I Am Pilgrim (18 page)

different proposition!

By the time he turned into the doorway of his tiny apartment he knew the way forward: while he might still become a doctor, he wasn’t going back to Saudi Arabia. Again, he didn’t know how to do it yet – Allah would show him when the time was right – but he was going to take the battle to the one

place which loomed larger than any other in the collective Arab imagination.

It would take years, on occasions the hurdles would seem insurmountable, but his long journey to

mass murder had begun. He was going to strike at the heart of America.

Chapter Eight

TEN YEARS AFTER the saracen’s revelation and half a world away, I was on a sidewalk in Paris arguing with a stranger, a black guy with a limp.

Lieutenant Bradley would end up holding my life in his hands but, in the short term, I was silently

cursing him to hell. In telling me that he wanted to discuss my book, he had comprehensively destroyed all the layers of false identities I had so carefully constructed around myself.

Seemingly unaware of the detonation he had caused, he was now explaining that an hour earlier he

had arrived outside my apartment just in time to see a person who he thought was me get into a cab.

He had grabbed his own taxi, followed me to the place de la Madeleine, circled the block trying to find me and, when that failed, had returned to the apartment to pick up the trail. It was he who had knocked on the door and, not sure whether I was inside or not, had decided to wait in the street to see if I turned up.

I got the sense he thought this was all pretty amusing and I started to dislike him even more. As much as I wanted to blow him off, I couldn’t – I was scared. He’d found me and, if he could do it, so might someone else. The Greeks, for instance. Everything, my feelings included, had to be set aside

until I found out how he had done it.

‘Fancy a coffee?’ I said pleasantly.

Yeah, he’d like that, he said, volunteering to pay. That was a mistake. Given the part of Paris we were standing in, he’d probably have to cash in his pension plan for an espresso and an eclair, but I wasn’t in the mood to show any mercy.

We started walking down rue François 1er a few paces apart, in silence, but we hadn’t gone more

than five yards before I had to stop: Bradley was gamely trying to keep up, but the limp on his right leg was worse than I had realized.

‘Birth defect?’ I asked. I can be fairly unpleasant when I’m angry.

‘That’s the other leg,’ he shot back. ‘I got this one last year.’

‘Work or sport?’ I was having to walk with him, so it seemed unreasonable not to continue the conversation.

‘Work.’ He paused fractionally. ‘Lower Manhattan, ran into a building without thinking. Wasn’t the

first time I’d done it, but this one was different – lucky it didn’t kill me.’ It was clear from his tone he didn’t want to elaborate on the circumstances.

‘Looks like your hip,’ I said, as we continued even more slowly, pretty sure I was right from the

way he was rolling and what I remembered of my medical training.

‘They replaced it with titanium and plastic. Said I’d need a lot of physio but, shit, not eight months.’

A homicide cop, a destroyed hip, titanium pins to hold the bone together – sounded like a large-calibre gunshot wound to me. He didn’t volunteer anything else, and I have to say that, despite myself, I was warming to him – there’s nothing worse than cops with war stories. Except maybe spooks.

We stopped at the lights, and I pointed at a limestone hotel with three new Rolls-Royce Phantoms

parked in front of it. ‘The Plaza Athénée,’ I said. ‘We can get a coffee there.’

‘Looks expensive,’ he replied, unaware that very soon he would understand the true meaning of that

word.

We went through the revolving door, across a marble foyer and into the hotel’s grand gallery.

From there, tall doors opened on to one of the most beautiful courtyards in Paris.

Totally enclosed, overlooked on all sides by bedrooms, its walls were covered in ivy. The balconies set among the greenery were shaded by red awnings, and guests could look down on a concert grand, elaborate topiaries, numerous Russian oligarchs and a variety of other Euro-trash. We took a table at the back, almost hidden from view, and the battered cop started to explain how he had deconstructed the legend of one of the world’s most secret agents.

Though he didn’t say it in so many words, it quickly became apparent that the injuries he had sustained when he ran into the building were far more serious than a smashed hip. One lung had collapsed – another bullet, I guessed – his spine had been injured and he had sustained a bad blow to his head, all of which added up to three weeks in intensive care.

For the first week it was a near-run thing if he’d survive, and Marcie wouldn’t leave his side.

Somehow, she and the physicians rolled the stone back from the cave and, eventually, he was released to the high-dependency unit. There it became clear that his ailments were more than physical.

Whatever abyss he had looked into meant he barely talked and appeared to feel even less. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was cowardice, maybe there was someone he couldn’t save – he never explained –

but whatever it was he’d encountered in that building meant he’d left a lot of himself behind.

‘I was alive, but I was a shadow of the person who’d gone to work that day,’ he said quietly. ‘The

numbing, the emotional disconnection, was worse than any physical injury – not just for me, for Marcie.’

Not even the love of his wife could turn his face towards the light, and I was certain, though he never used the term, that he was suffering from what was once called shell shock and was now termed

post-traumatic stress disorder. After weeks of anti-anxiety drugs but little improvement, the doctors suggested that taking him home might offer the best chance of reconnecting him. They probably needed the bed.

Marcie spent two days rearranging the apartment – turning a corner of their bedroom into an area

for his physiotherapy sessions and filling it with his favourite books, music and anything else she thought might engage him.

‘It didn’t work,’ he added. ‘I had too much anger and a bad case of what the psychologists called

“survivor guilt”.’

For the first time, I realized that others must have died during the incident – a partner, I wondered, a couple of members of his team? In retrospect, I was pretty dumb about the whole situation but, in my defence, I had no time to consider any of it in detail – he was hurrying on.

He said that whatever hopes Marcie had of nursing him back to health with love were soon overwhelmed by the terrible toll mental illness can take on even a good relationship.

Because he had been injured in the line of duty, she didn’t have to worry about his medical bills and, after three soul-destroying weeks, she finally got the number of a highly regarded residential-care facility in upstate New York. In the bleakest hours, she wondered whether, once her husband had been admitted, he would ever come home again.

I’ve been to enough Narcotics Anonymous meetings to know it only takes about twenty minutes before somebody gets up and says they had to hit bottom before they could start the long climb out.

So it was with Marcie. Sitting up late one evening, she’d begun filling in the forms she had received that morning from the Wellness Foundation in Hudson Falls.

With Ben asleep in the next room – watching people die over and over in his dreams – and a questionnaire taking her back through so many shared experiences, she found herself deeper in the canyons of despair than she had ever been. She didn’t know it, of course, but she had finally found

‘bottom’. One question asked what personal items the patient would enjoy having with them. Nothing

really, she answered – what was the point, she had tried providing all of that. As she was about to continue, she stared at the word and a strange thought took hold. ‘Nothing,’ she said quietly.

Marcie was a smart woman – a teacher at a charter high school in New York – and, like most women, she had thought a lot about love. She knew, even in marriage, if you advanced too far to please the other person it let them edge away, and you ended up always laughing and fighting and screwing on their territory. Sometimes you had to stand your ground and make them come to you –

just to keep the equilibrium.

She turned and looked at the bedroom door. She knew she had done so much to try to restore her

husband’s mental health that the equilibrium was way out of line. Maybe the trick was to make him emerge from the deep cell he’d built and edge back towards her.

When Ben woke seven hours later from his drug-assisted sleep, he thought he was in the wrong life. This wasn’t the bedroom he and Marcie shared, this wasn’t the room he had closed his eyes on.

Yes, the doors and windows were in the same place, but all the things that individuated it, that made it his and Marcie’s space, were gone.

There were no photographs, no paintings and no mess on the floor. The TV had gone and even the

kilim they both loved had silently disappeared. Apart from the bed and some physio equipment there

was, well –
nothing
. As far as he could see, it was the white room at the end of the universe.

Confused about where he really was, he swung off the bed and, hobbling from his smashed thigh,

crossed the room. He opened the door and looked into a parallel universe.

His wife was in the kitchen, trying to hurry up her coffee. Bradley watched her in silence. In the twenty years they had been together, she had grown ever more beautiful in his eyes. She was tall and slim with simply cut hair that accentuated the fine shape of her face but which, more importantly, seemed to say she didn’t care much about her own good looks. That, of course, was the only way to

handle such a gift, and it made her appear even more attractive.

Looking at her in the midst of the home they loved gave him a terrible catch in his throat. He wondered if he was being shown what he had left behind; maybe he had never got out of the building

and was already dead.

Then Marcie realized he was there and smiled at him. Bradley was relieved – he was pretty certain

people who saw a dead guy in their bedroom doorway didn’t act like that. Not Marcie, anyway, who

didn’t care much for Hallowe’en and had a deep aversion to graveyards.

For the first time in months Marcie’s spirits ticked higher: the new strategy had at least made him

come to the cell door and look out. ‘Another minute and I’m leaving for work – I’ll be back in time to get dinner,’ she said.

‘Work?’ he queried, trying to get his mind around the idea. She hadn’t been to work since he was

injured.

She said nothing – if he wanted answers, he was going to have to work for them. He watched her

jam a piece of toast in her mouth, grab her travel cup of coffee and head out the door with a small

wave.

It left Bradley marooned in the doorway, so, after a moment of silence and unable to keep the weight on his strapped leg, he did the only thing he thought sensible – he left the parallel world and went back into the white room.

He lay down but, try as he might, he couldn’t think clearly about what was happening with so many

psychoactive drugs in his body. In silence, alone in the decaying morning, he decided the only practical thing to do was to wean himself off them. It was a dangerous but crucial decision – at last he was taking responsibility for his own recovery.

Despite her promise, Marcie didn’t fix him dinner that night; he was in a fitful sleep so she decided to leave him be. Instead of a meal tray, she placed a new hardcover book on his bedside table, hoping that, with nothing else to occupy him, he would eventually pick it up. The idea for the book had come to her that morning, and immediately after school she had hurried down to a store near Christopher

Street. It was called Zodiac Books, but it had nothing to do with astrology – it was named after a serial killer in Northern California whose exploits had spawned a one-maniac publishing industry.

Marcie had never been inside Zodiac – she only knew of it from Ben – so when she climbed the set

of steep stairs she was amazed to enter a space as big as a warehouse, stacked with the greatest repository of books about crime, forensic science and investigation in the world. She explained to the ageing owner behind his desk what she was looking for – technical, factual, something to engage a

professional.

The owner was six foot seven and looked more like he belonged in the backwoods than in a bookshop. A former FBI profiler, he slowly unfurled himself and led her past shelves coated with dust and into a row of books and periodicals marked ‘New Releases’. Some of them must have been forty

years old. From a small carton on the floor, newly arrived from the publisher, he lifted out a buff-coloured doorstop of a book.

‘You told me he’s sick,’ the Sequoia said, opening the highly technical material to show her. ‘Fifty pages of this should finish him off.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘is it any good?’

He smiled, swept his hand around the room. ‘Might as well throw the rest away.’

As a result, the book which I had spent so many months writing ended up sitting on Bradley’s bedside table. He saw it when he woke early the next morning but made no move towards it. It was a