End to Ordinary History Page 2

  “I think I just heard Kazi.” He stood and went to the window. “Come down and tell us about her.”

  Fall was building a fire in the kitchen’s metal hearth. Cursing to release his tension, he turned as Kazi Dama and Atabet entered. “Don’t say it,” he said, his face bright red from exertion. “You could hear me grumbling. Well, damn it, I don’t have a woman to remind me of the Godhead.”

  In this mood of controlled frustration, he sometimes reminded Atabet of a picture depicting an angry Samuel Johnson. Fall poured himself a glass of wine and turned to the Tibetan. “Kazi,” he said, “are you okay?”

  Picking up a notepad, the Tibetan wrote “One Russian, one American spy outside.”

  Atabet sat by the hearth. “Where are they now?” he asked, forming the words silently.

  “In their car,” Kazi wrote. “Shall we stop the bug?”

  “If we stop it they’ll know,” Fall whispered. “But it’s screened off by the hearth. Just stand over here and keep your voices down.”

  The three men gathered by the fireplace, keeping its metal chimney between them and the window. Perspiration covered the Tibetan’s forehead. “I heard them talking,” he whispered. “They have a camera, but they’re confused. They argued the whole time I was near them. I got their license, though. Maybe we can find out where they came from.”

  Corinne had come downstairs. “We might have a lead to Kirov,” she said, taking a seat by the hearth. “Natalie Claiborne admitted she works for the CIA, collecting information about parapsychology and altered-states research in California. She knows about Boone’s Foundation.”

  “She told you that?” Fall asked with surprise.

  “Yes. She said that the CIA’s funding Boone’s parapsychology project. But here’s the best part. Lester Boone, our famous American patriot, has friends in Germany who are friends of Kirov. She said there is some kind of network—as you guessed, Darwin—that includes Boone and a German industrialist and scientists in Vienna, all working outside their governments to harness psychokinesis. At least certain CIA people believe that.”

  Fall sat down beside her. “Incredible,” he whispered. “How did you get her to talk?”

  “I did what you said—told her we correspond with Soviet parapsychologists. I told her you and I were friends, and that you wanted to meet her. Now get this. She said there’s a man at the Stanford Research Institute who might be part of Boone’s network. He sounds like the one who came to see you in November, the one who said he was inquiring about Kirov for the Department of Defense.”

  “God! I wonder,” Fall said. “An independent network after all! What the hell are they up to? But why would she tell you about it?”

  “She was very low key, but interested in the Greenwich Press and your translations of the Russian stuff. She wanted to hear about your experiments with Gorski. She was dangling bait, of course, when she said that Boone and Kirov might be connected. I think she believed me, though, when I said we knew nothing about it.”

  “I think you ought to see this lady,” Atabet said, turning to Fall. “Maybe you could trade her something for news about Boone. And maybe . . .” he paused. “Maybe we ought to look for Kirov after all. His image came up tonight. Again and again. Kazi, this Kirov obsession is the damnedest thing. Where does it come from?”

  The Tibetan’s face reflected the stillness that had gathered around him through the afternoon. “Listen!” he whispered. “Can you hear their car?”

  Only Atabet could hear it. An automobile was moving off the access road half a mile away. He nodded at the others.

  Kazi Dama closed his eyes. “Vladimir Kirov?” he asked. “It’s only a name to me. But someone Russian is bugging this house and trying to take pictures of us. If not Kirov, then some other Soviet wants to know us better.”

  2

  THE THIRD-STORY ROOM on an alley in the outskirts of Vienna had been Vladimir Kirov’s European hideaway for the last three months, his retreat from both Western and Soviet surveillance. His special position in the Scientific and Technical Directorate of the KGB and his Order of Lenin allowed him such a place, but as he sat on a wooden chest looking at the deserted alley below, he was aware that his freedom might be ending. His superiors in Moscow were questioning his months alone in Europe, his erratic travels, his failure to demonstrate a significant effort in the West to harness parapsychology for military purposes. Kirov sensed growing suspicions when he reported each Monday to the Vienna Rezident. The queries from Directorate T were getting more urgent, as if someone sensed his failing morale. Did they suspect his thoughts of defection?

  He got up from the chest, took off his gray, tailored suit, and hung it in the closet, brushing it carefully. Inanimate objects, he believed, had a dim consciousness that responded to human feelings toward them. In some subtle way his suit would respond with gratitude to this loving attention.

  Dressed in a T-shirt and undershorts, he did a series of stretching exercises. He was five feet eight inches tall, weighed 155 pounds, and was built like a well-conditioned gymnast. His fair complexion reddened as he did the exercises, and his blue eyes lost their haunted look. This ritual, based on dervish movements that conditioned the body for meditation, always gave him a physical lift.

  He sat on the wooden chest again and picked up a brochure that lay there. During the last few weeks this unlikely document had obsessed him.

  The brochure’s title, “Books from the Greenwich Press,” was printed unobtrusively along the cover’s lower edge, as if to make room for the picture above it. The picture, from a painting by Jacob Atabet, showed a winter sun rising through the hills of San Francisco. Kirov shook his head with wonder: the image was identical to his secret order’s most important icon. The contours of the city, the sense of living tissue in the hills, and the sun’s cool deadliness were the same in both pictures, as if the painter had copied some forgotten reproduction of the old mosaic. The similarity was more than coincidence, all his instincts told him, but the sources of the American artist’s inspiration remained a mystery.

  He turned to the brochure’s account of Darwin Fall’s book, the second layer of the mystery. But he sensed he would find nothing new. He had studied it for more than three months, had sent a Soviet undercover man to study Fall and his friends, and had traced Fall’s movements in Russia without understanding him. It was clear from the KGB files that these Americans didn’t work for the CIA. During his trip to the Soviet Union in 1969, Fall had met the amateur parapsychologists foreigners were permitted to visit, but he had not asked to see the people an agent would look for in getting leads. Fall had gone to Russia for some other reason, and Kirov could not tell why.

  He turned to the third perplexity: the description of Fall’s telepathic experiment with Nikolai Gorski, the famous Russian clairvoyant—an experiment that indicated Fall might have discovered the Soviet Union’s largest parapsychology project. Were there connections between it and the painting?

  He looked again at the brochure’s description of Fall’s research. If it was accurate, Fall’s project was unique. Nowhere else had Kirov seen such a thorough study of the body’s supernormal powers and their connection to spiritual practice. Conceivably, Fall had made important discoveries about the human body’s future transformation. Yet he had completed much of his study before meeting Atabet, his teacher. If Fall was only thirty-two, as the surveillance people said, he must have been twenty when his research started. Where had his vision come from? Kirov was convinced that these Americans were seeking a mutation of human flesh into the Earth of Hurqalya.

  “Identity and embodiment” was the title of a chapter in Fall’s book. It was followed by a rare Sufi adage: “A sea of centers is the One, not annihilation.” Kirov’s school had used the same sentence for centuries to describe a fundamental connection between flesh and the soul. Fall’s summary of the chapter said that humans would grow into their luminous and eternal bodies. Everywhere in this extraordinary catalogue there were coincid
ences with the witness of his teachers.

  3

  FROM HIS SECOND-STORY OFFICE at the Greenwich Press on upper Grant Avenue in San Francisco, Darwin Fall looked down at tourists crowding into the restaurants below. It was Friday night, and the noise was worse than ever. Seeing a passerby stop to watch him, he closed the windows and shutters. Selling this place and retiring completely from the city would be a relief.

  He surveyed the paneled room. Research papers covered a long wooden table. The latest version of his book was arrayed in stacks of binders on his desk. Files lined an entire wall. In this sanctuary he had established the foundations for his life’s intellectual work. In these last five years he had made this office the world’s largest archive of lore about the human body’s supernormal capacities.

  A daguerreotype of his great-grandfather, Charles Fall, hung on the wall behind his desk. Tonight, the proud, silver-maned face seemed full of anticipation, as if the old man were excited about meeting the CIA lady. He made a bright contrast to Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud, who flanked him. Fall looked at the desk again. His manuscript, now 2,500 pages long, would demonstrate the range and thoroughness of his work to the Agency’s Life Sciences Division. He would show it to Ms. Claiborne first, with the supporting documents he had collected during the last twelve years.

  Fall opened a drawer and found the file on Bernadine Neri. It contained articles about the Italian saint from European medical journals, with testimony about her healing force that Fall had collected in 1965 at her home in the Arno valley. Six photographs showed the physical changes that accompanied her ecstasy: though they did not reveal her stigmata, they recorded her transformation from a pinched little peasant woman to a robust beauty. Natalie Claiborne would be impressed.

  Or would she? Fall’s Stanford advisers had rejected these documents, arguing that Bernadine Neri’s followers had mythologized her life and works. Studying the saint had cost Fall the support of his doctoral committee. The uncontrollable energy that shone through Bernadine’s face disturbed most academics, he had concluded. Natalie Claiborne, he hoped, would be more open. The CIA, after all, had made its own studies of the powers that accompanied illumination.

  Placing the Neri file on his desk, Fall remembered the letter he had written to his professors in 1967 informing them that he was giving up his Ph.D. work. He would continue his studies, unburdened by their demands for statistical evidence and more clinical evaluations of his cases. Fall remembered his joy at the decision. The week after he made it, he had founded the Greenwich Press with money his parents had left him and had begun his life’s work with a passion. In the five years since, this room had become his place of vindication.

  From another cabinet he took a file on an Indian runner who had completed the Bombay Marathon ten minutes faster than the world record. Photographs taken before and after the race showed a change in the runner’s looks as remarkable as Bernadine Neri’s. While running, he had entered a nirvikalpa samadhi, the man had told the press, in which his mind had “vanished.” Three watches gave the same time for his run, and a check of the course had confirmed its length exactly. But the International Amateur Athletic Federation would not recognize the event, and most sports experts dismissed it by saying that Indians couldn’t count. Like many extraordinary athletic feats, this would be discounted by the sports establishment. Its persuasiveness depended upon its similarity in crucial details to other cases in Fall’s collection.

  Fall laid the photographs of the Indian runner and the Italian saint beside the transcripts of his experiment with Nikolai Gorski. Natalie Claiborne would be impressed most of all with the Russian’s responses during their telepathic exchange. Finally she would see that Fall knew more about the human organism’s hidden powers than the Agency’s leading experts. After seeing this archive, she might be tempted to trade him information about Vladimir Kirov.

  There was a knock on the door, and Natalie Claiborne entered. She was blonde, slightly taller than Fall, and more attractive than he had expected. He took her coat and poured her a glass of wine while she looked around the office. “Ezra Pound!” she exclaimed, going to the gallery of faces. “And Freud. Who’s the man in the middle?”

  “Charles Fall, my great-grandfather. He and Henry James, Senior, were friends. They worked together on a theory of man’s future evolution.”

  “Henry James Senior.” She leaned forward awkwardly to study the pictures. “What a glorious man! Have you read his books?”

  “Just the manuscript he and Charles Fall began.” Fall handed her the wine. “It helped inspire my study.”

  She was five feet ten, but seemed even taller in her black sheath skirt and sleeveless overblouse. Her carriage and cultured inflection suggested an Eastern finishing school, he thought. Had she gotten her job through family connections?

  “I read your report on the Gorski experiment,” she said, sitting on the room’s only couch. “Corinne Wilde must’ve told you I’m curious about it.”

  “Gorski and I saw it as a gesture for peace,” he said, as he sat down on a chair across from her. “But we had another idea, a crazy one, I guess. We thought we could start a Soviet-American project to study telepathy. I thought my report would stir up more attention than it did.”

  Natalie Claiborne was surprised by the man she faced. Instead of the cool intellectual her director had told her about, Fall seemed ill-at-ease. His rough florid complexion and unguarded responses did not fit the man she had pictured.

  “How did all this get started?” she asked, indicating the crowded desk and shelves. “It looks like you’ve been gathering material for an awfully long time.”

  “For twelve years, since I was in college.”

  “But you must have a staff,” she said with admiration. “How can you run a press and do so much research?”

  “I started collecting some of it when I was in high school,” Fall said, nodding toward the row of files that lined the wall behind her. “I’ve been interested in the body’s powers since I recovered from polio when I was a kid. Getting over it taught me some things about mind over matter.”

  With his arm bent at the elbow, Fall rotated his left shoulder stiffly. “I still can’t move my shoulders right,” he said. “But they’re improving. I’ve been recovering my movement for more than twenty years, if you can believe it.” He hesitated, considering whether she would be bored with his medical history. “All of this, my book, this archive, my trips to Russia, started when I saw how much capacity for change we have, how much reserve. You know the Soviet term, I suppose—‘hidden human reserves.’ ”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “My boss in Washington talks about it all the time. He thinks the Soviets are the world’s leading experts!”

  “That’s one reason I went there,” Fall said. “To see if I could loosen up these shoulders more. And to learn about their theories. Mind over matter is one of their great frontiers.”

  “And that led to your experiment with Gorski?”

  “It’s led to that and a great deal more.” He paused. “Have you read the Greenwich Press catalogue?”

  “Your description of the Gorski experiment was fascinating. Did he really get the images you sent?”

  “Some of them. You read my account. It was something, wasn’t it, how he saw the elephant? He thought it had a ‘movable nose dropper,’ just like the trunk on the model I used. I was amazed he was so accurate. There was absolutely no way he could cheat, given the fact that he was in Moscow and I was in San Francisco.”

  It was more than coincidence, she reminded herself, that “elephant” was the KGB code word for the largest Russian project in parapsychology, a project her superiors had taken pride in discovering. Were he and Gorski flaunting their knowledge of it? This experiment and Fall’s reports on Soviet research had to be related. There was more to it all than a gesture for peace.

  “A professor friend of mine chose the targets,” he said, “using a random-number table. Each object had to be small enou
gh to hold in my hands, like the toy elephant with the movable trunk. We used the same four objects every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon—which was eleven at night in Moscow.”

  Were Fall and Gorski part of some dissident scheme? she wondered. It was hard to believe that they had chosen an elephant as their first target by coincidence. “Did he get any of the others right?” she asked, feigning a look of innocence.

  “Look.” He leaned toward her. “I think we’ll save time by avoiding formalities. I’ll tell you everything I’m doing. As far as I know, none of it has anything to do with national security. If it does, I want you to tell me. But I’d like to find out about Vladimir Kirov. Corinne Wilde told you the rumors I’ve heard about him.”

  Startled by his sudden directness, she sat back on the couch. “I told Corinne Wilde everything I know about Kirov,” she said evenly. “I’ve only heard rumors that he might know Lester Boone. Rumors, mind you—only rumors. The Agency’s baffled by Soviet parapsychology because we hear so many conflicting reports.”

  “You know I published a report on the Starr Foundation.” Fall stood to refill his glass. “I was down at Boone’s lab in El Paso a couple of years ago and met his Argentine research man, Isaac Cruz. You read what I wrote.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve read all your catalogues. What do you think of their experiments?”

  “They’ve gotten pretty good results. I saw one of their subjects—a boy Cruz found in Buenos Aires—score thirty straight runs that were two or more standard deviations from chance. Cruz had him making love to their random-event machines. That’s their secret, I think—getting good subjects excited. I heard Cruz tell the boy to get an erection if he wanted to. He said it plainly, right in front of me!”

  “My goodness! What a creative approach!” she said ironically. “How did you meet this Isaac Cruz?”

  “Wrote to Boone, then went to see them in El Paso. We talked for a couple of hours and Boone got interested in my book. But what do you think they’re up to? The CIA still funds their work.”