Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said absently. “Okay? It just happened.”

  In truth, I was hardly listening to this admonishment and it wasn’t just because it was inaccurate. Most of my attention was reserved for the empty window of a derelict building on the other side of the road where my naked tormentor was watching us. Although he was at least thirty or forty feet away, I had the clearest view of him yet—if it really was a he, because there was something unpleasantly asexual about the creature who was observing my desperate and possibly futile attempts to escape destruction at his knotty, taloned hands.

  I do his will. As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.

  He was on all fours, like a kind of great ape, with the upper half of his hairless body disproportionately large and muscled. The skin that covered it had a strange incandescent aspect as if it glowed with some internal fire, and here and there on the surface were strange patches of what looked to be ash, like eczema, as if the heat from its body had actually burned through into the air. His feet and hands were outsize but human enough, although he seemed to be without sexual organs. Before, I had thought his face to be like a wolf’s, but this was not the case as the sun, shifting from behind one of the cathedral’s twin white towers to illuminate his features, now clearly revealed: it was a primordial face, like some species of ancient man, from a prelapsarian time when man had probably eaten raw what he killed with his own bare hands. The prognathous jaw was filled with large teeth and the slavering tongue seemed too big for its gaping mouth. A demon he truly seemed to be; however, it was an impression that was strongly confirmed in me not just by the creature’s loathsome and restless and protean features but also by some primordial sense of intuition.

  The door to the cathedral was now open and Coogan was patiently awaiting my entry. But then he caught the look on my face and where the trail of my eyes led; he was just in time to see something, but exactly what he could not say, which was just as well.

  “What was that?” he asked. “I swear I saw something up at that window, but now it’s not there.”

  “Never mind.” I walked into the cathedral and Coogan banged the door shut behind us, locking and bolting it as if that might save us both from what was outside. “You don’t need to know.”

  For a moment, I wondered if Sara’s car accident really had been a car accident; if her losing control of the Bentley had been caused by something other than speed and poor control; if perhaps the demon outside had chosen that particular moment to appear in the seat beside her, which would have made anyone crash. It was a horrible thought and I tried to put it out of my mind in the interests of self-preservation; I make no apology for that. Earlier thoughts of not wanting to live were gone, at least for now; there is nothing quite like sunshine and another new day to make a person want to cling to life—even in Galveston. Perhaps, if I made confession, I might achieve a state of inward grace and be reconciled with my creator; for hadn’t my mad uncle Bill promised as much? Would a confession give me the second chance he had mentioned? There seemed to be no other way ahead for me now.

  It seemed only fitting that my confession should be heard in Galveston’s crappy old ruined cathedral. Ever since sustaining significant water damage during Hurricane Ike, the St. Mary Cathedral Basilica had been closed for repairs, and certainly it seemed likely to stay that way. Inside the basilica all was chaos and decay, and to that extent the building provided a suitable picture of the state of my own abandoned religious faith. The original wooden floors were gone, many of the pews had been removed, the sacristy was ruined, the stained glass heavily mottled with mold, and most of the statuary, including a fine pietà, badly water-damaged. It was more like entering the mausoleum of some long forgotten Gothic king than a church that as recently as 2008 had been the distinguished center of a thriving Catholic community. We stepped through the door and immediately felt like trespassers, our footsteps echoing through the wooden rafters as if we were a couple of ghost hunters. Perhaps that wasn’t so very far from the truth. Something paranormal was abroad in the street outside. Only it was hunting me. Of the original confessionals, only one was in a fit state to be occupied, although the threadbare green satin curtains were draped like beach towels rather than hung on proper rails. Coogan pointed at the confessional and we went inside, each to a different side. I sat down on a dusty shelf and crossed myself several times very deliberately; it was the first time I’d done this in a very long time. I hesitated, trying to remember the proper form of words that was used here.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was . . . at least ten years ago.”

  Coogan was straight down to business; he read a passage from the Bible.

  And again he entered Capernaum after some days, and it was heard that he was in the house. Immediately many gathered together, so that there was no longer room to receive them, not even near the door. And he preached the word to them. Then they came to him, bringing a paralytic who was carried by four men. And when they could not come near him because of the crowd, they uncovered the roof where he was. So when they had broken through, they let down the bed on which the paralytic was lying. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” And some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, “Why does this man speak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But immediately, when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, he said to them, “Why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins”—He said to the paralytic, “I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” Immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all, so that all were amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

  I sat still for a moment, trying to think of all my sins; after ten years, there were a lot of them to consider; and, in no particular order, I opened the case for the prosecution.

  “Father,” I said, “I accuse myself of the following sins. I have denied my faith. I have placed my trust in substitutes for God. I have despaired of God’s mercy. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain. I have used profanity. I have broken my promise to be a good Catholic. I have failed to honor Sundays and to celebrate Mass. I have neglected prayer. I have abused alcohol. I have supported the idea of abortion and suicide. I have been impatient, angry, envious, revengeful, and lazy. I have not forgiven others. I have not been chaste in word and thought. I have had sex outside marriage. I have looked at impure images. I have spoken ill of people. I haven’t always told the truth. I have not been faithful to sacramental living. I have not contributed to the support of the Holy Mother Church. I have not done penance by abstaining and fasting on obligatory days. I have resisted God’s will for me.” I paused for a moment and then added, “Father, I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life.”

  “I want you to say three Our Fathers,” said Coogan, assigning me my penance. “And three Hail Marys. And while you’re doing it, I want you to consider the profound gravity of your sins and the mercy of God.”

  “O my God,” I said, “I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.”

  Then Coogan spoke the words of absolution: “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Sp
irit. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good,” said Coogan.

  “For his mercy endures forever,” I replied.

  I stepped out of the confessional and found my legs were trembling. Feeling a little faint, I sat down on one of the remaining wooden pews to begin my prayer penance.

  Coogan left me alone for that; I heard him as he went for a walk around the cathedral. Perhaps he prayed, too. Perhaps he prayed for me. But more than likely, from the smell, he was smoking a cigarette.

  Prayer. I hoped it would work for me and, remembering how months before I’d gone to the Cathedral of the Scared Heart in Houston to pray for God’s help that I might believe in him, I reflected that perhaps it always had done. Hadn’t that prayer I had made been answered? Because didn’t I now believe in God as never before? Truly, when God wants you to suffer, he answers your prayers.

  After I was through with my Our Fathers and my Hail Marys, I went to look for Coogan. He was sitting in the ruined sacristy among the warped and broken drawers of the beautiful wooden cabinets that once had held stoles, altar clothes, and altar furnishings. In that cold derelict room it was hard to imagine that God’s church had any kind of future.

  “Okay?” he said, quietly stubbing out his cigarette on the bare wooden floor.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I think so.” I glanced at my watch. “Time will tell.”

  But when we went outside again, the demon was gone.

  THIRTY

  The Magnolia Tree Café on San Jacinto Street was almost empty, which suited me very well. It was cool and almost dark in there, too, which suited me even better. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. A saccharine-flavored woman’s voice echoed out of the wide-screen television.

  I was sitting at my usual corner table, staring into my coffee. Now and again I glanced up at a big smiling face that was eyeing me in high definition from the wall next to the washrooms. The face belonged to a woman who was blond and beautiful; she was wearing a floral-print dress and holding a leather Bible as big as a telephone book. GOD IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said at the bottom of the screen. A fat waitress wearing a paper magnolia behind her ear came and filled up my cup with scalding hot coffee. It tasted like burned cork and smelled even worse, which was how the people who went to the Magnolia Tree Café seemed to prefer it.

  I was listening to the TV but not really watching. It was Pastor Penny Black’s Messiah Matinee and she seemed to be speaking directly to me; and, naturally, the news she had to tell was really wonderful. God in his infinite mercy and graciousness had chosen me to be there to watch her show; and even though I’d acted like the prodigal son, I’d been marked by God; I’d been chosen by God and forgiven by him; he’d ordered my footsteps; he’d given me an opportunity and the spirit of God was now drawing me to him; all I had to do was say “in the name of Jesus” and I’d have free access to God. This was good. Free access to God sounded just fine. Kind of like free Wi-Fi.

  Of course, I ought to have felt a warm glow of satisfaction flare up in me at this thought. But I didn’t. Not in the least. Pastor Penny made God sound like he was the nicest guy in the world. A nice, eccentric old man with a bushy beard and a generosity of spirit that was almost unknown among humankind. Only I knew different.

  Seeing me turn my nose up at Pastor Penny’s message, the waitress might have assumed from my sneer that I didn’t believe in God. But I did believe in God—absolutely—only my belief in God was no longer a matter of blind faith like Pastor Penny’s, but a matter of revelation and knowledge; it was based not on God’s grace but on fear. I was afraid of him as I would have been afraid of a man with a loaded gun, a dangerous dog, a rampaging grizzly bear, or a sepulchral voice emanating dramatically from inside a picturesque burning bush. Fear was the key to my whole belief system. Put your trust in the Lord is what someone like Pastor Penny would tell you; but I say it’s a lot better to put your trust in your fear of the Lord; you can’t go wrong with that. If you doubt what I’m saying, then take another, closer look at the Old Testament sometime; Noah, Abraham, and Moses do what they’re told to do—no matter how unreasonable—not because they want to do it but because they’re terrified. Abraham goes through with the whole charade because he’s afraid of the consequences if he doesn’t. Knowing God the way he did, he had to figure that there were many worse fates than having your throat cut. Simple as that. It’s the same with me. If you will forgive the comparison, I’m like Abraham; I do what I do out of fear and nothing else. Fear of the Lord is the only reason I’m still alive.

  As always, the thought of God and his capricious, tyrannical power made me feel a little weak inside and my stomach turned over. I sipped some hot coffee, which was as bitter as wormwood, but at least it helped dispel all thoughts of love and forgiveness. It tasted like shit. My whole life tasted like shit. And now that I was reconciled with my creator, possibly it always would. God just wanted it that way. And out of fear I went along with this. Fear of the Lord was what was going to guide me now for the rest of my life. But that was okay. You know where you are with fear.

  I got up and fetched a copy of the Houston Chronicle from the rack by the coffee counter. That was part of my afternoon ritual. I would have several cups of coffee, read the paper, and then head to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart a couple of blocks away. Mostly I just read the sports and TV section. On this particular occasion, however, the headline on the front page really caught my eye. To be honest, it did more than just catch my eye; it made my heart skip a beat, as if the angel of death were parked outside my front door again.

  It wasn’t the kind of bullshit good news that Pastor Penny retailed; it was actually a story I was keen to read.

  “Houston Serial Killer Slays Clear Lake Pastor,” read the headline.

  There was a large color shot of Van Der Velden—such a handsome, photogenic man; he was holding a Bible and wearing a smart suit. Harlan Caulfield appeared in a smaller monochrome picture at the bottom of the page, smoking one of his stupid e-cigarettes. I started to read, although I’d already seen the report on the previous night’s TV news.

  The Texas evangelist Dr. Nelson Van Der Velden has been shot dead on the grounds of the exclusive Houstonian Club.

  The incident happened yesterday shortly before 8:00 a.m. as the 37-year-old preacher was preparing to play his daily game of tennis with a member of his controversial Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women, located in Clear Lake, near Galveston.

  Witnesses described how Nancy Myerson, 25, ran screaming into the Houstonian Club reception area and told shocked staff that Dr. Van Der Velden had been shot. Bill Leggero, 41, the senior club tennis professional, said that when he went to investigate Miss Myerson’s report he found Dr. Van Der Velden’s body slumped in a chair on an outside court and covered in blood. It appeared that Dr. Van Der Velden had been shot three times in the back of the head, although no one at the club reported hearing gunfire. Dr. Van Der Velden was pronounced dead at the scene.

  A .22-caliber Walther automatic pistol was found by police in a discarded towel bin in the men’s changing room.

  Hundreds of people gathered outside Van Der Velden’s Art Deco–style church in Clear Lake to grieve the pastor’s death, and also at his $10 million home in River Oaks. Van Der Velden’s estranged father, Dr. Robert Van Der Velden, who until recently ran the Prayer Pyramid of Power church in Dallas, paid tribute to his son.

  “My beloved son has been gathered to the Lord,” he said. “We didn’t always see eye to eye but truly this man was a man of God. Right now, I know he’s in heaven with Jesus.”

  The Prayer Pyramid of Power closed last year and filed for bankruptcy with debts of more than $20 million.

  Meanwhile, police have sealed off the blood-stained tennis court and the men’s changing room at the Houstonian Club, where membership costs $10,000 a year, while they search for furthe
r evidence.

  Tributes are pouring in from many leading members of the community, among them the governor of Texas, who described Nelson Van Der Velden as a leading citizen and great humanitarian. “It’s a tragedy,” said the governor, “that such a decent, moral man and pillar of the Houston community should have been taken from us so cruelly.” The mayor of Houston, John Ortiz, praised Dr. Van Der Velden’s ministry and philanthropy.

  It has been only four weeks since Van Der Velden donated the sum of one million dollars to the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Doctors at the Fannin Street hospital spoke warmly of the late pastor, among them a professor of pediatrics, Dr. Gerry Soule, who said that the religious figure was “a great Christian who practiced what he preached.”

  Speculation mounted last night that Dr. Van Der Velden was the latest victim of a serial killer who has murdered six people in the Houston-Galveston area in less than a year. The victims of the multiple killer, nicknamed Saint Peter, had in common their great work for charity and devotion to the welfare of others and also the manner of their deaths: all of them were shot at close range with a .22-caliber pistol.

  Ballistics experts at the FBI are conducting tests on the gun found at the Houstonian Club to determine whether the weapon used to slay Dr. Van Der Velden was also used to kill any of the other victims. Harlan Caulfield, the FBI’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the task force investigating the killings, expressed the Bureau’s sorrow at Dr. Van Der Velden’s death; he also told the Chronicle’s reporter that Houstonians had nothing to fear from Saint Peter because he was very confident that the Bureau would soon apprehend the killer.

  However, others remain critical of the Houston FBI’s failure to apprehend the killer, most notably the writer and broadcaster Gene Haugen Olsen, who has called on Senator Bryant Hinman to meet with the Department of Justice and see what can be done to facilitate a new investigation. To date, there are no new leads, no suspects have been interviewed, and in an editorial today the Houston Chronicle lends its support to Mr. Olsen’s calls for a new initiative in an investigation that appears to this newspaper to be going nowhere.