Prayer (9 page)

Gisela nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s all for now, folks. I’ll think about what you’ve all said and let you know my decision when I’ve made one.”

A
week later, with nothing to show but a handful of expense receipts and inconclusive field reports, my swoop felt more like a belly flop. We’d struck out in Washington and New York, and now that we were in Boston, it looked as if we were going to strike out there, too. The only consolation was that we were staying with my mom and dad at their large South End house—a ten-minute car ride away from the Boston FBI office in downtown where we endured the silent mockery of our colleagues. Cops and feds have the hardest eyes in the world. Every time I looked at one of these guys, I knew they were thinking the same thing:
You flew up from Houston to investigate the death of a guy who fell out of a fucking tree?
We didn’t find anything of interest in the police report at headquarters on Cambridge Street; and we didn’t find much at the scene of Willard Davidoff’s death in Olmsted Park. Except, perhaps, the tree itself.

“That’s a fifty-foot sycamore,” said Helen. “I wouldn’t try to climb that tree on a summer’s day. And I’m someone who likes climbing.”

“You do?”

“Sure. I go bouldering sometimes at the Texas Rock Gym on Campbell Road.”

“Bouldering?”

“It’s climbing without a rope.”

“That sounds like a description of my career in the Bureau.”

“It can be pretty exhilarating, if that’s what you mean.”

“Sure. Until you fall.”

“And you think that’s what happened here. To you? With this investigation?”

“I’m still in the air, perhaps, but the outcome of that already looks clear enough.”

“We learn from our mistakes. Isn’t that what they teach us at the Academy?”

I shrugged. “I always liked this park.”

“Ever bring any girls here?”

“Just you.”

“My lucky day, I guess.”

“Not so far.” I looked back at the tree. “This is the right tree, yeah?”

Helen turned and looked at the Boston Police Department cruiser parked on Jamaica Way. “That’s what they said. They found tiny pieces of tree bark and moss on his clothes. And bits of his skin on that branch.”

I shook my head. “Yes. But how the fuck did he climb a tree like this?”

Helen took off her jacket and handed it to me. “Only one way to find out. You test a theory with an experiment. That’s scientific method. Galileo.”

“Yeah, well, be careful, Helen. Galileo discovered gravity. Just make sure you don’t discover it, too.”

“Actually, you’re wrong.” Helen took hold of the tree trunk and looked up for a handhold. “Galileo proposed that different bodies would fall with a uniform acceleration.”

“Same kind of shit.”

“The point is that between Galileo and Aristotle there were just a lot of guys with theories they never bothered to test.”

“I knew there was a reason I never brought any girls to this park.”

Helen jumped up, caught a branch, and pulled herself up with one arm and then two.

Instinctively, I went to help her.

“Don’t touch me,” she said sharply.

“Sorry.” I snatched away my hands and clasped them penitently behind my back.

“I meant—I have to do this on my own, like he did; otherwise there’s no point.” She swung her legs up and hooked the branch she was holding with her calves.

“Yes, of course. Stupid of me.”

She let go of the branch with one hand and pulled her skirt up around her waist, affording me a spectacular view of her underwear.

“This park is sure looking up,” I said.

“I can see that
you
are.” Helen took hold of the branch again and wrestled her way around until she was sitting on top of it.

“I’m just assisting in a scientific experiment,” I said.

“And what’s the conclusion, Galileo?”

“You’re a good-looking woman.”

“From where you’re standing.”

“True. How old are you, Helen?”

“Twenty-seven. Why?”

“Willard Davidoff was twice that age and more. If he climbed this tree, I’m George Washington.”

“That was a cherry tree.”

Helen swung down, dropped onto the grass, and then pulled her skirt over her tan thighs. “’Sa matter? Never seen a pair of panties before?”

“Sure. You’ll find my DNA on most of the lingerie shop windows in Houston.”

“Right. Who needs sniffer dogs with you around, huh?”

“It wasn’t my nose I was pressing up against the glass,” I said.

“Well, that’s all right then.”

“I sure wouldn’t like you to get the wrong impression about me, Helen.”

“No, everything’s quite clear to me now, Agent Martins. I’m beginning to understand your wife.”

“I wish I had your capacity for understanding. I don’t mind telling you, Helen, I’m having a tough time figuring how the BPD could ever have confused a sixty-five-year-old science professor with Indiana Jones.”

Helen inspected her hands for a moment before spitting on them and then rubbing them on a handkerchief I handed to her.

“I never did like science very much,” I said.

“Too intellectually demanding for you, I suppose.”

I grinned. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like that. I’m your supervisor.”

“That’s what makes it such fun.”

“Let’s get out of here before you say something you’ll regret.”

We walked back to the rental car we’d left parked behind the BPD cruiser. The two gumps praying into their styrofoam coffee cups regarded us with obvious amusement. They were both from the Irish Riviera—some shit suburb—overfed shiesties with breath like sour mash.

“Fucking guy fell out of a tree, I guess,” I said.

“O! Light dawns on Marblehead.”

Both of the cops laughed but that was okay. Cops have to have their laughs. Maybe cops most of all.

I had good reasons for not wanting to eat at home. For one thing, my monosyllabic answers about Ruth and Danny had been noted by my mom and dad, and I hardly wanted to expand on our trial separation—which was how Ruth’s lawyer had described it. To do that, I might have had to mention my own infidelity and Ruth’s religious fanaticism. This was still a touchy subject with my father. I didn’t want to upset my parents—they seemed so much older and more decrepit than I remembered. But Helen wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, she was more interested in my parents’ home than in food.

From the outside, at least, it was like any other town house in that part of Boston: tall, with bay windows, a stoop, and climbing ivy that was no good for the red brickwork, not that my father cared much about that; on the inside, however, they had made the place look like a real home from home, which is to say it was an exact facsimile of the house we had lived in back in Glasgow. There were stained-glass skylights, soft tartan furnishings, a lot of solid Victorian mahogany furniture, and, on the walls, several dull Scottish landscapes and several portraits of unforgiving, stone-faced ancestors and relations, including my father’s brother, Bill.

Not long after leaving Scotland to live in Boston—I was fourteen—my father gave me some advice that I’ve always tried to stick to.

“Be slow to take offense, Giles. Learn how to be tolerant and how to live and let live. Remember this: intolerance, bigotry, bearing a grudge—these are all the things we’re leaving behind.” This was rare advice from my dad; he wasn’t ever one for telling people what to do. In consequence, I’m difficult to provoke, which, from the Christian point of view of turning the other cheek, is good, I suppose. But it also made a few people believe that I didn’t care about anything very much. So everyone was surprised when I joined the Bureau. Nobody was more surprised than my dad; no one was prouder of me, either. And he never seems to tire of telling me so. “America has been good to our family, Giles,” he would say in an accent that—even after more than twenty years—still sounds as if he lives in one of the nicer parts of Glasgow. “I’m very glad that you’ve chosen to pay her back.”

Looking back at things now, I understand there was a lot more to the advice he gave me as an adolescent than just the desire to stop me from turning out like a lot of my countrymen. More important, he didn’t want me becoming like my uncle Bill.

By now Uncle Bill must be seventy-six years old and I haven’t seen him since we left Scotland in 1990; I’m almost certain my father hasn’t, either. You see, my uncle Bill went mad and is still confined to an asylum somewhere in Scotland. One time, not long before my family left Scotland, my father came back in tears from a visit with Bill, swearing he would never go again. My own memories of Bill are as vivid as if I had seen him yesterday. For almost ten years he was a doting uncle, but he gradually became a frightening person for anyone to meet, even his nephews and nieces. I remember the furious but entirely silent arguments Bill had with people who simply weren’t there. There’s a proper psychiatric term for what was wrong with Uncle Bill, but my dad says that it was just a case of someone having an abnormally heightened sensitivity to the disappointments of everyday life. That’s an easy situation to find yourself in if you happen to live in Scotland. Once I asked Dad who it was that Bill believed he was arguing with, and Dad told me he thought it was probably one of his other personalities. Another time Dad said he thought it might be God or the devil, and when I asked which he thought was more likely, Dad just shrugged and said, “It’s all the same thing.” That was before my dad announced his own atheism, but all the same, you could see the writing on the wall even then.

In retrospect it seems to me that Bill’s madness dates more or less exactly from the moment of my confirmation, or my nonconfirmation, depending on the way you look at it. After all, spitting out the host and wiping the holy oil off my forehead is not exactly the behavior of a devout Roman Catholic. Even Bishop Coogan didn’t know about that. For a long time afterward, I told my young self that God had punished me for my precocious act of blasphemy—he knew very well how fond I was of Bill—by punishing poor Bill with madness. Even today it’s no more or less persuasive a piece of reasoning for someone’s madness than a lot of others you’ll hear in any church.

Sometimes these things run in families.

My cell shifted on the dinner table as if an earthquake was in progress, startling my parents.

“Hello, this is Special Agent Gil Martins.”

“This is Cynthia Ekman.” The voice was a little breathy but sexy and English with a hint of American, like whiskey with a splash of ginger ale, the way my mom and dad always drank it.

“Peter Ekman’s wife,” she explained. “Widow.”

“Mrs. Ekman. I’m sorry we missed you when we were in New York.”

I stood up and moved away from the dinner table, beckoning Helen to follow and, at the same time, touching the speakerphone icon on the screen of my Bureau BlackBerry so that she might listen in on the conversation.

“My son was graduating from Oxford University and I went over to England for the ceremony. But I’m back in New York now.”

“My colleague, Agent Helen Monaco, is here with me and listening in on this conversation. It’ll save me describing it to her afterward. We’re in Boston right now.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Ekman. Both Agent Martins and I have read a lot of your late husband’s writing. Which we greatly admired.”

Helen and I were at a window overlooking Worcester Square. In the little tree-lined park below, the moon was reflected in the surface of the water underneath a fountain dominated by an ugly group of crudely realized figures that is supposed to be two Boston ladies out for a walk with their pain-in-the-ass children.

“I saw your husband debate the former archbishop of Canterbury in Washington, once,” I said. “You might say he helped to turn me off the church.”

Mrs. Ekman sighed. “Then I’m sorry for
your
loss, Agent Martins. In the face of my late husband’s militant atheism, I managed to retain my own religious faith. To have been married for ten years to a man like Peter and still call myself a Muslim, well, that took some doing. Look, the reason I’m calling is that there was something not quite right about what happened to Peter. He didn’t die accidentally, the way they said he did. I’m sure of it; and I assume that you yourselves might have some doubts, too.”

“What makes you think that the police might have been wrong?”