The Sleeper (23 page)

“A breakfast at the Council?”

“You know the place. You worked there as a gofer in 1992 when you were banging that woman researcher, right?”

“I know the place,” I said.

“Yeah, well, we're not going inside. We're going to stand back and watch.”

The morning got warmer by the minute as we walked through the park past the rowboats and the pavilion and halfway down through the mall under the enormous elms.

“Where does the money go?”

“From La Merced?”

“Yeah.”

“Medical research and soup kitchens and summer camps for inner-city kids, that sort of thing.”

“A one-man United Way.”

“Except for the religious part. All the groups that get money from La Merced are religious groups.”

“What kind of religion?”

“Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They're what you call faith-based charities. Doesn't seem to make much difference which faiths.”

“Big ones?”

Griffin smiled. “Not so big you've ever heard of them. And every one pretty fundamentalist.”

“What's the thing you're not telling me?”

“Rehab centers. La Merced gives a lot of money to rehab centers for drug addicts and small-time dealers. There's one group called Resurrection House that's pretty big in the Midwest. It starts working with inmates in state prisons, then brings them together in halfway houses when they get out. And it gets most of its money from La Merced.”

“It works with gang members?”

“You could say that. Six of them are lying unclaimed in the Ark City morgue right now.”

Black limousines lined up on Park Avenue and around the block on Sixty-sixth. Drivers waited beside them, or on the corner, many of them with their jackets off and their ties loosened.

“No Secret Service,” said Griffin. “No government heavies here today.”

Men in suits and women in business clothes started coming out the front door. I recognized Tom Brokaw from the Nightly News, and a couple of other faces I'd seen on TV. I saw Jeb Carlton, who was at the Council when I worked there, but I didn't think he'd see me, and didn't think he'd recognize me if he did. And then I saw Chantal. She was still tall and graceful and as alone-looking as a little girl with no friends on a playground. She was more than ten years older than me, and almost ten years had passed since I'd seen her. She walked right by me and I don't think she knew I was there. Maybe she thought I was just another one of the drivers. She had some other place to go.

“That's him,” said Griffin.

A slender man with salt-and-pepper hair, a mostly gray beard, and a suit as elegant as Fred Astaire's shook hands with a couple of other Council members, then looked over the line of cars and the clusters of chauffeurs. For just a second, he looked straight at me. His eyes were such a pale blue they were almost white. I thought I read recognition in them, but then he turned and went down the line of cars on Park, walking normally away from us until, just on the last couple of steps, he dragged his left foot behind him like he'd had polio, or like the bone in his foot had been broken—like the metatarsal had been cracked with an iron rod, and never been allowed to heal.

The man's uniformed driver opened the back door of the big black Mercedes for him to get in, but he put his hands on the roof of the car like he needed to brace himself, or was about to be searched, and he just stood there for a second with his head bent down, thinking. Heat gushed off the hoods of the cars, making a mirage out of the air between us. Then he turned full toward me again, looking straight through the rippling light into my eyes, and he waited.

I walked down Park along the line of limos until we were close enough to shake hands, but neither of us reached out. “It is time for us to talk in cooler, more civilized surroundings,” he said. He stepped back from the door of the car and gestured toward the leather seats. “Will you join me?”

“I'll get in on the other side,” I said, glancing back through the haze of engine-heat toward Griffin, but he was gone.

“Fulton and Broadway,” Oriente told the driver. “Take us right down the middle of the island.” He turned to me. “We ought to appreciate the full grandeur of this city,” he said.

“Before you destroy it.”

“Hah! Is that what you think?”

“Yes.”

“No. Destruction is so easy. Salvation is what's hard. And this is a city, this is a country, this is a world that needs to be saved. Surely you agree. Look up ahead of us, and all around us now.” We were rolling toward the Met Life building. “God made mountains, but men made this skyline. When the clouds roll in and the tops of these buildings disappear, you know, Kurt, there's no way to know where the hand of man ends and the kingdom of heaven begins. The Tower of Babel was nothing compared to this. But this is not—” He shook his head. “Like Babel, this is not the way of the Lord.”

We moved from sunlight to dark shadow as we followed the upward swerving tunnel that runs around the side of Grand Central Station.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A pious man.”

“In Granada you were a Syrian doctor disguised as a spice merchant. Here you're a Panamanian lawyer. Who the fuck are you?”

“Ah, that long afternoon and evening in Granada, when we got to know each other so well. Poor Pilar. She did not understand you as well as I did. And are you forgetting Kenya? You know, I think Cathleen was really quite fond of you. She was such a kind woman, for a spy. Didn't you think so? I believe she and Mr. Faridoon have gone back to the big hive in London now. Don't look surprised. You must certainly have guessed. But, you know, bureaucracies are so conservative, they would never have done anything in Somalia, in the end, if you hadn't—what should I say?—forced the issue? You are a surprising catalyst, Kurt, for so many things.”

The late-morning sun burst bright through the windshield and lower Manhattan stretched in front of us. We rode in silence for a while before I said, “Yes, we do know each other.”

He looked straight ahead and nodded. His face didn't show emotion, really, just quiet purpose. His expression was efficient. “Of course we do,” he said.

“So where do we go from here?”

“To my favorite place in all of New York.”

“Ground Zero.”

“Not quite,” he said.

“And then?”

“And then we shall see.”

“We're just about to end this thing,” I said. “You know it. I know it. Whatever your plans were, they're finished. You've been ID'd. You'll be arrested. It's over.”

“Kurt, maybe you know me. But you don't know your country. You don't know this world you live in. Do you hear sirens? Do you see police?”

“You are never going to threaten me or my family again.”

“That's right, Kurt. You know that and I know that, too.”

“I destroyed the Sword a long time ago.”

“Yes, I thought that was probably the case. But of course I had to be sure. That clumsy business in your hometown with all the gas—you couldn't have given me better proof. I knew you would trade me what I wanted if you had it. You wouldn't have played tricks. You worship your family. You would betray your country for them, your government. Even God. You would have let a hundred thousand children die to save your baby girl, and not think twice, I think. Once, you loved God. Now you love—is it Betsy? Miriam? Tell me something, Kurt, do you love one more than the other? Would you let yourself dare to think about that? But of course if you live long enough, that will change, too. Maybe you'll come back to God. I think you will.”

“How long have you been working for Bin Laden? Or is it Saddam? He's the one who gave us the Sword, isn't he?”

We were passing from Soho along the fringes of Chinatown. Oriente watched the crowds of shoppers and tourists and delivery boys and bums and schoolgirls elbowing around each other on the sidewalks. “So many people work with me, and for me, and for the cause of righteousness. Some of them know their roles, some don't,” he said. “Bin Laden is one player on the board. One player. Saddam is another player. But just one player. And what is so—I want to say sad, but I am not going to patronize you—what is so—frustrating is that you don't see the big picture, Kurt. Thousands and thousands of people are working for one purpose, and others are helping without knowing it, and one hand guides them all.”

I looked at the empty sky high above Wall Street. “All part of some vast conspiracy, some huge plot. Is that what you're telling me?”

“Part of a huge purpose. Working toward one goal. The Final Act. The script was written before they were born. Before any of us were born. All we have to do is play it out. But—we're almost there. Look at the name of the street: Canyon of Heroes. You always wanted to be a hero, didn't you? Well, here you are. This is the place you want to be. Someday maybe they'll throw ticker tape at you.”

The sudden bitterness in Oriente's voice made me feel better. “I fucked you up,” I said. “You know it and I know it.”

“We're here,” said Oriente. The car stopped in front of stone columns at the entrance to a brick church. “There are answers here to questions you never asked. You will see here what I know—and what you know.”

We walked up the steps to a glass door with a sign on it: “St. Paul's Chapel is temporarily closed for refurbishment.” Oriente knocked on the glass.

“You're Muslim,” I said. “Why are we coming to a church?”

“There is only one God,” said Oriente.

A young black man with gray plaster dust in his hair and a painter's mask over his face came to the door. When he saw it was Oriente, he opened up and said something in Spanish that I didn't understand, gesturing for us to enter. Painters and sanders were hard at work from floor to ceiling. “There is a lot of cleaning up to do,” said Oriente. “And I've donated a lot of the money for it.” He cast an eye over the workmen and the work. “There is a lot of history here,” he said. “George Washington used to pray here.” He smiled. “This is where the Founding Father came to meet with the Creator.”

Oriente turned his wolf eyes toward me. “But we will leave the tourism for another time. Up there in front of the windows, the altar, that is what I wanted you to see. We'll have to get them to take off the canvas covering.” Oriente shouted in Spanish to the workmen on the scaffolding in other parts of the chapel. One shouted back and a couple of them started climbing down. “This will take a minute,” he said. “Let's have a seat on the front row.”

Hot as it was, a cold shiver of superstitious fear ran through me.

“Do you remember,” he asked, “exactly where you were when you saw the Towers hit?” I thought of the kitchen in my house in Westfield, and of Miriam drinking milk out of the carton. I said nothing. “Of course you do,” said Oriente. “Everybody does. They remember watching TV over their morning coffee, or turning on the set in the boss's office, or frantically pushing the buttons on their car radios, changing stations to make sure they hadn't heard wrong. Everybody remembers. Everybody will always remember.”

“Where were you?”

“Sitting right here.” He looked over his shoulder for the workmen and saw they were bringing ladders up to the sides of the altar. They climbed almost to the second-story ceiling and untied the upper part of the canvas covering, then walked it down and pulled it away. I expected to see a crucifix, or at least a cross. But the image behind the altar was not quite like anything I'd seen in a church before. A thunderous white cloud was carved from wood, and golden shafts, half lightning and half light, exploded downward from it. In the center of the cloud, in the center of the explosion, was a single word written in an alphabet I didn't know. At the base of the cloud, delivered by the blast of lightning and shafts of light, were two black stone tablets with the Ten Commandments etched on them in gold.

“The flash of fire, the downward rush of the clouds—the altar has been like that since the days of George Washington. It has been here—waiting,” said Oriente. “Do you see the Hebrew letters? YHWH. Yahweh. Jehovah. ‘I AM THAT I AM.' The name before all the other names of God, the first name of Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment. Oh yes. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.' You feel it, don't you? You look at that and you know what it is and you feel it. ‘Behold, He cometh with clouds and every eye shall see Him.' ”

I looked at the altar, and at the sun coming from behind the windows, living rays lighting shafts through the plaster dust that hung in the air.

“I heard the first explosion,” he said, “and the pews trembled, but I didn't move. I bowed my head, and I waited. Eighteen minutes later, the second explosion. And that was when I went to the back of the church. Come. Come with me now.” We walked straight down the aisle behind us to the steel door, which was already half open for air. Oriente pushed it the rest of the way. “I will show you a beautiful thing,” he said. “Look at the altar, and now look out this door.”

In front of us was an old churchyard with crumbling head-stones tilted by the roots of ancient trees. Around the graveyard was an iron fence draped with banners and posters too far away for me to read, and in the far distance, a few tall buildings.

“Beyond these graves, and beyond this fence, just there, filling your eyes with its enormity—from here to there—was the World Trade Center.” He looked at me to make sure I understood. “I stood here,” he said, “and watched the flames and the people falling. I listened to the screams of sirens and the screams of men. I smelled the brimstone of the buildings burning and the stinking pitch of jet fuel, and I was covered with the ashes of Hell as I watched one by one the buildings coming down. Not just two buildings, but all seven. Like the seven candles, the seven churches, the seven seals of Revelation. ‘
Behold, He cometh with clouds and every eye shall see Him.
' ”

I resisted the horror and the beauty of the emptiness beyond the iron fence. But every image I had seen on television and in photographs and in my waking and sleeping nightmares was there in front of me. I resisted. But I saw it all.

“There is no God,” I said.

“You do not believe that,” he said, without surprise or anger. A simple statement of fact.

“And your client Ryan Handal, what did he believe up there on the ninety-third floor burning to death?”

The executor of the Handal estate and director of the La Merced Foundation weighed his words and decided not to use them. “Let's go across the street,” he said.