Prayer (5 page)

After more than ten years with the Bureau, however, I’m still just a Supervisory Special Agent and nothing more. Fact is, I might be an ASAC right now if only I’d been willing to work in the Chief Division Counsel’s office, but being a lawyer with a badge wasn’t why I joined the Bureau. My boss, Gisela, is an ASAC—an Assistant Special Agent in Charge—and so is Harlan Caulfield; but the field office boss, the Special Agent in Charge, is Chuck Worrall, who doesn’t like me at all. And maybe, if I am being honest here, it’s not just because I didn’t want to work in the CDC’s office.

You see, Chuck is from Washington, and he was previously Nancy Graham’s boss. After our affair was over, Nancy Graham resigned from the FBI and it’s my opinion that Chuck held me responsible for the loss of a very promising agent.

From Lakewood we went to the Houstonian Club, where Danny went down the water slide and Ruth swam fifty laps. Ruth is a beautiful swimmer, very elegant, with a flip turn a dolphin would be proud of. I sat under an umbrella and read a newspaper and watched the other guys around the pool watching Ruth. She’s worth a look. In her swimsuit she has a physical grace and a presence that always reminds me of an Olympic athlete.

When Ruth was through swimming, she came and lay next to me under the umbrella. She played with the hair on my chest while I stroked her head. Ruth is a very loving woman. It’s not her who has the sexual problem, it’s me. It’s said that most men prefer their wives to be a lady in public and a whore in the bedroom. Well, I’ve got a saint in the bedroom, the kitchen—pretty much everywhere you can think of. You try fucking a saint. What else do you call it when the minute after you’ve fucked someone they start reading the Bible or saying their goddamn prayers?

When we arrived back at Driscoll Street, Ruth made meat loaf. After dinner, I played an Xbox game with Danny and put him to bed; then I watched TV and fell asleep in my chair. I didn’t hear the telephone ring, but Ruth answered it in case it was the Bureau. It wasn’t uncommon for the office to ring on the weekend given the DT caseload, but it wasn’t the office, although I might have wished it was.

“It’s Bishop Coogan,” she said, handing me the telephone.

It had been months since Eamon Coogan and I had spoken, and while I was surprised to have him call me, I tried to look more surprised than I was. This little pantomime was for Ruth’s benefit as I hoped to avoid a scene with her the moment the call was over; I guessed she would assume his call was connected with my earlier declaration of disbelief and that I had already tried to bring my doubts about God to the bishop. I pressed the speakerphone button on the handset so she could hear all of our conversation in the hope it might save me the trouble of a denial.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you on a Sunday evening, Gil. I was hoping I could ask you to come and see me. In private. There’s something important I’d like to discuss with you. I know it’s short notice, and you’re probably very busy, but would now be possible?”

I glanced instinctively at my watch. It was already seven-thirty.

“Nothing’s happened back in Boston, has it?”

“No, no. Nothing like that, Gil. It’s something I need to ask you about in your capacity as a federal agent.”

The bishop was South Boston Irish and, despite his having lived in Houston for several years, some of his vowels sounded as wide as the Charles River. When he said “ask,” he sounded like JFK.

“Yes, sir. But would you mind telling me what it’s about?”

“It’s hardly a subject for the phone, I think. Come over to the bishop’s residence in an hour. Just sound your horn and I’ll come out. I was thinking, perhaps, we could go over to O’Neill’s.”

It was just like Eamon Coogan to suggest that we go to an Irish bar.

“All right. I’ll be there in an hour.”

I rang off and looked at Ruth.

“What do you suppose that’s all about?”

“If you ask me,” said Ruth—much to my irritation, she could always mimic a Southie accent perfectly—“it’s perfectly obvious what it’s about.”

I shrugged.

“It can only be about pedophile priests.”

“What?”

“You don’t think it goes on here, just like in Boston and Chicago?”

I put my arms around her waist and kissed her back. For a while, she let it happen and then pushed me gently away.

“God, I hope that’s not what it’s about,” I said, wrinkling my nose with disgust. “It’s really not something I feel comfortable talking about. He’s my mother’s oldest friend.”

B
rian O’Neill’s bar was the only Irish pub I’d ever seen with two palm trees out front, but inside things were more authentically Celtic, with the best draught Guinness in the city and perhaps the worst service anywhere west of Dublin. The place was popular enough, although, even by Texas standards, most of the bar’s customers looked as if they could have survived a couple of Irish potato famines.

No less in size was Bishop Coogan, who made any room he was in look small. He was sitting in a very fat-old-womanish way, all chubby-fingered and splay-legged, with the sleeves of his huge black jacket rolled up over his forearms and the waistband of his equally enormous black trousers riding just under his armpits. The priest’s collar around his neck was almost invisible under his chins. He looked like a sumo wrestler at a wake.

I set a second tray of drinks down on the table in front of him and one of the whiskies instantly disappeared. Now that our small talk about Scotland and Northern Ireland was exhausted, I was impatient for him to get to the point. I was especially intrigued by the old duffel bag he had brought with him.

“So, Bishop, what’s in the bag? Is it guns you’re bringing me or the loot from the Woodforest National Bank robbery? The Buick that’s parked on the drive in front of your house looks like the getaway car on that one.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Gil, but it’s just a lot of newspaper clippings, a couple of books, and some printouts off the Internet. One way or the other, I seem to be spending a lot of time on the Internet these days.”

“You and me both, sir.”

“The papers and the books are for you.”

Coogan unzipped the bag and handed me a paperback book titled
All the Possible Gods
. The author was Philip Osborne. As soon as I saw it, I laughed.

“Only an hour or two ago Ruth was giving me hell for reading this book. And several others like it.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“Dawkins, Hitchens, Peter Ekman.” I shrugged. “Sam Harris, Dan Barker, Daniel Dennett . . .”

Coogan chuckled. “That’s virtually the whole pantheon of disbelief you have there.”

“Why the hell do you want to give me this book?”

“Philip Osborne is a friend of mine,” said Bishop Coogan. “Or at least he was.”

“You say that like he’s dead.”

“He might as well be. He’s confined to the Harris County Psychiatric Center here in Houston. I visited him a few days ago and spoke with his doctors who described to me a case of psychogenic malignant catatonia resulting in permanent cognitive impairment. They’ve concluded there must be actual damage to the frontal lobe of his brain, although there’s absolutely no identifiable trauma that might normally have caused such a state of mental breakdown.”

Coogan’s familiarity with all these medical terms impressed me, at least until I remembered that before becoming a priest, Coogan had been a medical student at Tufts in Boston, where he had been taught by my father.

“So he didn’t fall and nobody hit him,” I said. “But you’re going to tell me what did happen.”

“I’m not sure I am. But I’d like to tell you what I know, Gil. And why I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Go ahead, but”—I shrugged—“I don’t see how I can help. At the FBI we have jurisdiction over violations of federal law. And so far I can’t see there’s anything federal here. If you want, I can put you in touch with the right people in the Houston Police Department.”

“Fidelity, bravery, and integrity,” said Coogan. He was quoting the Bureau’s motto. “Perhaps I should go ahead and add patience to that little trio of the better human qualities.” He laid his hand on the book. “It’s not a bad book at all. As a matter of fact, it was me who gave him that title. Or at least recommended it as a title.”

“A
ll the Possible Gods?”

“It’s from a quote by Stephen Roberts. He’s another of your so-called new atheists. As if they make any more sense than the old atheists.”

“I think that perhaps I’m not as patient as you think I am, Eamon.” I looked at my watch pointedly.

“About a month ago Philip turned up at my house in an agitated state. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he hadn’t been sleeping. That was obvious. And when I suggested he see a doctor and get some sleeping pills, he told me he couldn’t because he was already taking Xanax and that whenever he did sleep he had terrible nightmares. I asked him if he could account for this change in himself and he shook his head and said something strange. Well, for him it was strange—I might have said it was impossible. He asked me if I would pray for him.”

Coogan sat back for a moment. “Gil, you could have knocked me over with a feather. It was awful, that’s what it was. You see, I’m a man first of all, and a priest second. So there was no bloody rejoicing about a lost sinner. I felt sorry for the poor bastard.”

“So what happened after he came to your house?”

“My praying for him seemed to give him a bit of peace of mind. But only for a while.” Coogan searched his pockets. “I need a cigarette. Let’s go outside.”

It was hot on the terrace. We moved away from the tables where a few of the bar’s more heat-resistant customers were eating and drinking under the shade of some black-and-white umbrellas; we stood at the edge of the tree-lined road. Quickly and expertly Coogan made a roll-up and tucked it into the corner of his lopsided mouth, where it remained until it was the size of a lost tooth. Meanwhile, he continued to tell his story.

“A couple of months ago, Random House—his publisher—launched his latest book at a party at the Hotel ZaZa. The book is called
More Faith in a Shadow.
It’s kind of like the other one. A drive-by shooting outside the gates of heaven.”

“At least that sounds like a crime, Eamon.”

“The party had started at around seven. But at eight-thirty there was no longer any sign of Philip. Soon afterward, everyone on the terrace heard a commotion that seemed to come from the direction of the plaza. The plaza is a small island of trees and bronze figures just a few yards away. It was a dreadful commotion—like the sound of an animal in distress. I think it was the doormen who crossed the road to investigate. Anyway, they came back to inform us that it was Philip Osborne and that he appeared to be in a state of hysteria. Some of the guests went to see what we could do and an astonishing sight awaited us: Philip was cowering underneath the cupola of a little monument, whimpering like a dog. His hands and face were covered in blood and he was pleading with some invisible figure to leave him alone.

“When I tried to touch him, Philip let out such a scream that it quite put the fear of God into everyone. Philip then attempted to strangle one of the doormen and it was at this point that an HPD patrol car arrived. One of the officers was about to Taser him when suddenly he gave up the attack and took off across the road into some nearby fountains. And that’s where we found him a few minutes later—lying on the surface of the water, staring up at the sky, and quite unresponsive to all external stimuli, almost as if he were dead. He’s been like that ever since.”

By now I had remembered the story in the
Chronicle
—only the report had suggested the author had been drunk, and since it wasn’t unusual for drunks to take a swim in the fountains on Montrose Boulevard, I had paid little attention to it. It all sounded unfortunate, but I was still at a loss as to why Bishop Coogan was interrupting my Sunday evening with this.

“There was blood—Philip Osborne’s blood—all over that little plaza, as if he’d run around banging into one thing and then another like a crazy man. He gashed his arm and—”

“Well, there you are,” I said. “He must have hit his head on something as well.”

“But there were no contusions on his skull. Just a few scratches on his face from the branches on the trees.”

“And the blood on his hands?”

“He’d tried to climb the monument.”

“Did the police find any assailant?”

“No. The police think it was a simple case of stress, overwork, too much Xanax mixed with too much alcohol. A Britney-style breakdown that ended up being rather more damaging than a photo spread in
Us Weekly
.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about your friend, but however you want to cook it, Eamon, Bishop, sir, this meat’s HPD.”

“And if I told you that this is hardly an isolated case? That there have been similar cases—fatal cases—in other states?”

“I’d probably say what I said earlier. People go MIA when their heads are upriver. That’s just the way it is.”

Coogan was shaking his own outsize head. “No, no, this is different, Gil. I’m sure of it. I can feel it.”

“That might be a deeper source of religion, but it won’t do for my boss. We need evidence.”

“And I’ve got it. In my duffel bag there’s a file full of evidence. Just promise me that you’ll take a look at it.”

“All right. But I can’t promise to act on your material. That way I won’t disappoint you. On top of everything else.”

“You’re thinking you’re maybe an atheist and that I’ll mind and be disappointed, is that it? God’s got an electronic tether on you, Gil. And for the rest of your life it’ll be there around your ankle so that he can come and get you when he’s ready. Once it’s on, it stays on and there’s nothing you can do about it. You could wander to the end of the world, Gil, and it’ll still be sending God a signal once or twice a day forever.”