Prayer (20 page)

I stood up and headed toward Greene’s door.

“No one’s tapped your phone, Martins,” said Greene. “I just wanted to see how you’d react to the news about your friend Coogan. So sit the fuck down again.” He paused. “You’re not under suspicion of anything.”

I sat down, but I felt only partly reassured.

“I wanted to ask you some more about Bishop Coogan. What kind of man is he?”

“You mean is he a jacko, like Father Lawrence Breguet?”

“All right. Is he?”

“To be honest? I haven’t a fucking clue. It’s not the kind of thing that you talk about. But let me say one thing more: If Coogan is a jacko, then I’ll buy a fucking shovel and help you to bury him. Okay?”

“I’m reassured to hear that, Agent Martins.”

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn about your being reassured. I saw a woman I knew jump from the top of the Hyatt Regency today. Somehow after that, everything seems of lesser importance. And that includes your opinion of me.” I shook my head. “One more thing about the wiretap. When you said the wiretap had Bishop Coogan telling Father Breguet to stay away from Houston, you said that’s more or less what he said. So my question is this: Which is it?”

“I’m not with you, Agent Martins.”

“More or less. Which is it? Or maybe I should listen to the recording and decide for myself.”

Greene shrugged. “It might conceivably be argued by the bishop that he was carrying out the cardinal’s orders.”

I grinned. “Less than more, I’d say. In which case you’re going to have a hard job persuading a grand jury to hand down an indictment. A cardinal tells a bishop to do something, he does it. Not to do it would be like a soldier disobeying an order from one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s only my opinion, but I used to be a lawyer and I can tell you that you might be better off prosecuting the Houston diocese instead of the bishop.”

“It won’t be the first time that a Catholic bishop has been indicted by a grand jury,” argued Greene.

“It will be in Texas,” I said. “Houston has the third-largest Hispanic population in the United States. Forty-four percent Latin American. That makes Houston a very Catholic town. Unlike Kansas City.”

“I’m a Baptist myself,” said Greene.

“But it was Kansas you were talking about, wasn’t it? Where they indicted that other Catholic bishop? Kansas is a lot more Protestant than Houston.”

“And you. You say you’re not a Catholic anymore. So what’s your denomination now?”

“I don’t go to church. Since I don’t believe in God, there doesn’t seem to be much point in calling myself this or that.”

“Hell, Martins,” said Greene, “don’t you miss going to church?”

“I used to go because of what I believed. Now I don’t go because of what I know.”

I didn’t know much, that was obvious. And certainly not about Bishop Coogan. Ruth was going to be jubilant when she read about the grand jury investigation in the newspapers. Her detestation of the Roman Catholic Church now looked to be utterly vindicated. It just proved what she had always alleged: that the Houston diocese concealed a nest of pedophile priests, just like in Dallas. Of course, I was guilty of no small concealment myself. I ought to have mentioned to Gary Greene that I was now living in the Catholic diocesan house in Galveston. Probably I ought to have vacated the place and moved into a motel; and I was going to do that, just not right away. There was something important I needed to do first. Something that took me three-quarters of the way back to Galveston early that same evening and which made it convenient to stay on for one more night.

The USA may have ended the space shuttle program, but the international space station mission is still controlled from the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake City. It’s a complex of about a hundred buildings that dates back to a time when Americans looked to the heavens and thought not of Jesus but of the moon and the stars, and wondered how we were going to get there; it seems incredible, but forty years after the last manned flight to the moon, we look up at the sky and think of God and how to lead a life that will please him enough to let us into heaven. If that’s progress, then I’m Neil Armstrong.

A mile or two northwest of the Johnson Space Center, the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women was a big art deco building on Space Center Boulevard. I don’t think there were many guys from the space center who worshipped there. Back in 2007 there was a hostage situation in Building 44 and most of the guys I met then struck me as more inclined to put their faith in the telemetry that brought Apollo 13 back to Earth in April 1970. From everything I’ve read about that mission, it took a lot more than prayer to bring those guys home. More than anyone, they know there isn’t a heaven, I think; there’s just the great big glitter ball that we call the universe.

The church had the look of an old airport terminal and, given its proximity to Ellington Airfield, I had no doubt that’s what it was; but the control tower had been replaced with a tall glass steeple and there was an enormous bas-relief of an angel above the main entrance. He looked as if he were keeping an eye on the expensive cars that were already parked on the sun-baked lot. Either that or they used him to take the roll for evening service and then go find those careless folks who were still at home watching the ball game. They’d have come along with him, too. He didn’t seem to be the kind of angel who was likely to take no for an answer.

Near the entrance there were church greeters—men, mostly, wearing summer suits and carrying well-thumbed Bibles. The greetings were enthusiastic, too.
So far so Lakewood,
I told myself as I passed into the church’s mercifully cool interior where the similarity ended and I felt my jaw drop as I marveled quietly at my surroundings for a long time. I’ve been in plenty of cathedrals and churches but very few that were as impressive as this one. Somewhere an architect was still looking at his fee check, and when he wasn’t wondering if he dared to cash it, he was probably congratulating himself on his own breathtaking audacity.

Lakewood was big, but the Izrael Church was so achingly modern it was almost impossible to describe except to say that it was a circular structure with more than a dozen entrances that was dominated by a central chimney cone that rose up into the steeple. The altar was underneath the cone, which probably resembled the large hadron collider in Switzerland. A huge picture of Christ was hanging in the air above the seating area where several thousand people were waiting patiently for the service to begin. It was so like being on the set of a James Bond movie that when the pastor finally entered to thunderous applause I almost expected him to be carrying a white cat.

I sat down near the back and fixed a rictus smile to my face—the kind I’d frequently been obliged to deploy at Lakewood; almost immediately I was on my feet again as the worshippers surrounding me jumped up and began to pump their fists in the air, shouting “Hallelujah.” A huge organ started to play and it was quickly clear to me that the pastor of this futuristic church wasn’t the type to share the spotlight with a “worship team” of singers and second-string preachers. The music sounded like it was classical and perhaps baroque in origin, although I didn’t recognize the composer; but it had to be someone with a taste for the dramatic.

The pastor was in his early forties and wore a white shirt and black frock coat so that he resembled an old-fashioned preacher in a John Ford movie or perhaps an Orthodox Jew, depending on how you look at these things. From the big screen on which his beaming face was projected, I could see that he was handsome with sky-blue eyes, machine-cut features, and a smile like the raiment of angels. His hair was blond and thick, and his voice was deep, with an accent that couldn’t have come from anywhere but west Texas, and while his delivery was a tad wooden for my taste, there was no doubting its effectiveness; those around me just lapped it up as if he’d poured his voice onto a heap of warm pancakes.

We sang some hymns. All of the words appeared up on the screen. It was only when our pastor started to preach that I began to understand his angle. Every preacher has one. It’s just good business. Billy Graham used to preach about being born again in Jesus; Pastor Joel Osteen at Lakewood preaches that God wants you to be successful; at the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women Pastor Nelson Van Der Velden—his name was captioned on the screen above his head—preached passionately about the coming Last Days accompanied by “testimonies” of his direct communications with God, Jesus Christ, and his angels. I have heard many church sermons and could probably work out a reasonably fair scoring system for them if Zagat ever decides to start reviewing church sermons; but even in Texas this was the first time I’d heard a preacher declare that he’d actually met the Messiah in a vision. Pastor Van Der Velden spoke with the complete certainty of one who has taken the trouble of first convincing himself that everything he tells his enraptured audience is the absolute truth. I don’t know how else he could have pulled it off and, to this extent, it was like listening to a smoother version of a street-corner hustler working a highly sophisticated permutation of three-card monte. To work a good con like that requires you to partly believe it yourself.

“I hate to repeat myself,” he said, grinning handsomely. By now the volume on his charisma was on eleven. “I really do, folks. But some things do bear repetition. When Jesus talked about the good news he didn’t mean for us to shut up about it. On the contrary, he told his disciples, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.’ And if the gospel isn’t worth repeating every day of the week, every minute of every hour, I don’t know what is. No, sir, I’m never going to shut up about God’s message.

“You know how when you’re at work and you hear someone talking about something they saw on TV? Like
America’s Got Talent
? Well, that’s how I feel about God’s message. Me, I’m the kind of fellow who’s liable to say, ‘Sure, America’s got talent, but where do you think it got that talent from? Why from God, of course.’ Man, I love that show, but whenever I watch it, I can’t help but think about the parable of the talents. What a great story that is. What a great teller Jesus was, too. Now, there was a guy with an extraordinary talent.”

Lots of Amens and Hallelujahs and Praise the Lords.

“Repeating yourself,” said Van Der Velden. “Some folks get embarrassed about that. They think it’s a sign that they’re getting old. Well, by that standard, I must be as old as Methuselah because, if I’ve repeated God’s message once, I must have repeated it a million times.” He chuckled. “But who’s counting? Another thing you’ve heard me talk about before is my experience in the Holy Land. How back in 2005 I spent a whole year studying in Israel. I guess you could say that I just had a hunger to see the land of miracles. I was like one of those folks by the Sea of Galilee when Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. I was hungry all right, but like them, I got a lot more than I was expecting. Praise the Lord but I was filled with his message as if I’d eaten a great feast. Because if you seek, ye shall find; and if you knock, then the door will be answered to you, my friends. Amen. Amen.

“Some of you have also heard me speak of two wise man I met in Israel. Not three wise men this time, just two. Certainly these were the wisest men I ever met. One of these wise men was Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri. Senior Jewish rabbis from all over the world used to come and listen to Rabbi Kaduri, who for years was about the nearest thing there’s been to one of those Old Testament prophets; he certainly looked like one. Earlier on I mentioned Methuselah who was famously old, of course. And while Rabbi Kaduri wasn’t as old as he was, he was pretty old by modern standards. When he died on January 28, 2006, he was one hundred and eight years old. I’m proud to say I got to know him a little in the last few months of his great life. To be honest, I have no idea what a man like him saw in a young guy like me, except perhaps a hunger for spiritual truth and enlightenment.

“And maybe this, perhaps: that I was a gentile. Of course, there were a great many Jews who listened to Rabbi Kaduri and rightly so, but I think he worried that they would keep his final truth to themselves, or even try to suppress it. So, to that extent, I was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Nothing more to it than that.