“I would imagine he’s lying low right now. Out of professional embarrassment. Or maybe he’s just worried about getting thrown out of the U.S. Coast Guard.”
“Uh-huh. HPD found the probable weapon. Twenty-two-caliber Walther. Same as all the others. It was in a laundry basket at the club alongside a pair of evidence gloves.”
“I saw. It was in the paper.”
“They traced the weapon back to Dr. Sara Espinosa. That biologist you knew from the University of Texas in Austin?”
I nodded coolly.
“Dr. Espinosa is missing,” said Harlan, “presumed drowned following an auto accident last month in which she appears to have driven her $300,000 Bentley convertible off the Galveston Causeway into the bay near Virginia Point. That’s not far from where you were living before this place.”
“I know.”
“You don’t happen to know what she was doing in Galveston, do you?”
This was a trick question; I knew he knew the answer. Helen would have told him she’d gone there looking for me.
“On the morning she died? Sure. She turned up at my house claiming she had a stalker at her apartment in Austin. This was about three or four in the morning. She’d been drinking. We talked for a while and I’m afraid I told her I couldn’t help. That it was a police matter. Then she drove away. I didn’t hear about the accident until a while later.”
“Hardly very gallant of you. To let her drive off like that.”
“It was the middle of the night. I wasn’t feeling very gallant, Harlan. Or maybe I should just have called the Galveston PD and let them handle her.”
“Austin PD is investigating the possibility that Dr. Espinosa’s gun may have been stolen by an intruder in her home in Austin. In the days leading up to her death, Dr. Espinosa had become fearful of her own safety and had recently contacted a private security firm monitoring her safety with concerns about a possible stalker.”
“That’s what she told me when I went to see her in Austin. And again when she turned up in Galveston. She seemed very disturbed.”
“Did she mention she had bought a gun? The Walther P22?”
“No. But then buying yourself a gun is hardly news in Texas.”
“No, I guess not.”
For good luck, I fingered the St. Christopher’s medal I wore around my neck while I waited for Harlan to say something.
I could tell he didn’t believe me; he was a much better detective than the newspapers gave him credit for; but we both knew there was no evidence to contradict my story—certainly not from the daily records at the Houstonian Club. Avoiding the entrance and exit used by everyone else meant that I was almost never on the club’s computer. Slipping into the club without being seen at seven in the morning and waiting in some thick bushes near the tennis courts was a relatively simple matter. It’s not just the detection of crime they train you for at Quantico; it’s how to carry one out, too.
If killing Nelson Van Der Velden could ever be called a crime.
Harlan glanced around my room. “So this is where you’ve ended up,” he remarked. “Wouldn’t ever have figured it. Your becoming a priest ’n’ all.” He frowned. “I’m curious. What changed your mind? About God, I mean?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious?” He shrugged sheepishly. “I want to believe in him myself, Martins. If I can. Life is so much easier if you believe in something other than yourself.” He paused for a moment. “I figure if a sonofabitch like you can believe in God then there’s hope for me yet. So, what was it?”
“Sometimes it seems I had very little to do with it,” I admitted.
“Honestly?”
“Honestly. You could say I had a vision. And that wouldn’t be so far from the truth. So, maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.”
He nodded and stood up, and then he left without another word.
I was in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
I’d been wrong to think of it as looking like a maximum-security prison. It looks more like a modern theater where they put on the kind of big show that’s designed to persuade you of the same thing—that God is love. It wouldn’t do to let too many people know the awful truth about God, which is that he is despicably cruel and capricious and indifferent to good and evil, that he is a God who keeps all of us in a state of drunken distraction and malevolent intoxication. It would have done no good to have told people like the fat waitress in the Magnolia Tree Café the truth that I knew. The truth would have frightened them away as if they were rabbits.
Inside the cathedral I knelt in the nave and waited my turn in the confessional, and while I knelt there patiently, I listened as the church organist played an uplifting piece of music that was quite at odds with what God is really like.
Muffled footsteps echoed underneath the enormous ceiling of the cathedral as if we were already in some celestial place awaiting an appointment with a saint or an angel about a position in the hereafter—if such a thing could possibly exist; about that I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put it past God to have conceived of the whole idea of heaven as a really sick cosmic joke.
I looked up at the stained-glass window of a rather muscular, bare-chested Christ depicted as the light of the world and reflected that this was only half the story; because the true face of God—the God of darkness—was not shown here. He would have frightened people—scared the living shit out of them; that was the God I knew. Then again, I doubt that there’s a stained-glass window designer in America who’s equal to the task of depicting the gnostic, Manichean God whom I now worship, albeit in secret. If Michelangelo had painted the real face of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they’d probably have hung and burned him at the stake, like Savonarola.
A Hispanic-looking woman holding a rosary came out of the confessional and sat down, muttering the string of prayers that were her simple penance and that seemed to afford her some comfort. Well, of course, she didn’t know the difference between the true God and the one that people pray to. Otherwise, I daresay she couldn’t have managed it. How do you pray to a God who keeps the light trapped inside the dark, whose kingdom is one of fear?
It’s all a matter of knowing to whom and to what you’re speaking. Once you realize this, then prayer is easy. That’s what Nelson Van Der Velden understood. He worked out whom he was praying to, that’s all. He learned that real prayer, effective prayer, is about direction. The true God has nothing to do with the material world or the cosmos and so praying to the benign avuncular God of the Church is useless; it gets you nothing—as if you couldn’t have worked that out for yourself. Wars continue to be fought. Murderers—murderers like me and Saint Peter—remain unpunished. That’s how it’s always been and how it always will be. People go hungry. Diseases run amok. Natural disasters such as floods kill thousands. So what?
My own crime seems so insignificant it’s hardly worth mentioning. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t try to justify it now.
I thought back to the time when I had come into the cathedral to look for spiritual guidance—like a hungry cartoon mouse—and before that, to the time when I had been confirmed, and I laughed at my old innocent self. It had taken me all these years to figure the cruel misunderstanding that had been forced on humankind.
The God delusion, Richard Dawkins called it. Well, it is a delusion, of course it is; only it’s not quite the delusion anyone imagines.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
If there is a God, I rather agree with Randolph Churchill, who, having been persuaded by Evelyn Waugh to read the Bible, exclaimed, with no small incredulity: “Isn’t God a shit?” To which, in support of that same proposition, I would only add the following:
“
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”
MATTHEW 10:34–36
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
ISAIAH 45:7
“The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name.”
EXODUS 15:3
“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”
LUKE 19:27
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
LEVITICUS 20:13
“Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents. Without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death.”
ROMANS 1:30–32
“The wicked, through the pride of his countenace, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.”
PSALMS 10:4
“The wind of the Lord shall come up from the wilderness, and his spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be dried up: he shall spoil the treasure of all pleasant vessels. Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.”
HOSEA 13:15–16
“Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”
PSALMS 137:7–9
“Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.”
REVELATION 2:22–23
“And it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.”
DEUTERONOMY 28:63
“Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills were moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.”
PSALMS 18:7–11
“I will meet them as bear that is bereaved of her whelps and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.”
HOSEA 13:8
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
HEBREWS 10:31
“Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?”
AMOS 3:6
“Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them, that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to them when I depart from them!”
HOSEA 9:12
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to the men and women in the Houston office of the FBI for their help in the research of this book. They were unfailingly courteous and accommodating, and they will probably thank me if I don’t mention them by name. Any mistakes that remain in the novel about the operations of this dedicated organization are mine. I am equally grateful to the people at the Lakewood Church in Houston, who made me feel very welcome at their services, and to the people of Texas. I should also like to thank Dr. Nick Scott for sharing with me memories of our respective religious upbringings in Edinburgh. Thanks are also due to Jane Wood and Steve Cox in London and to Christine Pepe in New York for reading the text so closely. As always, a writer needs a good editor. I should also like to thank my wife, the author Jane Thynne, for braving a Texas heat wave and accompanying me to many of the locations in this book—most notably Galveston. I also want to thank Caradoc King, who always believed in this book when others, like the apostle Thomas, had their doubts. Thanks also to Ivan Held, Marian Wood, Mark Smith, Katie Gordon, Lucy Ramsey, Nicci Praça, Michael Wolff, and Robert Bookman. While in Houston, I stayed at both the Hotel ZaZa and the Houstonian Hotel and can unreservedly recommend both.
Philip Kerr, Prayer
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