Prayer

by Philip Kerr

When I returned from the bedroom with a blanket, I found her staring anxiously out of the window.

  “The car’s all right there,” I said. “I can guarantee it. The one advantage of living in a ghost town is that there’s no crime. You could leave a thousand bucks on your hand-stitched leather seat and it’d still be there in the morning.”

  I wondered if all that was about to change; if someone from the Izrael Church was planning to turn up the next day and murder me in some anonymous way.

  “Oh,” she said. “It wasn’t that at all.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head and smiled a sad little smile as I hung the blanket on her shoulders. We sat down on the sofa. She swallowed some more of the wine.

  “God, this is good wine,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?” I lifted the holster off my belt and laid it on the table.

  She looked up at the ceiling as if my small talk was becoming just too minute to bear; or maybe she just couldn’t bear to look at the gun. I picked it up and moved it onto the floor beside my foot.

  “Don’t you find it lonely, living here?” she asked. “I mean, it’s so very quiet. I’ve been sitting outside for a while and saw no one.”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is quiet,” I said. “Very. But right now I don’t have much choice about where I live. My wife is divorcing me and I’m going to need all my money for a good lawyer. Or, for that matter, a bad one. This house comes rent-free. I have a friend who’s a bishop. He lent me this house while I’m looking around for something else.”

  “Sounds like a good friend to have.”

  I smiled thinly. I hardly wanted to open up that one for discussion, either.

  “You’re very brave, I think,” she said, “living here among all this—this disappointment and ruin. I couldn’t do it. I think I would probably be afraid of all kinds of things.”

  “I have a gun,” I said. “All kinds of things can usually be shot.”

  “Yes. There is that, I suppose. You don’t have to hide it, you know. I don’t mind the sight of it at all. The gun, I mean. It makes me feel secure.” She smiled. “And so do you.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it.” I placed the holstered Glock on the coffee table in front of us, which strangely seemed to bring her comfort. “There. How’s that?”

  “It’s getting dark.” She got up again and went to the window and looked one way and then the other as if she expected to see someone she knew.

  “You’ve come a long way for a shooting lesson,” I joked. “If that’s why you’re here. And I really do think Mr. Hindemith might complain if we start shooting in the backyard.”

  “Did you say Hindemith? Like the composer?”

  “Hindemith. Yes, that’s what I said. Although I didn’t know about the composer. He’s the old man who lives up the street.”

  She lifted her eyebrows and shook her head.

  “What about him, anyway?” I asked.

  “It’s odd, but my first husband’s name was Hindemith. Charles Hindemith.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot about all your husbands. Do you have one living in Galveston?”

  “No. It’s just that it’s hardly a common name.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But then Charles was hardly a common man. Which is why I married him. He was a professor of English literature, at Yale.”

  “I’m guessing he was older than you.”

  “Oh, yes. Much. I was twenty-one, he was sixty-five. Charles was very stimulating to be with. He had a brilliant mind.”

  Carefully, I asked her what had happened to him—carefully because I had the very strong recollection that the Mr. Hindemith up the street had said that his name was Charles, and I hardly wanted her to think that her first husband was living less than a hundred yards away—especially as Sara seemed so very obviously nervous about something else.

  “He died. He had a heart attack not long after I married him.”

  I felt a small sense of relief, which was enough for me to give way to the crude thought in my head.

  “It figures,” I said. “Hey, I’m sorry. That wasn’t necessary.”

  “No, that’s all right, Gil.” She smiled a wry sort of smile. “It is actually accurate. He fucked himself to death. And not always with me. I wasn’t the only student he messed with.”

  “My own wife kind of ran out of interest in that side of things. At least with me.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said firmly. “There’s no need to creep around this, Gil. You want me. That’s natural. Almost as natural as the way I want you to do it.”

  I felt my jaw slacken a little at that. The woman was almost as fast as her car, and much more beautiful.

  She came back to the sofa and sat beside me again, only closer this time. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here. The last time we met there was something between us and—well, you must have felt it, too, right?”

  I nodded dumbly. I was out of practice with this kind of thing. The last time I’d contemplated a relationship with a woman she’d told me that she was a lesbian.

  Sara took my hand and pressed her face into its palm before kissing the heel of my thumb.

  “So why don’t you kiss me,” she said, “and then we can both relax?”

  I still felt a long way from relaxed, but I kissed her for a very long time, and when I stopped, I could feel that she didn’t want me to stop; in fact, from the way she held on to me I formed the strong impression that she didn’t want to let me go at all.

  “The last time we met I also felt that I managed to blow it,” I said. “I scared you.”

  “Yes, you did rather,” she said.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Oh, the usual stuff. Biology. You shouldn’t ever underestimate the power of biology.”

  “I try not to. Lately, however, I’ve been underestimating the power of all kinds of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s another way of saying that things haven’t been going all that well for me these last few months.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “She must be crazy. You’re really a very attractive man, you know? And very kind. As soon as you’d left my office, I regretted making you go. You were only trying to look after me. I can see that now. I sat there for a long time wanting to call your number right away. And every night since then.”

  I kissed her again, but this time I did it with my own skepticism ringing in my ears. I hadn’t forgotten the strong and obvious discomfort I’d seen in Sara in her office at UT when I’d told her about Esther Begleiter’s prayer list; only now she seemed to be trying to play that down. There was something odd about her being with me in Galveston, about her whole demeanor, not to mention her sudden desire to sleep with me, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her desperately—it was ages since I’d made love. Besides, I’d already blown it with her once and wasn’t about to blow it again.

  “You seem a little tense, Gil,” she said.

  “It’s been that kind of a day.” I shook my head. “But I’m feeling better already.” I tried to kiss her again but found her sliding out of my embrace and down between my legs.

  “You’re only saying that,” she said, coolly unzipping her trousers and then mine, “because I haven’t done this yet.”

  In other circumstances I might have stopped her. For one thing, I was too exhausted to resist and for another, I hardly thought I was taking advantage of her; she knew exactly what she was doing. Besides, what she was doing hadn’t been done in a long time and I felt absurdly grateful for it; as if, like some Good Samaritan, she had found me injured by the side of the road to Jericho and was now nursing me back to health. So I just lay back and tried to give myself up to it and put all of my being into my prick, which, all things be
ing equal, wouldn’t normally have been very difficult; but it took a while for me to relax. Indeed, she had to pause for a moment and fix me with her beautiful eyes and tell me to lie back and let her take complete charge of my pleasure.

  “No,” I said. “Not this way. Not the first time.”

  That was my cue to pull Sara onto my suddenly inspired lap, and my strength must have taken her by surprise because she gasped, and then gasped again as my hand pushed between her thighs until it met the soft silk and lace of her panties and half pulled and half tore them down her long tanned legs. Untangling her bare feet from these delicate shackles, I pried her thighs apart and pushed my face deep into the very essence of her. All I wanted was to smother myself with the most intimate flesh of this beautiful, beautifully clever woman whose attraction for me seemed as unlikely as it was welcome. I pushed the lips of her apart until my nose and tongue were fucking her and my face was soaked with her delicious wetness. A shrink might have suggested I was trying to hide myself inside her in some Oedipal way; all I knew was that this was a true act of worship. I hardly cared about my obsession with cleanliness, either—not anymore. I had found a cure for that; my growing fear and the desperate need for the holy sanctuary that was close contact with another human being now conquered all. If I could have swallowed a living part of her, like the Eucharist, I would have done so.

  Sara uttered a sigh that was also a deep, almost tectonic shudder, as if she, too, was suffering from shock; and that was my second cue. I was quickly between her legs, molding them around my waist and steering myself into the center of her body with the urgency of one who has almost forgotten what it was like to cleave unto a woman—as the Bible describes it rather wonderfully—and be one flesh with her; until, at the moment when I felt my hardened prick nudging right up against the neck of her womb, I let go of everything inside me—not just semen, but all sense of who and what I was—and, I think, she did, too.

  For a long time after, we lay intertwined like the roots of a prehistoric tree of knowledge that had existed long before us and would continue long after we were both gone. Then I felt myself gradually shrink inside and then out of her, which was the moment for imperfection and reality to return. We talked for a while about nothing in particular before I returned to what was bothering me.

  “Sara,” I said carefully. “Has something happened to you since we met in your office?”

  A smile twitched faintly on her mouth as if it were hooked on the end of a very fine length of fishing line.

  “No. Nothing at all.” She paused. “Well, yes. Perhaps.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it? The reason why you’re here. The real reason, not the role you’ve been playing since you walked through the door.”

  Sara frowned. “Why can’t you do your thinking with your dick like any other man?”

  “Because normally the FBI Academy at Quantico teaches us to keep it holstered until the moment when we really need to use it.” I waited for a moment. “There is no old friend here in Galveston. Am I right?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “I drove down here this morning. I’ve been hanging around outside your house for most of the day.”

  “Why?”

  “To see you, of course. Why the fuck would I come to Galveston for any other reason? I just can’t be at home right now. I can’t be alone, either. I’m scared, Gil.”

  I bit my lip. I was still feeling a little scared myself, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “What could be crazier than spending three hours in the car to get to Galveston?”

  Sara let out a long unsteady breath.

  “This isn’t like me,” she said. “I’m a scientist, for Pete’s sake.”

  “That might make you immune to human feelings, but it doesn’t make you immune to human failings.”

  “Listen to you, Michel Foucault.”

  “Just tell me the rest of your story.”

  “You’re just like my first husband. He never had the patience to hear anyone out. He was always jumping to the end of someone’s story. And films and plays. He could always predict the end of every movie I ever saw. And taking Charles to the theater was a nightmare. He couldn’t abide the stage. I don’t think I ever saw a second act of anything for as long as I was married to him.”

  I felt something like a frown on my face, and although the light in the room was now almost gone, she must have seen something in my eyes.

  “What?”

  I switched on a lamp, telling myself that she wasn’t the crazy one, I was; it was either that or the uncomfortable possibility that my own senses and memory had become very unreliable.

  “Nothing. Please go on.”

  “The day after you came to my office at UT, I decided to check on my ChoiceMail program. Much to my surprise, I discovered some rather curious threatening e-mails. They were the usual crap about how God was going to kill me because I was an ungodly bitch. What made them curious was the way they disappeared almost as soon as I had read them. Like someone had programmed them that way. Computers aren’t my field. I don’t install the latest Windows version without help. But even I know that’s unusual. I asked a colleague about it and—”

  “I know about this stuff,” I said. “So you can skip the e-mail for dummies explanation. Get to the meat.”

  She looked at me with some disappointment at my being so short with her, which prompted a muttered apology on my part; this was, of course, a lot easier than giving her an explanation for the disturbed feeling I had from the recollection of what the old man who lived up the street had told me that same morning. Surely there was no way he could have known Sara Espinosa.

  “All right,” she said. “Well, then some strange things started to happen. I mean outside cyberspace. I had the idea I was being followed. Footsteps in the underground parking lot at UT and my apartment building, that kind of thing. Footsteps that stopped when I stopped and started when I started walking again. And a very strong sensation that someone was standing behind me, when no one was. I asked Smith Protective Services to keep a closer eye on my apartment, which they did; and so imagine my surprise and alarm when one night I thought I heard something in the hallway outside my apartment door. I checked the picture on the entry phone and then the peephole and there appeared to be someone standing there in the shadows. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I couldn’t make the figure out in detail, but it wasn’t standing so much as squatting. Also the person—I can’t say for sure that it was a man—had bare feet.”

  “Bare feet?”

  “Yes. Bare feet. And bare legs. I called the people at Smith and they checked the entry-phone CCTV for the hallway and told me that there was nothing on the camera. And certainly not a man with bare feet. But they sent a security guard anyway to check it out and he came up to the ninth floor where I live and found nothing. The guard rang my doorbell, and while he was there, I checked the hall for myself.”

  “That does sound weird.”

  She shrugged. “That happened on three consecutive nights, so now they think I’m crazy. If I called them again, they’d probably tell me to take a sleeping pill. Or ask me what the fuck I was smoking.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No. I mean, how could I? What would I have said? I’m seeing things in my hallway that a private security company has already checked out and told me aren’t there? Bad enough to have the people at Smith thinking I’m nuts without the police thinking that as well.”

  “So why didn’t you call me?”

  “That’s a good question.” She sighed. “And I’m a little ashamed to answer it. I suppose, if I’m honest, in a strange way I thought maybe it might have something to do with you. After all, these things happened only after you’d come to see me.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

 
“I’m coming to that. On the third night I saw the figure in the hallway, I realized I would have opened the door and challenged the guy myself except that I was so terrified. Maybe if I’d had a gun, I might have. Which is why I bought one. It’s in my bag now. Anyway, on the day I bought one, he’d gone. The guy in the hallway. Thus far, he hasn’t reappeared .”

  “So that’s all right.”

  She gave me a sarcastic smile. “Well, at least you didn’t tell me I imagined it.”

  “No.” How could I have told her that?

  “Thank you.”

  “Describe your apartment building, please.”

  “There are ten floors. Each floor is one whole apartment. Mine is on the ninth floor. The hallway I’m describing is in front of the elevator. There’s a doorman downstairs who’s there until midnight and then from six a.m. Security is tight as a drum. Each floor is accessed by a key in the elevator car, which means the elevator won’t stop unless you have the key. There’s a fire escape, but you need the same key to access that.”

  “Any balcony? A terrace?”

  “No.”

  “So what happened then?” I asked. “What happened next that was enough to persuade you to drive two hundred miles to be with me? And please don’t say it was my kind brown eyes or I’ll know you must have also imagined the man with the bare feet outside your apartment door.”

  “But your eyes are kind,” she insisted. “And I know very well they’re not brown, they’re blue.” She stood up. “Oh, this was a stupid idea. Coming here. I don’t know what came over me. Really, I don’t. I should go. I’m well aware of what I must sound like: a woman living on her own, frightened of her own shadow. Except that I never have been before.”

  I reached out, took her hand, kissed the wrist, and pulled her back onto the sofa beside me. “So you didn’t imagine it. I believe you. Go on. Let’s hear the rest of it.”

  “Last night I was in bed and something woke me. I had the strong sensation that someone was in the apartment. There was a very strong smell of something rather horrible. I mean really foul. As if a large animal had died and gone bad in there.”