The God Hunter Page 12

  “Cruel.”

  “Why?”

  “People go, expect good luck or healing. But you have come in, stolen all the power. Stolen it and sold it and for what? To light a house, to run a food-­mixer, to warm a room? For what?”

  “Well, those are all important things, I think. And, honestly, it’s not like that. Sometimes we get called to a site where there’s some real unwholesome stuff. I’ve seen things. In fact, anywhere it starts to manifest, it’s usually disruptive. Destructive, too, most times. Nobody can deal with it. We’re just creaming off the top. Before it hits that stage. You know? We’re actually pretty sensitive about local beliefs, stuff like that. We’ve got to be. We want cooperation, after all. Local priest gets credit for settling things down, we make a contribution to a charity or the church roof fund . . . you know. And we cream off the excess. That’s all.”

  “Man makes God.”

  “Sort of.”

  “And if you do not cream. What then? It grows and grows, and it becomes a man? Like Jesus Christ?”

  “No. But good point.”

  “I have career built on good points. I am good points up to here, see?” She levelled her hand in front of her nose.

  “OK. Well, first thing is, some of these places, they don’t develop. There’s power there, but it never shows. Perhaps in time, but not so far.” I pushed a straying shred of fish back into my sandwich. “Official line, the power’s built up by the act of worship. By the sheer impress of feelings on the place. Question is—­and for a field op, no matter how you toe the party line, this will always be the sticking point, you know—­question is, why worship there to start with? Why’s a shrine become a shrine? A church become a church? Why that place, nowhere else?”

  She sniffed. “Most days in church,” she said, “nobody dies.”

  “True. But—­I dunno. There’s a lot of thinking about death. There’s a guy on a cross, for one thing. And a lot of talk about eternal life, and the end of the world, all that. But—­well, think back further. Most older churches are on sites already sacred. Pagan shrines, and so forth. Now, you could see that as the new religion cunningly and willfully absorbing and supplanting the old. Or maybe these are real places of power; maybe the place itself draws ­people to it. And in the old days—­before Chris­tian­ity—­who’s to say what kind of sacrifice was made there? Or what went on?”

  “Pagans. Ah yes. Pagans, human sacrifice. That, also, I think is fairy tale.”

  “Doesn’t have to be human. Dead hen, dead cow . . . I’ve wondered about slaughterhouses, sometimes. What we’d get from them.”

  “This is disgusting.”

  “This is how it is. And then you’ve got to ask yourself why one place gets associated with this function, another place with that . . . Lourdes with healing, say. There are traditions about churches. Go back, you find out they were first sacred to—­oh, Woden, or Baal, or Venus. Why? The churches mask that, as they’re meant to do, but some of it clings on.”

  “You tell me God is real. And for so long, we have been told that God is dead.”

  “The gods are real. Whatever they may be. They’re in the ground like seeds. That’s my view. This place, that place . . . been there thousands, maybe millions of years. Till they can even imitate us, when they want to. And we worship them, and they get stronger, bit by bit . . .”

  “They feed on us.”

  “In a sense. Yeah. Suppose they do.”

  “We are cattle. Take away technology—­take away your meter and your flask—­and they are dominant. For hundreds of years. They lure us and devour us. They feed on us.”

  “We’ve coexisted. For a long time.”

  “Our killer does not coexist. He kills.”

  “He eats.”

  “Like shark in human shape.”

  “He’s shifting gear. He’s got to build his power. No—­maintain his power. I bet it’s fading all the time. Same as you, and me.” I gestured to my bagel. “There’s no one coming by to sing a few hymns anymore, is there? He’s incarnate, and he’s mobile. And I’d say a human body takes a lot more energy to keep it going than just lying in the ground, unconscious.”

  “Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he does.”

  “No. We don’t forgive him. We find him, and we wipe him out. We don’t need to forgive. We need to understand.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THROUGH TOURIST EYES

  If it thinks like me. If it thinks like me, where would it go? Would it know my New York, the places I knew? Tourist New York? Or would it head over to Jersey, to the Registry offices? (Which, incidentally, I had so far failed to contact. But I had reasons for that. Whether they were good reasons, I couldn’t say, but I had reasons.) If it went for churches, what then? St. John’s, uptown? St. Pat’s? But there were churches everywhere. And had it even come here, to Manhattan? It hadn’t flown anywhere else. Not under my name. There would have been records of that. But it could have hopped a Greyhound, caught a train, gone anywhere. Nebraska, like Fantino had said. And then we’d never find it. Not until the killings came to light . . .

  But Manhattan stuck there in my mind. It was instinct, maybe, but if the two of us were truly linked, then instinct was the best I’d got to go on. It would need energy, human energy. That’s what it was drawn to. A hustling, bustling, self-­important, fascinating, feverish, exciting place. It could drink Wall Street dry or suck the pain and fury at Ground Zero. Perhaps it wouldn’t even kill. Perhaps it wouldn’t need to. There was so much here, so much in the air . . . It could go anywhere. Find anything it wanted . . .

  But somehow, I doubted we’d get off so easily. I really did.

  We waited outside MoMA, drinking coffee. And we hung around Times Square, tourist-­watching. We went downtown. We called in at bars that I remembered, bookshops I’d once visited. We sat in Washington Square Park and watched the buskers and the chess players. We roamed the streets, eyed the faces, checked them all out . . .

  “Stupidness,” moaned Anna. “Stupid, stupid, stupidness.”

  Hard not to agree.

  “You see him once. I tell you why. You see because he wants for you to see. You see because he follows you, and he is waiting for you. Now, no. Now he wishes to be hidden. And you do not see.”

  “I’ve thought of that as well.”

  “It happens to you then. Not now. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was curious.”

  “To see his daddy? No. I think he laughs at you.”

  “I’m not his daddy. And he isn’t me.”

  “But is like you. Right to fingerprints. This is established. Pretend that you are him, that he is you. What then?”

  She brushed her hair back from her face. It struck me just how seldom I had seen her smile; how pretty she would look if she smiled more readily.

  “He’s trying to adjust,” I said. “He’s working to a different rhythm. You spend centuries in one spot. Then you move. How do you handle that? It’s hard for anyone . . .”

  “I will say how sad I feel for him. I will cry for him, boo-­hoo. And I will make sure that he never moves again.”

  She called Fantino on my new cell. “We got murder,” he said, sounding bored. “Regular, everyday murder. BFD, y’know?”

  But I couldn’t help myself, looking at the folks around me, wondering which was next. And then it struck me, it didn’t have to be somebody visible. Someone seen. You had a home, a family, a place of work, and if something happened, you’d be noticed. Fine. How many ­people slipped between the cracks? I’d heard of ­people living in the sewers, I’d seen them living in the park. The only thing we’d got was that he didn’t seem too bothered about hiding bodies. Up till now. But that could change . . .

  We were tourists. Could have been lovers. Could have been newlyweds on honeymoon . . .

  I took her to a
downtown restaurant I’d gone to in the past and only later realized, no: I’d been here after Esztergom; logically, he’d only know the places that I’d been before that. Then thinking, So what? So what?

  They sold martinis made with apple schnapps. Ganz drank—­too many of them. But you couldn’t tell. She seemed to process booze like orange juice. She talked about her marriage; her husband was police as well, she said, and before I knew it I was right up to my neck in the unhappy details of her life, the past mistakes that kept on creeping back to haunt her.

  “You know word control freak, yes?”

  “I know it.”

  “When we divorce, he cries. He begs. On his knees. This big, proud man. He is on his knees before me, crying. I get no pleasure out of this. It is distressing to me, but I must witness it, he has decided. I must see his tears. But I do not do the thing he wants. I see him and do not give in.”

  “You’re . . . strong-­willed,” I said.

  “I know him. I know what is happening. I understand.”

  She gulped her drink. I’d set mine on one side and was drinking water—­a drunk’s determined backpedaling, knowing it’s already far too late.

  “He’s . . . trying to manipulate you? Win your sympathy?”

  “Of course. He is hurt. He is heart-­breaking. It is tragic! But is just his pride that stings him. He is hurt I actually leave.” She reached for cigarettes, recalled the law, and stopped herself. “In six months, he is married again. He knows her from before. It tells, I think, what kind of man he is.”

  “And you? Are you . . . ?”

  “I learn my lesson. So far.”

  We left early. She had to smoke, she said. At reception, I helped her with her coat.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve got a room here for another night. Much closer than Hoboken. You know?”

  “All right,” she said.

  All right? I thought. Well, that was easy. I smiled. I helped her with her coat and kept my arm around her shoulders once I’d done.

  “It has furniture?”

  “Um . . . yeah. Course. And en suite, and a coffeemaker, and a minibar, and . . .”

  “It has sofa? Armchair?”

  ­“Couple of armchairs, yeah. We can sit around, talk a while, that’s what you want.”

  “Good,” she said. “If it has armchair, it means you will have place to sleep. Yes?”

  CHAPTER 30

  THE KILLING

  My head was too big. It was too big for the armchairs and too big for the bed, the bed being currently made up of armchairs. It hung over my left shoulder, too heavy to lift, and it ached, and my neck ached, too, and my back ached from the strain of trying to support it; and I had a definite impression of the misery of living life tied to this burden, this overblown, ungainly thing, this ball-­and-­chain that housed myself and everything I felt and thought and cared about.

  Then I was aware of Anna’s voice. Clipped, hard, business-­like. Syllables: “Yes. Yes. I see. Say again. Yes.” And the scratching sound, which turned out to be pen on paper, held upon her knee.

  When I looked up, she had my cell phone to her ear.

  “Fantino,” she mouthed.

  I woke up quickly after that.

  There was a cab outside. I had my backpack hanging off one shoulder, trying to balance the aches I’d got from sleeping badly. My shoulder and one side of my neck were stiff. My head didn’t bear thinking of, and wasn’t, in itself, thinking too well anyway. I slumped in the backseat, checked my reader, cleared it, got it ready. This was too soon, said a voice inside my head. Too early. But then, any time would have been too soon. It wouldn’t have been right whatever happened.

  We drove into a ghost town, 4:00 a.m., the huge floodlit façades angling up like screens in some weird movie palace, stretching from the shadows of the sidewalk to the darkness of the sky above. It was a different city, the busy, vibrant world of day and evening stealthily supplanted by this lost zone, this land of phantoms. A single figure tottered like a sleepwalker over the vast gulf of Columbus Circle, as if the sheer distance—­so brief during the day—­had been extended through the empty dark into a great, Sahara-­like expanse.

  On Eighth, we saw the cop cars, whirling lights that flashed and flickered on the walls. The discotheque from hell.

  “Here,” I told the driver. “This’ll do.”

  The air was chilly when I stepped outside. Or maybe it wasn’t the air. Maybe it was only me.

  Fantino said, “I don’t know what this is. Don’t know. It could be your guy, though.”

  He’d ushered us inside before I’d taken note of where we were. A shop front. Windows blacked out, so the inside seemed to close around us like a cave. They’d set up a ­couple of portable lights, since there was some kind of a power outage, but those were further in. Debris shifted underfoot. Books, I thought, then, looking down, DVDs. Bright, lurid colors. Pinks. Browns. Flesh tones. DVDs and . . . sex toys.

  “Place you know?” said Anna. “You come here?”

  “No.”

  “You are lying, I think.”

  “Strange to say, I’m not.”

  Fantino wore a hoodie and police vest. “It’s the booths in the back,” he said. “Keep walking and you’ll get to it.” He ducked around a phallus of improbable proportions, saluted a cut-­out model in a latex thong. But it was humor by rote, that’s all. There wasn’t any humor here. Nor much of anything else, either.

  I checked the reader, knowing what I’d see. Feeling it already: that dead-­weight emptiness, hollowing me out and draining away everything, making me feel that it was I who’d died, an empty corpse perambulating on a preset route, performing tasks with neither sense nor purpose, a machine, a cheap tin toy, without emotion, without meaning, without . . .

  The cop was watching me.

  “OK?”

  “Yeah. Sort of . . .”

  “Not used to crime scenes, maybe you should wait outside.”

  Even in the angled light I saw that he, too, felt the change; the flesh seemed to have fallen from his face, eyes too round, nose too prominent, his cheeks sunk in.

  “This isn’t normal, is it? Even in your experience.”

  “It’s . . .”

  I looked about me; technicians in white overalls, a ­couple more plainclothesmen standing back . . . Some of the guys had breathing gear. Initial reports said gas or bioweapons. Terrorist attacks. They weren’t using the breathing gear right now. But they had been.

  “You all feel it. Everyone. Before you see it, before you even know what’s happened, you can feel it.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, “We don’t go on feelings,” and walked towards the lit depths of the room.

  Once I passed the lamps, the light was hard. Shadows had a sharp edge. Everything was picked out in that cold, white light. It had the look of somewhere functional, impersonal; a clinic, maybe, or a bank vault. A half a dozen booths lined each wall, narrowing the central space to just a yard or so. Through an open door I glimpsed a little plastic seat screwed to the floor and a video screen.

  “It smells,” said Anna.

  “It’s a guy thing,” Fantino said, as if he’d made a joke. But no one laughed. He ushered us towards the rear of the place. We peered over the shoulders of forensics men in bright white boiler suits.

  “Three deceased. Plus the guy minding the store. He may die; we don’t know yet. It’s the three back here should interest you, though. I mean, don’t know the client group this place was catering to, but these guys . . .”

  I didn’t need to see. I’d tell myself this afterwards; I could have turned around, walked out. The description would have done. Even a photograph, if I had really had to know. I didn’t need to look at it for real. I didn’t need to see. But, well—­I wanted to be taken seriously. The one civilian among the cops. I wanted
to say, I can do this, too. I wanted to assume the role, to be the guy they always bring in on the TV shows, the specialist, the expert, the one who finds the vital clue. So I swallowed back my fear, leaned forwards, and I looked.

  It was just one body. That’s all I saw.

  It had slid down off the chair, slumped in the corner of the booth, jammed between the chair seat and the wall. On entering the place it had quite likely worn a coat of some kind, no doubt the usual shirt and pants, as well; but that was far gone now. The fabric looked like it had rotted, unravelling in a thin, colorless fringe around the chest and what might once have been the belly. I noticed a wristwatch, hanging on a shriveled stick that might perhaps have been an arm. If the watch has stopped, that should be time of death, I almost said, then thought, No, that sounds stupid in real life. Stupidness, stupidness. The watch face had been cracked into opacity in any case. I tried to sort out the whole messy bundle in my mind, to put a name to parts. The skin like orange peel. The hair, withered up as if it had been burned. That limb on which the watch strap hung; but that could not have been a hand that capped it, that ugly, twisted, vegetable thing. That wasn’t fingers and a thumb. That wasn’t flesh . . .

  “You need some air?” Fantino asked me presently.

  “No. No, I’m fine.”

  “You need some air. Go on.”

  I didn’t move for several seconds. Then he jerked his thumb, and suddenly, as if a switch had turned inside me, I found that I was stumbling off towards the exit, through the harsh lights, into the dark penumbra and the cave of sex toys; it took an age. I bumped into a pair of guys on their way in, and for a moment we had an odd kind of a ritual, hushed courtesies: “I’m sorry—­” “Hey, my fault—­” as out of place in that bleak, empty dungeon as a tea party in Auschwitz. Then I was outside. There were ­people around. Noise. Lights flickering.

  No one took any notice of me. For a moment I had the weird, unsettling notion that I somehow wasn’t there, that I’d gone in and never really come back out. That I was still back, looking at that—­that thing, and I would be in there forever, at least in some part of my mind. I watched another car pull up, a bunch of guys get out and lift a big, metal-­edged box out of the trunk. I moved a few paces, parked myself under a streetlamp. Incredibly, a ­couple of cops nearby were talking over where to have breakfast, the merits of one venue or another. Like you could even think of breakfast in a place like this.