Criminal Karma (12 page)

I closed my eyes and began to take deep breaths, pushing my abdomen out so that the bottom of my lungs could fully inflate, then slowly pulling it back in to expel the air, taking twice as long to exhale as to inhale. It is the simplest form of breathing exercise and one of the simplest forms of meditation, very effective at dissolving negative emotions such as anxiety or sadness. Yoga has many complex breathing exercises with specific and startling psychic effects, but simple deep breathing is a surprisingly powerful technique. If you keep your attention focused on your breath, and breathe in and out steadily and slowly, it invariably calms the mind.

A feeling of peace had begun to stain me, spreading like blue dye from cell to cell, when there was a stir at the front of the room. Opening my eyes, I saw Baba Raba entering through a door at the far end. An attendant helped him up onto a low platform. It creaked beneath his barnyard weight as he walked forward and sat down cross-legged in front of the altar, facing the audience. The blonde, who came in with him, walked around and sat down on the floor in front of the platform, keeping her distance from a cluster of flower girls.

“Om namah shivayah,”
Baba Raba intoned.

“Om namah shivayah”
the devotees responded with a single resonant voice.

“The purpose of meditation is to still the mind so that it can perceive the infinite peace within,” Baba said. “The mind is like a curious little monkey. It is always running everywhere to look at everything, attracted first by one thing and then another, always trying to find something that will satisfy it. It sees a glittering jewel and wants that. But the jewel doesn’t make it happy. So it wants a shiny new car. Or a big house. Or a beautiful girl or boy. Because it thinks those things will make it happy. But nothing satisfies it for long. Everything in the physical world dies or decays. By cultivating attachment to material things, the mind ensures its own misery. What the mind truly seeks, the only thing that can truly satisfy it, is already within each of us. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that we are all
sat chit ananda
. Every one of us. Young or old. Rich or poor. Man or woman. That
is our essential, unchanging nature.
Sat chit ananda
. Infinite existence. Infinite consciousness. Infinite bliss.”

Baba paused. The dark room, heady with the smell of sandalwood, was utterly still.

“This bliss, or
ananda
, is the peace that passeth understanding that Jesus spoke of. It is within each one of you right now, far brighter and vaster than the sun. You must train your mind to be still and look inward so that it can begin to perceive your spiritual reality. Everyone likes to come to Southern California because of the bright warm sunshine. Oh, it makes us very happy. The beautiful light. We love to go to the beach and lie in the sun and feel its warmth. If we get a nice tan, we will be beautiful, too. Everyone will want us. But you have a light inside you brighter than ten thousand suns and a beauty surpassing anything on earth. Still your mind through meditation and you will perceive it. Then you will not need jewels to make you happy. You will not need cars or houses. Or boys or girls. Or money or fame. You are happiness. You are joy. Plunge into meditation and the light within you will burn up all your pain and sorrow. All your shame and disappointment. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate.”

Here, presumably following his own advice, Baba closed his eyes, lowered his chin to his hairy chest, and placed his hands together in his lap in
dhyana mudra
, the back of one hand resting in the palm of the other, thumbs touching. Again, I wondered if I was misjudging the big-butted guru. Spiritual truth is a tricky thing. In the mouth of someone who doesn’t fully understand it, the truth becomes a lie. It is dead and empty. In Baba’s mouth, it was thrilling and alive. His gloss of Vedanta’s most essential principle was flawless.

Ganesha stood up by the door and bowed toward Baba with his hands steepled in front of his chest, then turned to the room.

“For those who are new to meditation, Gurudev recommends
tratakum
. This is a very simple meditation that anyone can do. While breathing slowly and deeply, fix your gaze on one of the candles on the altar near Gurudev. If you keep your gaze steady on the flame, it will still your mind. Each time you catch your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to the candle flame. We will now meditate for forty-five minutes. Baba will answer questions in the library afterward.”

I knew all about
tratakum
. Fixing your attention on a single object. It did indeed steady the mind. Continuing to take deep, slow breaths, flooding my blood with oxygen, I visualized the pink diamond necklace and
waited for those around me to sink down into whatever meditative state they were capable of reaching.

After ten minutes or so, I opened my eyes and slowly swiveled my head to reconnoiter. To my right, Reggie was curled up like a giant baby in a fetal position with his head resting on two of the round cushions, snoring softly. He was holding the third cushion to his chest like a child holding a doll. Everyone else in the room seemed equally unconscious of their surroundings.

Ganesha had opened one of the French doors partway to let fresh air into the packed room, where fifty people were steadily inhaling and exhaling the atmosphere, extracting oxygen, adding carbon dioxide and moisture. Slowly, carefully, I unhooked my legs from the lotus position and stood up. My knees ached and my ass was numb. I did a dozen shallow knee bends to get the blood circulating, then tiptoed to the door, taking care not to bump anyone.

I watched Ganesha’s face as I slipped out. He didn’t stir. In the hallway, I resisted the delinquent impulse to rifle the cash register and headed straight for the stairs.

Hallways went in
two directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Down one was a series of small, minimally furnished rooms, each with a bed, a chair, and a cheap dresser-and-mirror combo. The rooms were lit by white-glass globe ceiling fixtures that blinked on when I flipped the wall switch by the door. On one dresser there was a well-thumbed copy of the Kama Sutra. The drawers were empty.

The closets held bathrobes, flower-petal-strewing robes, scented oils, and a few miscellaneous devotional items such as velvet ropes and blindfolds. So. Baba was a rascal, after all—not that I thought sex was sinful or anything silly like that. But the context made me angry. In itself, Vedanta is pure good, the most accurate earthly map to enlightenment for those who seek it. The foolish prejudice it faces in the West comes mostly from people’s fear of the unknown and the entrenched resistance of rival philosophies, both religious and secular. But sneaky fuckers like Baba hurt
the cause, too, periodically giving yoga a black eye by screwing dopey chicks or absconding with the funds. I had never heard of a legitimate yoga ashram where women were for sale.

At least there were no whips or handcuffs.

Down the other hallway were three larger bedrooms set up like dormitories with four bunk beds apiece, so that eight people could sleep in each room. Two were cluttered with girl stuff and had female clothes in the closets and dressers. The flower girls. The third was less cluttered, had men’s clothes in the closet.

A fourth bedroom, larger still, had a king-size bed and a view of the floodlit garden behind the house through tall casement windows that filled the exterior wall. Mary’s white jeans had been tossed negligently on the orange bedspread and her flimsy white T-shirt was balled up on the floor. I wondered if the massive guru had been in the room when she peeled off her pants and panties, then shooed that thought away like a bird from a rail. You can’t let your mind wander when you are perpetrating a cat burglary.

Aside from the evidence of Mary’s desirable presence, Baba’s lair wasn’t debauched. There was a meditation nook with a dusty altar, complete with candle, incense burner, and bell, and a bookcase full of paperbacks by a bewildering variety of spiritual teachers, the top shelf packed with books by Chogyam Trungpa, the controversial crazy wisdom master who founded Naropa Institute. A foot-tall antique ceramic Buddha in a niche beside the bed radiated an aura of holiness so tangible that I had to resist an urge to bow down before it.

Set end to end along the length of the wall opposite the windows was an oak banker’s desk, a computer desk with a new Macintosh, printer, and scanner, and a worktable piled with documents and blueprints. Some of the blueprints were street plans that showed the section of Pacific Avenue where Mrs. Sharpnick’s flophouse was located and blocks north of there. Others were construction drawings for a large hotel.

The papers were a complex mix—minutes of Venice City Council meetings, construction and real estate documents written in dense legalese, sheaves of letters to and from various individuals and city and state entities. Two names appeared frequently: Herbert Finklestein and Anthony Discenza. The second name was familiar, but I couldn’t think where I knew it from. Evidently, Finklestein and Discenza were principals in a limited liability partnership formed to develop a resort on the Venice
shore, and that they were using the city’s power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire property over the protests of landowners and neighborhood groups. There was litigation pending. The closing date for the financing was on Wednesday. If the money wasn’t in place by then, the main twelve-acre parcel, which comprised more than half of the proposed resort, would fall out of escrow.

Turning from the worktable, I saw a small clock on the desk that showed eight forty-five. The position of the clock’s hands shocked me like a bare wire. I had either lost track of the time during meditation or spent longer scanning the legal documents than I realized.
Satsang
would be over at nine o’clock. Only fifteen minutes remained to look for the diamonds and get back downstairs before the adepts opened their starry eyes and stretched and looked around to see if Krishna had materialized.

I searched the room as fast as I could without making noise or a mess. If I had been sure the necklace was there, I wouldn’t have worried about the mess and could have worked more quickly. As it was, I didn’t want to put Baba on guard, in case I needed to come back for another visit. I looked under the mattress, under the rugs, behind the pictures on the walls, in every container and drawer I could open, and in the tank of the toilet in the attached bathroom. No one ever hides anything in the toilet tank, but you are supposed to look anyway.

The clock kept ticking.

There were size-two girl’s clothes in the closet along with an extensive selection of XXXL men’s street clothes, including half a dozen suits from mid-level designers, Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, along with one navy-blue, three-button Armani. There was also a flashy selection of shirts, ties, and shoes.

Baba had a dual existence going.

The right-hand desk drawers held office supplies and ashram files. The left-hand drawers were locked. There was also a locked oak file cabinet stained the same golden color as the desk. I couldn’t find a key for the cabinet or desk and there wasn’t enough time to run out for a crowbar to crack them open, so I took a sturdy steel letter opener and tried to pry the top-left drawer open with that.

The lock had a steel tab that extended up into a steel-lined niche on the top of the drawer frame. I pried down with the letter opener at the same time as I pulled out and down on the U-shaped drawer handle, trying to open up enough space between the drawer and frame so that the
lock would slip. I had the tab almost out of the slot when the letter opener split the wood it was dug into. My hand shot forward, knocking a lamp onto the wooden floor with a loud crash.

I froze, stiff as an aviator in a glacier. Baba’s room was in the back of the house. I didn’t think they would be able to hear the crash in the meditation room, but I wasn’t sure. After a few moments, I heard what sounded like feet pounding on a staircase. Quick as I could with shaky hands, I set the metal lamp back on the desk, then dodged into the bathroom, squeezing behind the door.

A few seconds later, the bedroom door was flung open and I heard someone breathing hard as if they had just run up a flight of stairs; then the door closed and aggressive footsteps went down the hall to the other bedrooms, more doors opening and closing.

When there was no more noise, I stepped out of the bathroom, holding the letter opener in my right hand, which hung down at my side, the tip of the dull blade pointing backward. It wasn’t a good weapon, but it was a weapon.

I looked at the clock. Meditation would be over in another minute or two if it wasn’t already. I had to get back downstairs. My hand was on the knob of the bedroom door when I heard voices in the hall.

The voices were
coming closer. One of them was Baba Raba’s. The other was female. I started to retreat once more to the bathroom and then stopped. After an hour of meditation, the guru or his companion might need to use the facilities. The voices were right outside the door. Looking around wildly, I dove for the far side of the bed and wriggled under, same as sneak thieves and illicit lovers have been doing down through the dusty centuries since people first elevated their sleeping pallets to get away from crawling vermin. I felt a little silly hiding under the bed but, really, where are you going to go? The space beneath was clean and uncluttered. The bedspread hung down like a curtain to within a couple of inches of the floor.

I made it just in time. The orange fringe was still swinging when Baba came into the room. The floor shook as his big farm-boy feet plodded over
and stood beside the bed, close enough to reach out and tickle. Facing him was a second pair of feet, much smaller and neater with red-painted toenails.

“I am sorry to take you away from the others,” Baba said, “but I wanted to see how you are doing.” His bedroom voice was less bombastic than his professional-guru voice. He sounded genuinely concerned. I wondered if his words were a prelude to hanky-panky and looked up to see how much clearance there was between me and the bottom of the bed. Not much. There was a box spring, but I didn’t have confidence in it. If Baba started bouncing his washtub ass on the bed, the whole thing might collapse on me.