The Sleeper (24 page)

“Are there many more like you?” I asked as we waited for the light to change at the corner of Vesey and Church. The smell of hot pretzels filled the air, and Oriente bought a bottle of Snapple from the street vendor.

“More what?” he said, offering me a drink, then shrugging and putting it back when I refused. “There are many pious men and women in this country and around the world.”

“And if I was pious, what would you want from me?”

The light changed and we crossed, walking down Vesey to the entrance of the excavations. The guard at the gate, like the workman in the church, seemed to be an old acquaintance of José Oriente. He handed us each a hard hat, and we walked down the ramp under the office trailers to what must have been, once, part of a lower parking level. There was no one around us, and nothing to see in front of us but that huge hole and beyond it a mural painted on the side of a half-shattered building: a big heart in the colors of the American flag with the legend beneath it, “The human spirit is not increased by the size of the act but by the size of the heart.”

“What would I want from you?” There were a couple of big industrial spools that used to hold electrical cable and he pointed at them like they were easy chairs. “My leg is acting up,” he said. “Let's sit and talk. Sure you don't want a sip? No. Well. Kurt, what do I want from you? Just to listen—in here.” He tapped his heart. “There's no question of giving you orders, or bringing you into an organization. There are no orders. There is no organization. There is inspiration, and God's will. There is the guiding hand. I just want you to let yourself be guided. I want you to be saved.”

“You want to be my savior?”

“I want God to be your savior. But, yes, I suppose I want to play my part.”

“Tell me who you are.”

He shrugged. “I am who I am. I am the man talking to your wife at your door in Westfield. I am the voice on the phone the other day.”

“The voice ordering me and my child to be killed.”

“Not like that.”

“You are José Oriente from Panama.”

“Yes. And I am Ryan Handal from El Salvador.” He let me think about that for a second. “I thought you guessed,” he said.

“And who else?”

“A man with a lot of friends.”

“Was it you that called the White House to get me out of Guantánamo?”

The man with friends smiled and shook his head, but I couldn't tell for sure what that meant. “I didn't know who you were in Granada, Kurt, but by the time I found you in Africa I did. And I knew what a gift you had.”

“Did you call the White House?”

“Do you want me to trace a diagram in the dust here?” he said. “It would be a lie. It would be useless. It would teach you nothing and it wouldn't convince you of anything. What is true is that, just as I told you, I was a doctor who spent ten years in Tadmor prison. The pain is still in my bones, although sometimes I can control it. But mainly the pain is inside my soul. I have suffered for my belief in God. Suffered long and terribly. And from that suffering I have learned. When I was in prison, two things kept me alive: one was my faith, the other was a kind of strange dream. You know what it is like to dream, don't you? Prison dreams? I dreamed that when I was free, I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. Why limit yourself to one life if you can have many? And in America you can invent yourself again and again, even at the same time. And so I did, while I and the brothers prepared for Judgment Day.”

“With terror.”

“We're so close to the time. The lessons need to be learned quickly. The End of Days is near.”

I looked out over the destroyed pit where so many people died. “All this for some bullshit vision of the Apocalypse. Is that it?”

“Listen to me. Listen. The clash is coming between Believers and Unbelievers. But that's nothing to what will come after. What you see here has created believers all over the world. Muslims, Jews, Christians—they witnessed the horror, they felt the fear, they've suffered the wars since, and they turn to God for help.”

“God Almighty,” I said.

“You have to understand, Kurt. And I think you do. We have entered the last age of man, when God has given us the power to work His Divine Will. We can build mountains, and we can tear them down. We can create human life in a glass tube and we can use the same science to devastate life across the entire face of the planet. Now what does that mean? It means we have waited thousands of years for Judgment Day, never knowing when it would come. But now we can put it on the calendar. We can fix a date.”

I saw on his face the look of a man who is quietly content, and absolutely sure of himself. “When the Sword of the Angel came into our hands in 1992, we thought we had the key. When you stole it—you, Kurtovic—we thought we were lost.” He looked at me and smiled charitably. “Then we learned better. God showed us the way. He brought us the four winged beasts with many eyes.” He craned his neck to look up at the sky, as if he were following the flight paths of two airliners.

“When?”

“What?”

“When is the End of Days?”

He shook his head. “You aren't ready to know. There is more work to be done. More spreading of the word. More fire. More plagues.” He gestured like an actor onstage, moving his hands through the air. “So much more. But with every horror on earth, more souls will find their way to Heaven. You know that. I know you do. Ah. Look.”

There was a red dot of light on the palm of his left hand as he held it up. He looked at his other hand, and there was another red dot of light. No, two. He moved his hands in front of him, and the light didn't quite follow. Then he looked at his chest. More red dots danced across it, the pinpoints of laser gun sights. Somewhere in a tall shrouded building across the way, or from windows behind the all-American heart, people we couldn't see were taking aim.

“They won't shoot unless I make a move toward you, or I try to run,” said Oriente. “There is too much they want to know. And I have so many friends. We can keep talking. This will be taken care of.” He looked down at his chest and counted the quivering red dots as if he were looking for stains. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven points of light,” he said and twisted his mouth in an odd smile.

“You are so reasonable now,” he went on. “When you thought you were Allah's man on earth, Kurt, you were not so useful. You were a child. You heard the wrong message. But now you reason. Now you'll see. All of this”—he swept his hand over the sanitized destruction of Ground Zero—“all of this opens the door to salvation.”

He flinched. One of the red dots on his chest erupted dark red and liquid. “My friends,” he said, suddenly short of breath. Now another of the dots exploded. “My brothers!” And another and another. Seven silent shots ripped through him, heavy-caliber bullets tearing his elegant suit and shirt and tie and flesh and bone and guts to shreds until he was left lying on the concrete floor of the ruin like a dog mangled by a thresher, his pale eyes staring out at the empty sky.

When Griffin walked down the ramp a few minutes later, a group of men in the uniforms of sanitation workers came with him. They brought white plastic garbage bags to pick up the last little pieces.

“Your shooters?” I said.

“FBI,” he said. “And they weren't supposed to shoot.”

I kissed Betsy good night in the soft blue light of the hospital room. “We'll be there,” she whispered. I moved as silently as I could past Miriam's bed, afraid to wake her, and afraid to see the fear on her face again if I did, then I drove the rest of the way home from Ark City to Westfield.

The house was completely dark, and dead quiet. The top of the washing machine was still open with my sweaty running clothes still in it. The bed where Betsy and I made love that morning so long ago was still covered with twisted sheets. On the answering machine, the light was flashing like crazy. I threw the phone across the room and went back to the truck.

“Sam?” I called out, knocking on his front door. “Sam? Are you home?”

His wife, Caroline, opened the door. His youngest daughter stood beside her and Caroline twirled a finger in the little girl's hair. “Hey, Kurt, you're back,” said Caroline. “Thank God. Oh, thank God. How are Betsy and Miriam?” The little girl looked up. “Miriam?” she repeated. and now the other kids gathered around behind their mom, curious.

“They're good,” I said. “Just resting.”

“God bless,” she said.

“I wanted to talk to Sam about Thursday.”

“He's still counting on you.”

“Yeah. Is he here?”

“No, Kurt, he's back to doing double shifts right now. Go on down to the waterworks. He's gonna be mighty happy to see you.”

When I pulled the truck into the parking lot I saw Sam sitting outside on the back step. “Boy, am I happy to see you,” he said. He put out his hand and I put out mine, but that didn't seem like enough. He threw his arms around me and hugged me like a brother.

“Thanks, Sam.”

“It worked, didn't it, Kurt?”

“It did,” I said. “You and Betsy—I don't know how you did it.”

“All she had to tell me was the bad guys had come to town.”

“I know.”

“She had the plan. I wish I could have been there, you know, when it happened. I helped her move the canisters, and I wanted to stay. But she said I had to be back here to make it look right, like I was beat up.” He rubbed his jaw. “She swung that butt pretty good.”

We were both silent for a second. “Right,” I said, and we broke out laughing.

“She okay? And Miriam?”

“They'll be okay.”

“Ah, Kurt, man, who'd have thought it could happen here?”

“Yeah…. Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“You don't have anything to drink, do you?” I didn't really expect that he did. The county is dry, and nobody in his church drank, or admitted to it.

“Let's check the safe,” he said. He got a couple of cups from the watercooler and from far back in the back of the safe he pulled a blue velvet bag. “You won't find better bourbon than this,” he said. “It's so expensive, a bottle lasts me a couple of years.” He filled both cups to the brim.

“About Thursday,” I said.

“Everybody's looking forward to it, Kurt.”

“You still want me then.”

“Hell yeah,” he said. “
Hell
yeah.”

“After everything that's happened, I feel like, you know, a lot of people got fucked up because of this. Because of me.”

He looked at me and nodded and drank a little more deeply into his cup.

“They were after me,” I said.

“Well they learned a lesson, didn't they?”

“I'm thinking maybe we should go someplace else, me and Betsy and Miriam.”

“No, Boy. No way.” He looked at me through eyes watering from the whiskey. “This here's your home, and a man's only ever got one of those, you know? I mean, you can spend your whole damn life wandering around, and there's just gonna be one place—I mean not maybe where you was born—or school—that's not it.” He took another sip. “It's a place you feel like you can be. You know? Where you can
be.
Like, it
is
who you
are.
You know any other place in the whole wide world where you can
be
like that? You? No. Westfield, Kurt. Here. You. Here.” He put his arms out and hugged me again and was a little off balance. I helped him lean back on his desk. He finished his cup. “Good stuff,” he said.

 

Betsy and Miriam got out of the hospital on Tuesday, but they didn't come back to the house. They went to Ruth's because Betsy thought our baby wasn't ready to spend a lot of time with her daddy just yet. Betsy said she'd talked to the doctors at the hospital and that was what they told her. They said we'd have to take it in stages, real gentle. In the late afternoon I drove by Ruth's house slow, hoping I'd see Miriam in the yard or maybe just get a glimpse of her through the window, but I didn't, and I didn't stop.

I wanted to go back to work right away, but Sam said he could handle it until next week and he wanted me to take the time off. I couldn't just stay in the house. I couldn't sit there and think. I didn't turn on the computer. I didn't watch TV. There was all this talk on the news about a coming war with Iraq. I didn't want to know. So I ran. But whatever was there for me on the old run along Crookleg Creek was gone now. There was no mystery I wanted answered at Jeffers' Rocks. I ran on through the fields and tried, without much heart, to find the hill above the pond, but I must have gone wrong in the high stands of corn, and I couldn't find that place at all anymore.

 

On Tuesday afternoon, I drove over to my sister Selma's trailer. It had been a long, long time since I did that, and when she came to the door I was surprised by how old she looked. Her hair was a weird brown with a streak of gray along the part. Her skin was gray, too, and leathery from smoking.

“Well if it ain't the hometown hero,” she said.

“No, it's just me,” I said.

“Nice of you to remember your big sister. What do you want?”

“I wanted to see you, because it's been too long.”

“Well here we are.” She looked down at her jogging suit, which looked like it hadn't been washed for a while. “Want some coffee?” She poured some cold stuff from that morning into a chipped mug and put it in the microwave. “Your wife okay? And little Miriam?”

“They'll be okay.”

“So what do you want, Kurt?”

“I want to look in Mom's cedar chest.”

Selma's eyes narrowed and there was something animal in them. “What are you looking for?”

I was walking toward the bedroom in the trailer, where I knew she kept the chest. It took up about a third of the space in those cramped quarters, but she maneuvered around me and stood in the way.

“The uniform,” I said. “Is it still in there?”

Selma ran her tongue under her upper lip, making a show of thinking. She knew every little piece of memory that was in that trunk, big or small. Every so often she took all the clothes out and folded and refolded them, and put them all back in. And the uniform, which my mother kept for me, used to be at the bottom. What I didn't know was if she'd thrown it away.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I guess it's still there.”

 

On Wednesday I was lying naked in bed awake before dawn with the windows open to catch whatever cool there was, and whatever noise there was. The lawn sprinkler across the street hissed and sputtered for a while, then went off a little before sunrise. A couple of lonely birds sang. A car rolled down our street, and then slowed, and then drove back. The engine roared softly in front of our house, then shut down. There was nobody I wanted or expected to see today, not at this time of the morning anyway. My left hand felt the barrel of the Mossberg twelve-gauge on the floor beside the bed. I pumped a shell into the chamber, rolled off the bed, and stepped into the hall. The doorbell rang. I leveled the barrel at the door and waited for whoever it was to go away.

“Kurt?”

“Griffin? That you?”

“None other.”

“You alone?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Good,” I said, opening the door. “I'll put some clothes on. Why don't you go on into the kitchen.”

“That gun for me?”

“Nope. The dick's not either.”

“Fuck you.”

When I joined him he was sitting at our little table with two big cups of Chuckwagon coffee, a box of Krispy Kremes, and a big thick manila envelope.

“So?” I said. “How goes the war in Washington?”

“It's going to be long and hard,” he said. “You want to stay as far away as you can.”

“I'm trying,” I said. “But there's this asshole from Langley who keeps knocking on my door.”

“This is the last time.”

“You're not telling me this is good-bye.”

“Could be.”

“Well
hamdulillah.
”

“This is for you,” he said, pushing one of the coffees toward me. “And this too.” The envelope.

“Court papers?” I didn't want to touch them if they were. He shook his head. “Take a look,” he said

There were little bundles of hundred-dollar bills. A bunch of them. I sat down. “What the fuck is all this, Griffin?”

“That's a hundred fucking thousand dollars.”

“Yeah. And?”

“For Betsy and Miriam.”

“In cash?”

“From the DCI himself.”

There was something wrong here. Real wrong. “You want me to sign a receipt?”

“Nope.”

I spread the sheaves of bills on the table. “Whoa. It sure is pretty,” I said. “Never seen that much money in one place, in cash like this.”

“Yep. Mighty pretty.”

“But, Griffin, where's it from?”

“Who it's for is you.”

“Griffin, what's happening to all that money from La Merced?”

“I don't know. Gonna be tied up in the courts for a long time, I guess.”

“This ain't part of it?”

“No. Shit no. The Director himself signed off on this.”

“You're that tight with him? And he knows that much about me?”

“He knows enough.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure.”

“Keep the money.”

“Kurt, what's the matter with you? This is enough to build a new house, at least. Betsy wants this. Miriam needs it. Man, it could be her college education.”

“Uh-hunh. It's like a commission.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about three hundred million dollars in blood money.”

“Fuck no. And anyway, you earned it, man. Who more than you?”

“Not like this. Not with you coming here like a bagman.”

“You want me to get it out of an ATM like in London? That make you happier?”

“Forget that, Griffin. It's different. I can't take it.”

Griffin put his big hands flat on top of the money. “Don't take it now. Okay. I thought it would be good for you. Maybe you'll think about it a little longer and you'll think so, too.”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah.” I took another couple of breaths for Miriam and Betsy. “Yeah. I'll let you know.” I put the money back in the envelope. “Everything okay with you? Still leaving the Agency?”

“Not yet.”

“That's what I figured.”

“Yeah, the lines are drawn more clear since last week. The folks that count—they understand we got to do our own thing. The FBI's being cut out of the picture.”

“You mean now that their shooters took Oriente out of the picture.”

“Yeah. The Fucked-up Bureau of Investigation.”

“But you were with them when that happened.”

“I told them not to shoot unless he went for you or he tried to run. But you know, they don't listen, least not to the Agency.”

“Right. Got it. That's why he got seven rounds in the gut while he was sitting still right next to me.”

“I don't know what happened,” said Griffin. “I haven't got to the bottom of it. But I will.”

“Glad to hear it.” We sat there drinking the coffee a couple of minutes. “I think you better go,” I said.

We shook hands at the door. “Thanks for everything, Griffin. I mean it.” I handed him the envelope. He took it without a word. “And—don't come back,” I said.

Griffin walked toward his car, and I rested my hand on the barrel of the Mossberg leaning against the door frame. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder, suddenly tense. I held up my empty hands. He smiled. With a wave that was half a salute, Griffin got into his rent-a-car and drove away.