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Michael.”
    “How did we underrate Michael?”
    “He’s a chef, which isn’t a traditional career, so he never had trouble with what you did.”
    “How do you figure bringing up what was nice about Michael does me any good right now?”
    “Sorry, I was just making an observation.”
    “On the open market I scare guys off. Never occurred to me that a piece on a satanic cult was—odd. Am I odd?”
    “No, you’re single.”
    The concern of every freelance writer was how much time to spend on research before you were overextending yourself on an article. She had been doing the research for two weeks; time spent tracking the Satanic noise on the Internet, going through books on satanism in the library, conducting interviews by phone with a priest in San Francisco who had delivered a sermon on God and Satan that appeared on the Internet, and a professor of religion at the University of Michigan, who was an outspoken nonbeliever in Satan. After one more bit of research she was going to begin writing. Richard Smith was the author of The Many Faces of Satan, a history of Satanic worship she had purchased in paperback. She found it to be a good popular history. On the back cover the author’s Web site was listed. Ronnie sent an e-mail to him explaining the nature of her article, asking if he would answer a few questions, and he responded by e-mail that he traveled frequently, but would be in New York that week and he would be glad to meet her for coffee, writer to writer. She e-mailed back and they agreed to meet at a Starbucks on Eighty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue.
    She brought the book along with her; his author photo was on the back cover and she identified him at a table.
    “Mr. Smith? I’m Ronnie Delaney.”
    “A pleasure. I’ve read some of your things.”
    “Really? I’ve read your book.”
    She judged him to be in his late thirties. He was a trim, athletic-looking man in a blazer, white sports shirt and jeans, black loafers; light brown, wavy hair, pale light blue eyes, high cheekbones; so good-looking he was someone she would have taken for a model or a movie star, not “a noted lecturer on the subject of satanism, who has appeared at colleges and lecture halls throughout the world,” as stated on the book jacket.
    She told him about her visit to Cummings and his church and he knew about Cummings, that he was a recent starter in the satanic game. Ronnie was largely interested in exploring with someone who had written about satanism where he thought Cummings fit into the overall pattern. Smith didn’t feel Cummings was coming into it “heavy metal,” as he put it, more like “easy listening.”
    This corresponded to Ronnie’s sense and she offered that Cummings’s approach reminded her of the satanist of the 1960s, Anton LaVey, who had a run for a while as a pop satanist, extolling lust and hedonism.
    “Cummings does sound like LaVey. Satanism as a lifestyle. Sort of like being a vegan or smoking grass. Satanism Lite.”
    A good quote and she checked her tape recorder to see if it was running and jotted it down as backup.
    “What do you think of these cults using the Internet? Something as old as satanism being promoted electronically?”
    “Just shows the ability of the ideas in persisting.”
    “Why would you say people are drawn to these cults?”
    “Because people believe in Satan.”
    “Uh-huh,” she murmured without enthusiasm.
    “Who can prove Satan doesn’t exist?” he said.
    “Are you talking proof? Who can prove he does? By the way, I couldn’t tell from your book what you really think.”
    “You have to draw a distinction between Satan as a literary concept, as a metaphor for evil, and Satan as an actual presence, as an active instrument of evil.”
    “I don’t think Cummings is using metaphors. I think he’s talking Satan as an active presence in our lives, intervening, and for his people to follow Satan’s lead.”
    “Well, that’s the big leap of faith, isn’t