Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“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 résumé. 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 that 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, he’d 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 obituary 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.

Mencken hadn’t left after the trial. When Darrow’s expert witnesses had all been disallowed, he’d assumed it was all over but assorted legal technicalities and had gone back to Baltimore. He hadn’t seen Darrow’s withering cross-examination. He’d missed Bryan saying man wasn’t a mammal, missed 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.

“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 alias. “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 Scamwatch 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—” She stopped. “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 quit looking at them and 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 Sara 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. Plus 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 .