"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

–H.L. Mencken

"It’s me, Rob," Kildy said when I picked up the phone. "I want you to go with me to see somebody Saturday."

Usually when Kildy calls, she’s bubbling over with details. "You’ve got to see this psychic cosmetic surgeon, Rob," she’d crowed the last time. "His specialty is liposuction, and you can see the tube coming out of his sleeve. And that’s not all. The fat he’s supposed to be suctioning out of their thighs is that goop they use in McDonald’s milkshakes. You can smell the vanilla! It wouldn’t fool a five-year-old, so of course half the women in Hollywood are buying it hook, line, and sinker. We’ve got to do a story on him, Rob!"

I usually had to say, "Kildy–Kildy–Kildy!" before I could get her to shut up long enough to tell me where he was performing.

But this time all she said was, "The seminar’s at one o’clock at the Beverly Hills Hilton. I’ll meet you in the parking lot," and hung up before I could ask her if the somebody she wanted me to see was a pet channeler or a vedic-force therapist, and how much it was going to cost.

I called her back.

"The tickets are on me," she said.

If Kildy had her way, the tickets would always be on her, and she can more than afford it. Her father’s a director at Dreamworks, her current stepmother heads her own production company, and her mother’s a two-time Oscar winner. And Kildy’s rich in her own right–she only acted in four films before she quit the business for a career in debunking, but one of them was the surprise top grosser of the year, and she’d opted for shares instead of a salary.

But she’s ostensibly my employee, even though I can’t afford to pay her enough to keep her in toenail polish. The least I can do is spring for expenses, and a barely known channeler shouldn’t be too bad. Medium Charles Fred, the current darling of the Hollywood set, was only charging two hundred a seance.

"The Jaundiced Eye is paying for the tickets," I said firmly. "How much?"

"Seven hundred and fifty apiece for the group seminar," she said. "Fifteen hundred for a private enlightment audience."

"The tickets are on you," I said.

"Great," she said. "Bring the Sony videocam."

"Not the little one?" I asked. Most psychic events don’t allow recording devices–they make it too easy to spot the earpieces and wires–and the Hasaka is small enough to be smuggled in.

"No," she said, "bring the Sony. See you Saturday, Rob. Bye."

"Wait," I said. "You haven’t told me what this guy does."

"Woman. She’s a channeler. She channels an entity named Isis," Kildy said and hung up again.

I was surprised. We don’t usually waste our time on channelers. They’re no longer trendy. Right now mediums like Charles Fred and Yogi Magaputra and assorted sensory therapists (aroma-, sonic-, auratic-) are the rage.

It’s also an exercise in frustration, since there’s no way to prove whether someone’s channeling or not, unless they claim to be channeling Abraham Lincoln (like Randall Mars) or Nefertiti (like Hanh Nah). In that case you can challenge their facts–Nefertiti could not have had an affair with Alexander the Great, who wasn’t born till a thousand years later, and she was not Cleopatra’s cousin–but most of them channel hundred-thousand-year-old sages or high priests of Lemuria, and there are no physical manifestations.

They’ve learned their lesson from the Victorian spiritualists (who kept getting caught), so there’s no ectoplasm or ghostly trumpets or double-exposed photographic plates. Just a deep, hollow voice that sounds like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Basil Rathbone. Why is it that channeled "entities" all have British accents? And speak King James Bible English?

And why was Kildy willing to waste fifteen hundred bucks–correction, twenty-two fifty; she’d already been to the seminar once–to have me see this Isis? The channeler must have a new gimmick. I’d noticed a couple of people advertising themselves as "angel channelers" in the local psychic rag, but Isis wasn’t an angel name. Egyptian channeler? Goddess conduit?

I looked "Isis-channeler" up on the net. At first I couldn’t find any references, even using Google. I tried skeptics.org and finally Marty Rumboldt, who runs a website that tracks psychics.

"You’re spelling it wrong, Rob," he e-mailed me back. "It’s Isus."

Which should have occurred to me. The channelers of Lazaris, Kochise, and Merlynn all use variations on historical names (probably from some fear of spiritual slander lawsuits), and more than one channeler’s prone to "inventive" spellings: Joye Wildde. And Emmanual.

I googled "Isus." He–bad sign, the channeler didn’t even know Isis was female–was the "spirit entity" channeled by somebody named Ariaura Keller. She’d started in Salem, Massachusetts (a breeding ground for psychics), moved to Sedona (another one), and then headed west and worked her way down the coast, appearing in Seattle, the other Salem, Eugene, Berkeley, and now Beverly Hills. She had six afternoon seminars and two week-long "spiritual immersions" scheduled for L.A., along with private "individually scheduled enlightenment audiences" with Isus. She’d written two books, The Voice of Isus and On the Receiving End (with links to amazon.com), and you could read her bio: "I knew from childhood that I was destined to be a channel for the Truth," and extracts from her speeches: "The earth is destined to witness a transforming spiritual event," on-line. She sounded just like every other channeler I’d ever heard.

And I’d sat through a bunch of them. Back at the height of their popularity (and before I knew better), The Jaundiced Eye had done a six-part series on channelers, starting with M.Z. Lord and running on through Joye Wildde, Todd Phoenix, and Taryn Kryme, whose "entity" was a giggly six-year-old kid from Atlantis. It was the longest six months of my life. And it didn’t have any impact at all on the business. It was tax evasion and mail fraud charges that had put an end to the fad, not my hard-hitting exposés.

Ariaura Keller didn’t have a criminal record (at least under that name), and there weren’t many articles about her. And no mention of any gimmick. "The electric, amazing Isus shares his spiritual wisdom and helps you find your own inner-centeredness and soul-unenfoldment." Nothing new there.

Well, whatever it was that had gotten Kildy interested in her, I’d find out on Saturday. In the meantime, I had an article on Charles Fred to write for the December issue, a book on intelligent design (the latest ploy for getting creationism into the schools and evolution out) to review, and a past-life chiropractor to go see. He claimed his patients’ backaches came from hauling blocks of stone to Stonehenge and/or the Pyramids. (The Pyramids had in fact been a big job, but over the course of three years in business he’d told over two thousand patients they’d gotten their herniated discs at Stonehenge, every single one of them while setting the altar stone in place.)

And he was actually credible compared to Charles Fred, who was having amazing success communicating highly specific messages from the dead to their grieving relatives. I was convinced he was doing something besides the usual cold reading and shills to get the millions he was raking in, but so far I hadn’t been able to figure out what, and every lead I managed to come up with went nowhere.

I didn’t think about the "electric, amazing Isus" again till I was driving over to the Hilton Saturday. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from Kildy since her phone call. Usually she drops by the office every day, and if we’re going somewhere calls three or four times to reconfirm where and when we’re meeting. I wondered if the seminar was still on, or if she’d forgotten all about it. Or suddenly gotten tired of being a debunker and gone back to being a movie star.

I’d been waiting for that to happen ever since the day just over eight months ago when, just like the gorgeous dame in a Bogie movie, she’d walked into my office and asked if she could have a job.

There are three cardinal rules in the skeptic business. The first one is, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and the second one is, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is." And if anything was ever too good to be true, it’s Kildy. She’s not only rich and movie-star beautiful, but intelligent, and, unlike everyone else in Hollywood, a complete skeptic, even though, as she told me the first day, Shirley MacLaine had dandled her on her knee and her own mother would believe anything, "no matter how ridiculous, which is probably why her marriage to my father lasted nearly six years."

She was now on Stepmother Number Four, who had gotten her the role in the surprise top grosser "that made almost as much money as Lord of the Rings and enabled me to take early retirement."

"Retirement?" I’d said. "Why would you want to retire? You could have–"

"Starred in The Hulk III," she said, "and been on the cover of the Globe with Ben Affleck. Or with my lawyer in front of a rehab center. I know, it was tough to give all that up."

She had a point, but that didn’t explain why she’d want to go to work for a barely making-it magazine like The Jaundiced Eye. Or why she’d want to go to work at all.

I said so.

"I’ve already tried the whole ‘fill your day with massages and lunch at Ardani’s and sex with your trainer’ scene, Rob," she said. "It was even worse than The Hulk. Plus, the lights and makeup destroy your complexion."

I found that hard to believe. She had skin like honey.

"And then my mother took me to this luminescence reading–she’s into all those things, psychics and past-life regression and intuitive healing, and the guy doing the reading–-"

"Lucius Windfire," I’d said. I’d been working on an exposé of him for the last two months.

"Yes, Lucius Windfire," she’d said. "He claimed he could read your mind by determining your vedic fault lines, which consisted of setting candles all around you and ‘reading’ the wavering of the flames. It was obvious he was a fake–you could see the earpiece he was getting his information over–but everybody there was eating it up, especially my mother. He’d already talked her into private sessions that set her back ten thousand dollars. And I thought, somebody should put him out of business, and then I thought, that’s what I want to do with my life, and I looked up ‘debunkers’ online and found your magazine, and here I am."

I’d said, "I can’t possibly pay you the kind of money you’re–"

"Your going rate for articles is fine," she’d said and flashed me her better-than-Julia-Roberts smile. "I just want the chance to do something useful and sensible with my life."

And for the last eight months she’d been working with me on the magazine. She was wonderful–she knew everybody in Hollywood, which meant she could get us into invitation-only stuff, and heard about new spiritual fads even before I did. She was also willing to do anything, from letting herself be hypnotized to stealing chicken guts from psychic surgeons to proofreading galleys. And fun to talk to, and gorgeous, and much too good for a small-time skeptic.

And I knew it was just a matter of time before she got bored with debunking and went back to going to premieres and driving around in her Jaguar, but she didn’t. "Have you ever worked with Ben Affleck?" she’d said when I told her she was too beautiful not to still be in the movies. "You couldn’t pay me to go back to that."

She wasn’t in the parking lot, and neither was her Jaguar, and I wondered, as I did every day, if this was the day she’d decided to call it quits. No, there she was, getting out of a taxi. She was wearing a honey-colored pantsuit the same shade as her hair, and designer sunglasses, and she looked, as always, too good to be true. She saw me and waved, and then reached back in for two big throw pillows.

Shit. That meant we were going to have to sit on the floor again. These people made a fortune scamming people out of their not-so-hard-earned cash. You’d think they could afford chairs.

I walked over to her. "I take it we’re going in together," I said, since the pillows were a matching pair, purple brocade jobs with tassels at the corners.

"Yes," Kildy said. "Did you bring the Sony?"

"Yeah," I said. "I still think I should have brought the Hasaka."

She shook her head. "They’re doing body checks. I don’t want to give them an excuse to throw us out. When they fill out the nametags, give them your real name."

"We’re not using a cover?" I asked. Psychics often use skeptics in the audience as an excuse for failure: the negative vibrations made it impossible to contact the spirits, etc. A couple of them had even banned me from their performances, claiming I disturbed the cosmos with my nonbelieving presence. "Do you think that’s a good idea?"

"We don’t have any choice," she said. "When I came last week, I was with my publicist, so I had to use my own name, and I didn’t think it mattered–we never do channelers. Besides, the ushers recognized me. So our cover is, I was so impressed with Ariaura that I talked you into coming to see her."

"Which is pretty much the truth," I said. "What exactly is her gimmick, that you thought I should see her?"

"I don’t want to prejudice you beforehand." She glanced at her Vera Wang watch and handed me one of the pillows. "Let’s go."

We went into the lobby and over to a table under a lilac-and-silver banner proclaiming "Presenting Ariaura and the Wisdom of Isus" and under it, "Believe and It Will Happen." Kildy told the woman at the table our names.

"Oh, I loved you in that movie, Miss Ross," she said and handed us lilac- and-silver nametags and motioned us toward another table next to the door, where a Russell Crowe type in a lilac polo shirt was doing security checks.

"Any cameras, tape recorders, videocams?" he asked us.

Kildy opened her bag and took out an Olympus. "Can’t I take one picture?" she pleaded. "I won’t use the flash or anything. I just wanted to get a photo of Ariaura."

He plucked the Olympus neatly from her fingers. "Autographed 8x10 glossies can be purchased in the waiting area."

"Oh, good," she said. She really should have stayed in acting.

I relinquished the videocam. "What about videos of today’s performance?" I said after he finished frisking me.

He stiffened. "Ariaura’s communications with Isus are not performances. They are unique glimpses into a higher plane. You can order videos of today’s experience in the waiting area," he said, pointing toward a pair of double doors.

The "waiting area" was a long hall lined with tables full of books, videos, audiotapes, chakra charts, crystal balls, aromatherapy oils, amulets, Zuni fetishes, wisdom mobiles, healing stones, singing crystal bowls, amaryllis roots, aura cleansers, pyramids, and assorted other New Age junk, all with the lilac-and-silver Isus logo.

The third cardinal rule of debunking, and maybe the most important, is "Ask yourself, what do they get out of it?" or, as the Bible (source of many scams) puts it, "By their fruits shall ye know them."

And if the prices on this stuff were any indication, Ariaura was getting a hell of a lot out of it. The 8x10 glossies were $28.99, thirty-five with Ariaura’s signature. "And if you want it signed by Isus," the blond guy behind the table said, "it’s a hundred. He’s not always willing to sign."

I could see why. His signature (done in Magic Marker) was a string of complicated symbols that looked like a cross between Elvish runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics, whereas Ariaura’s was a script "A" followed by a formless scrawl.

Videotapes of her previous seminars–Volumes 1-20–cost a cool sixty apiece, and Ariaura’s "sacred amulet" (which looked like something you’d buy on the Home Shopping Network) cost nine hundred and fifty (box extra). People were snapping them up like hotcakes, along with Celtic pentacles, meditation necklaces, dreamcatcher earrings, worry beads, and toe rings with your zodiac sign on them.

Kildy bought one of the outrageously priced stills (no signature) and three of the videos, cooing, "I just loved her last seminar," gave the guy selling them her autograph, and we went into the auditorium.

It was hung with rose, lilac, and silver chiffon floor-length banners and a state-of-the-art lighting system. Stars and planets rotated overhead, and comets occasionally whizzed by. The stage end of the auditorium was hung with gold mylar, and in the center of the stage was a black pyramid-backed throne. Apparently Ariaura did not intend to sit on the floor like the rest of us.

At the door, ushers clad in mostly unbuttoned lilac silk shirts and tight pants took our tickets. They all looked like Tom Cruise, which would be par for the course even if this wasn’t Hollywood.

Sex has been a mainstay of the psychic business since Victorian days. Half the appeal of early table-rapping had been the filmy-draperies-and-nothing-else clad female "spirits" who drifted tantalizingly among the male séance goers, fogging up their spectacles and preventing them from thinking clearly. Sir William Crookes, the famous British chemist, had been so besotted by an obviously fake medium’s sexy daughter that he’d staked his scientific reputation on the medium’s dubious authenticity, and nowadays it’s no accident that most channelers are male and given to chest-baring Rudolph-Valentino-like robes. Or, if they’re female, have buff, handsome ushers to distract the women in the audience. If you’re drooling over them, you’re not likely to spot the wires and chicken guts or realize what they’re saying is nonsense. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

One of the ushers gave Kildy a Tom Cruise smile and led her to the end of a cross-legged row on the very hard-looking floor. I was glad Kildy had brought the pillows.

I plopped mine next to hers and sat down on it. "This had better be good," I said.

"Oh, it will be," a fifty-ish redhead wearing the sacred amulet and a diamond as big as my fist said. "I’ve seen Ariaura, and she’s wonderful." She reached into one of the three lilac shopping bags she’d stuck between us and pulled out a needlepoint lavender pillow that said, "Believe and It Will Happen."

I wondered if that applied to her believing her pillow was large enough to sit on, because it was about the same size as the rock on her finger, but as soon as they’d finished organizing the rows, the ushers came around bearing stacks of plastic-covered cushions (the kind rented at football games, only lilac) for ten bucks apiece.

The woman next to me took three, and I counted ten other people in our row, and eleven in the row ahead of us shelling out for them. Eighty rows times ten, to be conservative. A cool eight thousand bucks, just to sit down, and who knows how much profit in all those lilac shopping bags. "By their fruits shall ye know them."

I looked around. I couldn’t see any signs of shills or a wireless setup, but, unlike psychics and mediums, channelers don’t need them. They give out general advice, couched in New Age terms.

"Isus is absolutely astonishing," my neighbor confided. "He’s so wise! Much better than Ramtha. He’s responsible for my deciding to leave Randall. ‘To thine inner self be true,’ Isus said, and I realized Randall had been blocking my spiritual ascent–"

"Were you at last Saturday’s seminar?" Kildy leaned across me to ask.

"No. I was in Cancun, and I was just decimated when I realized I’d missed it. I made Tio bring me back early so I could come today. I desperately need Isus’s wisdom about the divorce. Randall’s claiming Isus had nothing to do with my decision, that I left him because the pre-nup had expired, and he’s threatening to call Tio as–"

But Kildy had lost interest and was leaning across her to ask a pencil-thin woman in the full lotus position if she’d seen Ariaura before. She hadn’t, but the one on her right had.

"Last Saturday?" Kildy asked.

She hadn’t. She’d seen her six weeks ago in Eugene.

I leaned toward Kildy and whispered, "What happened last Saturday?"

"I think they’re starting, Rob," she said, pointing at the stage, where absolutely nothing was happening, and got off her pillow and onto her knees.

"What are you doing?" I whispered.

She didn’t answer that either. She reached inside her pillow, pulled out an orange pillow the same size as the "Believe and It Will Happen" cushion, handed it to me, and arranged herself gracefully on the large tasseled one. As soon as she was crosslegged, she took the orange pillow back from me and laid it across her knees.

"Comfy?" I asked.

"Yes, thank you," she said, turning her movie-star smile on me.

I leaned toward her. "You sure you don’t want to tell me what we’re doing here?"

"Oh, look, they’re starting," she said, and this time they were.

A Brad-Pitt lookalike stepped out on stage holding a hand mike and gave us the ground rules. No flash photos (even though they’d confiscated all the cameras). No applause (it breaks Ariaura’s concentration). No bathroom breaks. "The cosmic link with Isus is extremely fragile," Brad explained, "and movement or the shutting of a door can break that connection."

Right. Or else Ariaura had learned a few lessons from EST, including the fact that people who are distracted by their bladders are less likely to spot gobbledygook, like the stuff Brad was spouting right now:

"Eighty thousand years ago Isus was a high priest of Atlantis. He lived for three hundred years before he departed this earthly plane and acquired the wisdom of the ages–"

What ages? The Paleolithic and Neolithic? Eighty thousand years ago we were still living in trees.

"–he spoke with the oracle at Delphi, he delved into the Sacred Writings of Rosicrucian–"

Rosicrucian?

"Now watch as Ariaura calls him from the Cosmic All to share his wisdom with you."

The lights deepened to rose, and the chiffon banners began to blow in, as if there was a breeze behind them. Correction, state-of-the-art lighting and fans.

The gale intensified, and for a moment I wondered if Ariaura was going to swoop in on a wire, but then the gold mylar parted, revealing a curving black stairway, and Ariaura, in a purple velvet caftan and her sacred amulet, descended it to the strains of Holst’s Planets and went to stand dramatically in front of her throne.

The audience paid no attention to the "no applause" edict, and Ariaura seemed to expect it. She stood there for at least two minutes, regally surveying the crowd. Then she raised her arms as if delivering a benediction and lowered them again, quieting the crowd. "Welcome, Seekers after Divine Truth," she said in a peppy, Oprah-type voice, and there was more applause. "We’re going to have a wonderful spiritual experience together here today and achieve a new plane of enlightenment."

More applause.

"But you mustn’t applaud me. I am only the conduit through which Isus passes, the vessel he fills. Isus first came to me, or, rather, I should say, through me, five years ago, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to believe it. It took me nearly a whole year to accept that I had become the focus for cosmic energies beyond the reality we know. It’s the wisdom of his highly evolved spirit you’ll hear today, not mine. If . . ." a nice theatrical pause here, ". . . he deigns to come to us. For Isus is a sage, not a servant to be bidden. He comes when he wills. Mayhap he will be among us this afternoon, mayhap not."

In a pig’s eye. These women weren’t going to shell out seven hundred and fifty bucks for a no-show, even if this was Beverly Hills. I’d bet the house Isus showed up right on cue.

"Isus will come only if our earthly plane is in alignment with the cosmic," Ariaura said, "if the auratic vibrations are right." She looked sternly out at the audience. "If any of you are harboring negative vibrations, contact cannot be made."

Uh-oh, here it comes, I thought, and waited for her to look straight at the two of us and tell us to leave, but she didn’t. She merely said, "Are all of you thinking positive thoughts, feeling positive emotions? Are you all believing?"

You bet.

"I sense that every one of you is thinking positive thoughts," Ariaura said. "Good. Now, to bring Isus among us, you must help me. You must each calm your center." She closed her eyes. "You must concentrate on your inner soul-self."

I glanced around the audience. Over half of the women had their eyes shut, and many had folded their hands in an attitude of prayer. Some swayed back and forth, and the woman next to me was droning, "Om." Kildy had her eyes closed, her orange pillow clasped to her chest.

"Align . . . align . . ." Ariaura chanted, and then with finality, "Align." There was another theatrical pause.

"I will now attempt to contact Isus," she said. "The focusing of the astral energy is a dangerous and difficult operation. I must ask that you remain perfectly quiet and still while I am preparing myself."

The woman next to me obediently stopped chanting "Om," and everyone opened their eyes. Ariaura closed hers and leaned back on her throne, her ring-covered hands draped over the ends of the arms. The lights went down and the music came up, the theme from Holst’s "Mars." Everyone, including Kildy, watched breathlessly.

Ariaura jerked suddenly as if she were being electrocuted and clutched the arms of the throne. Her face contorted, her mouth twisting and her head shaking. The audience gasped. Her body jerked again, slamming back against the throne, and she went into a series of spasms and writhings, with more shaking. This went on for a full minute, while "Mars" built slowly behind her and the spotlight morphed to pink. The music cut off, and she slumped lifelessly back against the throne.

She remained there for a nicely timed interval, and then sat up stiffly, staring straight ahead, her hands lying loosely on the throne’s arms. "I am Isus!" she said in a booming voice that was a dead ringer for "Who dares to approach the great Oz?"

"I am the Enlightened One, a servant unto that which is called the Text and the First Source. I have come from the ninth level of the astral plane," she boomed, "to aid you in your spiritual journeys."

So far it was an exact duplicate of Romtha, right down to the pink light and the number of the astral plane level, but next to me Kildy was leaning forward expectantly.

"I have come to speak the truth," Isus boomed, "to reveal to thou thine higher self."

I leaned over to Kildy and whispered, "Why is it they never learn how to use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ correctly on the astral plane?"

"Shh," Kildy hissed, intent on what Isus was saying.

"I bring you the long-lost wisdom of the kingdom of Lemuria and the prophecies of Antinous to aid thee in these troubled days, for thou livest in a time of tribulation. The last days these are of the Present Age, days filled with anxiety and terrorist attacks and dysfunctional relationships. But I say unto ye, thou must not look without but within, for thee alone are responsible for your happiness, and if that means getting out of a bad relationship, make it so. Seek you must your own inner isness and create thou must thine own inner reality. Thee art the universe."

I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Something, at least, but this was just the usual New Age nonsense, a mush of psychobabble, self-help tips, pseudo-scripture, and Chicken Soup for the Soul.

I sneaked a glance at Kildy. She was sitting forward, still clutching her pillow tightly to her chest, her beautiful face intent, her mouth slightly open. I wondered if she could actually have been taken in by Ariaura. It’s always a possibility, even with skeptics. Kildy wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled by a cleverly done illusion.

But this wasn’t cleverly done. It wasn’t even original. The Lemuria stuff was Richard Zephyr, the "Thou art the universe" stuff was Shirley MacLaine, and the syntax was pure Yoda.

And this was Kildy we were talking about. Kildy, who never fell for anything, not even that devic levitator. She had to have a good reason for shelling out over two thousand bucks for this, but so far I was stumped. "What exactly is it you wanted me to see?" I murmured.

"Shhh."

"But fear not," Ariaura said, "for a New Age is coming, an age of peace, of spiritual enlightenment, when you–doing here listening to this confounded claptrap?"

I looked up sharply. Ariaura’s voice had changed in midsentence from Isus’s booming bass to a gravelly baritone, and her manner had, too. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, scowling at the audience. "It’s a lot of infernal gabble," she said belligerently.

I glanced at Kildy. She had her eyes fixed on the stage.

"This hokum is even worse than the pretentious bombast you hear in the chautauqua," the voice croaked.

Chautauqua? I thought. What the–?

"But there you sit, with your mouths hanging open, like the rubes at an Arkansas camp meeting, listening to a snakecharming preacher, waiting for her to fix up your romances and cure your gallstones–"

The woman next to Kildy glanced questioningly at us and then back at the stage. Two of the ushers standing along the wall exchanged frowning glances, and I could hear whispering from somewhere in the audience.

"Have you yaps actually fallen for this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Of course you have. This is America, home of the imbecile and the ass!" the voice said, and the whispering became a definite murmur.

"What in the–?" a woman behind us said, and the woman next to me gathered up her bags, stuffed her "Believe" pillow into one of them, stood up, and began to step over people to get to the door.

One of the ushers signaled someone in the control booth, and the lights and Holst’s "Venus" began to come up. The emcee took a hesitant step out onto the stage.

"You sit there like a bunch of gaping primates, ready to buy anyth–" Ariaura said, and her voice changed abruptly back to the basso of Isus, "–but the Age of Spiritual Enlightenment cannot begin until each of thou beginnest thy own journey."

The emcee stopped in mid-step, and so did the murmuring. And the woman who’d been next to me and who was almost to the door. She stood there next to it, holding her bags and listening.

"And believe. All of you, casteth out the toxins of doubt and skepticism now. Believe and it will happen."

She must be back on script. The emcee gave a sigh of relief, and retreated back into the wings, and the woman who’d been next to me sat down where she’d been standing, bags and pillows and all. The music faded, and the lights went back to rose.

"Believe in thine inner Soul-Self," Ariaura/Isus said. "Believe, and let your spiritual unenfoldment begin." She paused, and the ushers looked up nervously. The emcee poked his head out from the gold mylar drapes.

"I grow weary," she said. "I must return now to that higher reality from whence I cameth. Fear not, for though I no longer share this earthly plane with thee, still I am with thou." She raised her arm stiffly in a benediction/Nazi salute, gave a sharp shudder, and then slumped forward in a swoon that would have done credit to Gloria Swanson. Holst’s "Venus" began again, and she sat up, blinking, and turned to the emcee, who had come out onstage again.

"Did Isus speak?" she asked him in her original voice.

"Yes, he did," the emcee said, and the audience burst into thunderous applause, during which he helped her to her feet and handed her over to two of the ushers, who walked her, leaning heavily on them, up the black stairway and out of sight.

As soon as she was safely gone, the emcee quieted the applause and said, "Copies of Ariaura’s books and videotapes are available outside in the waiting area. If you wish to arrange for a private audience, see me or one of the ushers," and everyone began gathering up their pillows and heading for the door.

"Wasn’t he wonderful?" a woman ahead of us in the exodus said to her friend. "So authentic!"

"Is Los Angeles the worst town in America, or only next to the worst? The skeptic, asked the original question, will say yes, the believer will say no. There you have it."

–H.L. Mencken

 

Kildy and I didn’t talk till we were out of the parking lot and on Wilshire, at which point Kildy said, "Now do you understand why I wanted you to see it for yourself,, Rob?"

"It was interesting, all right. I take it she did the same thing at the seminar you went to last week?"

She nodded. "Only last week two people walked out."

"Was it the exact same spiel?"

"No. It didn’t last quite as long–I don’t know how long exactly, it caught me by surprise–and she used slightly different words, but the message was the same. And it happened the same way–no warning, no contortions, her voice just changed abruptly in mid-sentence. So what do you think’s going on, Rob?"

I turned onto LaBrea. "I don’t know, but lots of channelers do more than one ‘entity.’ Joye Wildde does two, and before Hans Lightfoot went to jail, he did half a dozen."

Kildy looked skeptical. "Her promotional material doesn’t say anything about multiple entities."

"Maybe she’s tired of Isus and wants to switch to another spirit. When you’re a channeler, you can’t just announce, ‘Coming soon: Isus II.’ You’ve got to make it look authentic. So she introduces him with a few words one week, a couple of sentences the next, et cetera."

"She’s introducing a new and improved spirit who yells at the audience and calls them imbeciles and rubes?" she said incredulously.

"It’s probably what channelers call a ‘dark spirit,’ a so-called bad entity that tries to lead the unwary astray. Todd Phoenix used to have a nasty voice break in in the middle of White Feather’s spiel and make heckling comments. It’s a useful trick. It reinforces the idea that the psychic’s actually channeling, and anything inconsistent or controversial the channeler says can be blamed on the bad spirit."

"But Ariaura didn’t even seem to be aware that there was a bad spirit, if that’s what it was supposed to be. Why would it tell the audience to go home and stop giving their money to a snake-oil vendor like Ariaura?"

A snake-oil vendor? That sounded vaguely familiar, too. "Is that what she said last week? Snake-oil vendor?"

"Yes," she said. "Why? Do you know who she’s channeling?"

"No," I said, frowning, "but I’ve heard that phrase somewhere. And the line about the chautauqua."

"So it’s obviously somebody famous," Kildy said.

But the historical figures channelers did were always instantly recognizable. Randall Mars’s Abraham Lincoln began every sentence with "Four score and seven years ago," and the others were all equally obvious. "I wish I’d gotten Ariaura’s little outburst on tape," I said.

"We did," Kildy said, reaching over the backseat and grabbing her orange pillow. She unzipped it, reached inside, and brought out a micro-videocam. "Ta-da! I’m sorry I didn’t get last week’s. I didn’t realize they were frisking people."

She fished in the pillow again and brought out a sheet of paper. "I had to run to the bathroom and scribble down what I could remember."

"I thought they didn’t let people go to the bathroom."

She grinned at me. "I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of an actress they’d let out of rehab too soon."

I glanced at the list at the next stoplight. There were only a few phrases on it: the one she’d mentioned, and "I’ve never seen such shameless bilge," and "you’d have to be a pack of deluded half-wits to believe something so preposterous.’ "

"That’s all?"

She nodded. "I told you, it didn’t last nearly as long last time. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I missed most of the first sentence."

"That’s why you were asking at the seminar about buying the videotape?"

"Uh-huh, although I doubt if there’s anything on it. I’ve watched her last three videos, and there’s no sign of Entity Number Two."

"But it happened at the seminar you went to and at this one. Has it occurred to you it might have happened because we were there?" I pulled into a parking space in front of the building where The Jaundiced Eye has its office.

"But–" she said.

"The ticket-taker could have alerted her that we were there," I said. I got out and opened her door for her, and we started up to the office. "Or she could have spotted us in the audience–you’re not the only one who’s famous. My picture’s on every psychic wanted poster on the West Coast–and she decided to jazz up the performance a little by adding another entity. To impress us."

"That can’t be it."

I opened the door. "Why not?"

"Because it’s happened at least twice before," she said, walking in and sitting down in the only good chair. "In Berkeley and Seattle."

"How do you know?"

"My publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend saw her in Berkeley–that’s how my publicist found out about Ariaura–so I got her number and called her and asked her, and she said Isus was talking along about tribulation and thee being the universe, and all of a sudden this other voice said, ‘What a bunch of boobs!’ She said that’s how she knew Ariaura was really channeling, because if it was fake she’d hardly have called the audience names."

"Well, there’s your answer. She does it to make her audiences believe her."

"You saw them, they already believe her," Kildy said. "And if that’s what she’s doing, why isn’t it on the Berkeley videotape?"

"It isn’t?"

She shook her head. "I watched it six times. Nothing."

"And you’re sure your publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend really saw it? That you weren’t leading her when you asked her questions?"

"I’m sure," she said indignantly. "Besides, I asked my mother."

"She was there, too?"

"No, but two of her friends were, and one of them knew someone who saw the Seattle seminar. They all said basically the same thing, except the part about it making them believe her. In fact, one of them said, ‘I think her cue cards were out of order,’ and told me not to waste my money, that the person I should go see was Angelina Black Feather." She grinned at me and then went serious. "If Ariaura was doing it on purpose, why would she edit it out? And why did the emcee and the ushers look so uneasy?"

So she’d noticed that, too.

"Maybe she didn’t warn them she was going to do it. Or, more likely, it’s all part of the act, to make people believe it’s authentic."

Kildy shook her head doubtfully. "I don’t think so. I think it’s something else."

"Like what? You don’t think she’s really channeling this guy?"

"No, of course not, Rob," she said indignantly. "It’s just that . . . you say she’s doing it to get publicity and bigger crowds, but as you told me, the first rule of success in the psychic business is to tell people what they want to hear, not to call them boobs. You saw the woman next to you–she was all ready to walk out, and I watched her afterward. She didn’t sign up for a private enlightenment audience, and neither did very many other people, and I heard the emcee telling someone there were lots of tickets still available for the next seminar. Last week’s was sold out a month in advance. Why would she do something to hurt her business?"

"She’s got to do something to up the ante, to keep the customers coming back, and this new spirit is to create buzz. You watch, next week she’ll be advertising ‘The Battle of the Ancients.’ It’s a gimmick, Kildy."

"So you don’t think we should go see her again."

"No. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do. We don’t want to give her free publicity, and if she did do it to impress us, though it doesn’t sound like it, we’d be playing right into her hands. If she’s not, and the spirit is driving customers away, like you say, she’ll dump it and come up with a different one. Or put herself out of business. Either way, there’s no need for us to do anything. It’s a non-story. You can forget all about her."

Which just goes to show you why I could never make it as a psychic. Because before the words were even out of my mouth, the office door banged open, and Ariaura roared in and grabbed me by the lapels.

"I don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re doing it!" she screamed, "but I want you to stop it right now!"

"He has a large and extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance. . . ."

–H.L. Mencken

I hadn’t given Ariaura’s acting skills enough credit. Her portrayal of Isus might be wooden and fakey, but she gave a pretty convincing portrayal of a hopping-mad psychic.

"How dare you!" she shrieked. "I’ll sue you for everything you own!"

She had changed out of her flowing robes and into a lilac-colored suit Kildy told me later was a Zac Posen, and her diamond-studded necklace and earrings rattled. She was practically vibrating with rage, though not the positive vibrations she’d said were necessary for the appearance of spirits.

"I just watched the video of my seminar," she shrieked, her face two inches from mine. "How dare you hypnotize me and make me look like a complete fool in front of–"

"Hypnotize?" Kildy said. (I was too busy trying to loosen her grip on my lapels to say anything.) "You think Rob hypnotized you?"

"Oh, don’t play the innocent with me," Ariaura said, wheeling on her. "I saw you two out there in the audience today, and I know all about you and your nasty, sneering little magazine. I know you nonbelievers will stop at nothing to keep us from spreading the Higher Truth, but I didn’t think you’d go this far, hypnotizing me against my will and making me say those things! Isus told me I shouldn’t let you stay in the auditorium, that he sensed danger in your reality, but I said, ‘No, let the unbelievers stay and experience your presence. Let them know you come from the Existence Beyond to help us, to bring us words of Higher Wisdom,’ but Isus was right, you were up to no good."

She removed one hand from a lapel long enough to shake a lilac-lacquered fingernail at me. "Well, your little hypnotism scheme won’t work. I’ve worked too hard to get where I am, and I’m not going to let a pair of narrow-minded little unbelievers like you get in my way. I have no intention–Higher Wisdom, my foot!" she snorted. "Higher Humbug is what I call it."

Kildy glanced, startled, at me.

"Oh, the trappings are a lot gaudier, I’ll give you that," Ariaura said in the gravelly voice we’d heard at the seminar.

As before, the change had come without a break and in midsentence. One minute she had had me by the lapels, and the next she’d let go and was pacing around the room, her hands behind her back, musing, "That auditorium’s a lot fancier, and it’s a big improvement over a courthouse lawn, and a good forty degrees cooler." She sat down on the couch, her hands on her spread-apart knees. "And those duds she wears would make a grand worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster look dowdy, but it’s the same old line of buncombe and the same old Boobus Americanus drinking it in."

Kildy took a careful step toward my desk, reached for her handbag and did something I couldn’t see, and then went back to where she’d been standing, keeping her eyes the whole time on Ariaura, who was holding forth about the seminar.

"I never saw such an assortment of slack-jawed simians in one place! Except for the fact that the yokels have to sit on the floor–and pay for the privilege!–it’s the spitting image of a Baptist tent revival. Tell ’em what they want to hear, do a couple of parlor tricks, and then pass the collection plate. And they’re still falling for it!" She stood up and began pacing again. "I knew I should’ve stuck around. It’s just like that time in Dayton–I think it’s all over and leave, and look what happens! You let the quacks and the crooks take over, like this latter-day Aimee Semple McPherson. She’s no more a seer than–of allowing you to ruin everything I’ve worked for! I . . ." She looked around bewilderedly. ". . . what? . . . I . . ." She faltered to a stop.

I had to hand it to her. She was good. She’d switched back into her own voice without missing a beat, and then given an impressive impersonation of someone who had no idea what was going on.

She looked confusedly from me to Kildy and back. "It happened again, didn’t it?" she asked, a quaver in her voice, and turned to appeal to Kildy. "He did it again, didn’t he?" and began backing toward the door. "Didn’t he?"

She pointed accusingly at me. "You keep away from me!" she shrieked. "And you keep away from my seminars! If you so much as try to come near me again, I’ll get a restraining order against you!" she said and roared out, slamming the door behind her.

"Well," Kildy said after a minute. "That was interesting."

"Yes," I said, looking at the door. "Interesting."

Kildy went over to my desk and pulled the Hasaka out from behind her handbag. "I got it all," she said, taking out the disk, sticking it in the computer dock, and sitting down in front of the monitor. "There were a lot more clues this time." She began typing in commands. "There should be more than enough for us to be able to figure out who it is."

"I know who it is," I said.

Kildy stopped in mid-keystroke. "Who?"

"The High Priest of Irreverence."

"Who?"

"The Holy Terror from Baltimore, the Apostle of Common Sense, the Scourge of Con Men, Creationists, Faith-Healers, and the Booboisie," I said. "Henry Louis Mencken."

 

"In brief, it is a fraud."

–H.L. Mencken

"H.L. Mencken?" Kildy said. "The reporter who covered the Scopes trial?" (I told you she was too good to be true.)

"But why would Ariaura channel him?" she asked after we’d checked the words and phrases we’d listed against Mencken’s writings. They all checked out, from "buncombe" to "slackjawed simians" to "home of the imbecile and the ass."

"What did he mean about leaving Dayton early? Did something happen in Ohio?"

I shook my head. "Tennessee. Dayton was where the Scopes trial was held."

"And Mencken left early?"

"I don’t know," I said, and went over to the bookcase to look for The Great Monkey Trial, "but I know it got so hot during the trial they moved it outside."

"That’s what that comment about the courthouse lawn and its being forty degrees cooler meant," Kildy said.

I nodded. "It was a hundred and five degrees and 90 percent humidity the week of the trial. It’s definitely Mencken. He invented the term ‘Boobus Americanus.’ "

"But why would Ariaura channel H.L. Mencken, Rob? He hated people like her, didn’t he?"

"He certainly did." He’d been the bane of charlatans and quacks all through the twenties, writing scathing columns on all kinds of scams, from faith-healing to chiropractic to creationism, railing incessantly against all forms of "hocus-pocus" and on behalf of science and rational thought.

"Then why would she channel him?" Kildy asked. Why not somebody sympathetic to psychics, like Edgar Cayce or Madame Blavatsky?"

"Because they’d obviously be suspect. By channeling an enemy of psychics, she makes it seem more credible."

"But nobody’s ever heard of him."

"You have. I have."

"But nobody else in Ariaura’s audience has."

"Exactly," I said, still looking for The Great Monkey Trial.

"You mean you think she’s doing it to impress us?"

"Obviously," I said, scanning the titles. "Why else would she have come all the way over here to give that little performance?"

"But–what about the Seattle seminar? Or the one in Berkeley?"

"Dry runs. Or she was hoping we’d hear about them and go see her. Which we did."

"I didn’t," Kildy said. "I went because my publicist wanted me to."

"But you go to lots of spiritualist events, and you talk to lots of people. Your publicist was there. Even if you hadn’t gone, she’d have told you about it."

"But what would be the point? You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in channeling. Would she honestly think she could convince you Mencken was real?"

"Maybe," I said. "She’s obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make the spirit sound like him. And think what a coup that would be. ‘Skeptic Says Channeled Spirit Authentic’? Have you ever heard of Uri Geller? He made a splash back in the seventies by claiming to bend spoons with his mind. He got all kinds of attention when a pair of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute said it wasn’t a trick, that he was actually doing it."

"Was he?"

"No, of course not, and eventually he was exposed as a fraud. By Johnny Carson. Geller made the mistake of going on the Tonight Show and doing it in front of him. He’d apparently forgotten Carson had been a magician in his early days. But the point is, he made it onto the Tonight Show. And what made him a celebrity was having the endorsement of reputable scientists."

"And if you endorsed Ariaura, if you said you thought it was really Mencken, she’d be a celebrity, too."

"Exactly."

"So what do we do?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? You’re not going to try to expose her as a fake?"

"Channeling isn’t the same as bending spoons. There’s no independently verifiable evidence." I looked at her. "It’s not worth it, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like Charles Fred. He’s making way too much money for a medium who only charges two hundred a performance, and he has way too many hits for a cold-reader. We need to find out how he’s doing it, and where the money’s coming from."

"But shouldn’t we at least go to Ariaura’s next seminar to see if it happens again?" Kildy persisted.

"And have to explain to the L.A. Times reporter who just happens to be there why we’re so interested in Ariaura?" I said. "And why you came back three times?"

"I suppose you’re right. But what if some other skeptic endorses her? Or some English professor?"

I hadn’t thought of that. Ariaura had dangled the bait at four seminars we knew of. She might have been doing it at more, and The Skeptical Mind was in Seattle, Carlyle Drew was in San Francisco, and there were any number of amateur skeptics who went to spiritualist events.

And they would all know who Mencken was. He was the critical thinker’s favorite person, next to the Amazing Randi and Houdini. He’d not only been fearless in his attacks on superstition and fraud, he could write "like a bat out of hell." And, unlike the rest of us skeptics, people had actually listened to what he said.

I’d liked him ever since I’d read about him chatting with somebody in his office at the Baltimore Sun and then suddenly looking out the window, saying, "The sons of bitches are gaining on us!" and frantically beginning to type. That was how I felt about twice a day, and more than once I’d muttered to myself, "Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?"

And I’d be willing to bet there were other people who felt the same way I did, who might be seduced by Mencken’s language and the fact that Ariaura was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

"You’re right," I said. "We need to look into this, but we should send somebody else to the seminar."

"How about my publicist? She said she wanted to go again."

"No, I don’t want it to be anybody connected with us."

"I know just the person," Kildy said, snatching up her cell phone. "Her name’s Riata Starr. She’s an actress."

With a name like that, what else could she be?

"She’s between jobs right now," Kildy said, punching in a number, "and if I tell her there’s likely to be a casting director there, she’ll definitely do it for us."

"Does she believe in channelers?"

She looked pityingly at me. "Everyone in Hollywood believes in channelers, but it won’t matter." She put the phone to her ear. "I’ll put a videocam on her, and a recorder," she whispered. "And I’ll tell her an undercover job would look great on her acting resume. Hello?" she said in a normal voice. "I’m trying to reach Riata Starr. Oh. No, no message."

She pushed "end." "She’s at a casting call at Miramax." She stuck the phone in her bag, fished her keys out of its depths, and slung the bag over her shoulder. "I’m going to go out there and talk to her. I’ll be back," she said and went out.

Definitely too good to be true, I thought, watching her leave, and called up a friend of mine in the police department and asked him what they had on Ariaura.

He promised he’d call me back, and while I was waiting I looked for and found The Great Monkey Trial. I looked up Mencken in the index and started through the references to see when Mencken had left Dayton. I doubted if he would have left before the trial was over. He’d been having the time of his life, pillorying William Jennings Bryan and the creationists. Maybe the reference was to Mencken’s having left before Bryan’s death. Bryan had died five days after the trial ended, presumably from a heart attack, but more likely from the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Clarence Darrow, who’d put him on the stand and fired questions at him about the Bible. Darrow had made him, and creationism, look ridiculous, or rather, Bryan had made himself look ridiculous. The cross-examination had been the high point of the trial, and it had killed him.

Mencken had written a deadly, unforgiving eulogy of Bryan, and he might very well have been sorry he hadn’t been in at the kill, but I couldn’t imagine Ariaura knowing that, even if she had taken the trouble to look up "Boobus Americanus" and "unmitigated bilge," and research Mencken’s gravelly voice and explosive delivery.

Of course she might have read it. In this very book, even. I read the chapter on Bryan’s death, looking for references to Mencken, but I couldn’t find any. I backtracked, and there it was. And I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t left after the trial. When Darrow’s expert witnesses had all been disallowed, Mencken had assumed that the trial was all over except for assorted legal technicalities and had gone back to Baltimore. Mencken hadn’t seen Darrow’s withering cross-examination. He’d missed Bryan saying man wasn’t a mammal, his insisting the sun could stand still without throwing the earth out of orbit. He’d definitely left too soon. And I was willing to bet he’d never forgiven himself for it.

"To me, the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it has been so as long as I remember. Not once in this life have I ever been inclined to seek a rock and refuge elsewhere."

–H.L. Mencken

"But how could Ariaura know that?" Kildy said when she got back from the casting call.

"The same way I know it. She read it in a book. Did your friend Riata agree to go to the seminar?"

"Yes, she said she’d go. I gave her the Hasaka, but I’m worried they might confiscate it, so I’ve got an appointment with this props guy at Universal who worked on the last Bond movie to see if he’s got any ideas."

"Uh, Kildy . . . those gadgets James Bond uses aren’t real. It’s a movie."

She shot me her Julia-Roberts-plus smile. "I said ideas. Oh, and I got Riata’s ticket. When I called, I asked if they were sold out, and the guy I talked to said, ‘Are you kidding?’ and told me they’d only sold about half what they usually do. Did you find out anything about Ariaura?"

"No," I said. "I’m checking out some leads," but my friend at the police department didn’t have any dope on Ariaura, not even a possible alibi.

"She’s clean," he said when he finally called back the next morning. "No mail fraud, not even a parking ticket."

I couldn’t find anything on her in The Skeptical Mind or on the Scam-watch website. It looked like she made her money the good old American way, by telling her customers a bunch of nonsense and selling them chakra charts.

I told Kildy as much when she came in, looking gorgeous in a casual shirt and jeans that had probably cost as much as The Jaundiced Eye’s annual budget.

"Ariaura’s obviously not her real name, but so far I haven’t been able to find out what it is," I said. "Did you get a James Bond secret videocam from your buddy Q?"

"Yes," she said, setting the tote bag down. "And I have an idea for proving Ariaura’s a fraud." She handed me a sheaf of papers. "Here are the transcripts of everything Mencken said. We check them against Mencken’s writings, and–what?"

I was shaking my head. "This is channeling. When I wrote an exposé about Swami Vishnu Jammi’s fifty-thousand-year-old entity, Yogati, using phrases like ‘totally awesome’ and ‘funky’ and talking about cell phones, he said he ‘transliterated’ Yogati’s thoughts into his own words."

"Oh." Kildy bit her lip. "Rob, what about a computer match? You know, one of those things where they compare a manuscript with Shakespeare’s plays to see if they were written by the same person."

"Too expensive," I said. "Besides, they’re done by universities, who I doubt would want to risk their credibility by running a check on a channeler. And even if they did match, all it would prove is that it’s Mencken’s words, not that it’s Mencken."

"Oh." She sat on the corner of my desk, swinging her long legs for a minute, and then stood up, walked over to the bookcase, and began pulling down books.

"What are you doing?" I asked, going over to see what she was doing. She was holding a copy of Mencken’s Heathen Days. "I told you," I said, "Mencken’s phrases won’t–"

"I’m not looking up his phrases," she said, handing me Prejudices and Mencken’s biography. "I’m looking for questions to ask him."

"Him? He’s not Mencken, Kildy. He’s a concoction of Ariaura’s."

"I know," she said, handing me The Collectible Mencken. "That’s why we need to question him–I mean Ariaura. We need to ask him–her–questions like, ‘What was your wife’s maiden name?’ and ‘What was the first newspaper you worked for?’ and–are any of these paperbacks on the bottom shelf here by Mencken?"

"No, they’re mysteries mostly. Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain."

She straightened to look at the middle shelves. "Questions like, ‘What did your father do for a living?’ "

"He made cigars," I said. "The first newspaper he worked for wasn’t the Baltimore Sun, it was the Morning Herald, and his wife’s maiden name was Sarah Haardt. With a ‘d’ and two ‘a’s.’ But that doesn’t mean I’m Mencken."

"No," Kildy said, "but if you didn’t know them, it would prove you weren’t." She handed me A Mencken Chrestomathy. "If we ask Ariaura questions Mencken would know the answers to, and she gets them wrong, it proves she’s faking."

She had a point. Ariaura had obviously researched Mencken fairly thoroughly to be able to mimic his language and mannerisms, and probably well enough to answer basic questions about his life, but she would hardly have memorized every detail. There were dozens of books about him, let alone his own work and his diaries. And Inherit the Wind and all the other plays and books and treatises that had been written about the Scopes trial. I’d bet there were close to a hundred Mencken things in print, and that didn’t include the stuff he’d written for the Baltimore Sun.

And if we could catch her not knowing something Mencken would know, it would be a simple way to prove conclusively that she was faking, and we could move on to the much more important question of why. If Ariaura would let herself be questioned.

"How do you plan to get Ariaura to agree to this?" I said. "My guess is she won’t even let us in to see her."

"If she doesn’t, then that’s proof, too," she said imperturbably.

"All right," I said, "but forget about asking what Mencken’s father did. Ask what he drank. Rye, by the way."

Kildy grabbed a notebook and started writing.

"Ask what the name of his first editor at the Sun was," I said, picking up The Great Monkey Trial. "And ask who Sue Hicks was."

"Who was she?" Kildy asked.

"He. He was one of the defense lawyers at the Scopes trial."

"Should we ask him–her what the Scopes trial was about?"

"No, too easy. Ask him . . ." I said, trying to think of a good question. "Ask him what he ate while he was there covering the trial, and ask him where he sat in the courtroom."

"Where he sat?"

"It’s a trick question. He stood on a table in the corner. Oh, and ask where he was born."

She frowned. "Isn’t that too easy? Everyone knows he’s from Baltimore."

"I want to hear him say it."

"Oh," Kildy said, nodding. "Did he have any kids?"

I shook my head. "He had a sister and two brothers. Gertrude, Charles, and August."

"Oh, good, August’s not a name you’d be able to come up with just by guessing. Did he have any hobbies?"

"He played the piano. Ask about the Saturday Night Club. He and a bunch of friends got together to play music."

We worked on the questions the rest of the day and the next morning, writing them down on index cards so they could be asked out of order.

"What about some of his sayings?" Kildy asked.

"You mean like, ‘Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy?’ No. They’re the easiest thing of all to memorize, and no real person speaks in aphorisms."

Kildy nodded and bent her beautiful head over the book again. I looked up Mencken’s medical history–he suffered from ulcers and had had an operation on his mouth to remove his uvula–and went out and got us sandwiches for lunch and made copies of Mencken’s "History of the Bathtub" and a fake handbill he’d passed out during the Scopes trial announcing "a public demonstration of healing, casting out devils, and prophesying" by a (made-up) evangelist. Mencken had crowed that not a single person in Dayton had spotted the fake.

Kildy looked up from her book. "Did you know Mencken dated Lillian Gish?" she asked, sounding surprised.

"Yeah. He dated a lot of actresses. He had an affair with Anita Loos and nearly married Aileen Pringle. Why?"

"I’m impressed he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that they were movie stars, that’s all."

I didn’t know if that was directed at me or not. "Speaking of actresses," I said, "what time is Ariaura’s seminar?"

"Two o’clock," she said, glancing at her watch. "It’s a quarter till two right now. It should be over around four. Riata said she’d call as soon as the seminar was done."

We went back to looking through Mencken’s books and his biographies, looking for details Ariaura was unlikely to have memorized. He’d loved baseball. He had stolen Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and then given them to his friends, inscribed, "Compliments of the Author." He’d been friends with lots of writers, including Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d gotten so drunk at a dinner with Mencken he’d stood up at the dinner table and pulled his pants down.

The phone rang. I reached for it, but it was Kildy’s cell phone. "It’s Riata," she told me, looking at the readout.

"Riata?" I glanced at my watch. It was only two-thirty. "Why isn’t she in the seminar?"

Kildy shrugged and put the phone to her ear. "Riata? What’s going on? . . . You’re kidding! . . . Did you get it? Great . . . no, meet me at Spago’s, like we agreed. I’ll be there in half an hour."

She hit ‘end,’ stood up, and took out her keys, all in one graceful motion. "Ariaura did it again, only this time as soon as she started, they stopped the seminar, yanked her off-stage, and told everybody to leave. Riata got it on tape. I’m going to go pick it up. Will you be here?"

I nodded absently, trying to think of a way to ask about Mencken’s two-fingered typing, and Kildy waved goodbye and went out.

If I asked "How do you write your stories?" I’d get an answer about the process of writing, but if I asked, "Do you touch-type?" Ariaura–

Kildy reappeared in the doorway, sat down, and picked up her notebook again. "What are you doing?" I asked, "I thought you were–"

She put her finger to her lips. "She’s here," she mouthed, and Ariaura came in.

She was still wearing her purple robes and her stage makeup, so she must have come here straight from her seminar, but she didn’t roar in angrily the way she had before. She looked frightened.

"What are you doing to me?" she asked, her voice trembling, "and don’t say you’re not doing anything. I saw the videotape. You’re–that’s what I want to know, too," the gravelly voice demanded. "What the hell have you been doing? I thought you ran a magazine that worked to put a stop to the kind of bilgewater this high priestess of blather spews out. She was at it again today, calling up spirits and rooking a bunch of mysticism-besotted fools out of their cold cash, and where the hell were you? I didn’t see you there, cracking heads."

"We didn’t go because we didn’t want to encourage her if she was–" Kildy hesitated. "We’re not sure what . . . I mean, who we’re dealing with here. . . ." she faltered.

"Ariaura," I said firmly. "You pretend to channel spirits from the astral plane for a living. Why should we believe you’re not pretending to channel H.L. Mencken?"

"Pretending?" she said, sounding surprised. "You think I’m something that two-bit Jezebel’s confabulating?" She sat down heavily in the chair in front of my desk and grinned wryly at me. "You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t believe it either. A skeptic after my own heart."

"Yes," I said. "And as a skeptic, I need to have some proof you’re who you say you are."

"Fair enough. What kind of proof ?"

"We want to ask you some questions," Kildy said.

Ariaura slapped her knees. "Fire away."

"All right," I said. "Since you mentioned fires, when was the Baltimore fire?"

"Aught-four," she said promptly. "February. Cold as hell." She grinned. "Best time I ever had."

Kildy glanced at me.

"What did your father drink?" she asked.

"Rye."

"What did you drink?" I asked.

"From 1919 on, whatever I could get."

"Where are you from?" Kildy asked.

"The most beautiful city in the world."

"Which is?" I said.

"Which is?" she roared, outraged. "Bawlmer!"

Kildy shot me a glance. "What’s the Saturday Night Club?" I barked.

"A drinking society," she said, "with musical accompaniment."

"What instrument did you play?"

"Piano."

"What’s the Mann Act?"

"Why?" she said, winking at Kildy. "You planning on taking her across state lines? Is she underage?"

I ignored that. "If you’re really Mencken, you hate charlatans, so why have you inhabited Ariaura’s body?"

"Why do people go to zoos?"

She was good, I had to give her that. And fast. She spat out answers as fast as I could ask questions about the Sun and the Smart Set and William Jennings Bryan.

"Why did you go to Dayton?"

"To see a three-ring circus. And stir up the animals."

"What did you take with you?"

"A typewriter and four quarts of Scotch. I should have taken a fan. It was hotter than the seventh circle of hell, with the same company."

"What did you eat while you were there?" Kildy asked.

"Fried chicken and tomatoes. At every meal. Even breakfast."

I handed her the bogus evangelist handbill Mencken had handed out at the Scopes trial. "What’s this?"

She looked at it, turned it over, looked at the other side. "It appears to be some sort of circular."

And there’s all the proof we need, I thought smugly. Mencken would have recognized that instantly. "Do you know who wrote this handbill?" I started to ask and thought better of it. The question itself might give the answer away. And better not use the word "handbill."

"Do you know the event this circular describes?" I asked instead.

"I’m afraid I can’t answer that," she said.

Then you’re not Mencken, I thought. I shot a triumphant glance at Kildy.

"But I would be glad to," Ariaura said, "if you would be so good as to read what is written on it to me."

She handed the handbill back to me, and I stood there looking at it and then at her and then at it again.

"What is it, Rob?" Kildy said. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing," I said. "Never mind about the circular. What was your first published news story about?"

"A stolen horse and buggy," she said and proceeded to tell the whole story, but I wasn’t listening.

He didn’t know who the handbill was about, I thought, because he couldn’t read. Because he’d had an aphasic stroke in 1948 that had left him unable to read and write.…

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