I got to the corner in time to see two men pile into the back of the van, one of them carrying a bag. A third climbed into the front seat beside the driver. Danny wasn’t with them. I ducked down and let them peel out, then rushed into the warehouse.
I smelled it before I saw it. Burning gasoline.
Fire rose from a wide splash across the warehouse floor. The flames lit up the abandoned interior, and the heat came at me in waves. A wall of flame was between me and Danny—my witness, Ahmad Nazami’s salvation—and then a new smell came to me, like roasting meat. The building was beginning to burn too, and it would only get worse.
I ran to the side to get around it, or at least through the least of it. Then I charged forward, holding my arm up over my face. I felt like the fire was cooking me, and the fumes were getting in my lungs, and it was hard to breath.
When I got past the worst of the fire into an open place, I stopped and gasped for breath. I looked back and saw that it had spread wider, and flames were beginning to climb up the walls. I turned to my left, looking for Danny.
He sat, unmoving, as the flames danced around the base of his chair, starting to cook his bound feet, as if a sacrilegious modern artist had inserted a naked muscleman into a medieval painting of a Catholic martyr being burnt at the stake.
The wire around his upper body held his trunk upright. His arms dangled, and I now saw that his right hand was missing three fingers. They lay on the floor, already black and charred, burning down to the bones. A long-handled hedge cutter lay in the middle of the fire.
He was covered in blood, and his head had flopped forward. Through the smoke and the waving distortions created by the heat, I could see the big exit wound on the side of his head. They’d shot him first. The purpose of the fire was to destroy any evidence they’d left behind.
Then I heard sirens. The response to the 911 call. The men who had done it were gone, and all that was left was me and the corpse, trapped behind a wall of flame.
I looked around wildly. I was near the door that I’d tried from the outside. It was shut tight with a dead bolt. I grabbed it and pulled at it, but it wouldn’t budge. I took out my HK and used the butt as a hammer, banging at it until it loosened. Then some more to get it all the way clear. I kicked the door open, then stumbled out into the night, gasping for air. I pushed the door closed behind me, leaning on it, sucking for oxygen, trying to push the smoke out of my lungs.
I couldn’t see the police cars, but I could see the blue and white and red of their lights rising up into the sky and bouncing off buildings as they came toward me.
53
I made it to my car before the police came around the corner. I knew that when they saw me, they would stop me. I stank of the fire and of gasoline. They’d haul me in, and then it would take about five minutes to book me for arson and murder.
I turned off the dome light, grabbed my last beer, and got out. I was by another warehouse. I sat on the ground, leaning my back against the chain-link fence that surrounded it. Then, regretfully, I poured half the beer over myself.
The cops pulled up while I was drinking the rest. They jumped out of their vehicle to look at my rental and then noticed me. When they came over, I said, “Fuckin’ Mexicans took my fuckin’ beer. Go get ’em. Get my beer back!”
One of the two leaned down to me. His face wrinkled in disgust at the way I smelled. “What happened to you?”
“Tol’ you. Fuckin’ Me-ki-kins took my beer. You gon’ he’p me or not?”
“Come on,” his partner said.
“You’ve had enough anyway,” the first one said, turning away. They had more exciting things to do.
After they’d driven off to the fire and the big crime scene, I slunk back to the car, made sure the lights wouldn’t come on, and started it up. When I was a few streets away, I turned my headlights back on.
I made it back to the motel. I showered and did my best to clean the cuts and abrasions on my face, hands, and knees. My throat, the back of my head, and my lower back all hurt from the beat down I’d taken from Danny Polasky. May the son of a bitch rest in peace. So I went down to the night clerk, Pratap, a Bengali, like the owner, and asked if he knew any place I could find some painkillers stronger than aspirin. He sold me two generic hydrocodone tablets for $10 apiece and told me he could get me some Oxycontin if I wanted to wait a couple of hours.
I took a half. It had been a long, rough day, the longest and roughest. I expected it would knock me out and put me to sleep. It made me feel better, but I was wide awake. Awake and unbearably alone. So I set out to do what I normally do at the end of a day’s work: make notes. Write down what I know and don’t know. What I’ve found out and what I should look for next. I found myself writing something else. Maybe because I was a little bit high.
Once I had a world.
In that world, I had a wife and a child. I had a job that I did well enough to make a living. I belonged to a church. That gave me a community. Mostly of wonderful and supportive people who would help me if I were ever in need. That church had a leader who was eloquent and intelligent and hugely successful, who was making that community larger and stronger. He preached the word of the Lord, who held us all in the palm of His hand. Whose word gave all the answers. Whose love bound all the other loves together. Whose order held everything in place.
Then I took a job. A small contract.
In the course of that job, I discovered that my pastor, the man who had taken on the role of guiding me and people like me, was a hypocrite and a liar who had crimes committed on his behalf. It was not merely that he had girlfriends. I’m a man. I understand sexual temptation. He did more. He had people intimidated, beaten, and raped in order to silence them. He had a man kidnapped and tortured in order to frame him for murder. A murder that he had, perhaps, committed himself.
A bad man can still say good things.
The Bible itself is full of flawed heroes. Did not Saul plot to kill David? Did not David plot to have Uriah murdered so that he could have Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba? Did not Lot lay with his daughters? Did not Saul persecute Christians before he became Paul?
The flaws of a man, any man, all men, do not deny the truth of God. But I am face to face with the truth that a man of faith, of belief, a man of God, is not made good by his faith. Are we to say that he would have been even worse if he had been an unbeliever? That is not sufficient. It can’t be demonstrated. I don’t think it’s true. What then, is the point of all that faith?
As a result of that job, as a result of the way I did something in that job, my friend was killed. He was a Jew. My religion told me that he was going to go to hell. I honestly thought that he was a better man than me. But my religion told me that I would go to heaven and have life eternal. There was something wrong with that. Something unsustainable.
At the same time, I found myself among unbelievers. And hearing the words of unbelievers.
Their words rang true.
If God is who we are told He is, the world would have to be a different place. If the world is the way it is, and there is a God, he must be either indifferent, so indifferent as to mean almost nothing, or perverse and evil.
Or, we have got it all wrong, and we mistake good for evil and evil for good. For if we were to act as God does, to model ourselves on Him, then we would be indifferent to suffering and injustice, we would make the innocent suffer for the sins of the guilty, and we would slaughter without mercy.
Now I am alone.
I took the other half of the hydrocodone. Then I wrote some more.
What is left?
I love my daughter, and I love my wife.
I believe in them. But I don’t know what belief is. Yet, I feel it. I know it.
I may lose them too. As a consequence of my own actions. I can’t seem to stop what I’m doing. It is as if my actions go forward, and I follow. It is not only God who moves in mysterious ways. So do we all. I am a mystery to myself.
So I move forward. The on
ly hope is that if Gwen can see what I have seen, she may change. Not lose her faith. I don’t need her to do that. I wouldn’t wish this feeling of emptiness and loss on anyone. But enough that she can understand, and love me, and build our lives out of something else than the lies of hypocrites. That’s my goal.
54
“You’re hurt,” Teresa said, care and worry in her voice—and curiosity.
“I’m all right,” I said. I was on the second hydrocodone. Just one a day, that can’t be bad. And I had a margarita. So I wasn’t feeling much pain, not physically. I reached for the chips. She saw how hard it was for me to use my hand. She took it and turned it palm up. “I’m all right,” I said.
She kept her eyes on my mine as she raised my hand. When it was close to her, she bent her head slightly, kissed my palm with a feather touch, then moved her lips lightly across the scars and scabs on my fingers. “Of course, you are,” she said, looking back at me, her touch lingering as she let go of my hand. “The other night . . . I mean, the way you walked out, I didn’t even know if you were still working on the case.”
Saturday night, at Barbarosa, a good Mexican place over on the cheating side of town. That’s one of those sentences that can be turned around—it’s a good cheating place on the Mexican side of town.
If you get a booth or a back table, you can talk without being overheard, and it’s so dark you have to use the table candles to peer at the menu. A lot of cops go there—and politicians too. Never with their wives. That’s understood.
It’s at the far end of the Wolvern District, all low-rise commercial buildings, auto body and transmission shops, discount markets in strip malls, showrooms for furniture and TV rentals, a couple of welfare motels, and one upscale motel that seems out of place. It services mostly the same people who go to the restaurant. So nobody wanders into Barbarosa by accident, or from shopping, or because they’re visiting cousin Joan.
The restaurant itself is tucked up against the blank curving wall created by the exit ramp off the east end of Colonel Bender Bridge. Parking is in an unpaved lot alongside, or if you’re really worried about your car being spotted, there are spaces around the back.
The food is good. The chips come with four different homemade salsas: molcajete, mango chipotle, corn and tomatillo, and one made with cilantro and lime. I ordered the grilled sirloin strips with a side of tomatillo salad. Teresa got the red snapper with napolitos in cilantro sauce.
I summarized most of what I knew. Leaving out how I knew it. I didn’t want anyone to place me at the scene of Polasky’s murder.
But what Teresa really wanted to know was what had brought our last night together to an end and, by implication, where we likely stood now. I told her, “That was my wife who called. Even though it’s Plowright, and she’s very close to him, she respects the fact that I’m her husband, understands that enough that she’s helping me. She heard a rumor that Nicole Chandler might be up at CTM.”
“In the Cathedral.”
“No, the other part, the office tower. They call it the citadel. Plowright has a private apartment there.”
“The princess in the tower,” Teresa said, teasing. “And the knight will ride to rescue her. Is that the plan?”
“No. My wife,” I said, waving the word like a cross in front of Dracula, “works there, and she’ll make it possible for me to get in.”
“It sounds dangerous,” she said. “I don’t want anything more to happen to you.”
“It won’t,” I said.
“And you’re going to do this when?”
“Sunday night, tomorrow night, when it’s quiet.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” she said.
“What?”
“The other night . . . we seemed close . . . . ”
I gave her a look that meant to say, you may have been close, but I wasn’t, though that wasn’t true. There’d been something between us the moment we met. She felt free to reach for it; I feared what would happen when we got it.
She let it pass and said, “You’ve made it clear how important your marriage is to you. So for us to be the way we were, there had to have been something wrong between you and your wife.”
“No.”
“Well, it felt like it. And when she called, you were surprised. And you were surprised she wanted to help you.”
“Yeah, I did something stupid. I lied to her.”
“Why did you lie to her?”
I told her a short version of what happened, then pointed out, “Because you had called me at home, over and over again, on Sunday, she thought I went to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” Teresa said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble for you.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” I snapped back at her. “You like trouble.” It had been in her voice when she apologized. Sincere on top, but underneath she was deliciously excited by her own mischief and had a hidden feeling of accomplishment. “You knew perfectly well what you were doing.”
“No . . . not . . . alright, yes.” Caught out, nailed. “I’m sorry,” she said, finally near to genuine about it.
I explained the rest, emphasizing again how Gwen had come back around, and we were right as husband and wife again. I left out the part about my losing my faith and my wife not understanding me.
When the food came, the waitress noticed that Teresa’s glass was empty and asked if she’d like a refill. She said, “Yes, please,” to her fourth margarita.
Mine was nearly finished as well, so I said, “Me too,” going on my third.
We began to eat. Teresa said how good it was and complimented me for picking the place. She ate small, neat pieces. Her refill came quickly, and she sipped at it. “Can I ask you something?” she said.
“I have a question for you,” I said.
“What?”
“How the hell do you live with no God?”
“Lots of good sex,” she said.
“And that’s enough? For you?”
“I was teasing,” she said. “Flirting.”
“What was his answer?”
“His?”
“Nathaniel’s. He was the one going around saying there is no God. But there are people who have God, who want Him. Having Him makes them happy. Sometimes it makes them good—it doesn’t necessarily make them good, but sometimes it does. And it makes all kinds of other things happen. So, if you take God away, then what do you do? Fuck a lot? Get drunk? Fuck some more? Get stoned? Come on, what the hell do you do? Did he think about that? Or did he just say, I’m going to rob you of what makes your life meaningful, and you can stand there with your dick in your hand wondering where to piss?”
“I’m a little drunk,” she said.
Me, too. Once upon a time, my body would barely have noticed just two drinks, but now I was already feeling the glow. Once upon a time, I had a drinking problem. Maybe she had one now. Maybe I’d have one again.
“Can I flirt with you while I talk?”
“Sure.”
“How much? Am I allowed to touch you?” she asked, taking my hand again. “Big, strong hand. Hurt hand. Did it feel all better when I kissed it?” This time she kissed with her lips open and wet, her tongue briefly coming out and teasing. I wanted her mouth on my mouth. I wanted her mouth all over my body.
She stopped and said, “You’re different than him,” talking about Nathaniel. “But like him. ‘You don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it.’ Maybe that’s why . . . . ” She smiled and made a gesture from her to me that ended with her caressing my upper arm. “We would make a good couple, the academic and the tough guy.”
Then, changing focus, she said, “That was his question. You can’t just stop things with reason. Reason says that sex is for having children. If you want four children, you should only have sex four times. But you can’t reason desire away.” Her fingers walked the words down my arm, back to my hand. “God is an answer to other things we desire,” she said. “Can’t just reason him away. You have
to offer something else instead.”
“What? What do you offer?”
“Ourselves. We claim we worship God because He made us, but if we made Him, shouldn’t we turn it around.”
“Shit,” I said. Maybe that was a reflex. I’d heard a hundred sermons against secular humanism as the mock religion of me, me, me, limitless indulgence, no rules, no salvation, nothing higher than our petty, crawling, sinful selves to answer to.
The waitress came with fresh drinks and, after asking, cleared away the dinner plates.
“Do you know the story of the three hundred?” Teresa asked. “The Spartans who stood up against the three hundred thousand, or million, or whatever it was, Persians.”
“Yes,” I said, irritated because I felt she was talking down to me in her little game of the educated intellectual slumming with the illiterate stud.
“Well, I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know,” she said defensively. “I don’t know if you read Herodotus.”
“It was a comic book too,” I said sarcastically. “Then it was a movie, but the comic was better.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Whatever.”
“The point is that they fought for glory. They knew they were going to die, but they fought for glory. Nathaniel said that kind of glory belongs to each of us because every human being stands at the edge of the abyss, his whole life long, battling to hold back the chaos. To fight that endless war, we created love and honor and glory, rationality and tools and justice and all the rest. We did that. God didn’t do it. We know that we’re going to die in the end, but still we fight, and that’s glorious. That’s what we should celebrate, the human struggle against chaos and destruction.”
“Does that work for you?” I asked her.
“Nate thought that was the answer because glory was what Nate wanted,” she said. “He wanted to answer the big questions. Most people get over that during sophomore year and realize they’re just sort of ordinary.” She said that last with wistful sadness, a great sadness, like someone looking at a landscape she used to know as a wide and shining lake, the sun glittering off the clear, sustaining water, that had somehow gone dry, the space now empty, the earth barren and cracked.
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