Life Blood Part 10

Again he was studying me, as though trying to determine whether I was going along with what he was saying.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "the Hygeian school more or less died out in the West. However, it lives on in other places. For example, primitive peoples have no manufactured, synthetic drugs, so they use natural herbs to enhance their own immune system and stay healthy."

He turned to study the river, dropping into silence.

"Maybe I'm missing something," I declared finally. His hypnotic voice had drawn me in, in spite of myself. "How does this relate to infertility?"

He turned back and caught me with his shining eyes. They seemed to be giving off heat of their own. "Just as the body is intended to heal itself, so is a woman's womb meant to create life. If she's childless, the reason more often than not is that her body is out of harmony with itself. What I do here is seek out each woman's unique energy flows and attempt to restore them, using Eastern practices and Hygeian herbal therapies."

"Does it always succeed?" I abruptly wondered if his techniques might work for me. Face it, Western medicine had completely struck out. The problem was, the guy was just a little too smooth.

"Not always. Some women's bodies are naturally unresponsive, just as all organisms are subject to random . . . irregularities. In those cases, I try to provide her a child by other means."

"You mean adoption," I suggested.

"By whatever means seems appropriate," he replied cryptically

"Well, there's something I'd like to understand. Last week I met a woman who had adopted a baby boy through Children of Light. She got him in three months. Such a thing is, according to what I can find out, totally unheard of. So how did you manage that?"

He stared down at the river. "I thought I'd explained that adoptions are not what we primarily do here. They're provided only as a last resort, in the few cases where my regimen of Hygeian therapies fails."

"But in those cases, where do you find--?"

"As I've said before we talk about adoption, first we need to satisfy ourselves that no other options are possible." Then his eyes clicked into me. "If you could come back next Sat.u.r.day to begin your tests and receive an orientation, I could give you an opinion about your chances of bearing a child. It will require a thorough examination, but I can usually tell with a good degree of certainty whether my program can help someone or not. It's really important, though, that you stay at least . . ." He was staring at me. "Mind if I do something that might relieve some of the symptoms of that cold?"

He reached out and touched my temples with his long, lean fingers. Then he placed his thumbs just above my eyebrows and pressed very hard.

After a long moment, he slowly moved the pressure down to the bridge of my nose, then across under my eyes. Finally he put the heel of his hands just above my ears and pressed again. After a couple of seconds he stepped away and continued talking as though nothing had happened.

"After I give you a full examination, we can discuss our next step."

With that he turned, ready to head back. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a lot of research data to organize."

I guess he a.s.sumed his juggernaut of arcane medical theory had rolled over me sufficiently that he could move on to other matters. I sensed he really wanted me to come back, but he was careful to wind down our mutual interview with a take-it-or-leave-it air. All the same, I felt intrigued as we moved back through the gardens and then into the courtyard. A baby. Maybe he could make it happen for Steve and me. In spite of myself, I felt a moment of hope.

"Thank you for coming," he said by way of farewell, just brushing my hand, then turned and disappeared through one of the ancient wooden doors along the veranda, leaving me alone.

Well, I thought, the calm voice and casual outfit are probably just part of his bedside manner, but you can't be near Alex G.o.ddard and not feel a definite sense of carefully controlled power. But is his power being used for good?

This was the man whose staff was trying to deny me interviews with mothers who'd adopted through Children of Light. And what about the Hispanic hood with the gun? Did Alex G.o.ddard send him? If not, his appearance at Paula's building was one h.e.l.l of a coincidence. So why should I trust . . .

That was when I noticed it. My lingering cold had miraculously vanished, inflamed sinuses and all. I was breathing normally, and even my chest felt cleared.

My G.o.d, I thought, what did he do? Hypnotize me? It was as though a week's healing had pa.s.sed through my body.

I had an epiphany, a moment that galvanizes your resolve. I had to do a doc.u.mentary about this man, to find out what he was really up to. He'd mentioned he had a place in Central America. Was that the source of his special techniques, some kind of ancient Meso-American medical practices he'd discovered?

He claimed he didn't want any publicity, but that's always just an opening move. When somebody says that, what they really mean is they don't want any bad publicity; they just want to have final say about what you produce. There're ways to handle the problem.

I liberated a brochure from the hall table on my way out, thinking I would study it soon. Very closely. I had a nose for a good story, and this one felt right.

When I got back to the car, Lou was nowhere to be seen. He'd given me the impression he intended merely to sit there and doze while I went inside, but now he was gone.

Then he appeared emerging from the forest of trees. Actually, there was another building opposite the stone drive that I hadn't noticed at first. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what that's all about. For some reason Alex G.o.ddard hadn't offered me a tour; he'd taken me for a stroll in the opposite direction. . . .

"That was fast," Lou said settling into the car. "You get what you came for?"

The answer to that was both yes and no. In a sense I'd gotten considerably more than I bargained for.

"He wants me to come back," I said. "And I think I might do it. There's a lot more going on with Alex G.o.ddard than you'd know from just looking at this place. The trick is to stay in control when you're around him."

I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine. He took it and immediately began looking through it.

Lou, I knew, was a man always interested in facts and figures. As we headed toward the Parkway he was pouring through the brochure with intense interest, even as I tried to give him a brief reprise of Alex G.o.ddard's medical philosophy.

"It says here his patients come from all over the United States and Europe," he noted, finally interrupting me.

I found nothing odd in that, and went back to rambling on about Quetzal Manor. Give the place its due, it was placid and tranquil and smacked of the benign spirituality G.o.ddard claimed to put so much stock in.

Still, I found it unsettling.

However, Lou, as usual, chose to see matters his own way. He'd been studying the fine print at the back of the brochure, mumbling to himself, and then he emitted a grunt of discovery.

"Ah, here's what I was looking for," he declared. "You know, as a registered New York State adoption agency, this outfit has got to divulge the number of babies they placed during their last yearly reporting period."

"According to him, he only resorts to adoption if he can't cure your infertility with his special mind-body regimen," I reminded him. "Your energy flows--"

"No s.h.i.t," Lou observed, then went on. "Well, then I guess his mind-body, energy flows, whatever, bulls.h.i.t must fail a lot. Because last year the number was just under two hundred. So at sixty thou a pop, like it says here, we're talking about twelve million smackeroos gross in a year. Not a bad way to fail, huh?"

I caught myself emitting a soft whistle as he read out the number.

There was definitely a lot more going on with Alex G.o.ddard than met the eye.

"So what's he do with all that dough?" Lou mused. "Better question still, where in the h.e.l.l did he find two hundred fresh, orphaned babies, all listed here as Caucasian? And get this: The ages reported at final processing are all just a couple of months, give or take."

Good questions, I thought. Maybe that's the reason he doesn't want publicity; it sounds a little too commercial for a mind-body guru.

My other thought was, with so many babies somehow available, why was Alex G.o.ddard so reluctant to even discuss adoption with me?

The answer, I was sure, lay in the fact he already knew more about me than I knew about him. He knew I was making a film about adoption (how did he come by that knowledge? I kept wondering) and he was concerned he might be mentioned in it. I kept asking myself, why?

On our drive back down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I decided I was definitely looking at a doc.u.mentary in the making. I just had to decide whether to do it with or without his cooperation.

Chapter Six

After I dropped off Lou at his s.p.a.ce in Soho, where he was house sitting for an estate now in the courts, I decided to head on home. The more I thought about Alex G.o.ddard, the more I felt frustrated and even a little angry that I'd completely failed to find out any of the things I'd wanted to learn about him. I replayed our interview in my mind, got nowhere, and then decided to push away thoughts of Quetzal Manor for a while and dwell on something else: Sarah, my film, anything.

It was Sat.u.r.day, and unfortunately I had no plans for the evening.

Translation: no Steve. Back to where I started. How many million stories in the naked city, and I was just so many million plus one.