The Graving Dock (28 page)

She smiled. “Despite my spiritual perspective, I’m tempted to agree. But he wasn’t really the problem.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “How do you figure?”

She pulled the collar of her coat tighter against her neck. “Let me tell you what I was angriest about. Among many things…I kept thinking about our wedding day. It was hugely romantic. We were married out of doors, on the coast near Brighton.” She smiled. “In England, that is, not near Coney Island. It was a beautiful sunny day. Over there, that’s worth a lot. I marched up the aisle, and I looked at my new husband-to-be, and I thought,
Now my unhappiness is over. Now my life can finally begin
.” She shook her head ruefully. “After he left, I kept looking back at that moment, when he uttered those vows.
To love and cherish; for better and worse; as long as ye both shall live
…I took that commitment very seriously. It was supposed to be so permanent.” She sighed. “There we were, both
alive
, and he just walked away. I felt terribly betrayed.”

Jack threw up his hands. “That’s what I’m saying: The jerk left you.”

The nun looked at him calmly. “Yes, but where was my anger coming from?”

Jack looked at her in utter mystification. “He was
cheating
on you. You had every right to be angry.”

She shook her head. “The anger only comes from
inside
. And the sadness, and the loneliness, and all the rest of it. If I had seen that more clearly, I might have suffered a great deal less.” She looked off down the street as though she were looking into her past. “It took me a long time to understand that I was not just angry at my husband. I was angry at the world, because it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. I wanted guarantees. I wanted permanence. True love, forever.”

Jack frowned. “So how is that an opportunity?”

The nun considered him calmly. “Maybe your friend has given you a chance to open your eyes. To see the world more clearly. What lasts forever, detective? That’s not the nature of things.”

Jack remained silent.

The nun continued. “Everything changes, all the time, and everything that rises eventually falls away. In little more than a hundred years, everyone alive on this planet right now will have passed on. Is that a tragedy, or simply how things are?” She looked at him quizzically. “You must see this in your work all the time. I would imagine that you and your colleagues would get rather philosophical, no?”

Jack shrugged, sheepish. “Everyone thinks that, but talking about death actually grows old pretty fast. The fact is, mostly we sit around and jaw about what to get for lunch, or where to buy a good cigar. Anyhow, what’s your point?”

The nun shrugged. “We can be like salmon, always struggling against the current, always fighting, always suffering because the world isn’t the way we wish it was. Or we can accept the way the current flows.”

Jack frowned. “You know, this is sounding kinda
dark
. I keep thinking about my father. He was the kind of man who would put a little kid up on the mantelpiece and hold out his arms and say
Jump!
And you’d jump, and then he’d pull his arms away and say
Tough beans, kid
—
now you know how life works
.”

The nun shook her head. “What I’m saying is not nihilistic. Not at all. We can work to increase happiness and to relieve suffering. But first we have to understand where suffering comes from.” She brushed her hands together. “I’ve been blathering enough. I’m not saying that some sort of intellectual insight will suddenly end your pain. It’s something you have to learn to feel, deep in your bones. When you don’t struggle against the way things are, you can discover that peace is here, all the time, waiting for you.”

They rounded a corner and found a walkway into a waterfront park. The view opened up, spectacular: the Brooklyn Bridge to the south; the Manhattan Bridge overhead; the dark, gleaming river; Manhattan’s glowing honeycombs of light. And always, always now, that terrible dark hole in the sky where the towers had so recently stood. They stared across the river, neither of them saying anything. Just a few months ago, Jack was thinking, he and Michelle had made a terribly sad pilgrimage to nearby Brooklyn Heights, where somber citizens had huddled along the riverside promenade to light candles in front of impromptu shrines. Dripping wax, bouquets of flowers, faces of lost loved ones blooming out of faded photographs…

He was ashamed. All of those people in the towers, all those girlfriends and boyfriends, fiancées and spouses, fathers and mothers, suddenly wrenched out of their loved ones’ lives far more brutally than Michelle had ever left his. How could those left behind ever deal with
that
?

Suddenly he felt a flare of anger. He turned to the nun and pointed across the river. “What about that? What about what happened there? You don’t think that’s a tragedy? Like,
all those people were gonna die someday anyhow
?”

The nun went silent, so quiet that he wondered if she would even answer his question. When she did speak, her voice was low. “That’s not what I think at all, detective. I think about the men who did this terrible thing, and how they acted out of the most horrible delusions of ignorance, and anger. I think about how immense those delusions are in our world today. To be honest, I worry about how much we can do to fight them, to help people free themselves from such dark thoughts.”

Jack turned back toward the water. He didn’t feel angry anymore, just sad.

They strolled down to a rocky little beach at the water’s edge. An occasional passing boat or barge sent wakes surfing toward it, their crests rippling silver as they caught the light.

After a couple of minutes of deep silence, the nun glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry, but I should get back to the center. I don’t know if any of this has been helpful to you. It takes a great deal of time and effort to heal such wounds, and I don’t expect that one short talk will make much difference. You might venture one little exercise, though: When angry or terribly sad thoughts come upon you, as I’m sure they must, don’t fight them. Take a breath and look at them for what they are: just thoughts. Like everything else, they rise up; they fall away. You can just let them go.”

Surprised by a surge of bitterness, Jack almost spit. “I wish I had never met her!”

The nun had started to walk away, but she stopped. “Do you think that your love brought you this pain?”

He picked up a stone and chucked it fiercely out into the water. “If I hadn’t met her, I can’t say I’d be dancing with joy right now, but I definitely wouldn’t be going through this bullshit. Pardon my French.”

The nun shook her head. “The pain comes from attachment.”

He stared at her. “What, you’re not supposed to be attached to people you love?”

“We use the word differently.
Attachment
is when you believe that something external will bring you happiness. It’s when you say
I need you to make me happy. I need you to love me.
But love is something else. It’s
I want to make
you
happy!’
She tucked her hands in her coat pockets. “I’ll just say one last thing, detective: True love is
never
the cause of pain.”

JACK MULLED OVER THE
nun’s words as they walked back to the car. He didn’t know what to make of them, really. All this talk about things fading away—his own pain certainly didn’t seem like it might disappear anytime soon. But there
was
something comforting about the woman, maybe just her calm presence…

Half an hour later, just after he had dropped her back at her office, his cell phone buzzed. Unfamiliar number, New Jersey area code.

“Detective Leightner? This is Gene Hoffer.”

Jack stopped at a red light. “What is it?”

The Governors Island historian cleared his throat. “I’ve been talking with my wife. We’d like to apologize for the way we treated you the other day. And we feel that we may have given you a bad impression about our little group. If we can, we’d appreciate the opportunity to correct it.”

Jack waited, puzzled, for the man to get to the point.

“We’d like to extend an invitation,” Hoffer continued. “We’re having a reunion of Governors Island alumni this weekend, and it’s going to be a special one, the fiftieth anniversary of the group. We’re holding two days of events out on the island.”

Jack’s blood went cold. “Is this something you’ve publicized much?”

I
KNOW EXACTLY HOW
this plays out,” said Gary Daskivitch. “We’re all waiting for him to show up by sea, but he already knocked out a ferry worker or a maintenance guy and stole his uniform, and he tries to take us by surprise on land.”

“Nah,” said the young NYPD S.W.A.T. sniper sitting next to him, his black fatigues making him almost invisible in the dark room. “He takes the ferry with the other people in the reunion. He’s dressed like a priest, and it looks like he’s only got one leg, and he’s on crutches, so nobody wants to give him a hard time about who he is. And then he gets on the island, and he unscrews a crutch, and he’s got a rifle hidden inside it.”

Daskivitch chuckled. “
Day of the Jackal,
right?”

“Both of you are wrong,” said the fourth man in the room, a young FBI field agent. “He’s got one of those folding kayaks, and he sneaks up to the island in the middle of the night. He’s just about to land, when one of you S.W.A.T. bozos moves around and clinks your rifle against a wall or something, and the perp takes off.”

The S.W.A.T. scoffed. “That Michael Mann flick.
Heat.
Yeah, I got a VCR, too.” Jack heard him zipping up his collar in the dark; the minimally heated building offered little protection against the January cold. “So—who do you think kicks more ass: Pacino or De Niro?”

Daskivitch cracked his massive knuckles. “I don’t know, but I like the fight card: Montana versus LaMotta.”

Jack stirred in his chair in the corner. “Keep it down.” The men were perched on the third floor of a brick building called Pershing Hall, on the northeast coast of Governors Island. The windows offered broad nighttime views. The southern tip of Manhattan, its skyscrapers crossword patchworks of light and dark, even though it was after midnight (late-shift office cleaners, hard at work). The piers of Brooklyn Heights and Red Hook across the way, with sparsely spaced security lights hanging over their long blue sheds. And the water itself, a black plain surrounding the islands.

“Ya know what I think?” the S.W.A.T. said. “I think he’s gonna swim over in a scuba suit, and then he’s gonna peel it off, and—”

“He’ll have a tuxedo underneath,” said the Feeb.

“James Bond,” said Daskivitch.
“Dr. No.”

“Actually, I think it was
Goldfinger
.”

Jack frowned. He had heard this sort of jocularity on stakeouts for years, and he knew it helped to cover nerves, but still—he wasn’t in the mood. His young colleagues had never had to watch a partner get shot in the face. And they had never taken bullets of their own. This was definitely not a game. Tomorrow sixty Governors Island army alumni would land here on the island, many of them with wives and children in tow, and he hated to think what Robert Sperry might have in mind. If revenge—as somebody once said—was a dish best served cold, the man had had a good fifty years to brood. So much for the notion that he was just a passive reactor…

The Feeb took his turn in front of a night vision scope, scanning the water for small craft. Another contingent of task force members was camped out in the next room, and a Harbor Unit launch waited around the southern tip of the island. If Sperry showed up, he wouldn’t be the one to spring the surprise.

A cell phone trilled in the dark. The Feeb fumbled it out of his pocket and turned it off.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack muttered. “Put it on vibrate.” He didn’t like being the guy to put a damper on the festivities, but it had been a long twenty-four hours. He’d had to scramble to alert the task force and to arrange the logistics for their island trap. They’d had to plan it out carefully in case Sperry was watching. In the early morning, they’d sent a number of Canine Unit teams to scour the island in case he was already there, and then—when they’d ascertained that the grounds were clear—they’d brought the task force in under cover of night. Everything had to be set in place, hidden away for the next day’s reunion, because they wouldn’t be able to move about in daylight.

Jack sighed. Things would have been a lot easier if Hoffer had given him more notice of the reunion, but then he had never explained exactly why he was interested in Sperry. He had been in New Jersey to get information, not to give it, and his visit had been cut short by Hoffer and his wife. The historian, amazingly, still didn’t seem aware of Sperry’s recent notoriety. Maybe his ignorance wasn’t so surprising: The man lived out of state, and even in New York the story had slipped to the newspapers’ back pages. All anybody wanted to talk about these days was terrorists in turbans.

Jack took a turn at the night scope. A bright moving light caught his attention as it slid across the water, but he soon saw that it was attached to a barge, and moving toward Staten Island. He scanned the rest of the dark harbor, and sighed again. Opinion had been divided over the wisdom of allowing the reunion to proceed in the first place. He had voted for forcing the group to cancel, but Sergeant Tanney and Ray Hillhouse’s Feeb bosses were so eager to catch their target that they had overridden any objections. And they had decided not to inform the reunion alumni of the risk. Tanney was in full John Wayne mode. “Don’t sweat it,” he’d said. “If Sperry is going to come over, he’ll do it in the middle of the night, before any alumni even arrive. And we’ll be more than ready for him.”

BY MORNING, THOUGH, THEIR
quarry had still not shown up, and all the members of the task force were on edge. Jack had managed to catch only a few hours of rough sleep on a cot set up in the other room. First thing in the morning, he found Sergeant Tanney in the improvised command center, an office on the second floor, looking similarly sleep-deprived. Jack didn’t bother reminding his boss of his assurances that Sperry would have been caught by now; Tanney looked jittery and insecure enough as it was. (For the hundredth time, Jack wondered how the man had managed to get his current job. Undoubtedly, he had some kind of hook down at One Police Plaza: a relative, a favor owed…)