Prayer (10 page)

“I’ve found a journal he was keeping up until he died. A secret journal I didn’t know about. Having read it, I’m sure there was more to his death than met the eye.”

“Have you told the police about this journal?”

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

Cynthia Ekman sighed. “My husband was having an affair. And I don’t trust the police not to show the diary to someone in the press. When Peter died, there were several stories in the
New York Post
that could only have come from the police. The News Corporation and Peter had a feud that went back years. And now that he’s gone, they’d love to smear his memory with some shit like this. The diary is principally about his affair; but from time to time he mentions something that makes me think he was scared. Really scared.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to send us the diary?”

“I have to trust someone with this, but I can’t yet bring myself to trust people I’ve never met. Perhaps if you came down to New York, we could meet and I could read you extracts from the diary here.”

T
arrytown is an affluent village in the New York county of Westchester and occupies one of those spacious coves that indent the eastern shore of the Hudson. Not far from this village and halfway toward the village of Sleepy Hollow was the quiet acre of land on which stood Cynthia Ekman’s house. Surrounding the house was a small forest of flowering dogwood, cherry, pear, and, in larger number, tall white pines. The tapping of a woodpecker was the only sound to break in upon the uniform tranquillity. It seemed like a promisingly sequestered spot for a writer to take up residence, especially one with some hard-core urban enemies. In the early-evening twilight, we approached the house in the Taurus we’d hired at LaGuardia.

“Do you feel it? That sort of drowsy, unreal feeling in the air?”

I grinned. “You’ve been listening to that fucking guy behind the front desk at the Doubletree hotel. According to him, this place is like one big Tim Burton movie and abounds with haunted spots, local tales, and morbid superstitions. You ask me, Helen, they trade off shit like that. Headless horsemen, witch doctors, things that go bump in the night. It’s good for business, that’s all. Brings in the tourists.”

“You don’t believe in the supernatural?”

“Me. No. Not anymore. I don’t believe in anything I can’t shoot.”

“Maybe that’s because you’ve never shot anyone. After you’ve shot and killed someone, it becomes a whole lot easier to believe in all kinds of shit. That guy I shot on the boat? For a long time afterward, I had the weird idea that he was still around. I would start to hear music and voices in the air—the same music and voices I heard on the boat at the time the whole thing went down. And a couple of times I even thought I saw him. Like he was holding some witchy power over my mind.”

We caught sight of the house and I steered the car down a long winding gravel drive. It was an old two-story wooden colonial with an exterior stair and a wooden deck that looked as if it afforded a fine view of the grounds and glimpses of the Hudson River.

We got out of the car and walked up to the front of the house.

“And now? Do you think about him still? The Arab?”

“No. That’s the first time I’ve thought about him in ages. And certainly the first time I ever talked about him to anyone other than the Head Fed.”

The Head Fed—Dr. Sussman—was the psychiatrist to whom the Bureau assigned you after you’d shot someone, to make sure you weren’t crying into your Starbucks about it.

“Well, I’m very glad you shared. I think it’s important I know what you’ve been through and vice versa.”

“What exactly have you been through, Martins, that wasn’t wearing a split-tail skirt?”

We walked up the steps and knocked on the door.

“That was cruel. True, but cruel.”

The door opened and a good-looking woman in her forties was standing there. Very tall, with a thin frame, a face like an almond, a neck as long and sinuous as the Horn of Africa, and skin the color of unpolished copper, she looked like a model. She was wearing a red blazer, gray slacks, leopard-print kitten heels, a white shirt, and a silk scarf. She greeted us warmly and, ushering us inside, led us into a double-height sitting room that had more books on the shelves than a room in
Architectural Digest
. Helen and I sat at opposite ends of a long couch while Mrs. Ekman moved a book off the chair where she had been sitting. Choosing the edge to perch on, she faced us demurely with hands clasped in front of one knee. The lamplight, bright on the glass of some framed movie posters and even brighter in the diamond studs in Mrs. Ekman’s earlobes, glinted on Helen’s glasses as she looked one way and then the other before glancing up at the gallery, as if to remind herself that this was where the panic room in which Ekman had died was located.

“You’ve been here before, of course,” said the widow, watching Helen carefully.

“Yes,” said Helen. “The last time we were here, your housekeeper let us in to take a look around.”

“So you’ll already know that’s where he died. Up there.”

Both of us nodded. The CSI pictures of Ekman’s dead body were still in the file in my briefcase, but more unpleasant, they were also lodged inside my head. I’ve seen quite a few dead bodies in my brief career with the FBI; a lot of the time the bodies are fucked up and in poor condition. Ekman’s body hadn’t had a mark on it, but there was something about the body that profoundly disturbed me—something grotesque about the dead man’s face. When people are dead, they’re dead, and usually that’s all you can say about them. But this particular cadaver’s face seemed to look at you in a very concentrated sort of way. It sounds absurd, but it was as if the face contained something more than just the story of one death—it was almost as if it had something to say about the nature of all death, a truth, perhaps, about the nature of eternity and our place in it. That all sounds pretty weird, I guess; and it is. But I sincerely hoped that Mrs. Ekman had never seen the pictures of her husband’s dead body.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “I have some wine open.”

“No thanks,” I said.

Mrs. Ekman was already on her feet again, and helping herself from a bottle of white wine that was open on the sideboard.

“I never used to drink wine,” she said. “Probably I wouldn’t ever have started if Peter hadn’t drunk so much of it. I used to finish a bottle just to stop him from finishing it, you know?” Bearing a glass of golden liquid, she came back to her chair and sat down, this time more comfortably than before. “My husband wasn’t exactly a fan of the FBI. Under the Freedom of Information Act he managed to get a copy of the file you had on him. He wrote to your FOIA Request Record/Information Dissemination Section somewhere in Virginia, obtained the file, and then wrote an article about it on his blog.”

I nodded.

“You’ve seen Peter’s FBI file?”

“I’ve looked at it, yes. But just recently and only because he’s dead. The Bureau tends to keep files on foreign nationals, people who’ve signed a political petition, previously been a member of the Communist Party, or who’ve hung out with a foreign dictator. Peter qualified on all four counts.”

Mrs. Ekman took a large sip of white wine, frowned, and then answered her own question. “Of course. He wrote a book about Hugo Chávez, didn’t he? Another mistaken judgment on Peter’s part. He always thought the best of politicians until, inevitably, they let him down just like the rest of us did. Only, Peter always took that kind of thing very personally.” She smiled. “But don’t get me wrong. He was very proud of that FBI file. He loved talking about it at smart dinner parties. He thought it made him seem edgy and subversive. Even though he wasn’t like that at all. In a lot of ways, Peter was very conservative. As I’m sure you know if you’ve read some of his stuff.”

“Yes, I do know. But it’s not us he was afraid of. It was someone else, you think?”

“He was definitely afraid of something.”

She shivered a little and, collecting a cashmere shawl off the arm of her chair, wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Sometimes this place gets a bit lonely and one starts to imagine things. We used to joke about it, Peter and I. The Sleepy Hollow syndrome, we called it. It’s a lot easier to joke about that sort of thing when you don’t live on your own.”

“Are you afraid of something now, ma’am?”

She shrugged. “Your husband dies, sometimes you forget he’s not here. You imagine he’s in the kitchen. Or in his study. Like he always was. Or, sometimes, you imagine—other stuff.”

Cynthia Ekman shook her head. “It’s an old house. Sometimes it creaks a bit, that’s all. I’m sure that there’s no one who has it in for me, the way they might have had it in for him. Not anymore, anyway. It’s been a long time since anyone threatened me. At least five years.”

“We didn’t know about that,” said Helen. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid that all of our attention has been on your husband’s death.”

“I’m originally from Somalia,” said Mrs. Ekman. “I was born there and then sought political asylum in England to avoid an arranged marriage, before coming to work here in the States as a translator at the United Nations. Then I wrote a book about the treatment of women in Islamic society called
Among the Odalisques: Breaking Out of the Seraglio
.”

“I read that,” said Helen. “You’re Cynthia Shermarke?”

“Yes.”

“I enjoyed that book,” said Helen. “It was a bestseller, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. Only the book earned me a lot of criticism in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Some of it quite violent, really. I had more than a few death threats. These days that’s par for the course when you write something people disagree with. After I’d written the book, I met Peter. We married and came to live out here. The panic room was originally supposed to be for my benefit. Little did we think that it would be him who’d feel he needed it.”

“Perhaps you’d care to elaborate,” said Helen.

Mrs. Ekman smiled and it seemed that Helen at least had won her confidence.

“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps I should.”

Mrs. Ekman put down her glass and got up to fetch a laptop off a desk. She brought it back to her chair and opened it up on her knees.

While we waited for it to start up, I glanced around the room. A number of handsome cigar boxes occupied pride of place in alcoves like the tombs of unknown French generals. I knew they were cigar boxes because there was a cigar cutter on the top of each one. A crystal ashtray the size of a hubcap was on the coffee table next to a granite table lighter that looked as if it had probably been cracked off a meteorite. And there was an oxygen cylinder with a line and a breathing mask to remind me that Peter Ekman had suffered from smoking-related emphysema.

“He kept the journal on this laptop,” explained Mrs. Ekman, as she typed some more. “It was protected by a secret password. Except that the password wasn’t so very secret. It was written down in a little notebook where he kept a record of all his passwords. Peter was very careless about that kind of thing.”

Mrs. Ekman smiled a patient sort of smile and, for a moment, I had an insight into the kind of relationship they’d enjoyed: him, frequently drunk and disorganized, but fun with it, probably; and her, resourceful and tough, even a little steely, and often exasperated by her brilliant husband, but obviously charmed by him, too. At least she had been until she found out about the affair, I imagined.

“I’ve highlighted the key passages for you, but for present purposes it might be better if I just read them out loud. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to hand this laptop over to you.”

I shrugged. “You could just give us a copy on a thumb drive. I have one right here.”

“Look, you’ll probably understand what I mean when I start reading, all right? And perhaps it would be best if you saved any questions until I’ve finished.”

I nodded. “Sure. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable, ma’am.”

She shook her head bitterly. “Oh, believe me, Agent Martins, there’s really nothing I find at all comfortable about any of this. And would you say Cynthia or Mrs. Ekman instead of ma’am? It feels condescending. Like you’re trying awfully hard to be patient with me. I’d appreciate that, thank you.”

As Mrs. Ekman glanced down at the screen, I caught Helen’s eye and tried to contain the desire I had to pull a face in her direction. My leash had been snapped hard, and I was still gagging a little and flexing my neck like a corrected mutt.

“There is so much e-mail I get now,”
read Mrs. Ekman,
“that, at times, it feels like a modern variant of the proverbial Chinese curse—may all your messages find you. It’s like the opposite of a diaspora. If a thousand roads lead forever to Rome, then I’m equally sure that a thousand e-mails a week seem to lead to me. These days I am resigned to receiving UBE (unsolicited bulk e-mail), UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail), or just plain spam from so-called zombie networks that are located all over the world. Routinely, I am promised millions of dollars if only I will send my bank details to some illiterate Nigerian ‘phisherman’ (for so these spammers are sometimes called); or I am offered some equally improbable means of making my male parts much larger than they are at present. I have grown used to this kind of junk mail much as I have grown used to having gray pubic hair or supplements in the sections of the Sunday
New York Times
.

“Sadly, I am even used to threatening e-mails. In my line of work, they are an occupational hazard and nearly always these are the usual nocent missives about how I have mightily offended the GOP or Islam or God and how he will soon punish me with death. But lately I have been receiving e-mail threats that are very different from the ones I normally receive. Not in their content—no, the content stays the same: God just hates my guts—but rather in the way they seem to behave when they arrive in the in-box of my computer.

“Now, I am not a technical person. One of the smaller paradoxes of my life is that I spend so much time using a computer and yet understand nothing at all of how one works. Of course, I have become used to this level of quotidian ignorance. And, like most people who own a laptop computer, I can live with it. Or at least I thought I could.”

Cynthia Ekman read aloud from the on-screen journal with an obvious pride in her late husband’s slightly pompous prose. I hadn’t the least fucking clue what “nocent” meant and I was someone who’d been to law school.

“No, what I find perplexing,”
she said, continuing to read,
“is that I am quite unable to find any one of these e-mails on my computer. Let’s call them the Mr. Phelps e-mails, for they seem programmed to self-destruct just as soon as they have been read, almost in the manner of the taped message that used to precede the titles in the sixties television show
Mission: Impossible
. Jim Phelps, the stone-faced leader of the MI force of con men and safecrackers, would play a cassette tape that would then dissolve in a cloud of smoke, as if a hidden vial of acid had erased the secret message forever. It was always the best moment in the entire show, if only because it was always the easiest part to understand.