I Am God (12 page)

He went in the bedroom and undressed, throwing his clothes on the floor. The torn jacket ended up in the garbage. Next he went in the bathroom and forced himself to take a shower and a shave, avoiding the temptation to put the foam on the mirror instead of on his face. In order not to see his face. In order not to see his expression. After that, he found himself alone in the apartment. And by alone he meant having nothing to drink, not a single line of cocaine and not a cent in his pocket.

The apartment where he lived was unofficially his but in fact it was owned by one of his family’s companies. Even the furniture had been chosen – tastefully – by a designer paid by his mother from among the vast choice available at budget prices from Ikea and similar stores. The reason was simple. Everyone knew that Russell would have sold anything of value he had in his possession and the money would have gone on gambling.

That had happened often enough in the past.

Cars, watches, paintings, carpets.

Everything.

With destructive rage and maniacal precision.

Russell sat down on one of the couches. He could have phoned Miriam or one of the other models he’d been seeing lately, but having them around meant that after a while he’d have to put a little white powder on the table. And he’d also have to have the money to take them out.

Or rather, a name.

Ziggy.

He’d met that colourless little man a few years earlier. He’d been one of his brother’s informants, someone who
sometimes
gave him tips about interesting things happening in the city, the kind of things he defined as ‘over the edge’, which were good to know about because they might turn out to be stories. Since Robert’s death they’d kept in touch, though for very different reasons. One of these was that, in his brother’s memory, Ziggy supplied him with what he needed and gave him credit. He even helped him out with a few small loans when, as was the case now, he was in a tight corner. Russell didn’t know why Ziggy was so fond of him and trusted him like that. But it was a given, and when necessary he took advantage of it.

Unfortunately Ziggy didn’t use a cellphone, and getting in touch with him usually took a while. After a bit of nervous pacing around the living room and bedroom, he came to a decision. He went down to the garage and took out the car, which he drove rarely and reluctantly. Maybe because it was a cheap Nissan that wasn’t even registered in his name. He checked there was enough gas in the tank to get there and back. He knew where Ziggy lived, and he set off for Brooklyn. The journey was a kind of blur. He saw the city speed past without seeing it, paying it back for the fact that it didn’t see him.

His lip hurt and his eyes smarted, in spite of his sunglasses.

He crossed the bridge, ignoring the skylines of Manhattan
and Brooklyn Heights, and plunged into neighbourhoods where ordinary people lived ordinary lives. Places that had no illusions any more, places where nothing ever worked out. Places roughly drawn in the faded colours of reality, where he often came because it was here that he found the secret gambling joints he liked to visit – it was here that anyone could find what they needed.

You just needed to have few scruples and a lot of money.

He reached Ziggy’s place almost without realizing it. He parked just past the building, and after taking a few steps found himself pushing open the entrance door and descending the stairs that led to the basement. There were no doormen here, and the entryphone was a formality nobody bothered with any more. At the foot of the stairs he turned left. The walls were industrial brick, hurriedly painted in a colour that must once have been beige, and was now covered in stains. There was a smell of boiled cabbage and damp in the air. He turned the corner, and saw a line of faded brown doors in front of him. Someone was coming out of the one he was heading for, on the right-hand side towards the end of the corridor. A man in a green military jacket with a blue hood pulled down over his head, who moved quickly and resolutely to the end of the corridor and disappeared around the opposite corner.

Russell didn’t pay much attention to him, thinking only that he was one of the people Ziggy came into contact with every day in his line of business. When he reached Ziggy’s door, he found it ajar. He pushed the handle and his eyes took in the room and then everything happened as if he was seeing things frame by frame on a Moviola.

An image of Ziggy on his knees on the floor with his shirt all stained with blood, clutching at a chair and trying to pull himself to his feet

an
image
of
himself
approaching
him
and
Ziggy’s
bony
hand
reaching
out
and
clutching
his
arm

Ziggy supporting himself on the edge of the table and reaching out his hand towards the printer

himself
not
understanding

Ziggy
pressing a button with his finger and leaving a red mark on it

himself
listening
without
hearing
as
the
printed
sheet
rustled
onto
the
tray

Ziggy
with a photograph in his hand

himself
terrified

and finally Ziggy convulsing and drawing his last breath and blood spurting from his open mouth. He fell to the floor with a dull thud and Russell found himself standing in the middle of the room, holding a black and white photograph and a printed sheet of paper, both stained red.

And
in
his
eyes
the
image
of
his
brother
lying
in
the
dust
covered
in
blood.

Moving like a puppet, hardly aware of what he was doing, he stuffed the sheet of paper and the photograph into his pocket. Then, with the logic and instinct of an animal, he fled, leaving reason behind him, in that place that smelled of boiled cabbage and damp. He reached his car without seeing anybody. He set off, forcing himself not to drive too quickly in order not to attract attention. He drove as if in a trance until his breathing and heartbeat returned to normal. At that point he stopped the car in a side street and started thinking. He told himself that, in running away, he had clearly made an instinctive choice, but at the same time he was certain it was the wrong choice. He should have called the police. But that would have meant having to explain why he was there and how he happened to know Ziggy. And God alone knew what
kind of trouble Ziggy had got himself into. In addition, it was quite possible that the man in the green jacket was the person who had knifed the poor bastard. The thought that he might, for whatever reason, decide to come back was pretty scary. Russell had no desire to join Ziggy lying dead on the floor.

No. Better to pretend that nothing had happened. Nobody had seen him, he hadn’t left any traces, and the
neighbourhood
was full of people who minded their own business and certainly weren’t crazy about talking to the police.

As he was thinking and trying to decide what line to follow, he realized that the right sleeve of his jacket was stained with blood. He emptied his pockets onto the passenger seat, checked that nobody was about, then got out of the car and threw the garment in a dumpster. With a touch of self-deprecation that surprised him, given the situation, he told himself that, at the rate of two jackets thrown away per day, he would soon have serious problems with his wardrobe.

He got back in the car and returned home. From the garage, he took the elevator direct to his floor. That would save the doorman the effort of remembering that he had gone out wearing a jacket and come back in his shirtsleeves.

He had just put his things on the table when the explosion happened.

He got up from the couch and went and switched the light back on, his eyes turned to the glare in the east but his mind on the fact that he couldn’t get away from what had happened in the afternoon. Now that he was thinking clearly, something occurred to him. Why had Ziggy used his last remaining strength, and the last moments of his life, to copy that sheet of paper and put it in his hands together with the photograph? What was so important about those things?

He went to the table, picked up the photograph, and stared at it for a few moments. He had no idea who that
brown-haired
young man with the black cat was, no idea what the photograph had meant to Ziggy. The sheet of paper, on the other hand, was a photocopy of a handwritten letter. The handwriting was clearly a man’s. He started to read, trying to decipher the rough, imprecise writing.

And as he read the words and grasped their meaning, he kept telling himself that it couldn’t be true. He had to read the paper three times to convince himself. Then, barely able to breathe, he put the letter and the photograph down on the table, with only Ziggy’s bloodstains to confirm that in fact it was all real, that it wasn’t a dream.

He looked back at the fire still burning in the distance.

His head was all mixed up. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind and he couldn’t get a fix on any of them. The anchorman on Channel One hadn’t mentioned the exact address of the building that had blown up. They were sure to report it on a subsequent news broadcast.

He absolutely had to know.

He went back to the couch and turned up the volume on the TV. He didn’t know if what he wanted most was a denial or a confirmation.

He sat there, wondering if the void into which he could feel himself falling was death. Wondering if his brother had felt the same every time he tackled a new story or got ready to take one of his photographs. He hid his face in his hands and in the darkness of his closed eyelids turned to the one person who had really mattered to him. As a last resort, he tried to imagine what Robert Wade would have done if he had found himself in this situation.

Father Michael McKean was sitting in an armchair in front of an old TV set in his room at Joy, the community he had founded in Pelham Bay. It was a top-floor room, an attic with a partly sloping ceiling, white walls and a pine floor. In the air there still lingered the smell of the preservative with which the wood had been treated a week earlier. The cheap furniture that comprised the spartan decor had been collected wherever they could find it. All the books in the bookcase and on the desk and the night table had arrived here by the same route. Many were gifts from the parishioners, some made specifically to him. But Father McKean had always chosen the most worn and damaged things for himself. Partly that was his character, but mostly it was because, if it was possible to improve the everyday life of the community, he preferred the kids to be the ones to benefit. The walls were bare, apart from the crucifix over the bed and one splash of colour: a poster of the Van Gogh painting in which the artist had depicted, the poverty of his bedroom in the Yellow House in Aries. Although they were quite dissimilar, you had the impression, on entering, that those two rooms complemented each other, that there was some kind of communication between them, and that the poster on the white wall was an opening into a distant place and a different time.

Beyond the curtainless window you could glimpse the sea reflecting the blue, windswept late April sky. When he was a child, his mother would tell him on bright days like this that the sun turned the air the colour of the eyes of angels and that the wind didn’t let them cry.

But today there were bitter lines at the corners of his mouth and the expression on his face was grim. Those words of his mother, so full of imagination and colour, had stayed in his memory for ever. But the news on CNN today had other words and other images, scenes that from time immemorial had been associated exclusively with war.

And, like all epidemics, sooner or later war reached into every corner.

There, in close-up, was the face of Mark Lassiter, a reporter with a sharp, alert face, who looked as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing and saying, whose eyes and hair and shirt collar bore the marks of a sleepless night. Behind him lay the rubble of a shattered building, from which pathetic spirals of grey smoke still rose, the dying residue of the flames that for hours had illumined the darkness. The firefighters had fought all night to bring them under control and even now, on one side of the building, long jets of water indicated that the job wasn’t completely over.

‘What you can see behind me is the building that was partly destroyed by a powerful explosion last night. The experts are still at work trying to establish the cause. So far nobody has claimed responsibility, so we still don’t know if we’re dealing with a terrorist attack or a tragic accident. The only thing we know for sure is that the toll of the dead and missing is quite high. The rescuers are working around the clock to get the bodies of the dead out from under the rubble, although they haven’t given up hope of finding survivors. Here are the
images taken from our helicopter, which show better than any words could the extent of this tragedy that’s shaken the city and the whole country and reminded us of other images and other victims that’ll never be forgotten.’

A series of aerial shots now followed, with Lassiter heard as a voice-over. Seen from above, the scene was even more harrowing. The building, a twenty-two-storey redbrick
construction
, had been cut in half straight down the middle. The right side had collapsed but, instead of the building imploding, it had slid to the side, leaving the other half still standing like a finger pointing to the sky. The fracture was so sharp that on the standing side you could still see the rooms without their outer walls, and in them the remains of furniture and other relics of everyday life.

On the top floor, a white sheet had got caught on a trellis and was flapping in the wind caused by the displacement of air from the blades of the helicopter, like a flag of surrender and mourning. Fortunately, the part of the building that had come away had fallen on a wooded area, a small park with a children’s playground, a basketball field and two tennis courts, missing other buildings. If it had hit them, the death toll would certainly have been greater. The explosion, occurring over toward the East River, had spared the buildings on the other side even though all the panes of glass within a significant radius had been knocked out by the blast. Around the shattered building and in among its debris was the highly coloured frenzy of rescue vehicles and men, bustling about full of energy and hope in a race against time.

The TV cut away from these images of desolation and death and back to a close-up of the reporter.

‘Mayor Wilson Gollemberg declared a state of
emergency and rushed to the scene of the disaster. He took an active part in the rescue operations all through the night. We have his first statement, recorded last night soon after he arrived on the scene.’

They cut again, with that slight loss of quality that a recording made in those conditions involved. The mayor, a tall man with an open face who gave the impression of throbbing with anguish and at the same time conveying
self-confidence
and strength, was illumined by the motionless white lights of the TV cameras fighting against the background of unchecked flames behind him. At that moment of confusion and panic, his comments were few and to the point.

‘It’s impossible right now to draw any conclusion from this tragedy. The only thing I can promise as a mayor to all my fellow New Yorkers and as an American to all Americans is this. If any person or persons are responsible for this atrocity, I want them to know that there will be no escape for them. Their cowardice and savagery will receive the punishment they deserve.’

Back again to Mark Lassiter, reporting live from a place that for many people would never be the same again.

‘For the moment, that’s all from the Lower East Side of New York. A press conference is due to be held shortly. We’ll let you know if there are further developments. I’m Mark Lassiter, returning you to the studio.’

Just as the anchorman reappeared on the screen, the cellphone on the small table next to the armchair rang. The priest turned down the volume on the TV and answered. From the other end came the voice of Paul Smith, the parish priest of Saint Benedict, slightly blurred with emotion.

‘Michael, are you watching television?’

‘Yes.’

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘All those people dead. All that despair. I can’t come to terms with it. What goes through the mind of a person who could do something like that?’

Father McKean suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a strange, desolate tiredness, the kind that strikes the humanity of a man when he is forced to confront the total absence of humanity in other men.

‘There’s something we have to realize, Paul,’ he said. ‘Hate isn’t an emotion any more. It’s becoming a virus. When it infects the soul, the mind is lost. And people’s defences against it are increasingly weak.’

At the other end there was a moment’s silence, as if the elderly priest was thinking over the words he had just heard. Then he came to what was probably the true reason for his call.

‘Given what’s happened, do you think it’s right to celebrate solemn mass? Don’t you think something more modest would be better in the circumstances?’

McKean thought about it for a moment and shook his head, as if the parish priest at the other end could see him.

‘I don’t think so, Paul. I think that solemn mass, especially today, is both a statement of opposition and a specific response to this atrocity. Whatever its source. We won’t stop praying to God in the way we consider most dignified. And in the same way, we’ll pay tribute to the innocent victims of this tragedy.’

He paused briefly before continuing.

‘The one thing I think we could do is change the reading. The planned reading for today was a passage from St John’s Gospel. I’d replace it with the Sermon on the Mount. It’s part
of everyone’s experience, even non-believers. I think it’s very significant on a day like this, when mercy mustn’t be
overwhelmed
by an instinctive desire for revenge. Revenge is the imperfect justice of this world. The justice we must speak of isn’t worldly and is therefore uncontaminated by error.’

At the other end there was a moment’s silence.

‘Luke or Matthew?’

‘Matthew. The passage from Luke includes an element of retribution that isn’t in line with what our feelings should be. And for the hymns I’d suggest
The
whole
world
is
waiting
for
love
and
Let
the
valley
be
raised.
But I think we should consult Mr Bennett the choirmaster about that.’

Another pause, before Father Smith replied with relief in his voice, as if all his doubts had faded away. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. There’s just one thing I’d ask you. And I’m sure everyone would agree with me.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’d like it to be you giving the sermon.’

Instinctively, Father McKean’s heart went out to Father Smith. Paul was a highly sensitive man, and easily moved. His voice often broke when he had to deal with delicate subjects.

‘All right, Paul.’

‘See you later, then.’

‘I’ll leave in a few minutes.’

He put the cellphone down on the little table, got up and went to the window. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the familiar view without seeing it. The same shapes and colours as always, sea and wind and trees, which today seemed like alien spectators, images without meaning, incomprehensible. The news he had just watched on TV continued to superimpose itself on what he had in front
of his eyes. He remembered the terrible period around September 11, the day that had changed the world for ever.

He thought again of how many crimes had been committed in the name of God, when God had nothing to do with them. Whichever God was being evoked. Instinctively Michael McKean felt like asking one question. Some time earlier, John Paul II had apologized to the world for the behaviour of the Catholic Church of some four hundred years earlier, at the time of the Inquisition. What was being done now that the then Pope would have to apologize for in four hundred years’ time? What would
all
men in the world who professed a faith need to ask forgiveness for?

Faith was a gift, like love and friendship and trust. It was not born out of reason. Reason could only, in some cases, help to keep it alive. It was like a railroad track running parallel to reason, in a direction it was not given to men to know. But if faith made people lose their reason, then love, friendship, trust and goodness were also lost.

And so was hope.

In the time that Joy had been in existence, he had had kids around him who had never known hope, or who had lost it in the course of their brief, unhappy journeys through life. What they had had, instead of hope, had been a terrible certainty. That life was made up of dead ends, making do, dark shadows, unrealized wishes, blows, affection denied, beautiful things reserved for others. That in going against life and against themselves, they had nothing to lose, because there was nothing in their lives.

And in doing so, many had become lost.

There was a knock at the door. Father McKean walked away from the window and went to open it. In the doorway he saw the figure of John Kortighan, Joy’s lay director.
Positive thinking personified. And God knew how much positive thinking was needed every day in a place like this.

John dealt with all the practical aspects of a structure that was, from a technical point of view, fairly easy to run but at the same time, for different reasons, quite complex. He was the organizer, administrator and financial director. When he had agreed to take on the running of Joy for a fairly modest – and not always very punctual – salary, Father McKean had at first been incredulous and then euphoric, as if he had been given a wonderful, unexpected gift. He hadn’t been wrong in his judgement and had never had any reason to regret his choice.

‘The boys are ready, Michael.’

‘Good. Let’s go.’

He took his jacket from the rack, left the room and shut the door. He never bothered to lock it. There were no bolts or locks at Joy. What he always tried to convey to his kids was that they weren’t in a prison but in a place where everyone’s actions and movements involved freedom of choice. Each of them was autonomous and could leave the community at any moment, if he or she saw fit. Many of them had ended up in Joy for the very reason that in the places they had lived earlier they had felt imprisoned.

Father McKean was well aware that the battle against drugs was long and hard. He knew that each one of these kids was struggling with a physical need that could turn into a genuine disease. At the same time each of them had to deal with all those things, inside and around him, that had driven him into the worst kind of darkness. With the certainty that the physical torture could cease and all the rest could be hidden or forgotten with a simple gesture: taking a pill, sniffing white powder, sticking a needle in your veins.

Unfortunately, some didn’t make it. Some mornings they woke up and found themselves confronted with an empty bed. Every defeat of that kind was difficult to take. At such moments, the other kids would huddle around him. That display of affection and trust gave meaning to everything, and gave him the strength to continue, with all his bitterness absorbed as experience.

As they walked downstairs, John couldn’t help commenting on what had happened the previous evening in Manhattan.

‘Did you watch the news?’

‘Not all of it, but quite a lot.’

‘I had work to do this morning. Have there been any new developments?’

‘No. Or at least no developments the media know about.’

‘Who do you think it was? Islamic terrorists?’

‘I really don’t know. I haven’t got any clear ideas yet. I don’t think anyone has. The other time, the claim of
responsibility
was immediate.’