Life Blood --V---Page 20

Then he appeared emerging from the forest of trees. Actually,
there was another building opposite the stone drive that I hadn't
noticed at first. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what that's all about.
For some reason Alex Goddard hadn't offered me a tour; he'd
taken me for a stroll in the opposite direction. . .
        "That was fast," Lou said settling into the car. "You get what
you came for?"

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

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

I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine.

He took it and immediately began looking through it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I caught myself emitting a soft whistle as he read out the number. There was definitely a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than met the eye.

"So what's he do with all that dough?" Lou mused. "Better

question still, where in the hell did he find two hundred fresh,

orphaned babies, all listed here as Caucasian? And get this: The
ages reported at final processing are all just a couple of months,
give or take."

Good questions, I thought. Maybe that's the reason he

doesn't want publicity; it sounds a little too commercial for a mindbody guru.

My other thought was, with so many babies somehow

available, why was Alex Goddard so reluctant to even discuss adoption with me?

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

On our drive back down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I

decided I was definitely looking at a documentary in the making. I
just had to decide whether to do it with or without his cooperation.