The Eighth Day (4 page)

An announcement came over the public-address system, and Belzer glanced at his watch.

“When does your plane leave?” Danny asked.

Belzer’s chin lifted slightly. “When I tell it to,” he said.

It took a moment for this to sink in, and, when it did, Danny heard himself say, “Well, I can probably help, but . . . maybe you could be a little more specific about what you’re after.”

“Christian Terio,” Belzer insisted, looking a bit annoyed. “It’s as simple as that. Who
was
he? What was he up to?”

“You said he was a professor.”

“He was in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at George Mason University,” Belzer explained. “It’s hard to understand why anyone in that position would want to malign Mr. Zebek. So we’d like to find out a little more about his friends and colleagues—the people he was close to, his correspondents, if any. It may be that someone was using him as an intermediary, or that he was being paid to do what he did.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“Smear my client.”

“Would it be possible to see the stories?” Danny asked. “It might help.”

Belzer thought about it. “Do you read Italian?”

Danny looked regretful.

Belzer shrugged. “Well, perhaps we could have them translated for you, though actually . . . I’m not sure they’d be all that helpful.” He paused and shifted gears. “We’re
particularly
interested in any files you can obtain—paper, computer, whatever. There might be items of interest—connections to Mr. Zebek—that
we’d
recognize but you would not.”

“Things that would be meaningful to your client.”

Belzer let his hands fall open like the pages of a book. “Exactly. The more raw data we get, the better. Apart from that, we’d like you to investigate Mr. Terio as if we were in a hostile takeover situation.”

“So . . . you want me to profile him.”

“Exactly. And with as much detail as possible.”

“An assets search?”

The lawyer nodded. “Keeping in mind that Terio was a professor and not a Nigerian dictator—yes. An assets search might tell us who was paying him.”

Danny cleared his throat. “I don’t see a problem with any of that,” he said, “though I’ll need to know what sort of budget you have.”

The lawyer made a dismissive gesture. “The budget is . . . open. We’ll pay whatever expenses you have—and your rates, which are . . . what? A hundred dollars an hour?”

Danny tried to keep a straight face. Here he was, trying to find the chutzpah to jack up his rates to thirty-five or forty bucks an hour, when Belzer
volunteers
a hundred! He took a deep breath. “That’s fine,” he managed.

Belzer grinned. “I know you’re an artist, Mr. Cray—”

“Dan.”

“—and that you’re still getting established. I don’t mind helping you with that, so long as the client’s interests are served.”

“Of course.”

“And I do hear great things about you.”

“You
do
?” This seemed so unlikely that Danny couldn’t suppress a nervous laugh.

“I do,” Belzer insisted. “I saw a piece of yours at Les Yeux de Monde—brushed aluminum—very nice. And I understand you had something at the Torpedo Factory. I didn’t see it, but I did read that you took a first-in-show.”

Danny was flattered and a bit unnerved. Obviously Belzer himself knew something about investigation.

“Maybe, when this is done,” Belzer went on, “I could take a look at your . . .
oeuvre
.”

“Actually, I’m having a show,” Danny told him. “In October—at the Neon Gallery.”

“Fantastic. I don’t buy a lot of art, but I do have a few pieces, so who knows?” And with that, Belzer handed him an envelope bearing the logo of the Admirals Club. “Your retainer,” he explained. “There’s five thousand to start—against your time and expenses. If you’ll keep an accounting, we’ll supplement this as needed.”

It was Danny’s first retainer. Usually he had to wait as long as two months for Fellner to process his hours and expenses. Having so much cash all at once, and up front, was startling. “So—”

“Just do whatever it takes,” Belzer said. Then, getting to his feet with the help of his silver-handled cane, he removed a business card from inside his jacket. The card was embossed with a telephone number—and nothing else.

“My cell phone,” Belzer explained. “Call me when you have something.” Then he turned and, with a little wave over his shoulder, stabbed his cane into the thickly carpeted floor and walked out.

Danny just stood there, card in hand, thinking,
A hundred dollars an hour eight hours a day five days a week—what happened to the guys with the honey-roasted peanuts?

He looked around. They were gone.

Four grand a week, sixteen grand a month . . .
It wasn’t until he was back on the Metro that he let the thing that was bothering him actually come to the surface:
What kind of lawyer has bodyguards
?

FOUR

It was a dream, and he knew it was a dream even as he dreamed it. Still . . .

He was standing on a cliff at the edge of the ocean, tingling with vertigo. He was holding Belzer’s business card, but it was impossible to read. No matter how hard he focused, the numbers softened and blurred, then changed into letters that changed into
other
letters even as they began to form.

The telephone beside the bed was ringing, pulling him up from sleep. He didn’t want to answer it. He wanted to read the card. It was important to read the card. But his hand obeyed a reflex of its own and reached out, fumbling, for the phone. Half-asleep, he dragged the receiver to his ear.

“Happy Birthday, Son!” His father’s booming voice.

Danny mumbled an incoherent reply and propped himself up on an elbow, blinking.

“I tried to get him to wait,” his mother chimed in, “but you know what he’s like.”

“Hi, Mom. Dad.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. They were calling from the cottage in Maine, the summer place his grandfather had built.

“It’s seven-thirty,” his father said in a mixture of mock surprise and feigned innocence. “
Everybody’s
up at seven-thirty! It’s the way of the world!”

“Happy Birthday, Danny boy,” his mother cooed. “And I’m sorry we woke you.”

“You snooze, you lose,” his father announced.

Danny chuckled. “It’s okay. I was having a bad dream anyway.”

“I think your father should learn to respect your hours,” his mother insisted. “Artists operate in a different time frame than the rest of us.
I
understand that.”

A snort from his father.

“I mean it, Frank!” As usual, his parents were not so much talking to him as bickering
around
him in their good-natured way. Their affection for each other was bedrock for him. He was the youngest of the three Cray boys and by far the most easygoing. Unlike Kevin and Sean, Danny enjoyed his father’s ribbing and usually gave back as good as he got.

“What kind of dream?” his father asked. “The recurring nightmare of being thirty years old—”

“Hey!”

“—and no job?”

“I’m only twenty-six!”

The old man let out a whoop of delight.

“
Frank!
It’s his birthday.”

“Excuse me.
Twenty-six
years old,” his father mused. “Finest education money could buy . . .”

“Frank.”

Leaving the bed, Danny dragged the telephone cord around the corner and tramped into the kitchen. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got some good news: I’m having a show. In October. At the Neon Gallery.”

“Really,” his father replied, suddenly serious.

“It’s kind of a big deal,” Danny confided as he filled the electric kettle with water.

“Oh, Danny!”

He made coffee while his mother gushed about what a genius he was and how everybody knew it was “only a matter of time . . .” Finally, his father couldn’t stand it anymore and changed the subject, booming in a thick, improbable brogue, “We’re goin’ back to the auld sod, we are—me and your mum!”

“You’re doing what?”

“Goin’ home, Son—twelve days and eleven nights, Dublin, Waterford, Kerry, and Cork. It’s certain to be grand.”

Danny laughed.
The auld sod.
To the best of his knowledge, no one in his family had been to Ireland in a hundred years.

Before she’d gone to work, Caleigh had prepared a birthday breakfast for him, and Danny sat down to it while his parents rattled on about the trip. Like Danny, Caleigh was—most of the time—a vegetarian, though they ate dairy products and, on rare occasions, fish. They told themselves it was for the omega-3 oils. On a Saran-wrapped plate, smoked salmon and cream cheese were flanked by rings of onion sliced so thin as to be translucent. A poppy-seed bagel waited in the toaster. Reaching over, he pushed the lever down and watched the coils flare to orange.

Nearby, a birthday card was propped against the salt- and pepper shakers. On the front of its heavy cream stock a teddy bear sat with a birthday cake before him, getting ready to blow out the candles. Opening the card, Danny found a handwritten message that read:
Happy, Hap-py Birthday, Ba-a-by. C.

Then the kettle began to boil and he poured a stream of water over the coffee grounds, listening patiently to his father’s monologue about Caleigh. (
How did he get from Dublin to Caleigh?
Danny wondered.)

“She’s a great girl,” his father was saying, “and one of these days she’s going to wake up and realize she’s been living with a cad—”

“A ‘cad’?! What century are we in, Dad?”

A grunt from his father. “Hey,” he said, “we got a present for you—but your mother didn’t send it on time.”

A whimper from Mom. “I was hoping you might come up, even if it’s just for a weekend. Your dad’s thinking of buying a new boat—so he could use your advice.”

His father whistled. “You’ll like this one, kiddo! Got some zip.”

“Too much zip, if you ask me!” his mom exclaimed. “Anyway, honey, I’m sure you’ve got things to do. But Happy Birthday!”

“Thanks.”

The toaster popped.

“Love you love you love you.”

“Love you, too.”

By ten o’clock, Danny had been sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, on-line for nearly an hour. The first place he’d gone was to the George Mason University Web site, where he found what looked like all of Terio’s numbers: address and phone, e-mail, and fax. The Philosophy and Religious Studies Department had its own Web page, with biographical notes on each of its faculty members. According to the site, Terio had earned his undergraduate degree at Georgetown in 1978. Twelve years later, he’d received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. (
What took him so long?
Danny wondered.) From Johns Hopkins, he’d gone on to teach at Boston University before coming to George Mason. In the last decade, he’d published a dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as a 1995 book titled
The Radiant Tomb: Hermitage and Ecstasy in Early Christianity
.

According to Amazon, the book was out of print, so Danny went to Alibris.com, where he found a used edition for twenty-eight dollars and change. After ordering the book and paying for Next Day delivery, he clicked his way to the
Washington Post
’s Web site, where he knew he could download any stories they’d run about Terio and his death. Much to his irritation, the site was down and there was no way to know when it would be up again—probably in a few minutes but maybe not for hours.

Using paper filters and a plastic cone, he made another cup of coffee, and tried again. Nothing.

With a sigh, he rocked back in his chair and considered the alternatives. He didn’t know anyone at the
Post
well enough to ask for a favor, but there were lots of people he did know who had access to Nexis—the supernaturally expensive database whose electronic archive stored the full text of thousands of newspapers and magazines. Fellner had a subscription that he could use, but . . . no. Belzer wanted to keep them out of it, and that was fine by Danny. He’d do things the old-fashioned way—at the library.

Grabbing a notebook, he took the fire stairs down to the lobby, where he checked the mail and, finding none, descended the front steps to the sidewalk. His apartment building was a somewhat down-at-the-heels three-story building on Mintwood Place, about one hundred feet from Columbia Road, itself the site of an ongoing carnival.

He considered driving but decided against moving the Brown Bomber from its current resting place. Not only did the Olds demand a supersized parking space, but because it still had Virginia tags he couldn’t park for longer than two hours in the many spots restricted to D.C. residents. Besides, the air conditioner didn’t work and the starter was sketchy and parking anywhere but in a lot was always a hassle. He’d take the bus. Boom boxes throbbed to a salsa sound, while homeless men stood in the street, directing cars into parking places (whether they wanted them or not). Kids on skateboards wove in and out of the pedestrian traffic. Near the corner, a well-dressed white woman stood by the curb, arguing with an implacable black cop who was ticketing her Jaguar.

“But why shouldn’t I park there?” she demanded. “You haven’t given me a reason! Just because the meter’s broken—that doesn’t mean the
space
is defunct.”

This made Danny grin. He’d never heard anyone use the word
defunct
before—not in conversation and not in Adams-Morgan, where half the residents weren’t what you’d call completely
fluent
.

His shirt was already beginning to stick to him as he waited for the bus outside the bank—waited until it occurred to him that his expenses were being covered. And not just expenses: at a hundred bucks an hour, he wouldn’t be doing his client any favor by taking the bus.

So he hailed the first cab he saw and, five minutes later, got out in front of the Cleveland Park library on Connecticut Avenue. Most of the time, he avoided libraries. Microfiche was a nightmare to handle, and microfilm wasn’t any better. As often as not, he couldn’t find what he was looking for at the library and, when he did, the machines spit out gray-on-gray copies that curled in his hand. He hated it.

Fortunately, Terio’s death was recent enough that the newspapers he was looking for were still on the shelves. Not that there was much in any of them.

The
Post
carried an obituary with a photograph at the top. Danny studied the picture for a long moment, but there was nothing to be learned from it. Terio was a nice-looking man in his late thirties, with a soft smile and a salt-and-pepper beard. The obit itself was brief, summing up Terio’s life in a chain of bland sentences that ended with the words “left no survivors.” Still, the story wasn’t entirely without interest. According to the
Post
, Terio had been a Jesuit priest for six years prior to renouncing his vows and becoming a teacher. (
So that’s why it took him so long,
Danny thought.)

The
Washington Times
covered the story as news, rather than as an obituary. It reported the circumstances of the body’s discovery, including the names of the concerned mailman and the Fairfax County sheriff’s deputies who’d actually found the body. The
Times
quoted the medical examiner, who attributed the death to dehydration occurring between July twenty-third and twenty-fourth.

There wasn’t much else in the newspapers, so Danny searched through the
Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature
, looking for articles the professor had written. There were quite a few, and Danny listed each of them in his notebook, compiling a bibliography of sorts. (If nothing else, it would help him to pad out his report if he came up empty in other areas.) Looking over the titles, he saw that the most recent efforts were “Syncretism in Western Kurdistan” and “Uzelyurt: ‘Vatican of the Yezidis.’ ”

Danny considered himself well read, but Kurdistan wasn’t a country he knew. And as for the Yezidis, well, forget it. The encyclopedia straightened him out on Kurdistan:

a traditional region, an extensive plateau and mountain area inhabited mainly by Kurds, including large parts of what are now eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran (also smaller parts of northern Syria and Armenia).

To Danny’s mind, the locale conjured up a vortex of political psychopathology, but that was it. He didn’t really know much about the area. Just the usual things: dictators and dust. Handicrafts and torture.

Turning to another volume of the encyclopedia, he found a single reference to Yezidi, which it defined as “a syncretic religion in the Near East.”

And that was it for the library. Going out to Connecticut Avenue, he bought a slice of pizza at Vace’s Italian grocery, then flagged down a cab to take him to the Fairfax campus of George Mason University. As it turned out, the driver was new to the country. A former Liberian diplomat, he needed a lot of help just to find Virginia, but Danny got him there, directing him to the Key Bridge, then out 66 past the Beltway.

Set on a suburban campus fifteen miles from Washington, Mason was a state school with a growing reputation and a rapidly expanding student body. Danny knew where it was. A couple of months earlier, he’d taken Caleigh to a Dave Matthews concert at the nearby Nissan Pavilion.

Walking up a low hill toward the Visitors Center, wondering if the cabdriver would ever find the way back to the District, Danny asked himself whether or not he was padding his hours. After all, what did he really expect to find? Probably nothing when you got right down to it. But visiting the school was one of those stones that couldn’t be left unturned—or he’d look like an idiot in the client’s eyes.
(You mean, you didn’t even go out to where he worked?)

So he found his way to the Visitors Center, where a muscular young woman gave him a brochure with a map on its back. “You want Robinson,” she said. “Religious Studies are on the second floor.”

On his way to “Robinson,” he thought about a pretext he could use. Something simple. Undramatic. Like . . .
Hi, I’m a friend of the family—thought I’d check out Chris’s office, see how hard it’s going to be to move things.
Or, better:
I loaned him a book a few weeks ago—I was hoping maybe I could see if it’s on his desk.

It was a lie, of course, but only a small one—and besides, pretexts went with the territory. You couldn’t work as a PI without them.

In this case, though, a pretext proved unnecessary. The department secretary—a jowly woman in a floral dress—explained that the late professor didn’t
have
an office.

“You mean: he doesn’t have one
any longer
?” Danny said.

The corners of her mouth turned up in a patient smile. “Sort of,” she said. “I mean, of course he
had
an office, but . . . we’re just growing so fast! When Professor Terio went on sabbatical, we had to give his space to Dr. Morris—who was visiting from Oxford.”

“Oh,” Danny said, disappointed.

“Professor Terio was supposed to get it back,” the secretary explained. “Dr. Morris returned to England months ago, but . . . for some reason, Professor T. just took his time about moving back in. Not that there was any hurry—and, obviously, he had things on his mind—but . . .” She shook her gray curls and squeezed her eyes shut.