Vigil (16 page)

And it sounded as if the speaker were leaning over his very shoulder.

His head had jerked back and he’d whipped around in his seat. The back of his neck tingled, and his heart was pounding in his chest.

But no one was there. There was no one in the room.

But he had
heard
the voice. And he had felt a breath, a warm exhalation, on his face.

The concerto began, playing softly.

He got up from his chair; his legs felt a little weak. The curtains by the window, the double curtains he’d had Gertrude hang, were stirring—barely perceptibly, but stirring, nonetheless. With faltering steps he went toward them. Took hold of them. Drew them apart.

He felt a slight draft, cool wind from outside blowing through the cracks in the French door frames. But the doors were locked, and the balcony was empty.

He was alone in the room.

He went back to the drafting table, looked down at his work. The surface of the table was half-covered now, with bits and pieces of the scroll that he had painstakingly restored, fitted together . . . and to some extent translated. It was indeed the Book of Angels. Also known to scholars as the Lost Book of Enoch. He’d been right about that. Dead right. It was Enoch’s account of his journey to Heaven, and of what he saw there. Of angels, burning bright around the throne of God; of others, fallen from favor. Of a coming war. And pestilence upon the earth. It was a dream, it was a prophecy . . . and it was his. No one had seen it, no one had read it, probably for thousands of years. Sometimes the sheer weight of that revelation felt like a hammer inside his head, threatening to crack open his skull.

And maybe that’s what had happened tonight, he thought. Maybe a tiny, tiny fissure in his skull had opened up, just for a split second, and let the sound of that voice escape. Maybe it hadn’t come from outside at all; maybe it had come from
inside
his own head. The bicameral mind, once again in operation.

A fire truck, siren wailing, barreled up First Avenue, with several cabs trailing in its wake. A limousine pulled up at the curb and a girl in a glittery party dress, carrying her shoes, got out. A line of pigeons walked in a perfect line across his path—like the Beatles on the cover of
Abbey Road,
he thought.

The sky was dark blue, but the sun was coming up.

Ezra kept going; when he had to stop at a corner to wait for the WALK light, he marched in place. He needed to feel the movement, to expend the energy. He needed to hear his feet pounding on the pavement, the cars whooshing by—anything, so long as it wasn’t that voice in his ear.

A man in a flower shop was hosing down the sidewalk, and stopped to let Ezra pass.

Outside a Japanese restaurant, one that Ezra had occasionally gone to, a wooden pallet of fresh fish was waiting on the sidewalk. As he went by, a large fish, its silver scales gleaming, seemed to fix him with its dead eye.

He moved on quickly. The traffic was getting heavier by the minute. The sun was up, the sky clear. A Korean deli owner rolled up the heavy metal grates that covered his windows and door.

Ezra kept walking; the farther he went, the better he felt. The sound of the voice diminished in his ear. It was good to be out, good to feel the morning air and the pulse of life around him. Maybe he should do this on a regular basis, he thought; maybe he should start taking long walks, getting some exercise.

Before he knew it, he was at the corner of Eighty-ninth Street—his Uncle Maury’s street. He noticed it when he had to stop outside the old Vienna bakery where his uncle liked to buy his Danish. The bakery door was locked, but there were lights on inside, and he could see a woman sliding a tray of orange Halloween cookies into the display case.

He knocked lightly on the glass in the door. Wouldn’t it be a nice surprise to show up at his uncle’s with some of his favorite treats?

The woman came around the counter, wiping her hands on her apron.

“You open?” Ezra said through the door. “Can I buy some things?”

She leaned closer, then drew back. “We’re closed,” she said, turning away.

Closed? She’d looked like she was reaching for the lock, to let him in. What time did they open? He stepped back to see if any business hours were posted. Then he caught his own reflection in the glass. A glassy-eyed man with a thick stubble of beard and messy hair, his overcoat gathered around him. One of his shoes, he now noticed, had even come unlaced.

No wonder. He considered knocking again and trying to persuade her of his sanity, but she’d disappeared into the back—no doubt waiting for him to go away.

He crossed the avenue, and walked past a row of decrepit brownstones. His uncle lived on the third floor, in front, and Ezra knew that he was a bad sleeper and an early riser. He stopped in front of the stoop, where someone had deposited an empty beer bottle, and looked up at his uncle’s windows. The lights, sure enough, were on.

In the foyer, Ezra buzzed, but knowing his uncle, he didn’t wait for him to respond; instead, he stepped back outside, knowing his uncle would simply stand at the window, looking down at the sidewalk to see who had bothered him.

Ezra waved when he saw the curtain pulled back. His uncle, in a bathrobe, stared down at him, as if processing this unlikely information. Then he simply dropped the curtain, and by the time Ezra got back into the foyer, the door was unlocked and buzzing.

He had his door open when Ezra came around the landing. “What the hell are you doing up here at this hour of the morning?” Then, as if something dire had occurred to him, he said, “Your father? He’s okay?”

“For all I know, he’s fine. He’s still in Palm Beach, with Kimberly.”

Ezra came into the kitchen, where the apartment began. It was a railroad flat, with the kitchen in back, then a bedroom, and then the living room—such as it was—in front.

“You want some coffee?” his uncle asked, gesturing at the jar of Folger’s Coffee Crystals on the counter. “I was just making some.”

“Yeah, that would be great. I stopped at the Vienna bakery to buy you some Danish, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

Maury chuckled, said, “I can’t say as I blame ’em. You look like you just jumped out a window at Bellevue.”

In a way, Ezra thought, that’s how he felt. That spectral voice—low, insinuating, strangely sinister—echoed again in his head.

Maury took another coffee mug from the dish rack, spooned in some coffee crystals—“You like it strong?” he asked—and when Ezra nodded, spooned in some more. He poured in the boiling water, then led the way into the living room.

His uncle settled himself into his white Naugahyde Barcalounger—with the heat and massage controls—and Ezra sat down on the sofa across from him. Plaster was peeling away from the walls and hanging down in what looked to Ezra like furled scrolls.

“I’m still waiting for an answer,” his uncle said. “This isn’t the usual time for a visit. What’s wrong?”

Ezra took a sip of his coffee. “I couldn’t sleep, and just started taking a walk.”

“Gertrude tells me you don’t sleep at night at all anymore. She says you don’t go to bed till dawn and you get up in the afternoon. What are you doing all night, Ezra?”

“Working.”

“You can’t work during the day, like most people?”

“It’s better at night. Quieter. Fewer interruptions.” Until, of course, this particular night.

Maury didn’t look convinced. “What’s your doctor say? That Neumann woman?”

“I haven’t discussed it with her.”

“Maybe you should. She’s got you on some medications, for the mood swings and the rest?”

“Yes,” Ezra said, looking down into his cup, wondering at the way the lamplight shone in iridescent circles on the surface of the hot coffee. He hadn’t told Neumann about his insomnia; he knew she’d only prescribe some sleeping pills for him, and sleep wasn’t what he wanted. Not when he was doing such exciting work, such breakthrough stuff. The only prescriptions he wanted from her were for things that would keep him focused, keep him alert, keep him calm enough to concentrate on the momentous task before him.

Which was why he wouldn’t—why he
couldn’t
—tell her about the voice he’d heard that night, any more than he could tell his uncle. He knew what that could lead to—endless psychotherapy at best, and an involuntary commitment at worst. The scroll was coming together, bit by bit, but it was a mind-boggling task, the sort of thing that drove one mad; in fact, as Ezra knew better than anyone, it had done just that to many of his predecessors. The first to feel the curse had been Shapira, the man who’d originally discovered some ancient manuscripts from the Dead Sea shores in the late nineteenth century. In his lifetime, his discoveries were considered forgeries—nothing, the scholars of his day concluded, could have survived so long in such an inhospitable climate—and after enduring years of professional disdain and dismissal, Shapira checked into a Rotterdam hotel and put a bullet through his head. Since that time, and with the amazing finds at Qumran in 1947, Shapira had been vindicated—for all the good it did him—and others had picked up where he’d left off, often with equally dire results. Scroll scholars were famous for their descents into madness and despair, for their alcoholism and drug abuse and suicidal tendencies (acted upon at a fairly regular pace). Ezra knew of one such case personally, an Australian woman, the most prominent authority on the theology of the Essenes, who’d worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls housed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem; in less than two years’ time, she had been reduced to a babbling fanatic, raving about the Apocalypse to come, and running from an omnipresent specter she called the Shadow Man. At a conference in Haifa, she’d rushed to the podium, and after shouting something about the Sons of Light, she had set fire to herself. Badly burned, but still alive, she’d been sent back home to Melbourne, where, last he’d heard, she lived under heavy medication and constant care in a private sanatorium.

When you studied the Scrolls, Ezra knew, you had to keep a firm grip on yourself.

“Gertrude called me yesterday,” his Uncle Maury was saying now. Ezra looked up from his coffee. “She had some news, and she was going to tell it to you today, whenever you woke up.”

“What was she going to tell me?”

“Your father and Kimberly are flying back from Palm Beach. They’ll be back in New York in a few days.”

That
was
news. Right after the fight at the dinner table, they’d packed their bags and fled, without a word, to more hospitable climes.

“Now your father’s not an easy guy to get along with,” Maury confessed, “and sometimes I don’t know how your mother put up with him for all those years. But if you want to stay in that apartment—and Gertrude tells me that you do—you’re going to have to work a little harder at it. You’ve got to make more of an effort, Ezra.”

His uncle was right, of course, though Ezra had no idea how that effort should manifest itself. If his mother had been alive, there’d be no problem. She had been proud of everything he did, whether it was drawing a picture of a horse or guessing all the right answers to some TV game show. It was his father who never seemed to think anything he did was good enough. It was his father who never believed he would measure up. Who didn’t understand anything Ezra enjoyed or was interested in. All Sam Metzger knew was how to make money, how to put up buildings and parking garages and shopping centers. Everything he touched turned to gold, while everything Ezra touched turned to dust.

But the scroll would change all that. Ezra was going to do something here that would make the world sit up and take notice. And then his father would have to acknowledge him and admit that Ezra had done something—something momentous—that even he, the great Sam Metzger, could not have done himself. When that day came, it was going to be the sweetest in Ezra’s life.

And it wasn’t far off.

But in the meantime, what was he supposed to do as a peace offering—bake a cake? Leave a letter of apology on their pillows? “I’ll try to make it work,” he simply said.

“Good. You do that,” Maury said, putting his coffee mug on the floor and struggling up out of the Barcalounger. The morning sunlight was now streaming through the dirty windows of the apartment. “Me, I’m ready for some Danish. How about you?”

“I’m buying,” Ezra said.

“Better leave that to me,” Maury said. “You, they won’t even let inside the place.”

“Is it okay if I ask Professor Russo a question directly?”
Katie asked, and Carter, who was sharing the lecture hall stage with him, said, “Be my guest.”

Katie stood up and leaned on the back of the seat in front of her. Russo and Carter were on opposite sides of the slide screen, on which an artist’s rendering of a pterodactyl in flight was depicted. “Professor Cox believes that birds are the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs,” Katie said, “and that some of the dinosaurs, including a fossil of one that we saw in a previous lecture, actually had feathers. I know this is a big debate, but which side of it do you fall on?”

Carter should have known Katie would try to nail him; she was the smartest kid in the class, but she liked to make mischief, and Russo’s being there provided her with the perfect opportunity. It was almost as if she’d guessed that this was one of the few paleontological points on which he and Russo did not agree.

Russo stuffed his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket and looked like he was wondering how to answer that one—truthfully, or to defer to the views of his host? “Yes, you are right. There is much debate about this point,” he said, to buy some time. When he took his hands out of his pockets again, he had a matchbook in one and a crumpled pack of Nazionalis in the other. He tamped out a cigarette and actually started to light it before a couple of the students laughed, and Carter had to say, “Joe, I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.”