Tunnel Vision (8 page)

“We’re going to make this look like a break-in, so I need to tie you up. I’ll call 911 from the road.
Capice?
”

“Yes.”

He then bound Pomeroy’s legs together with plastic ties. The same with his wrists, but over his shirt to avoid marks. He put a washcloth across his eyes, then secured it with a small bungee cord. He then had him lie flat on the floor with a sofa pillow under his head.

According to the spec sheet, Pomeroy had a history of arrhythmia and was taking medication for high blood pressure and cholesterol. Actuarial statistics would give him a higher than 70 percent chance of dying by cardiac arrest. That narrowed the options to one.

And that came from a plant that grew four thousand miles south of Cape Cod in the rain forests of the Amazon—curare, a vine whose compound was used by local Indians to poison their arrows and blowgun darts. Also known as tubocurarine chloride, the substance upon injection caused paralysis of skeletal muscles, resulting in respiratory failure and death. With the standard autopsy, no trace of the compound would be detected, and the cause of death would be listed as cardiac arrest.

You’re a warrior of God,
a voice whispered in Roman’s head.
Like St. Michael.
“Okay, lie still.” For a man of 170 pounds, it took about seven minutes. In that time, the victim would remain conscious but incapable of sucking in a breath of air. He would die of asphyxiation. To appear natural, the body could not have any marks of struggle. And because the toxin had to be injected, not even the prick of the needle could be visible on the autopsy table. Special circumstances demanded special strategies.

Roman moved into the next room and filled a syringe with 4cc curare. When he returned, he knelt beside Pomeroy on the couch. “Before I leave, I have a couple of questions. Is there anything in your research that would be a problem to the Catholic Church?”

“No, I told you that.”

“How about any government agency or whatever?”

“No.”

“Any personal enemies or associates?”

“Not that I can think of.”

He could see Pomeroy relax into the expectation that it would be over soon, that Roman would wrap up the break-in scene and leave. In his head, Roman rehearsed the next step. “One more thing…”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t have lost your faith.” In one smooth move, he threw himself full length onto Pomeroy’s body, jamming the needle deep into his left nostril and depressing the syringe with his thumb. Pomeroy’s body jolted under Roman as he let out a thin scream. Roman pulled the needle out of his face while trying to keep his body from bucking him onto the floor. The washcloth and bungee slid off Pomeroy’s face in the thrashing, and Roman did all he could to prevent the man from leaving any telltale bruises for the coroner to ponder.

Because the compound was rated six out of six in toxicity, in less than a minute Pomeroy’s torso and legs stiffened. His eyes bulged like cue balls and his mouth went slack, incapable of sucking in a breath. In seconds he had turned into a warm corpse, his legs giving an occasional twitch and his eyelids settling to slits of jelly.

Roman spread him out on the couch. He removed the tethers and adjusted Pomeroy’s clothing and feet until he looked like a man who had died from a heart attack while reading a magazine. He removed a copy of
Time
from the coffee table and positioned it on the floor. When he was finished, Roman looked back at the dead man. “So how come you’re Satan’s doorman?” Whatever. Roman did not feel closer to God, just twenty grand richer. He disarmed the rear door and slipped out into the night.

Half an hour later, he pulled into the scenic parking area along Route 6A.

During the day, dozens of fishermen would be perched on the rocks below, casting their lines for stripers. At ten at night, only one diehard kept at it. Motoring down the canal from the waters of Boston Harbor was a long, sleek sailing vessel. One of these days, he would buy himself a piece like that and set course for Bermuda. Roman pulled out the secure cell phone provided him by the guy in the confessional and punched in the number given to him.

A male voice answered with a simple, flat, “Yes?”

“Mission accomplished.”

“Good. And in the manner prescribed?”

The voice sounded like that of Father X. “Yes.”

“We’re very grateful for your service. And so is the Lord God. You’re cleansing your soul and moving closer to eternal life, my brother.”

Roman felt something quicken inside, and it wasn’t the priestly kind of talk that embarrassed him as a kid. “Mean we’re not done?”

“In a few days you’ll hear from us. Thank you, my son.” And the man clicked off.

For a moment, Roman stared at the dead cell phone in disbelief. Then he folded it and slipped it into his jacket pocket. So there was more.

Below, the fisherman reeled in a striper. Working in the lights of the parking lot, he held the line with one hand, netting it with the other and hauling it onto the rocks. It looked under regulation size, twenty-nine inches, but after removing the hook from its mouth, he tossed it into a cooler.

Roman took a swig of his bottled water. As he watched the yacht slide down the dark expanse of the canal, the thought of a second assignment set off a giddy sensation in his gut. Maybe another fifteen grand. And maybe another millennium in paradise.

He looked out over the water, the shore lights on the far bank reflecting off the black surface. He thought about how interesting life had become of late. He raised his eyes to the sky. Above the black eastern horizon, stars began to emerge in the dark as if blown in by the sea. He sucked in the crisp salt air and took in the night. Above the far horizon, he saw a shooting star.

Thank you, God.

12

“The last thing I need is a bunch of religious fanatics flocking around him like he’s Our Lady of Lourdes,” Maggie said.

“Well, they won’t get to him anymore,” Kate said.

They were sitting in the hospital café the morning after the incident. Zack had been moved to another room in a different ward, known only to a handful of staff and family. At Maggie’s insistence, the hospital had posted a guard outside his room around the clock. “If he was such a healing force, you’d think it’d occur to them that he’d wake himself up.”

“Logic doesn’t appear to be their strong suit,” Kate said, sipping her coffee.

“Whatever. I’m not sure I’ll be by Sunday.” That was Easter, and Kate usually hosted a meal, less as a religious celebration than as an occasion for a family gathering.

“Maybe you can stop by for dessert after the hospital.”

Maggie nodded, distracted by something in her sister’s manner. And she was certain that missing Easter dinner wasn’t the issue. “Is everything okay?”

Kate looked at her for a moment as she turned something over in her head. “Yesterday Bob dropped in on a friend, Art Avedisian, in Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages.”

Bob taught French literature at Wellesley College. “Yeah?”

“Well, he showed him the video of Zack.”

Maggie was suddenly alert. “Yeah.”

“It wasn’t glossolalia.”

“Of course not. It was plain gibberish.”

“Actually, it wasn’t gibberish. It was Aramaic.”

“Aramaic? Isn’t that some ancient language?”

“Yes, and the native tongue of Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“According to Bob’s friend, who’s a scholar and an expert on Aramaic, it’s still spoken in small parts of the Middle East. He says Zack spoke it in an older dialect.”

All Maggie could say was, “What?”

Kate nodded. “That’s what he claims.”

“Well, that’s not possible. He’s wrong. Zack doesn’t know any ancient languages. That’s absurd.”

“I’m just telling you what he said. He also translated what he could make out.” She removed a notepad from her handbag. “I guess he was repeating several phrases: ‘Father, with You everything is possible. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.’ Then Zack recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I know. But according to Avedisian, that’s what it was, an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount in the original dialect.”

“W-what?… How?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “As far as you know, did he ever take a course in Aramaic?”

“No, and why would he?”

“I don’t know. And I guess it’s not your basic college elective. According to Art, the only place you can find such a course in New England is the grad school at Harvard. And we know he never did that. Nor is Aramaic something you can pick up on Rosetta Stone.”

“Then the guy’s wrong. That’s not what it was,” Maggie insisted.

“I guess. Even if you wanted to, where would you find Aramaic versions of Jesus’s sermons?”

Maggie felt a rash of gooseflesh flash up her arms. “He’s not even religious.”

“I know, but how do you explain it?”

“The guy is wrong. Dead wrong.”

Kate nodded and sipped her coffee.

And Maggie rubbed her arms against the chill.

*   *   *

Later at home, Maggie listened to the tape over and over again. She could make no sense of the language, of course. It sounded a bit like Arabic crossed with Greek. But what stayed with her as she lay on her pillow in the dark was not the language, but the voice.

All she could hear was Nick.

13

Beetles were eating his brain.

He could hear them just inside his ears—a high-pitched electric chittering as they munched their way through the gray matter to the core of his head.

Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. He could feel their thrumming just below his skull, nearly blinding him with distraction. He could barely restrain himself from making a scene in the back of the bus, from screaming and ramming his head into the balance pole.

As he did every morning at daybreak, he walked to Harvard Square from Boston and boarded the number 350 bus that took him down Massachusetts Avenue to the Alewife stop at the Cambridge/Arlington line, where he’d get off and walk half a mile to the intersection of Routes 16 and 2, his territory to panhandle the line of cars at the stoplight. It was a good place for handouts—maybe a buck or two for every twenty cars.

But this morning was the worst. The crackling and high-pitched chit-chit sounds and images of their little pincers boring tunnels had grown worse over the last week, so much so that he could barely hold up his cardboard sign:

PLEASE HELP

SICK AND HOMELESS

GOD BLESS

He could barely concentrate on his little walk up the worn path from the traffic lights along the line of stopped cars. Usually he’d eye the drivers, hoping they’d not pretend he was invisible and lower the window with a handout.

The lunatic scrabble on the inside of his skull had been going on for days, but today it was worse than ever—as if he had been slipped some bad tripping mushrooms. Then last night, he had a dream about falling off his bed and into a large dark funnel, moving at breakneck speed toward a misty gray light at the end. But it didn’t feel like a dream because he heard an electric crackling sound that got louder as he shot down the tube toward an end that he did not want to reach. As he neared the light, he tried to stop himself by dragging his hands and feet against the sides but broke through the end into a black pit buzzing with beetles.

When he woke, he stumbled his way to the bus stop, trying to shake the sensation that they were inside his head and threatening to eat their way out of his ears. By the time he got off at Alewife, the chittering had intensified to an insane level, leaving him rubbing his face and batting his ears. His whole world had been reduced to those little shiny bodies with pincer jaws beginning to stream out of his ears and nose.

He stumbled along the traffic line, frantically trying to wipe the things off his face and head, spitting and gasping for air against the hot drilling buzz.

He stumbled to the ground, totally unaware of the drivers trying to watch the lights while not being distracted by the spectacle of Wally, yelping and insanely tearing his hair from his scalp and skin from his face.

Through the crack of his eyes, he saw a huge green dump truck idling at the light, the large double wheels filling his vision.

At the moment the light changed and the traffic began to move again, Wally scuttled onto the road and pushed his head under the rear tires.

14

Maggie had no idea how Zack ended up muttering Jesus’s words in Aramaic.

The only thing that made sense was that somewhere in his studies he had read it or heard a tape and committed it to memory, consciously or unconsciously. But that raised even more questions, like where did one find such recordings? Even if he could, why would Zack, who took pride in being a secular humanist, be interested? Or commit to memory the Lord’s Prayer in the original? Not to mention how and why he’d muttered the passages from a coma.