Prayer (2 page)

F
rom the outside, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart resembled a prison. With its high windows, gray seamless concrete blocks, and a freestanding bell tower, Sacred Heart did not look like a promising place for a talk with the Almighty. I walked through the doors into the mercifully cool marble interior and was greeted by a handsome African-American wearing a priest’s collar and a welcoming smile. He informed me that Mass would begin in thirty minutes and confessions in ten near the Sacred Heart transept.

I thanked the priest and passed inside. I hardly wanted to tell him that it was a long time since anyone had heard my confession. I wasn’t even a Roman Catholic. Not anymore. I was an evangelical. And I was there to pray, not to attend Mass or seek absolution for my sins.

The prayer was a mistake. I should never have given it wings. As soon as I saw the weirdly modern stained-glass windows and the plastic figure of St. Anthony of Padua, I ought to have turned and left. Compared to the Catholic churches of my youth, this place felt too new for a talk with God about what was troubling me. But where else was I to go? Not to my own church—the Lakewood. That was a former basketball arena. And among the architectural eyesores that constituted the fourth-largest city in the USA, St. Anthony himself would not have found anywhere better than Houston’s Catholic cathedral to come nearer to God. I was certain of that much anyway, even if I was less certain that I wasn’t just wasting my time. After all, what was the point of praying to a God who—I was almost convinced—wasn’t there at all? This was what I had come to pray about. That and the state of my marriage, perhaps.

I picked a quiet pew facing the Sacred Heart transept, knelt down, and muttered a few holy-sounding words; looking up at the simple stained-glass window with its red, comically disembodied sacred heart, I tried my best to address the problem at hand.

“Breathe in me, o Holy Spirit, er . . . that my thoughts may all be holy. Act in me, o Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy . . . Which it isn’t. How could my work ever be holy? I see things, o Holy Spirit—terrible things—that make me doubt that you could ever exist in a world as fucked up as this one. And I know what I’m talking about, Lord.

“Take that heart on the transept window up there. Oh, I know what it’s supposed to mean, Lord: it’s the Holy Eucharist and symbolizes the love that is God who, out of his love for us, became a man on Earth. Yes, I get that.

“But when I see that heart, I remember Zero Santorini, the Texas City serial killer who used to cut out his victims’ hearts and leave them beside the bodies on a neat little nest of barbed wire. (It was a nicely sadistic touch, the barbed wire—very Hollywood; it was useful, too, because it’s the thing that helped us to nail him. The wire was galvanized eight-inch field fence, and Santorini bought twenty-five yards of it from Uvalco Supply in San Antonio.) Sure, I can delude myself that I’m doing your work, Lord, but it really doesn’t figure that you could have been around for any of the seventeen poor girls Santorini murdered.

“It’s true that most of those girls were drug addicts and prostitutes, but nobody deserves to be killed like that. Except perhaps Zero Santorini. According to him, he actively encouraged most of those women to pray for their lives before he murdered them; and when you didn’t show up with a lightning bolt in one hand and your Holy Spirit in the other, he figured you’d given him the go-ahead to shoot them with a nail gun. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Santorini was looking for some sort of sign that you do actually exist; that in an extreme situation such as the one he had engineered, you might just have put in an appearance and allayed all of his very reasonable doubts.

“I believed his story, too. In a way, his actions struck me as kind of logical. He even took pictures of these poor girls as they knelt on the ground naked, with their hands clasped in prayer, which seemed to bear out his story. You, on the other hand—well, I’ve got a hundred good reasons to disbelieve you.

“If you are there, then all I’m asking for is some help to believe in you. I’m not asking for a sign, like Zero Santorini did. And I’m not asking for an easier life or an easier job. I’m just praying for the strength to deal with the life and the job I already have. The fact is that in my ten years with the Bureau not once have I seen you fixing something that needed fixing. Not once. And I just get the impression that if all the brick agents on Justice Park Drive stayed in bed one morning then this city would be in a bigger fucking mess than it is right now. I certainly don’t see you taking on the loonies I have to deal with in Domestic Terrorism, Lord: the white supremacists, the Christian militias, the sovereign citizens, the abortion extremists, the animal-rights and eco warriors, the black separatists, and the anarchists—to say nothing of the Islamists that the guys across the hall in Counterintelligence are having to keep an eye on these days. I don’t see you worrying about any of that, Lord. In fact, I don’t see you at all.”

I got to my feet. It was time for me to leave. The cathedral was filling up. A priest quietly approached the altar and lit some candles, and upstairs in the organ loft someone started to play a Bach prelude.

Leaving the transept, I walked back up the aisle to the south front, pausing only to collect the parish news bulletin from a pile by the door, and then I went out into the heat of a typical Houston summer evening.

Home was a new-built stone-and-stucco house southeast of Memorial Park on Driscoll Street. From the tower bedroom that served as my study, I had a good view of a suburban Houston street of reassuring ordinariness: a sidewalk lined with several palm trees scorched by the relentless sun and neat lawns that were nearly always smaller than the shiny SUVs parked beside them.

It was a nice house, but I couldn’t ever have afforded it on an FBI salary, which was why Ruth’s father, Bob Coleman, had bought it for us. In the beginning, Bob and I had got along pretty well; but that was before I was dumb enough—his words, not mine—to have turned down a well-paid position with a prestigious firm of New York attorneys to go to the academy at Quantico and train for the FBI. Bob said he would never have given his blessing to our being married if he had thought I was going to throw away a legal career out of a misguided sense of patriotism. Bob and I don’t see eye to eye on any number of issues, but my working for Big Government is just one more reason for him to dislike and distrust me. Then again, I feel the same way about Bob.

I dumped my stuff on the breakfast bar and kissed Ruth for longer than either of us was expecting, after which she let out a breath and blinked as if she had just turned a cartwheel, and then she smiled warmly.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” she said.

“You have a strange effect on me.”

“I’m glad. I’d hate to think I bored you.”

“Never.”

I went into the bathroom to wash up.

“Did you have a good day?” she called after me.

“It’s always a good day when I come home, honey.”

“Don’t say that, baby. It reminds me of all the things that could go wrong when you’re out of the house.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong. I’ve told you before. I’m blessed.” I sprayed some antiviral sanitizer on my hands; I must have thought the stuff was an antidote to the kind of lowlife scum I spent most of my time trying to catch. “Where’s Danny?”

“Playing in the yard.”

When I came back into the kitchen, Ruth had the Sacred Heart parish newsletter in her hand.

“You were down at the cathedral?”

“I was in the area so I decided to drop in and see if Bishop Coogan was there. You remember Eamon Coogan?”

“Sure.”

Currently the archbishop emeritus of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Eamon Coogan was an old friend of my mother’s from Boston, which is where my family had moved after we left Scotland.

I went to the refrigerator to fetch a cold beer.

“And was he?” she asked sweetly.

“I don’t know.”

She laughed. “You don’t know?” And then she guessed I was lying, because Ruth always knew when I was lying. After Harvard Law, Ruth had worked as an assistant DA in the New York District Attorney’s Office, where she had demonstrated a real talent for prosecution and cross-examination.

“Oh,” she said, “I get it. You went there for confession, didn’t you?”

“No.” I jerked the top of the beer bottle off and sucked the contents down.

“To pray, then.” She grinned. “Why can’t you go to our own church to do that, Gil?”

“Because it doesn’t feel like a church. You know, whenever I’m in there, I feel like looking for the commentary box and a hot dog salesman.”

She laughed. “That’s not fair. It’s just a building. I don’t think God needs stained-glass windows to feel at home.”

I shrugged.

“Is anything wrong, honey?”

“No, but I think maybe I just answered your first question about what kind of day I’ve had.”

Danny appeared at the back door and, seeing me, launched himself in my direction like a human battering ram; I had time only to cover my balls with my hands before his large and surprisingly hard head connected with my groin.

“Daddy,” he yelled, and wrapped his little arms around my legs.

“Danny. How are you doing, big guy?”

“I’m good,” he said. “I haven’t been bad at all. And I didn’t hit Robbie.”

I caught a look in Ruth’s eye that seemed to contradict this spontaneous denial.

“Robbie?”

“The Murphy boy,” she said. “From across the street.” She shook her head. “They had a small disagreement.”

“I told you. I didn’t hit Robbie. He fell over.”

“Danny,” said Ruth. “We talked about this. Don’t lie to your dad.”

“I didn’t.”

I grinned. “You stick to your story, kid,” I said. “Don’t ever fold under questioning.”

I turned the boy around, stroked his fine yellow hair, and gently pushed him further into the kitchen.

Danny went to the sink and washed his hands. Ruth was already serving dinner and this was my cue to remove the Glock on my hip. Ruth had nothing against guns—she was from Texas, after all—but she always preferred me to take it off before I sat down for dinner and said grace.

I said a prayer before every meal in our house, but on this occasion my heart wasn’t in it. Instead of our usual grace—“Great God, the giver of all good, accept our praise and bless our food”—I found myself uttering something less worshipful: “For well-filled plate and brimming cup and freedom from the washing up, we thank you, Lord. Amen.”

Ruth tried to control a smile. “Well, that’s a new one,” she said.

After we’d eaten, I put Danny to bed and read him a story and then went into my study in the tower, which is where Ruth came and found me later on.

“Can I fetch you another beer, baby?”

Ruth didn’t drink, but she didn’t seem to mind that I did. Not yet.

“No, thanks, honey.”

She stood behind me and massaged my neck and shoulders for a while.

“You seem kind of distant tonight.”

Suddenly I wanted to tell her everything—I had to tell someone—but I could hardly have done that without risking an argument. The church was an important part of Ruth’s life.

“You remember I told you about that motorcycle gang of white supremacists who call themselves the Texas Storm Troopers?”

Ruth nodded.

“We’ve been running a wire on a bar the gang uses in Eastwood. Well, today I heard three of them discussing some murders that were committed back in 2007. Two black women were raped and murdered on the Southside.”

“How horrible.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. But it was clear from their conversation that it was the Storm Troopers who carried out these murders.”

Ruth shrugged. “So, that’s good, isn’t it? Now you can arrest them.”

“We already sent someone up for those murders. A guy named José Samarancho. I worked Violent Crimes for a while when we first moved to Houston, remember? It was our task force that helped to convict him.”

“Then this evidence should help to clear him, shouldn’t it?”

She still didn’t get it, and I could hardly blame her for that.

“It would have cleared him if José Samarancho was still alive. They executed him last month up at Huntsville.”

Ruth sat down at my desk and pursed her lips. “That’s awful. But you mustn’t blame yourself, sweetheart. It’s not your fault at all.”

“Of course I blame myself. I’ve thought about nothing else all day.” I shook my head. “I was there when he got the juice. I was there, Ruth.”

She frowned. “But if he was convicted in 2007, you might have expected that he’d still be alive. I mean the appeal process can take years, even in Texas.”

“José Samarancho was a car thief. He was unlucky enough to steal a car that belonged to one of the two dead women, so his forensics were all over it. The car had been left in the parking lot where the Storm Troopers kidnapped the women. Samarancho stole cars to feed a drug habit that caused him to have blackouts; and when we presented him with the evidence that he’d been in the murdered woman’s car, he agreed he might have committed the murders and confessed to something he hadn’t done because I put it in his mind. His fucked-up brain even managed to dredge some drug-fantasy memory of his murdering the women and by some fluke he got the details right. He didn’t appeal the death sentence because he thought he’d done it and therefore deserved to die.” I shook my head bitterly. “Even while he was strapped to the gurney with the juice plugged into his veins, he was praying to the Lord to forgive him. The poor dumb idiot died still believing he’d committed two horrible murders and expecting that he might be going to hell.”