so bad about that? Isn’t everyone a whore in one way or another?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You aren’t part of the order, are you?”

  “No,” she said, calmer. “Baba wants me to join, but I won’t do it.”

  “Why not, if it’s such a good thing?”

  “Like I told you,” she said in a tough tone, “no one turns me out. And there is something strange about those girls. It’s like they are on something.”

  “You think he is feeding them drugs?”

  “No,” she laughed. “I don’t think he’d do that. He is really not as bad as you think. It is more like he is using tantra and psychic powers to control them. He has some kick-ass siddhis. I’ve seen him do some amazing things. Like with you at the beach yesterday. He really turned up the juice on you. I know you felt it.” She paused, giving me a curious look. “Why is he interested in you?”

  “I’m an interesting person,” I said lightly, but her question made me uneasy. Why had he focused on me? I didn’t like the idea of his mental powers probing my subconscious when it contained a crystalline image he would be quick to recognize. “Did Baba start the Magdalene Order, or does it exist in other places?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do men call and make dates or do they join a tantra yoga class or what?” I was counterprobing.

  “There’s no class. It’s more like private lessons. I’m not sure how they set up the appointments. There are a couple of guys that run the girls for Baba, a creep named Jimmy, and some other muscle-bound jerk who goes by Namo. I can’t stand either one of them. Can we talk about something else now?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”

  Instead of answering, she noisily sucked the last of the Coke from her vase-shaped glass, then rattled the ice and tilted the glass to her lips to get another drop or two. I could tell she came from a lower-middle-class background, same as me. Soda is one of our favorite things.

  “Let’s keep walking,” she said, standing up. “I’ve never ridden on that Ferris wheel before. Might be fun.”

  As we continued north on the boardwalk I looked back and caught the Sikh sneaking a peek at the pink shorts and shook my finger at h
im.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was a bright, breezy three-quarters of a mile from the snack stand to the pier where the Ferris wheel was revolving slowly against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains. I took the hint and didn’t ask Mary anything else about herself. As a reward, she gave me the Cliffs Notes version of her life story.

  She was twenty-four, a Gemini born in May 1971, as I was stumbling through the second semester of my drug-blurred freshman year at Hazel-wood High School. She grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath tract house in Anaheim half a mile from Disneyland. Her mother, like mine, was an alcoholic. Her father was a mindless Catholic churchgoer who beat her when she started getting interested in boys. She ran away from home in her early teens and had always been with older men, starting with a thirty-year-old pot dealer when she was fourteen. After that it was a little vague. She had traveled, worked at different things. She had quit drugs and alcohol two years earlier when she got interested in Eastern religion, gone back to school fifteen months before, in the fall of 1994, after passing the GED test.

  Her personality, which she complimented me by displaying freely, was a blend of sunny optimism, fatalistic cynicism, and fierce self-determination. She was intellectually ambitious, though not terribly well informed. She was a bit of a snob about some things, little-girl curious about others.

  As we walked down the sloping causeway onto the Santa Monica pier, she let me take her hand, which made me ridiculously happy. When we came to the amusement rides, I impressed not just her but myself and the concessionaire by slamming the big wooden mallet down hard enough to ring the bell atop the thirty-foot tower of the high striker. Mary clapped and laughed, and the concessionaire made a “Well, what do you know about that?” face.

  I am six-two and weigh about 175 pounds, which makes me look skinny. But I am a lot stronger than I look, and years in construction taught me a thing or two about leverage and swinging hammers.

  I don’t know if she was doing it to mess with me or not, but Mary said she wanted a popsicle. So I bought her a cylinder of cherry ice. She licked it contentedly as we waited in the line for the Ferris wheel. When she put it in her mouth the first time to suck on it, she looked up frankly into my eyes, saw some of what was going on there, and then burst out laughing, bending over and slapping her thigh with her free hand, leaving a red mark.