Vigil (38 page)

For a few moments, Carter sat immobilized in his
chair, the sound of that voice ringing in his ears.
I must go.
Could that have been the voice of an angel? It had been smooth and deep, with only a slight, strange intonation, the sort of thing you’d notice in someone who’d learned English well, but whose first language was something else entirely.

And what had Russo been shouting just before the line went dead? Carter knew that he’d said not to let Arius get near him, but what was he saying next? Not to let Arius get near Beth? Was that it? And was there some reason, other than the obvious, for the urgent warning?

He grabbed his leather jacket off the back of his lab stool, pulled it on, and then ran for the door. He kicked the door closed behind him, and frantically dialed the hospital on his cell phone as he charged up the stairs to the street level.

“Village Pizza,” a voice said over the commotion of a busy kitchen, and Carter disconnected, stopped on the stairs, and dialed again, more carefully.

This time it went through, but when he asked for the nurses’ station on Russo’s floor, he was put on hold. Should he have just asked for the security office? Should he hang up and call in again?

He pushed open the main door and looked up and down the street for a cab.

Or should he call that police detective and tell him to go straight to St.Vincent’s, right away, if he wanted to catch the guy who’d torched the prostitute? But what kind of warning would he have to give him at the same time? Would he have to tell him to bring his Bible along, or some holy water? Would those things even do him any good if he did?

Would they do
anyone
any good?

The hospital operator came back on the line, and in a voice that sounded as if she was straining to sound unperturbed, said, “I’m sorry, but that nursing station is unable to take your call at this time. Please call back later.”

Before she could disconnect, Carter blurted out, “But this is an emergency!”

“You’ll have to call back later,” she reiterated, and this time Carter could hear something in her voice, something she wasn’t saying.

And he was terrified of what it might be.

A cab rounded the corner and stopped to let out an elderly woman. Carter bolted toward it, cutting off a couple of students with heavy duffel bags shuffling to the curb.

“Hey, man! We saw him first!” one shouted.

“He’s faculty,” Carter heard the other one say. “Professor Bones.”

“So what?” the first one replied, but Carter was already in, slamming the door shut and telling the cabbie to head for St. Vincent’s. He dialed Ezra’s apartment, and that woman who’d served him lunch—Gertrude, was it?—answered in a hushed voice.

When he identified himself and asked for Ezra, she seemed unsure of what to do.

“It’s extremely important,” Carter said. “I have to talk to him. Right now.”

The cab was still inching its way through the West Village traffic.

Then, finally, Ezra came on.

“I’m on my way to the hospital,” Carter said. “Something might have happened to Russo.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Carter said, not wanting, even now, to think of the awful possibilities. “But he might have had a visit there. From Arius.”

He could hear Ezra’s intake of breath.

“As soon as I’m done there,” Carter said, “I’m coming to you.”

“Here?”

“You’re going to show me that whole damned scroll of yours, all put together, and we’re going to figure out what we have to do.”

Carter hung up and crammed some bills into the metal receptacle in the Plexiglas partition. “That’s twenty bucks,” Carter said. “Make some time.”

The cabbie reached one hand back, fished out the bills, then stepped on it. He gunned the taxi through three yellow lights and one red, but when he got to the hospital block, the entrance was ominously blocked by three fire trucks and half a dozen police cars, their red lights whirling. Carter knew now that he should expect the worst.

“Let me off across the street.”

The cab swerved across the congested lanes of traffic and stopped in front of the chain-link fence surrounding the condemned surgical supply. Carter got out, then charged like a running back weaving his way downfield through the tangle of police and fire vehicles. Over the squawking radios and walkie-talkies, he could hear snatches of what was going on. He heard “The fire’s contained” and “Maximum damage, sixth floor.” Russo’s floor. He’d heard nothing yet about fatalities.

Both of the side doors were wide open but filled with emergency personnel hurrying in and out. Carter used the revolving door instead, stepping inside and shoving it around.

But the moment he did, the moment he breathed the air in the revolving compartment, he felt as if he’d stumbled into a dense forest after a sudden rain. It was the same scent he’d smelled in his own apartment, the night he’d found Beth sprawled nearly naked on their bed, with the window to the fire escape gaping open.

And then, as quickly as he’d been enveloped in the aroma, he was out of it again—standing in the commotion of the hospital lobby. Several firemen and cops were directing some sort of emergency operation—Carter quickly surmised that it was an evacuation; a nervous bunch of visitors was being ushered out of an elevator and toward the exit doors. A policeman shouted “Hey you!” at Carter. “The hospital’s closed.”

Carter nodded and turned around, but instead of going back out the revolving doors, he ducked into a short corridor that he knew led to an interior stairwell. The door was propped open and Carter could hear the rubber boots of firemen stomping and squeaking up above. He climbed the stairs two at a time, and on the third landing bumped into the fire crew.

“I’m a doctor, I just got the call,” he said, as he barged through them. “Sixth floor, right?”

“Right,” one of them said, but Carter was already rounding the next landing, and then the next.

At six, he stopped and bent over, to catch his breath and to brace himself for whatever he might find. The smell of fire had grown stronger the higher up he went, and there was no question in his mind that there’d been some kind of explosion.

Like the explosion in his lab.

The door was secured in the open position and Carter could hear an immense racket just outside it. The floor glistened with water, black with soot and ash, that was even now washing into the stairwell and trickling down the stairs. He stepped over a running stream and into the wide sixth-floor corridor.

The scene was chaos, with firemen and cops trying to help the nursing staff remove the remaining patients from the area—the patients, still in their beds, were being wheeled carefully out of their rooms and through the debris. Carter skirted the deserted nurses’ station and made for Russo’s room, but even before he got there he could see that it was the epicenter of the destruction. The door was completely missing, as was a portion of the wall; inside, he could see that the windows on the opposite side had also been blown out, and a strong breeze was keeping a cloud of ashes swirling in the air. A couple of emergency personnel were moving around in the interior, but carefully staying clear of something that lay in a blackened heap near where the door to the room had once been. Carter’s stomach lurched.

And then there was a hand on his elbow, pulling him back.

“You can’t go in there,” he heard, and turned to see Dr. Baptiste, her hair disheveled, her face besmirched. “There’s nothing you can do.”

She pulled him away.

“What happened?” Carter asked her, numbly.

She drew him down the hall and into the doorway of an evacuated room.

“No one knows,” she said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her hospital coat. It was gray with soot. “A smoke alarm went off in his room, and I was hurrying to check in on him. That’s when I saw the other man leaving.”

“What other man?” Carter asked, though in his heart he knew.

“The tall man, with blond hair,” she said, and as she spoke her eyes bore in on Carter with amazing intensity. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Then you tell me,” she said, gripping his arm again. “He came out of the room, and I saw him close the door behind him. I stopped him, to ask him why that smoke alarm was ringing. I took his arm, just as I’m taking yours now,” she said, glancing down at Carter’s elbow, “and I don’t know what I was holding onto.”

Carter didn’t know what to say. What could he tell her that she could believe?

“He had dark glasses on,” she said, “so I couldn’t really see his eyes. But I’m glad now that I couldn’t.”

“You should be,” Carter replied.

“Then the whole room just exploded. I was knocked halfway down the hall. Everything inside was on fire,” she said, shaking her head with sorrow, “everything. And that man in the sunglasses was gone.”

Of course he was, Carter thought. He would always be gone. He would sow death and destruction—what
good
had it done him to kill Russo?—and then be gone.

But there was one thing that Dr. Baptiste had said that had lodged in Carter’s mind—she’d said that the man had closed the door behind him. Carter gently removed her hand from his arm, and said, “I need to do something.”

“I told you,” she repeated, “there’s nothing you can do. He’s dead. Your friend is dead.”

“I know that,” Carter said. “Do you have a surgical glove in your pockets?”

“What?”

“A surgical glove—do you have one on you?”

She fished in the pocket of her dirty hospital coat and pulled out a couple of rubber gloves. Carter swiftly pulled them on, then left her, puzzled, in the empty room.

He moved down the hall and back toward the nurses’ station. He’d remembered correctly—there was a door, a hospital room door, lying against the wall. Its surface was black and splintered, but its number plate was still intact—as was its metal handle. It was the door to Russo’s room.

Carter put his foot against the cracked wood and pressed down; the wood split the rest of the way, freeing the door handle along one side. He kicked down on the wood on the other side, and it broke free, too. Then, with his gloved hands, he pried loose the door handle. A cop, passing by, looked at him strangely.

“Arson investigation,” Carter said, holding the handle carefully by its singed base.

At the nurses’ station he found a manila envelope with patient charts inside; he emptied out the charts, put the door handle in the envelope, and wedged it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Glancing into Russo’s room, he could see that they’d placed a black plastic tarp beside the remains. A couple of medical personnel were bending down, preparing to move the body. And much as he hated to face it, Carter knew that he couldn’t let his friend go without at least saying good-bye.

He made his way through the firemen and cops and stepped into what was left of Russo’s old room.

“Hey, buddy, you can’t be in here,” one of the paramedics said, but the other one, perhaps understanding the look on Carter’s face, said, “We can give you a second,” and moved a discreet distance away.

Carter stood above the charred, almost unidentifiable remains of what had been his friend. Russo had been such a big guy, so burly and full of life, and now, all that was left was a twisted heap of blackened limbs and bare bones. In the extremity of the pose, in the way that it suggested the limits of human endurance, it reminded Carter of the figures unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The face, or what remained of it, was turned to one side, toward the floor, and it was there that Carter felt he had to touch his friend and say farewell. He knelt down and put out his hand toward the sunken, scorched cheek; he let his fingers graze the seared flesh—it felt like warm tar—and under his breath he said, “Good-bye, Joe—I’m so sorry.”

Then, before he knew it, he heard himself add, “God be with you.”

For Carter, a devout unbeliever all his life, they were words he never thought would pass his lips. But now, confronted with this horror, and about to face horrors that would no doubt surpass it, the words flowed as naturally as water from a well . . . or blood from a wound.

They’d been at it for hours, Ezra going over and over
the scraps of the scroll, explicating the text, filling in the details of scriptural history, building his case. And in the dimly lighted and increasingly stuffy room, Carter could barely stay awake and focused any longer.

“You see, right here,” Ezra was saying, as he strode to another segment of the scroll preserved behind acetate and fastened with thumbtacks to the wall, “it says that the Watchers numbered in the hundreds and that God had appointed them to watch over mankind.” Ezra chortled, shaking his head. “Turns out, they watched too well.”

“Meaning?” Carter asked, taking another sip of his now-cold coffee.

“They were watching the women—and they got some bad ideas.”

“Speaking of bad ideas, do we really need to keep the window closed? It’s almost impossible to breathe in here.”

“I can’t risk any more damage to the scroll,” Ezra said, irritably. “I told you, I’ve got only a few scraps left to translate, and then I’ll have finally put the whole thing together.”

“Go on,” Carter conceded.

“They felt lust.”

“So these angels could feel emotions?”

“I never said they couldn’t. I only said they had no souls.”

“Why would angels need a soul? Aren’t they kind of past that already?”

“Good point. But if we read from this section here,” he said, pointing to another yellowed scrap tacked to the wall, “they came to covet them. They saw the special place that mankind, who possessed the gift of a soul, had assumed in God’s eyes, and so they wanted one, too.”

“And they couldn’t just ask for it?”