Vigil (11 page)

“He’s bringing that massive fossil you told me about—”

“Over three thousand pounds!”

“—all the way to Manhattan? Just so you can work on it together, like old times?”

“That’s exactly what he said. Almost.”

Carter knew he was asking a lot—Beth liked her privacy, especially lately, while they worked on the baby issue—but he also knew she’d never do anything to stand in the way of his work. One of the thousand and one reasons he loved her so.

“Anything else I should know?” she finally said.

“Well, he’s built on kind of a grand scale. He smokes like a chimney—but I’ll tell him not to in the apartment—and he never has any money.”

“I like him already.”

Carter laughed and threw an arm around her shoulders. “And weren’t you the one who said you wanted to hear the patter of little feet around the apartment?”

“
Little
feet,” she replied. “The operative word was
little.
”

“Oh,” Carter said, “sorry. How about if I tell him to tiptoe?”

All day long he had encountered nothing but resistance,
interference, and meddling. Why, Ezra wondered, couldn’t they just leave him alone, stay out of his way and let him do the work that he, and he alone, had been destined to do?

It had started at Dr. Neumann’s office where, the moment he sat down, he noticed the telltale letterhead of Dr. Herschel Stern, his psychiatrist in Jerusalem, on a batch of papers in her lap. So, she’d been in touch with him, after all. He knew what was coming even before she mentioned the words
Jerusalem syndrome.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of it,” she said. “In fact, I believe Dr. Stern discussed it with you?”

“He might have.”

She pressed on. “It’s an affliction that befalls certain people—evangelicals, religious laypeople, scholars like yourself—who come to the Holy Land and become overwhelmed by it. They are so absorbed, so moved, so changed by the experience that they become, to some extent, delusional. In the most extreme cases, they become convinced that they are, for instance, the Messiah.”

“Yes, I’m aware of the syndrome,” Ezra replied, “and no, I am not suffering from it. Trust me, I know I am not the Messiah, Moses, or the Angel of Death.”

“I’m only mentioning it as a preface,” Dr. Neumann replied. “There are other kinds of disturbances”—she uttered that last word, Ezra noted, with the same caution with which she’d used
delusional
a moment ago—“that can also crop up there. It’s very fertile ground, very potent, and Dr. Stern has written me and told me a little bit about your work in Israel. I must say, it’s no wonder you began to feel a certain strain.”

“Did the good doctor also inform you of the difficulties I got into? With the authorities?” Ezra had no particular desire to go into it himself, but he felt he might as well find out exactly how much she knew.

Dr. Neumann paused, as if she wasn’t sure how much of her hand she should show yet.

“The Dome of the Rock?” Ezra prompted her.

“Yes,” she finally admitted.

Ah, so he’d told her that, too.

The Dome of the Rock, the holy Muslim shrine, erected above the ruins of the Second Temple. That was the key. Ezra had read the scrolls, and he knew what they were saying. No one else ever had, no one else had ever put it all together. He knew that if he could burrow, unobstructed, into the foundations below the dome, he could find there the most holy relic in all the universe. In fact, he’d almost succeeded. He’d found the subterranean tunnel; he’d seen the clay tablet sealing the aperture; and he had heard, in the chamber within, the sound of all the winds in the world.

The rumbling groan of a living, breathing God.

The sound of Creation itself.

But it was then, before he could get any closer, that the Israeli security agents had grabbed hold of his ankles and dragged him out.

It was a sound that still sometimes filled his ears.

“I’m concerned that your work here, the work you’re doing in New York, is tied to the work you were pursuing there. Some of the things you said at the time of your arrest”—and here she’d stopped to put on her reading glasses and refer to her notes—“are powerful, and troubling. ‘I’ve communed with angels.’ ‘Creation can be unlocked. ’ ‘I can show you the face of God.’” She took off her glasses and looked at him. “You’re a very intelligent man, Ezra, so I need hardly point out to you the nature of these comments—the self-aggrandizement, the epochal content and context, the messianic fervor. What do we do with those thoughts and those emotions? And even more to the point, do you still feel them?”

How was he supposed to answer that? On the one hand, he could lie, and keep Dr. Neumann where he wanted her—acting as his psychiatric parole officer, guaranteeing any authorities who asked after him that his delusional episodes were under control and that he, Ezra, was no longer a threat to anyone, and certainly not to the sovereign state of Israel. Or, on the other hand, he could tell the truth—he could tell her what the stolen scroll was gradually revealing to him—and risk being committed to some institution where the only rolled-up paper he’d ever see again would be the toilet tissue.

It wasn’t a tough call.

“The change of scene has done me good,” he said. “Here, in my old rooms, in New York City, I feel a lot more relaxed. I don’t feel any of that mania I experienced in the Middle East.”

She gave him a fishy look. He hadn’t sold her.

“And the voices? Of angels?”

“I never claimed that it was angels who actually talked to me. Even at my worst, I never said that.”

But she wouldn’t let him duck the question. “Whatever you believed the voices were, do you still hear them? You have to tell me, Ezra, if you are still experiencing auditory hallucinations. Otherwise, it’s very hard for me to help you.”

That, he thought, was worth a laugh. The very idea that Dr. Neumann could offer him any help at all, apart from keeping his prescriptions filled, was a joke.

“No, I’m not having any hallucinations,” he said, once again carefully skirting the truth. “Everything I hear, and see, is real.”

From the look on her face, his powers of persuasion still needed work.

 
As did his patience. Sitting, now, in the dining room
of the Sutton Place apartment, it was all he could do not to bolt from his chair. But the price of living here, Ezra reminded himself, was enduring the occasional scene like this.

His father sat at the head of the table, in a silk smoking jacket—since when had he started wearing those?—and Kimberly sat at the other end, with her perfect hair and makeup and outfit. Ezra was stuck in the middle, and in jeans and a Gap sweatshirt he was feeling distinctly underdressed.

Gertrude put the bowl of sautéed potatoes and onions down by Ezra’s elbow—“Eat all you want,” she said, “but save room for dessert”—then turned back toward the kitchen door.

“That will be all, Gertrude,” Kimberly said, quite unnecessarily, as the door had already swung shut behind her.

Ezra took some of the potatoes and onions, then tried to pass them to Kimberly, who held up her hand as if he were trying to pass her a bowl of rancid milk. He handed them instead to his father, who had to pull back on the sleeve of his too-tight smoking jacket in order to reach them.

“I had a chance to talk to somebody in the Israeli embassy today,” Sam said, portentously.

Ezra kept his head down and ate his veal and potatoes.

“They’re not going to pursue the matter,” Sam said.

“What matter?” Kimberly asked, sipping her wine.

“The matter of Ezra’s criminal trespass.”

Here it came. First Dr. Neumann, and now his father. Was anyone ever going to let it go?

“Criminal trespass? Where?” She looked at Ezra with what might have passed, if he hadn’t known better, for maternal concern. “What’s this all about?”

“You want to answer that, Ezra?” his father echoed.

“If you spoke to the embassy, then you already know all about it.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

Ezra took another quick bite—there was no telling how much longer he’d be at the table—then said, “I knew what I was doing.”

“Don’t you always,” Sam replied acidly.

“They’ve got so many rules and regulations over there about where you can go, what you can do, who you can talk to, that if you observed them all, you’d never get anything done.”

“Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, they have all those rules for a reason? That maybe the government of Israel knows more about how to run things than you do?”

“They know how to run a government—and even that’s debatable—but they don’t know a damn thing about what I do.”

“And what is that, Ezra?” Kimberly interjected. “I’ve never been exactly sure.”

Ezra turned toward her; for once, he thought she was actually speaking the truth. She didn’t know, and even if he told her, in a million years she would never understand. Still, he had to say something. “I look for answers to the big questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The biggest. Why are we here? Is there some purpose? Is there a God, and if there is, how can we discover what he wants from us?”

“Those
are
big questions,” Kimberly said.

“But you’re not going to find the answers,” Sam interjected, “skulking around in the middle of the night at highly restricted holy sites. That whole country is a tinder-box, and somebody like you, doing whatever he wants, paying no attention to the authorities, can inadvertently blow the place sky-high. It’s a lucky thing you didn’t.”

“There was never any danger of that.”

“That’s not what the Israelis think. If I hadn’t pulled the strings I did and gotten you out of there, you’d be sitting in a jail cell in Jerusalem right now.”

That much, Ezra had to concede, was probably true. The problems he’d had with the directors of the Feldstein Institute paled in comparison with the trouble he’d stepped into at the Dome of the Rock.

“It might interest you to know,” Sam went on, “that I’ll be making a substantial contribution to the re-election campaign of the mayor of Jerusalem.”

“Maybe you can swing a real estate deal there,” Ezra said, and regretted it even before his father’s fist had hit the table so hard that a lighted candle fell out of its holder.

“You think this is some joke?” Sam shouted, his face turning the crimson of his jacket.

Kimberly grabbed for the hot candle rolling across the tablecloth.

“You think I’m always going to be around to clean up your messes, to bail you out and make things right? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Ezra wiped his mouth, folded his napkin over, and put it on the table.

“Answer me!”

“I assumed that it was a rhetorical question,” Ezra replied.

His father looked apoplectic.

“Sam, your heart! Calm down,” Kimberly said.

“What do you care?” Ezra said to her. “You waited around for my mother to die, now you’ve just got one to go.”

“You lousy son-of-a—” Sam shouted, jumping up, but Ezra was too fast. He was out of the room and halfway down the hall before his father had unsnagged the sleeve of his jacket from the arm of his chair. He could hear Kimberly trying to settle him down with “Let him go” and “Don’t make this worse than it is.” For perhaps the first time in his life, and wouldn’t you know it was right after he’d insulted her, he was actually grateful for Kimberly’s presence.

When he got to his room he locked the door and waited, breathing hard, to hear if he was being followed. How old was he, he thought? Thirty years old, and here he was, acting like some grade school kid running from a spanking. He put his ear to the door, but the apartment was so vast, and the dining room so far away, he couldn’t hear a thing. What had just happened? What had he just said? He could hardly believe it himself. He’d been so careful, so far, to mind his manners and stay out of everyone’s way, and now, in a couple of minutes, he’d blown the whole thing. Not that he cared all that much about his rapport with Kimberly; that had never been great. And his relationship with his father had been deteriorating for years. But what he did want was a safe haven, a place to do his work unmolested, unhampered—and until a minute ago he’d had it. Had he just chucked all that out the window with a few ill-considered, inflammatory remarks?

At least it appeared the battle was over; no one was banging on his door. But his heart was racing and he could feel the blood pounding in his temples. He had to calm down, especially if he still had any intention of working that night. He went into the bathroom, threw open the medicine chest, and took a couple of the Xanax he had gotten Dr. Neumann to represcribe. He swallowed a couple of the quarter-milligram tablets, went back into the bedroom, and flopped down on the edge of the bed. In fifteen or twenty minutes, he’d start to feel the effects.

He shouldn’t have made that remark to Kimberly, about her waiting for Sam to die, too. Until that point the situation had been salvageable. But among the many things he’d never forgiven his father for, Kimberly was at the top of his list. While Ezra’s mother had been suffering through years of surgery and chemotherapy, his father had been increasingly remote, even uninterested, and it fell to Ezra—and even his Uncle Maury—to be there for her, to comfort and take care of her. In fact, on the night she died in her private room at Sloan-Kettering, Sam was nowhere to be found; Ezra had called home, had spoken to Sam’s secretary at his office, had called the Metropolitan Club, but Sam was missing in action. Later, he learned that his father had been holed up at Kimberly’s place, a tidy little maisonette he had purchased for her on Beekman Place. While Ezra’s mom was breathing her last, Sam was probably breathing hard over his very accommodating advertising exec.

But as he calmed down and took stock of the situation, Ezra realized that if he kept the lowest profile imaginable, and maybe even found a way to apologize (though how could you ever really claim you hadn’t meant to say something so pointed?), he might be able to hang onto his little sinecure. He’d had plenty of blowups as bad as this one over the years with his father, and his stepmother would probably be as anxious as he was to pretend it had never happened; it wouldn’t do her any good to be perceived as having come between Sam and his son, no matter how estranged they were. And while Ezra recognized that most sane people in his shoes would be moving out and finding a new place to live, for him it wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t as if he had money of his own, or even a credit card; everything came from Sam, doled out by one of the drones in his business accounts office, and the last thing Ezra wanted to do was stir things up and have to ask for a new deal. Sam might let him be if he stayed where he was, comfortably under the radar, but if he started asking for more, it could get tricky. His father might even cut him off completely and demand that he get a job.