Esther Begleiter swallowed stiffly and then stopped the recording although, according to the progress bar, there were several more minutes to come, and I took the opportunity to pause the recording for a moment and devote my attention to the food.
“You done?” inquired Ken.
“I got some minutes left here. We can talk in a minute.”
I hit the play arrow again; the picture shifted with a cut that hardly looked professional; and when Esther came back, the time ID in the corner of the picture showed a whole day had passed.
Sorry about that,
she said—it was almost as if she had been talking directly to me and I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if she had addressed me by my name
. But it was the death of my friend and lover, Agnes Reilly, that prompted me to begin my book,
Prayer,
again and to make this video. If you want to check my story, please do. You’ll find nearly everything I’ve said can be verified. That might even include this, our latest prayer victim. Currently the Kavanot is praying for the death of Philip Osborne. Check the time and date signature on this recording, and by the time this is viewed, he, too, will perhaps be dead. But I guess these things can be faked, can’t they? So, to offer some more proof in this regard.
Esther held up a copy of the
Houston Chronicle
.
To help verify today’s date, here is a copy of this morning’s newspaper and—”
Next she produced a small transistor radio and turned it on.
And this is KPRC AM 950 on the radio.
She paused.
But there’s a news bulletin coming up, so you can check that out, too. Remember what’s being said here; I’m telling you that Philip Osborne, who’s still alive, might well be dead by the time you view this recording.
She paused as the news bulletin on the radio gave the date and time of day.
But I could have faked this, too, right? Yes, I’m sure it could be done. So maybe I need something else to prove what I’m saying is true. Okay. I think I have it. The answer is just a few blocks away, I think, and given that this is a Monday . . .
This time the cut looked more professional, to an exterior shot pulling back from a giant announcement board. Esther Begleiter was at Minute Maid Park, at a ball game between the Houston Astros and the Cincinnati Reds; and after focusing on the time and the score, she turned the little camera on herself. The game was sparsely attended; but that was hardly unusual for the Astros. She appeared to be seated in the club box area, right behind the diamond.
There,
she said.
That should be easy enough for you to check. Maybe now you’ll believe what I’m saying. Look, I hope I’m wrong. I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen. But right now, July 25, I’m telling you that the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women is praying for the death of Philip Osborne. So if the poor bastard does die, then you’ll have to believe me, right?
The film cut back to Esther’s study at her house on Gregg Street.
Look, I know this all sounds totally nuts. Nobody is more aware of that than I am. I’m a scientist after all. In spite of that, you probably think I belong in the bughouse and I can’t say I blame you. But if you are a cop, then let me lay this out for you in a way that even a cop can understand.
You’ve got item number one: Three enemies of the Christian right—Dr. Clifford Richardson, Peter Ekman, and Professor Willard Davidoff—have died suddenly. Perhaps you’ve already written those three deaths off as nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence. But I’m telling you that Nelson Van Der Velden and members of the Izrael Church, including me, prayed for those deaths to happen.
You’ve got item number two: Two members of the Izrael Church—Norris Clark and Brent Pitino—have died violent accidental deaths.
You’ve got item number three: A third member of the Izrael Church, Agnes Reilly, committed suicide because she felt guilty about what had happened, guilty and terribly afraid that something similar might happen to her.
You’ve got item number four: Members of the Izrael Church are currently praying for the death of Philip Osborne.
You’ve got item number five: The manuscript of my unpublished book. Please read it; the book contains a lot more details about what I’ve described in this film.
And last of all you’ve got item number six: That’s me. As I explained at the beginning of this film, if you’re watching, then it means I must be dead. And if I’m dead, then you can bet it wasn’t natural causes. You see, I’ve made this film because I’m frightened that something will happen to me the way it happened to Clark and Pitino. The thought police at the Izrael Church know that Agnes and I were close. They’ve already questioned me about her death as if they suspect I think the same way about things as she did and that I also feel terribly guilty, which I do. I can’t tell you how bad I feel about everything. And, of course, I miss Agnes desperately. So much so that I’m not sure I can go on without her. I don’t believe I’m a prayer victim myself. Not yet, anyway. I would have felt that, I’m certain of it. But it’s what I fear the most. From what Agnes told me, I only know a little of what happens when you become a prayer victim. And she was genuinely terrified of that happening to her. She told me that Almighty God’s tame demon Azrael doesn’t strike immediately. At Nelson’s instruction, he takes his time and prefers to strike the fear of the Lord into the soul of the nominated victim. Sometimes Nelson takes a hand in this process himself and through some complicated offshore Internet service provider—I think it’s in China—he sends his prayer victims an e-mail informing them that the Angel of the Lord has marked them out for death. After that, it’s just a matter of time but never more than thirty days. I’m not sure why that should be so, but it is. Richardson, Ekman, and Davidoff were all dead within a month of their nomination. Oh, yes, I didn’t explain that, did I? You are nominated for death by the Kavanot and then a vote is taken. I’ve made a list of everyone that has been nominated so far, which I wasn’t supposed to do; the whole business of prayer victims is treated as a matter of great secrecy with the Izrael Church and there are even people who worship there every week who don’t know about this activity. Anyway, you’ll find the list in my Bible inside my prayer closet. It’s in no particular order, although the first four names on the list are all prayer victims. After Osborne, it’s anyone’s guess who’ll come next.
Please. Stop them if you can. For me? But be careful, too. You have no idea of what you’re dealing with.
As Esther Begleiter’s short film ended, I uttered a long bewildered sigh and leaned back on my armchair. The Nelson Van Der Velden described by her sounded as if he were a million miles away from the guy pictured on the front of the
Chronicle
giving a million dollars to a children’s hospital. I sensed I was back where I was when I’d gone on a month’s enforced leave. There was no real evidence in what Esther Begleiter had said. Not a word of it could have been substantiated to the satisfaction of the assistant district attorney, let alone a grand jury. Even the time ID prediction that Philip Osborne was going to die looked like David Blaine street magic. There’s a trick to foretelling the future like that; and more often than not, when Penn & Teller have explained how it’s done, it always looks Homer Simpson simple. Surely no one in Justice Park Drive would ever believe I was on the way back to mental fitness if I turned up at the office suggesting that we take her claim seriously. I could hear Gisela Delillo now.
Go home, Martins. You are sick. See the Head Fed. Forget this stupid obsession of yours. The woman sounds as mad as you are
. The Chief Division Counsel would laugh me out of his office. Doug Corbin would tell Gisela I told you so, Gary Greene would mutter some crap about my not being a team player, and Chuck Worrall would write a damning comment in my personnel file that would effectively end my career.
I tugged out the earphones, tossed them on top of the iPad.
“What’s your opinion, Ken?”
“She’s crazy, of course. Has to be. Prayer isn’t about getting six numbers in the lottery. The last time I prayed and expected a result was 1978, when my old man was ill in the hospital. I prayed real hard for him to get better. He didn’t.” He shrugged. “I never won the lottery, either.”
I emptied the bowl of sugar packets into my hand and started to play solitaire with them.
“You won’t find the answer there,” said Ken.
“I’m looking to establish an order to how things are,” I said. “And I’m beginning to see that this habit of mine is just a metaphor for what any detective does. So, what the fuck? Maybe when I’ve figured out what’s happening here, I’ll stop doing it. For a while, anyway.”
“Whatever.”
I scratched my head as if hoping that might provoke my brain to arrive at some sort of strategy on how to proceed. It didn’t.
But it occurred to me that I might just provoke Nelson Van Der Velden. After all, it was a Sunday.
A
fter lunch, I went to a movie at the Cinemark in Webster, just off the Gulf Freeway only a couple of miles west of the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women. It was somewhere dark to sit for a while and think, which in Houston is always difficult. There was a McAlister’s deli next door to the theater, and after the movie had drawn to its interminable conclusion, I went in there and had a coffee and a pastry for supper. I read the first chapter of
Prayer
, which was on the flash drive that Ken had given me, but it was kind of dry and certainly not as interesting as her tape; then again, it was only the first chapter and it certainly didn’t deter me from my intended course of action. While I’d been watching the movie, a number I didn’t recognize had called my cell several times, but I hadn’t heard the phone ring in my pocket. Whoever it was, I didn’t bother to call them back. I had other things on my mind, like what I was planning to do when I went back to the Izrael Church. Almost certainly this was going to get me into trouble, one way or the other. I was full of doubt, of course, but only the stupid are always cocksure and certain of what the fuck they’re doing. That’s what I told myself as I drove into the church parking lot, which was full of cars and more or less empty of people because, according to my watch, the service was already well under way. For once it seemed as if I’d timed things perfectly.
“It’s not that you’re any better than a lot of other bastards in the Bureau, Martins,” I said aloud, as I got out of the car and opened the trunk. “It just takes a while longer for you to give up on something. Dumb when it doesn’t work out for you and smart when it does. Maybe that’s what it takes to be good at this fucking job. I don’t know. Hell, I haven’t thought any of this all out clearly. I can’t. I don’t know enough. Not yet anyway. But this’ll stir the pot, right enough. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t.”
I took off my shirt and felt the sun like a laser on my bare skin before I slipped on a blue T-shirt with the letters FBI in clear yellow on the back and a Bureau roundel on the front. I clipped my gold badge to the front of my belt, put on my aviator sunglasses, checked the Glock on my hip, tucked Ken’s flash drive into the pocket of my trousers, and walked calmly toward the front door. This time I wasn’t looking to go unnoticed. I felt like a fox that was about to enter a hen house. I glanced up at the angel Azrael on the bas-relief above the front door. He looked rather less benign and even more muscular than before. This was an angel who did a bit more than just sing the glory of God and bring good tidings of peace and joy to all mankind at Christmastime; this was an angel with a fucking attitude. And if the expression on his face wasn’t enough to make you wary of him, there was something about the broken manacle on his ankle that put me in mind of an escaped felon, like Charlton Heston in
Ben-Hur
.
One of the stewards near the entrance walked toward me with his hand held up in the style of a traffic cop. He was wearing sunglasses like mine and I could see the whole parking lot—myself included—reflected in each lens as clearly as if someone had drawn it on using Photoshop.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “the service has already started.”
I opened my special agent’s wallet and held it up in front of his face the way we’d been taught to do at the Academy. Show it like it means something, was what they told you, like it’s a presidential fucking order.
“You can’t go in,” said the steward.
“This says differently,” I said, and then put the heel of my hand on my holster for added emphasis.
But the greeter was already backing off; and now all I saw reflected in his sunglasses were the letters FBI so I knew he could see I meant business.
I pushed the heavy glass door open and walked inside. My footsteps echoed on the floor like the sound of a longcase clock and cool air brushed against my face as if the angel outside had just flapped his wings. Beyond a set of double doors I could hear that Nelson Van Der Velden had already started his sermon; in his smooth and folksy voice he was talking about the
Titanic
and how if they’d only heeded the warnings about all the icebergs then the fifteen hundred people who lost their lives might have been saved and how it was time that people started listening to God’s warnings if similar disasters were to be averted. It was good advice and I might have done well to have listened to it.
I put an arm of my glasses into the neck of my T-shirt and stepped into the auditorium. At the sight of the several thousand people who were present, I paused and glanced around for a seat as near to the front as possible and, seeing one, walked down the aisle. It suited me just fine that my arrival did not go unnoticed; that was part of my so-called strategy. A lot of people did a double take as they saw me and I hoped that Ruth would be one of them who was wondering what the hell was going to happen when I reached the front. I was kind of interested in finding that out myself.
Nelson Van Der Velden saw me—by the time I neared the front, he could hardly have avoided seeing me—but to give him credit, he hardly paused at all and, for a moment, carried on with his sermon as if nothing had happened.
I walked to the end of the row where I had identified a spare seat and, as politely as I could, I pushed my way along to it. I sat down and tried to make myself as comfortable as you can be when you’re wearing a Glock on your hip and everyone is looking at you, not all of them in a kindly and Christian way. If there was one thing I’d learned from Ruth, it was that the only guns that Texans really minded were the ones worn openly in church.
“Don’t make a big deal of your problems,” Van Der Velden told his congregation. “Make a big deal of praising God. That’s what we’re all here for. Isn’t that right? All of us come into God’s presence with praise because you’ve got to give him something to work with. If he’s going to help you, you’ve got to magnify his glory. You’ve heard what David says in the Psalms. He says, ‘The Lord is my very present help in times of trouble.’ That’s right, he’s always there to help us, but only because we come here to give him what’s rightly his: our worship and our praise. It’s true of most of us, although I’m none too sure about that gentleman who just sat down in the third row.” Van Der Velden chuckled. “The guy from the FBI? Did you see him? You know, when I was a kid, there used to be a TV series called
Dragnet
. So I’ve heard of Sergeant Friday; but it could be that we’ve got ourselves a Sergeant Sunday. Let’s hope so.”
Everyone, Van Der Velden included, thought that was very funny; even I managed a smile.
“I guess that Sergeant Sunday knows more about times of trouble than most. You might say trouble is his business. And it might just be that he’s in more trouble than any of us can imagine. And that he just felt the need to come here and be with us all. So, you’re very welcome, Sergeant Sunday. Hey, mister, stand up and say hello. Come on, don’t be shy. Nobody gets to be shy in the presence of the Lord. Stand up and take a bow.”
I fixed a rictus on my face and stood up, turned around, and bowed stiffly at the congregation before sitting down again. But Van Der Velden was hardly finished with me.
“You know, after Waco, the FBI is hardly the most popular institution of Big Government in Texas. You might say its agents are about as popular as the tax gatherers were in Jesus’s time. Not that
they’re
exactly popular now, either. Collecting people’s taxes has never been the most respected career choice a guy could make. You’ll remember what the Pharisees said to Jesus about them in Luke, when a tax gatherer called Levi decided to give a great feast in the Lord’s honor. The Pharisees said, ‘Hey, Jesus, why do you hang out with the tax gatherers and the sinners?’ And Jesus said unto them, ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’ So, I say again to our friend Sergeant Sunday from the FBI, ‘Sir, you’re very welcome here, to worship God with us this evening.’ And I hope that everyone in this church will go out of their way after this service to tell him just that.”
All of the people seated around me smiled or nodded in agreement; one of them shook my hand; and I felt real welcome—almost.
“Praise the Lord,” said Van Der Velden. “One of the things I like most about the gospels is God’s sense of humor. The way he turns stuff around on the people who are trying their hardest to trip him up. Me, I always imagine there’s a twinkle in his eye when he outsmarts them. And it’s one of the things that makes the Bible such a great book to read, isn’t it?
“Yes, sir, I love my Bible. I read a lot of other stuff, too. Sports, of course. But I also read a lot about science:
Popular Science
,
Scientific American
. Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking. No, really. You might say that I like to keep a close eye on what the opposition is up to.” He chuckled again; and so did the congregation. “One of the things that amuses me about scientists is the way they’ll twist themselves into knots to look for a scientific explanation for something that is staring them in the face. You’ve heard of the expression ‘nature abhors a vacuum.’ Well, so does science, which has spent almost three thousand years trying explain the idea of empty space in the universe. Aristotle said the universe was filled with an invisible medium he called the ether. So did Sir Isaac Newton. If you’ll permit me another joke, it was Newton who first made something out of nothing, with his laws of motion in space.
“Today, you’ve got quantum physicists trying to get us to take them seriously when they come up with what are some pretty nonsensical conclusions about that same space, which they now want us to call dark energy. They tell us now that a quantum vacuum is a vacuum that isn’t really a vacuum on account of the fact that it contains an infinite amount of this same dark energy. Dark energy is what you’d have left after you take out all of the galaxies of stars and planets that—some of these scientists will tell you—amount to about 70 percent of the mass of the universe. And of course, some think that and some think this and about all they can agree on is that they don’t agree about anything very much. More than a few of these scientists even want us to accept the idea that they may actually need to come up with a whole new physics just to reconcile all of the contradictions that exist in the physics we already have. And let’s not mention all of the money they want to spend. They’ve already blown millions of dollars inventing something called the Large Hadron Collider to find out about, you guessed it—
nothing
. It’s a mystery, they say, this nothing. Because while nature seems to abhor a vacuum, it doesn’t seem to mind a quantum vacuum. So that’s all right, then.”
Van Der Velden chuckled again.
“Can you imagine the howls there would be if Christians did that? If we came up with a whole new Bible to explain some of the things they say we can’t explain? We’d never hear the end of it, would we? Now, if all of this seems like much ado about nothing, then you’d probably be right. Because I think you’ll agree with me that Christians already know what to call this invisible energy in the universe. We already have an explanation for how to make something out of nothing. And we sure don’t need a new physics to do it. There’s nothing mysterious about the identity of this invisible force, is there? We sure don’t call it dark energy, or a quantum vacuum, or the uncertainty principle, or the Higgs particle. Maybe one of those scientists was beginning to get the idea when he called it the God particle. But then we knew about that all along, didn’t we? We’ve already got the best explanation in the world for how to explain what can’t be explained. We’re talking about God. If those scientists are happy with a big fat nothing in their lives, then so be it, but me, I prefer something better. If you want a reason for why everything happens in the universe, you sure can’t beat Almighty God. They’ve all been looking in the wrong place. Because all of the answers to the universe and everything are right under our noses. They’re in the Holy Bible. This Bible.”
Van Der Velden grinned and held up his Bible, which seemed to be the cue for everyone in the congregation to stand and do the same, and to repeat a mantra that sounded as if he and they had said it many times before. I stood up and considered holding my FBI ID wallet in the air—in its black leather cover it was almost as big as a small Testament—and then rejected the idea as perhaps a provocative step too far; so I folded my arms and waited.
“Because I believe that this Bible contains the revealed and incorruptible word of God,” they all said. “I believe what the Bible tells me—”
“That the Father Almighty created heaven and earth,” said Van Der Velden.
“I believe what the Bible tells me,” said everyone.
“That by him all things are made through Christ our Lord, who was crucified for our sins, that all prayers are answered,” said Van Der Velden.
“I believe what the Bible tells me,” said everyone.
“That Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.”
“I believe what the Bible tells me.”
“That he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
“I believe what the Bible tells me.”
“About the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen. Let me hear it: Did you receive the message today?”
“Yes,” they clamored.
“Let me hear it: Did you receive it today?”
“Yes!”
“Amen and praise the Lord. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening. Bless you all.”
The organ struck up with something loud and grand, the choir joined in as if the Messiah had phoned in to say he was on his way, and the service was over. People started to shake my hand and to clap me on the shoulder as if I were the prodigal son.
“I guess you must have come straight from work,” said one.
“You on duty after this?” said another.
“Something like that,” I answered politely, and made my way toward the figure of Frank Fitzgerald, Nelson Van Der Velden’s gatekeeper.
Fitzgerald was standing by an elevator at the back of the church auditorium that led up to the pastor’s Bond-movie suite of offices. He was stockier than I remembered and, what with the black suit and the broken nose and the earpiece and the way his hands were clasped in front of him, he looked less like a church elder and more like a security guard in a nightclub. He regarded me with distaste and, given the way I was dressed, I couldn’t exactly blame him.