The Book of Jonah (47 page)

She pulled one corner of the paper toward her with one hand, the other corner away with the opposite, poised to rip it apart. She didn't care about her promise. She'd made it with every intention of breaking it—even with an enthusiasm for breaking it. If nothing else, it would feed her omnidirectional revenge. But she was aware she was struggling against a sort of wonder—a curiosity: How had he found her? He couldn't have known her last name; she barely knew her last name. And how had he known this was the church? No one knew this was the church. “Jonah Jacobstein,” she read again. It was all very—strange.

She was standing in the middle of the empty sidewalk, a few feet along the fence around the church, staring over at the fortresslike pawnshop. She knew she could tear up this paper, and all the scraps of letters and numbers would be scattered in a hundred different directions—and in a year every place they scattered to would no longer exist as it did now. In a year she would be doing—what? Whatever the Colonel told her to, presumably. She could leave whenever she wanted, of course: It wasn't as if he'd stoop to stop her, if he'd care at all. And she still had the $876,000 she'd inherited from her parents, in the same Citibank checking account, had never allowed him to touch it. But what good had money ever done her? No, she would probably stay. There would be other churches—other ways to win. He knew her well enough to give her that, if only that. And after everything, she still liked the feeling of winning, of achievement. Everyone ended up somewhere, as she'd said to Jonah that afternoon in Amsterdam. She would end up here.

But if she tore up this paper, she would never know anything more about him, and what had brought him here, and how he had found her, and why. And she wanted to know more.

So, she thought, what was it, finally: Judy or Judith?

4.
WHO CAN TELL IF GOD WILL TURN AND REPENT?

The Aces High Apartment Complex had the virtue of being only a ten-minute bus ride from the strip. A resident of the Aces High could, if so inclined, stand in the empty lot behind the building among the weeds poking through the spider's web of cracks, the dappled accumulation of broken glass, and see the sprawl of outbuildings backing the casinos on the western side of the street—the offices, the kitchens, the laundry rooms, the garages—and, past these, the casinos themselves: the silhouette of the roofed coliseum of Caesars Palace, the obsidian-colored pyramid of the Luxor, the jagged green spike of the Olympus, the squat approximation of the New York skyline.

Conveniently, the Aces High was also located along several other bus routes: to north Las Vegas, to Henderson to the southeast, to Summerlin, to McCarran International, where a few Aces High residents worked in food service and baggage handling. There were churches all across the city, Jonah had learned quickly—so he had sought out a place that made it relatively easy to get wherever he needed to go on a given day.

In addition to the advantageous location, the Aces High featured (ostensibly)
FREE CABLE & INTERNET!, CLEAN & SAFE ROOMS!, WEEKLY OR MONTHLY RATES
!—these attributes listed on the sign at the entrance to the complex's parking lot. In fact, Jonah had found that only the super's cable worked, the Internet was spotty at best, the rooms were not reliably safe, and they were clean only in the most superficial sense of the word. Still, it was one of the nicer short-term apartment complexes he'd found in central Las Vegas. It was not overrun with meth addicts, as was a motel a few blocks down the street; the super, Francisco, did make an effort to keep the facilities at least minimally functional. Sometimes when Jonah returned to the parking lot, the two stories of apartments—in horseshoe configuration, mint-colored doors facing into an outdoor corridor with aquamarine railings—looked even somewhat inviting: the paint still relatively bright, the palm trees at the elbows of the complex more green than yellow. As he arrived today, however, he thought the Aces High looked exactly as inviting as would any other low-cost, short-term residence on the juncture of several Las Vegas bus routes.

It was by then approaching dusk. He had ended up going to a second church, more or less for the sake of doing so. But he hadn't called ahead, and the priest wasn't there, and the custodian he spoke to seemed increasingly suspicious as they talked that he was some sort of undercover cop. It was actually a more plausible explanation for what he was doing there than the real one, Jonah had to concede, as he trudged inside the Aces High.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor, walked down the outdoor corridor to his room. Simon, his neighbor, was sweeping the concrete in front or his door—clearing it of dried palm leaves and cigarette butts. He did this every morning, every evening. “My friend!” Simon greeted Jonah.

“Hey,” Jonah replied.

Simon was a slender young black man, originally from Mozambique. He lived in his apartment with four other young southern African men, which was the only way they could afford the monthly rent. One of the (many) ironies Jonah had noted about the Aces High was that, for most of its residents, it was actually rather expensive. Simon, dressed in a plain blue painter's cap, an oversize pink polo shirt that sagged at the collar, and the dusty blue jeans he wore every day, took Jonah's hand in a handshake, and as usual, it continued into a more amorphous hand grip. Simon did not seem to recognize that Western handshakes typically terminated after a second or two. “Did you find your woman today?” Simon asked him as he held Jonah's hand.

“No, I didn't find the woman…” Jonah answered.

“You will find her,” Simon told him. “Tomorrow.” Simon gave him this assurance daily, his faith in Jonah's half-explained project never wavering; Jonah could only wish he had the same confidence. “I sweep for you, my friend,” Simon offered, finally releasing his hand. To say that Jonah was entirely indifferent to the cleanliness of the patch of concrete outside his door at the Aces High would have been an understatement—but he'd given up denying Simon this chance to help him.

During the first days of their acquaintance, Simon had advised Jonah that he shouldn't get his checks cashed at the check-cashing store on the corner, because they charged a higher percentage than the one a bus stop south. Jonah had asked Simon why he didn't simply deposit his checks into a bank account, as there they wouldn't charge him any percentage at all—and Simon had stared at him, flabbergasted. This led to a long and somewhat tedious discussion (Simon required facts to be repeated several times before he would believe them) about the American banking system, and interest rates, and the rights conferred by green cards, and the relative risks of bank robbery, and so on. It all culminated in Jonah going with Simon to a bank branch a few blocks away, walking him through the steps of opening a checking account, and standing there as Simon deposited for the first time his paycheck from his job in the laundry room at Caesars Palace. For this, Jonah had earned Simon's undying gratitude and, evidently, a lifetime of doorway cleanings.

“In the last night, my friend, I tell you who go,” Simon said as he swept. At the Aces High, someone was always either coming or going—and Simon, despite having limited English and working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, somehow kept up with all the building gossip. “In the last night,” he continued, “Martha, children…” And he paused his sweeping long enough to make a gesture of his palm parallel to the ground, slowly rising—which suggested Martha and her kids had floated off into space—but Jonah got the point. Martha had crammed herself and her four children into a one-bedroom unit; Jonah had once given her some predictably useless legal advice regarding unpaid child support. “Left things, all things, in dumper,” Simon went on. “Clothes, papers, fan.” Simon spun his index finger, as though to show Jonah how a fan operated. “Still work!” he said brightly.

“I guess there's always a silver lining,” Jonah muttered. Simon seemed immune to the assorted miseries of the Aces High. But then, from what Jonah had heard about Simon's childhood, they had very different standards for what constituted misery. Still, thinking of Martha and her four overweight, sullen children, all piled onto a bus headed somewhere with whatever of their things they could carry, did nothing to dispel the hopeless feeling he'd been wrestling with since his visit to the Greater Love Hath No Man Church. “That's probably clean enough,” he said to Simon, opening his door as the sweeping went on.

“Tomorrow you find your woman, my friend,” Simon said. “Or sooner!” he added.

“Right, count on it,” Jonah said, and went inside and closed the door.

His room consisted of a double bed with a dark-brown comforter, a dresser with a television chained to it, a closet-sized kitchenette equipped with a sink, a three-foot refrigerator and an electric burner, a marigold-tiled bathroom with a curtainless shower, a card table and chair by the window—and that was about it. He tossed his wallet and keys onto the dresser beside the Bible he'd been trying to read; it had proved slow going—he'd gotten bogged down in Leviticus.

He could hear a man shouting in the adjacent room. The walls were thin enough that if he'd listened he could have made out every word this man said—but he had heard it all before by now. The man had been kicked out of his house by his pregnant wife, who suspected he was cheating. He spent at least a few hours a day on the phone with her, trying to shout his way back home. Despite his at times vicious, at times sobbing denials, he really was cheating: Jonah had met his redheaded, spray-tanned mistress smoking cigarettes in the outdoor corridor a few times. She was a baccarat dealer at the Golden Nugget, was actually pretty friendly—though from what he heard through the walls, he knew she was capable of viciousness, too.

“Is it my fault I'm fucking in love with you, bitch?” the man shouted.

Jonah opened one of the heavy dresser drawers, took his laptop out from under a pile of his T-shirts. It was a meaningless precaution; if someone broke into the room, they'd obviously search the drawers. But it was better than just leaving it out. Sometimes when people happened to see inside the room, their eyes lingered on it.

He sat down with the laptop at the card table, checked his email. He'd put ads in the newspaper, had posted them on Craigslist, seeking information about a Judy or Judith in Las Vegas. All this had gotten him was forty emails a day from prostitutes and phishers, claiming to be her or know her.

He had new emails from both his parents, continuing with their advice war as to what he should do with his life now that he'd told them he wasn't on a sabbatical but rather had “quit” corporate law. His mother thought he should take up a craft of some sort, something that would let him work with his hands—printmaking was her latest suggestion; his father thought he should go back to corporate law. Philip Orengo had written, as well, updating him on the New York gossip: Patrick Hooper had a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend who was “not even wholly unattractive”; Philip himself was considering a run for city council the following fall. And naturally, all this seemed at least a world or two away from the Aces High in central Las Vegas.

He clicked over to the list of churches he kept. He actually had only about a dozen left—couldn't tell whether he found this alarming, or a relief. Either way, he didn't know what he would do when he got to the end of this list. He'd thought about going through every real estate company in the city—calling each of them up, asking to speak to Judy. And when that failed? he asked himself. He knew he couldn't stay in Las Vegas forever—whether he found Judith or not. He just had no idea what he should do next. It wouldn't be printmaking or corporate law, though. In the heady days just before he'd left Amsterdam, he'd toyed with the idea of becoming a human-rights attorney—but that seemed an especially bleak prospect, as he sat there. But didn't whatever he did after this have to depend on what happened here, in the end? How could he know what came next until he found Judith—or didn't?

He clicked back to his email. Nothing worth reading had appeared in his inbox in the last ninety seconds. He was about to close the computer, when he did get a new message—from Becky, he saw. He hesitated a moment—then opened it.

Dear Jonah

First of all I got all your emails. And Aimee talked to her sister about that girl, but she said she hasn't heard from her in years. If you do track her down she wants her email. So that's that. The real reason I'm writing is to let you know that Danny & I broke up. I still think you're an asshole for everything you did, but I guess I see the whole thing a little differently now. Maybe someday we can talk about it. But not now. Anyway. I thought you should know.

Becky

Jonah reread this email several times—but each time he read it, he only grew more perplexed. Did this mean he'd been right to tell her about Danny? Or did their breakup have nothing to do with him? And what was the “whole thing” she saw differently? And why did she think he should know? He was turning all this over in his head when he heard a knock on the door. He figured it was Simon; as he stood up and opened it, his eyes were still on the computer. Only when he didn't hear Simon greet him did he turn and look—and see in his doorway a tall, skinny woman with short blond hair in a belted trench coat.

And Jonah told Judith the whole story.

*   *   *

Jonah paced back and forth across the room as he spoke, Judith sat at the card table by the window, only listening, not asking questions—and by the time he'd finished, the last of the dusk through the window had faded from the room, and all the surfaces—bed, dresser, table, carpet—looked as though they had been splashed with shadow. He sat down heavily on the bed when he was finished—nose aching from talking so much, wishing he hadn't mustered the will to quit smoking after all.