Lost At Sea Part 52

Sylvia's a.s.sistant, Nancy, rushes up to me in the lido restaurant. Sylvia has agreed to an interview. Five p.m., the Neptune lounge.

It's time for our next two-hour lecture with Sylvia. She seems in a far better mood today.

"I want to know if my son will come back safely," one woman asks.

"Yes, honey," Sylvia replies.

"I'm having cardiology work done soon," asks the next person. "Am I going to get better?"

"Yes, you are." Sylvia smiles.

"Will my daughter live past twenty-five?" asks the third.

"At least into her fifties," Sylvia says.

And so on. All this is in stark contrast to the other grouchy evening when it seemed that n.o.body's sick relative was going to make it past 2009. I can't help wondering whether, if Shawn Hornbeck's parents had gone to Sylvia today, she would have told them that their son was alive and well.

At 5:00 p.m., I knock on the door of the Neptune lounge. It is sw.a.n.ky and invitation-only-reserved for guests staying on the rarefied seventh floor. Sylvia is there to greet me, along with one of the four men who seem always to surround her. I tell her what Ca.s.sie said about her being rude in the shopping arcade. It's a relatively trivial allegation, but I'm curious to see how she'll respond.

She denies it. "You can approach me anywhere, anytime," she says. "I've never, ever been rude to anyone, anywhere. No one could ever accuse me-when I'm eating dinner and they come to me, or if I'm in the casino-I have never, ever been hateful. Never! That's one thing I've been so much against. These people put you there! To be rude to them is just terrible."

The thing is, just before the interview, I b.u.mped into Ca.s.sie's two companions from the shopping arcade. They both told me Sylvia had been startlingly rude to them and now they're really off her.

I've wanted to interview Sylvia for years, but I suddenly wonder if it is pointless. I think she's a consummate pro who will just say anything.

"There are times," I say, "when you've got it wrong in a very bad way with missing-"

"The kid," interrupts Sylvia. She means Shawn Hornbeck. "Yeah, I believed the kid was dead." She shrugs. "What I found out later-Larry King wanted me to come on and explain but I said I'm not going to explain anything-is there were three children missing. I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blond and two boys who are dead. I think I picked up the wrong kid."

"Shawn Hornbeck," I say. "Were the other kids missing from the same area?"

"Absolutely," Sylvia says.

"At the same time?" I ask.

"Yes," Sylvia says. "I have a tiny newspaper cutting about them back in my office."

(I later realize that, of course, "three children missing" in the "same area" is annoyingly too vague to be checkable.)

"Then there was Opal Jo Jennings," I say.

Sylvia looks blankly at me.

"Back in 1999," I say.

Sylvia still looks blank.

"You said she was sold into white slavery in j.a.pan but actually she was dead," I prompt.

"I don't remember that case at all," Sylvia says.

"Little girl," I say. "She'd been killed but you said she'd been sold into white slavery in j.a.pan."

"No," Sylvia says. She shakes her head. "Don't remember that. Not at all. All I remember was that kid Van."

"Shawn," I say.

"Van Hornwell?" Sylvia says.

"Shawn Hornbeck," I say.

"Yeah. Hornbeck," Sylvia says. "I don't remember the j.a.panese girl at all." She pauses. "Look," she says, "no psychic-and this is what they don't understand-can ever be one hundred percent. That's G.o.d."

By "they" she's referring to her two biggest critics, James Randi and Robert Lancaster. She says she doesn't care what they say about her: "The whole thing about my job"-she pauses and corrects herself-"G.o.d-given career, is if you're right, you're right. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And the people that are gonna love you will love you and the people that won't, won't."

Then, just as I think how self-a.s.sured she must be not to let their attacks eat her up, she says, "I've had a private investigator on Randi and Lancaster, and I have enough on them to hang 'em." She reels off a few defamatory allegations, then adds, "But I'm not going to play that game. That's vengeance, see? Who cares? Randi is an evil little man. When I told him he was going to have a heart attack, and then he did-ha!-he wouldn't give me any kudos."

In the end it is a short interview, just half an hour. What was I thinking? That she would admit to being a fraud? I will give her this, though: I believe that she is genuinely pa.s.sionate and knowledgeable about spiritual things. The only times during the interview when she becomes really animated are when she talks about Mother G.o.ddess this and that. So I don't believe that part is fake. But there is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, showstopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she's in a grumpy mood.

"I don't think people should go to a psychic to hear a fairy story," she says. "It might be nice for a time, but what about the validity in the future?"

"But when you're dealing with missing kids and you're wrong," I say, "it's very, very bad."

"Right." She shrugs.

"What do you say to people who say you're a fraud?" I ask.

"My years," she replies. "My years of validation save me." She pauses. "If after fifty-three years I was a fraud, don't you think they would have found out?"

DAY 5: DISEMBARKATION

I jump s.h.i.+p in Athens, two days early. I miss Sylvia's final lecture. The next day I receive an e-mail from Ca.s.sie, the German fan who went off her after she was rude in the shopping arcade. "Please call me!" she writes. "Sylvia talked so harsh about you! I wrote everything down she said!"

I phone her.

"You have no idea what that woman said about you yesterday!" Ca.s.sie says. "She got up onstage and said to the audience, 'Are you guys enjoying the trip?' And everyone yelled, 'Yeah! Whooh!' And then she said, 'Because I heard that some of you aren't enjoying the trip.' And she launched into this huge attack on you! She said, 'I had an interview with this pale little man and he said I was rude to some of you in the shopping arcade. You must have seen him around. He's a creepy little worm... .' She said you were a worm and a creep and a dark soul ent.i.ty. She just went on and on about you. It lasted for about twenty minutes!"

"How did the audience respond?" I ask.

"People didn't know where the h.e.l.l this was coming from," Ca.s.sie says. "A few of them said to me afterward, 'I didn't pay four thousand euros to listen to someone go on like that.'"

All this proves one thing to me. Now I know for sure that Sylvia isn't psychic, because I don't have a dark soul at all. I have a very light soul.

The Fall of a Pop Impresario