Xavier L. Espinel
Copyright © 2026 Xavier L. Espinel
First published
Boston, Massachusetts. April 1995.
“Why am I here?”
“Oh yes, the assistant district attorney. She should arrive at any moment.”
I waited in the park across from the courthouse, circling a lamppost. Beside it stood a bench buried under old, wrinkled newspapers.
The pile was in the wrong shape. Too long. Too heavy.
Oh God. Is there someone under there?
I whispered it beneath my breath, though there was no one to hear.
Then the newspapers stirred, and an arm slid out from beneath them, slow and deliberate, as if it had been waiting for me.
“Even what you treasure most must be surrendered. It’s the only way to secure the continuing course of compassion.”
The voice rose from the bench, low and unhurried. The old man hadn’t bothered to sit up. He lay flat beneath the newspapers, and his stench reached me before his face did: a deviant bouquet of rotting garbage and sweat, the perfume of those who live in streets and alleys.
“Why do you tell me this?” I asked.
His eyes opened halfway. They held a soft glimmer and a tenderness I had seen only in the eyes of a dying man.
“Because you’ll ask.”
I stared at him, irritated by the answer and by his misery. Here was a man sprawled across a public bench, wasting space and consuming what belonged to the productive: the benches, the parks, the very air. People like him were a flesh-rotting cancer on our great society, and I made no effort to hide what I thought.
Yet the tenderness never left his eyes.
“I saw you looking desperately for an answer,” he said. “I saw you standing here alone, dressed like a man who has everything and knows nothing of why he’s alive. I saw you pace, and sit, and look at your watch, and yet you waited for no one.”
“I’m waiting for someone,” I said briskly. “That person happens to be late.”
He grinned and pushed himself up into a casual recline. There was no sarcasm in his smile, no malice. Only friendliness.
“She is not coming. Which means you wait for no one.”
She?
I had never said the person was a woman.
Men of my station do not debate hobos, and this conversation, which was about to become an argument, had already gone too far. Without a word, I turned and walked toward the courthouse.
Halfway there, something began to rise in me: a hollow, familiar feeling. I knew it. But from where?
Then it came to me. It was the emptiness that followed a courtroom victory, when I sat alone over a celebratory drink. The same emptiness that left me cold after sex, lying silent beside my girlfriend in the dark. It was the feeling of something missing, something left behind, and with every step away from the old man, the fear grew that I was abandoning something important.
I stopped on the third step of the Roxbury District Court. A cold wind bit at my face. Winter had not yet surrendered our great historic city; the park behind me was only beginning to turn green, and the air still carried the gray sting of steel.
I didn’t move. I felt paralyzed by one all-consuming thought or by the sudden halt of all thought, and silence closed over me. I had no choice but to look back.
And there he was.
He hadn’t left his bench. He was still smiling, bright and wide, and his gaze did more than suggest. It demanded that I return.
A bone-deep chill ran through me, and it was not the wind.
I tightened my gloved hand around my Louis Vuitton briefcase and, in my soft black Bally shoes, marched back toward the vagabond. But as I drew near, something peculiar began to happen.
He threw off the newspapers he had used as a blanket, and before my eyes, the hobo seemed to change. He was much younger than I had thought. His clothes, loose pants and a shirt in earthy tones, were simple and clean. And the smell had changed. The garbage was gone, the rot was gone. In their place was something intimate and safe, something that carried me to a garden, to a faint memory of flowers lining a private yard.
Which flowers?
Yes, of course. Magnolias.
By the time I reached the bench, the now strangely familiar man had risen to face me, and only then did I understand what he was. Of all the people I might have met, he was a “Cholo.”
In my native Ecuador, the word meant more than mestizo, the mix of European, African, and Incan blood that left a man somewhere between a mulatto and an Indian. A cholo was poor, and worse than poor: a person of little human value. They begged in the streets, labored for wages, or worked as servants, carrying shopping bags for their patrons and running every errand for the rich of relatively clean European descent. They were the disposable, unmissed people of misfortune.
I was of the upper middle class, from a strong, unmixed Spanish lineage. I was one of the lucky ones. In the city where I was born, families like mine lived behind tall stone walls that stood mighty as an army, protecting us from infection by the countless poor. I remember cholos trying to scale ours to reach the mangos on our trees.
Now, in Boston, there were no walls between us. Only a bench.
I tried to be polite and asked his name.
“Call me anything you want.”
“El Cholo,” I said.
The word was out before I could stop it. You don’t call a Cholo “Cholo” to his face. It’s like calling a hunchback “hunchback.” He began to laugh, but not the way a humiliated man laughs at an insult he cannot answer. He laughed like a man delighted by the creativity and perfect fit of his new name.
“El Cholo it is,” he said with enthusiasm.
Then a silence settled between us, and it was not the empty silence strangers share in moments of inadequacy. It was restful. A sparrow crossed the sky high above. Not far away, a squirrel climbed the trunk of a tree and settled on a branch. The whole scene seemed at peace.
Without warning, El Cholo gripped my arm. His eyes pierced mine.
“Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?”
I looked at him in shock. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s not important,” he answered.
But it was. It was very important. No one in the United States knew that my first name was Francis. Here I had always been known only as Xavier Armand.
I closed my eyes. I don’t know why. And the memories came, uninvited, vivid, each one carrying its own emotion.
Two empty coffins sinking into the sinister murk of parallel graves. I was eight years old, standing in the rain at my grandfather’s side, reading words cut into wet granite: In memory of the loving compassion of Marlene and Carlos Armand.
My parents had vanished on a climbing expedition on Guagua Pichincha, swallowed by a landslide. In Quechua, guagua means child. Its neighbor is Rucu Pichincha, the old man. Officials never found their bodies. I never said goodbye. Margarita, my nanny, took the call and had the good sense to phone my grandfather before telling me. He sat me in a chair, held my hand, and told me I was an orphan.
I never returned to those graves. I never let myself imagine how they had died. I blamed a mountain instead, the Incan Guagua, the Indian child, and I swore to my grandfather Isadore, who raised me as his own son, that I would never go near a volcano for as long as I lived.
Then the images raced forward. The move to the United States when I turned twelve. Prep school. Harvard. The School of Law. And at last, the life I had built: the penthouse, the car, the furnishings, the clothes, the electronic gadgetry, my girlfriend, my career.
All of it seemed wrong. Out of place. I had poured my energy into a lifestyle that, at that moment, no longer felt like mine. My practice had begun to dissatisfy me, not for lack of success but for lack of interest. My girlfriend felt less like a girlfriend and more like an abusive materialist addict, always demanding exotic trips, expensive clothes, fancy dinners, and jewelry.
Something, no, everything, was wrong, and I didn’t know why.
I opened my eyes. This stranger seemed to know my deepest secrets. How? Who was he?
I tried to focus on who I really was and what really mattered. Then I thought myself crazy for listening to a homeless madman. I yanked my arm from his grip and ran. I ran as fast as I could, as if from an armed mugger. Or a ghost.
My running grew frantic. I was agitated and disoriented, and somewhere along the way I realized I had left my briefcase behind. The streets seemed unfamiliar; for a moment I couldn’t recognize the buildings along the narrow sidewalks. I shoved people aside. I made a woman drop her groceries. I glanced back at the fallen bag and a few oranges rolling across the pavement, and terror seized me once more.
A lanky man with spiked reddish hair was staring straight at me.
He was following me.
Adrenaline took over. I sprinted, turned a corner a few blocks later, and stopped. I looked around and couldn’t remember my own address. Then, seconds later, I saw it: the Metropolitan Tower, a millionaire’s dark-glass building looming down the road. The door opened automatically as I approached, and I ran past the concierge toward the elevator.
I pushed the button again and again. Sweat dripped from my eyebrow, and dizziness crept over me. The door opened. I stepped inside and searched my pockets for the private-floor key that gave me exclusive access to my penthouse, but it was gone. I pressed the penthouse button anyway, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, the elevator began to rise.
Forty-three floors up, the door opened. I crossed the private hallway and pushed into my opulent two-floor penthouse. The dizziness grew worse, and my head throbbed. I heard sounds and glimpsed shadows. I stumbled up the stairs, clinging to the banister, until I reached my bedroom on the second floor.
I opened the door. For a moment, my eyes focused.
The room was empty.
No furniture of any kind, only soft off-white walls closing in around me. I didn’t understand. I braced myself against the nearest wall, but my legs weakened and my vision began to fade. The last thing I felt was the thump and the cold marble floor against my skin.
After that, nothing.
Boston. April 1995.
Earlier that day.
My internal clock never failed me. I woke five minutes before the alarm, switched it off, and reached for the remote. A moment later, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons filled the penthouse, carrying from the kitchen below to the master bathroom upstairs.
There were worse ways to begin a morning than showering to “Spring.”
Steam rose around me beneath the twin showerheads. I had two hours to dress and reach the office, and for once I wished I had less. Today I became a partner at the most prestigious law firm in Boston.
After bringing in Trust Mutual, I deserved it.
I had met Michael Brown, the company’s chief executive, at a New Year’s party. Another insurance client had brought him. Somewhere between the drinks and the pleasantries, the conversation turned into business. By the end of the evening, Brown wanted me to represent his company. The account was worth millions to the firm every year, and once the paperwork was signed, the senior partners offered me the partnership I had spent years working toward. I could still remember how casually I had tried to accept.
In the walk-in closet, I passed the rotating racks and went straight to the suit I had chosen long before this morning: Italian, made to measure in Milan the previous summer. An indulgence, certainly. Today it looked like an investment.
I exchanged my Rolex for the titanium Cartier, adjusted my cuffs, and studied myself in the mirror. The shave was close, the haircut precise, the suit exactly right.
I smiled. This was what success was supposed to look like.
The inheritance from my grandfather had paid for all of it. He had died five years earlier, leaving his only grandson a small fortune, and for a while I let the money sit in savings accounts. Then I found the Metropolitan Tower.
The penthouse occupied part of the top two floors: marble staircases, Boston Harbor in every window, music and light that answered the touch of a button. On my first visit, I walked from room to room imagining my things already there. I put down a third of the purchase price and financed the rest. The monthly payment was substantial, but after today I would scarcely have to think about it.
The silver Ferrari took whatever the penthouse had left. My friends called it my pride and joy. I called it an investment. I had researched its rarity and convinced myself that in ten years it would be worth far more than I had paid. That it was beautiful enough to stop people on the sidewalk was merely a bonus.
Before picking up my briefcase, I called downstairs and asked the concierge to bring it around.
It was April 1995. I was thirty-five, and everything was happening according to plan, some of it ahead of schedule. I exercised every day, watched what I ate, and spent evenings at the symphony. I was in love with Rachel, a beautiful television reporter at NBC.
I could not think of a single thing my life lacked.
Within hours, I would lose every bit of it.
Lancy, Berger, and Williams had been part of Boston’s legal establishment for generations. Its name carried weight, and I had wanted mine beside it from the moment I began imagining a career in law. Ron Williams, one of the senior partners, belonged to the family whose name was already on the door. I had no such connection. What I had was a Harvard law degree, a place near the top of my class, and ten years of making myself valuable.
Now I would be the first Hispanic partner in the firm’s history.
I was proud of that, although I knew I had moved through some doors more easily than others might have. People often assumed I was Spanish or Italian. I noticed how comfortable they were with that assumption, and I had learned to let the comfort work in my favor.
The receptionist smiled the moment she saw me.
“They’re waiting for you in the main conference room, Mr. Armand.”
Of course they were.
There were congratulations, raised glasses, and expensive drinks at an hour when we normally drank coffee. I accepted handshakes from men whose approval I had spent a decade earning. Then someone walked me upstairs to my new office.
It was enormous.
I set my briefcase on the desk and went straight to the windows. My salary had nearly tripled, with a share of the firm’s profits coming. For a long moment, I simply stood there, looking down at Boston as though it belonged to me.
Eventually, I turned away. Twenty-six cases were waiting.
All of them were insurance cases. When someone demanded money under a policy, my job was to find a reason the company didn’t have to pay. Sometimes the answer lay in the wording of the contract. Sometimes it was buried in an old medical record.
I was very good at finding it.
Three paralegals helped me search, and the best of them was Roxana.
Roxy had been at the firm longer than I had, and she had worked with me since I passed the Massachusetts bar in 1985. She knew more about the practical business of law than many of the attorneys who handed her assignments. She had once wanted to become a lawyer herself, but her father’s death and her mother’s illness had changed that. She trained as a paralegal, moved to Boston with her mother, and built a life around responsibilities she had never expected to carry.
At thirty-six, she was attractive and sharp, and still hoping her boyfriend, a police officer named Mark, would finally propose. I admired her sacrifices, although I seldom considered what they cost her.
Mostly, I knew this: when Roxy brought me something, it was worth putting down whatever I was reading.
I was reviewing Mrs. O’Brian’s accident claim when she appeared in my new office with a file in her hand.
I recognized the expression at once. She had found something.
An old medical condition. A provision in the policy. Together, they gave us grounds to argue that Trust Mutual owed Mrs. O’Brian nothing.
More than six hundred thousand dollars was at stake.
I read the passage Roxy pointed to, then read it again. Our new client would be pleased.
Clipped inside the folder was an intake sheet I had no reason to read. Single mother. Two dependent children. My eye stayed on that line a moment longer than it needed to. I had been a dependent child once, and there had been a grandfather to take me in.
Then I turned the page. Sentiment was not a billable activity.
I called Mrs. O’Brian’s attorney and arranged to meet her at eight that morning in a conference room at the courthouse. There was no reason to delay the bad news.
By seven forty-five, I was on my way.
At eight, she had not arrived. I called her mobile phone and got her answering service. I tried again a few minutes later. Nothing.
I went outside to wait.
After the quiet of the conference room, the street seemed loud. I paced the courthouse steps, checked my watch, and searched the passing faces for Eli. At twenty past eight, I crossed to the small park opposite, where a lamppost stood at the edge of the path, and I began to circle it.
That was when I noticed the bench.
A long shape lay buried beneath a heap of old newspapers. I had walked past it twice without really seeing it.
This time, I looked.
Boston. Later that day.
Cold marble.
That was the first thing I felt, the chill spreading through my shoulder blades. Then the voices came, indistinct and impatient, and the world slowly sharpened into two police officers standing over me.
“Sir, you need to leave the premises. Now.”
The other officer, a rather rotund man, kept repeating the same question. “Identification, sir. Do you have any identification?”
I got to my feet and gave them my name, patting my pockets for my wallet. I explained that this was my penthouse and that there had been some mistake.
Then I looked down at myself.
The ruin of a dark suit hung from my shoulders, stained and frayed at the cuffs. Split shoes. I had never seen any of them before.
Confusion turned into panic. I pushed past the officers and strode toward my bathroom, and they followed, shouting for me to leave immediately.
Everything was gone. The Guayasamín originals. My toiletries. The Tiffany floor lamp Rachel had given me for my birthday.
I turned on the tap, splashed water on my face, and looked up.
A stranger stared back at me from the mirror: gaunt, bearded, his hair long and tangled, his eyes older than mine had no right to be.
That man was not me.
I screamed.
Then the officers were on me. Shouts. Hands. “Face down! On the floor!” I was shoved to the tile, and cold steel closed around my wrists.
They patted me down for weapons and drugs and asked whether I was carrying either. One of them began reciting the Miranda warning from a memory that had clearly seen better days, and even then, I appreciated the irony. Miranda was one of the first cases I had studied in law school. But to these men, I was no respectable attorney. I was a drug addict, perhaps a thief, who had somehow wandered inside the impenetrable walls of the well-to-do.
At the precinct, I was booked for resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer (apparently, pushing the rotund one aside counted), and breaking and entering. They strip-searched me and locked me in a crowded holding cell. A few hours later, every charge was dropped. Even the officer I’d pushed let it go.
The explanation was almost funny. I had crashed into an open house. The realtor showing my own penthouse to prospective buyers had called the police.
My penthouse was for sale.
Why? I sat in that cell trying to work it out, and nothing made sense. It was the first of many questions I could not answer.
When they released me, the police returned my personal effects. There was almost nothing to return, only two things: a bracelet of small wooden beads I did not recognize and a folded sheet of white computer paper.
Without knowing why, I wrapped the bracelet around my left wrist. Then I unfolded the paper.
Two words, in my own handwriting.
Mt. Shasta.
I asked the officer at the front desk whether I could make a local call. She handed me the receiver and dialed the number I gave her: Rachel’s. A recording informed us that it had been disconnected.
I walked out of the station without identification or money, with the bracelet on my wrist and the folded note in my pocket. I felt like a refugee.
Hunger drove me to St. Catherine’s House, a homeless shelter a few blocks away, where at least the meal was free.
On its steps, I stopped. The night was black and cold, and a group of men huddled around a bonfire built in a metal garbage can. One of them looked up, smiled, and waved me over. I strained to make out his face in the dark. Something about the way he stood unsettled me.
I kept walking.
Inside the shelter, a strange feeling came over me: I knew the place. I had never set foot in a homeless shelter in my life, yet the sights, the sounds, even the smells seemed familiar, and I couldn’t shake it.
Standing in the food line, I was struck by an absurd sense of freedom. No mortgage. No insurance premiums. No car payments, no tolls, no status symbols, no appearances, no future. To be open to whatever the moment brought, without a worry in the world, seemed a life of indescribable luxury.
The feeling lasted until someone handed me a bowl of watery chicken soup. My stomach, it turned out, was still pining for beef Wellington and baked Alaska flambé. Not to mention a long hot shower and fresh clothes.
I carried the bowl to an empty table near the wall and sat down. One leg of the table was shorter than the others; every time I moved my arm, a little broth slipped over the rim.
“Here. Lift your end.”
A young woman stood opposite me, holding a folded piece of cardboard. I raised the table slightly, and she crouched to push it beneath the offending leg.
“Try that.”
I rested my elbows on the table. Nothing moved.
“An improvement,” I said.
“Best table in the place now. Mind if I sit?”
I shook my head.
She set down her bowl and tucked a worn duffle bag beneath her chair. She looked about twenty, perhaps a little older, with pale blonde hair gathered into several loose braids and golden freckles across her nose. Her dark-blue sweater read “I LOVE NEW YORK.” There was a streak of white paint near one cuff.
For a while, we ate without speaking. Around us, chairs scraped the floor and someone at the serving counter called for more bowls. I was grateful that she had no immediate interest in how I had arrived here.
“You’ve forgotten something,” she said at last.
I looked down at myself.
“Bread. They keep it at the end of the counter.”
“I didn’t see it.”
She held out a paper napkin with two rolls on it.
“Take one.”
I hesitated.
“I can get another,” she said.
“Thank you.”
The roll was hard at the edges, but I had eaten half of it before remembering my manners.
“My name is Xavier.”
“Claire.”
She smiled and dipped her bread into the soup.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
The moment I said it, I heard how it sounded.
“That came out badly.”
“A little.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She smiled again. “A few nights. Long enough to learn about the table.”
I glanced at the bag beneath her chair.
“Are you staying here?”
“For now.”
There was nothing embarrassing or defiant in her answer. She said it as casually as someone telling me which hotel she had chosen.
“I came east for a job at a little inn in Maine,” she continued. “They were getting ready to reopen. Reception, cleaning, whatever needed doing. There was supposed to be a room included.”
“Supposed to be?”
“The owner ran out of money. Unfortunately, he waited until I’d painted two bedrooms to mention it.”
She rubbed the white mark on her sleeve with her thumb.
“I came down to Boston because I thought finding another job would be easier here. A room costs a lot more when it doesn’t come with the work.”
“He didn’t pay you?”
“A little. Most of it went on somewhere to sleep.”
“Did you have anything in writing?”
Claire stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth.
“What?”
“The arrangement. The wages, the accommodation. Did he put any of it in writing?”
“A letter. Why?”
“You should keep it.”
She considered me for a moment.
“You sound very certain about that.”
It was the first thing I had felt certain about since leaving the police station.
“Keep the letter,” I said.
“All right.”
She went back to her soup without asking me to explain myself.
“Will you stay in Boston?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I lived in San Francisco for a while. I’ve been thinking about heading west again.”
“Another job?”
“Eventually. First I’d like to stop spending the money I’m supposed to be saving.”
I looked around the room. A man at the next table was carefully wrapping half his bread in a napkin and slipping it into his coat pocket.
Until that evening, I would have assumed I knew how people ended up in a place like this. Claire’s explanation was uncomfortably ordinary.
“What about you?” she asked. “Do you have somewhere to go tonight?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing useful came out.
There had been an apartment. There had been a woman whose telephone number I knew by heart. I could have described my bedroom down to the grain of the marble floor, but I could not tell Claire where I would sleep.
“I’m not sure.”
She put down her spoon.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know that either.”
A cart struck the edge of a nearby chair with a sharp metallic bang. I flinched, and my sleeve caught the bowl. Claire steadied it before it tipped.
Her eyes fell briefly to the beads around my wrist. Her hand remained against the bowl for a moment, then she withdrew it.
“There’s water by your elbow,” she said.
I took a drink. She waited.
“Something happened to me,” I said. “I can remember things, but they don’t seem to belong to the life I’m living.”
It sounded worse aloud.
“This morning, or what I thought was this morning, I knew where I lived. I knew what I was supposed to do.”
“And now?”
I looked down at my clothes.
“Now I’m here.”
“Is there anyone you can call?”
“I tried. The number doesn’t work.”
She nodded slowly.
I expected more questions. My address. My family. Whether I had been drinking. Instead, she picked up her spoon and gave me a moment to eat.
That small courtesy nearly undid me.
“There is one thing,” I said.
I took the folded paper from my pocket. I had opened and closed it so often that one corner had begun to tear. Claire waited while I smoothed it against the table.
“Mount Shasta,” she read.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“It’s in Northern California. I’ve been through that part of the state.”
“What is it? A town?”
“There’s a town by that name. And a mountain. A volcano, actually.”
I stared at the two words.
A volcano. As a boy, I had sworn never to go near one.
“Xavier?”
“It’s my handwriting.”
“Do you remember writing it?”
“No.”
I turned the page over, although I already knew there was nothing on the other side.
“I had it with me. That and this bracelet. Nothing else.”
“Perhaps you wrote it so you wouldn’t lose the name.”
“I seem to have lost everything except the name.”
She let that pass without trying to make it sound less terrible.
“How far is it?” I asked.
“From here? Nearly across the country.”
“I have to get there.”
She leaned back slightly.
“Tonight?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
I looked again at the words, trying to summon a road, a building, a face. The effort produced only a dull pressure behind my eyes.
“I can’t explain it.”
“You don’t have to explain it all right now, man.”
“What if there’s nothing there?”
“There’s a town,” she said. “We could start by asking.”
I looked up.
“We?”
“I could come with you.”
She said it quietly, leaving the suggestion between us.
“To Mount Shasta?”
“I was already thinking about California. Going with someone would be better than going alone.”
“You barely know me.”
“We’ve repaired a table together. That’s a start.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
“Look, I don’t have a car or enough money for two tickets across the country. It would take some figuring out. But I know how to travel cheaply, and you look as though you could use some company.”
“You’d go all that way with a stranger?”
“I’d go west with someone who offered to help me get my wages back before asking me for anything.”
“I didn’t actually offer.”
“No. You were very careful about that.”
For the first time that evening, I laughed.
Claire smiled, but she did not press me. I considered what little I could offer her: no money, no transport, and a destination I could not explain. Yet the thought of her getting up and leaving was suddenly harder to bear than the thought of the journey.
“I would like you to come,” I said.
“All right.”
“Provided you understand that I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“I figured.”
She nudged my bowl toward me.
“Finish your soup. We can work out the first part while you eat.”
I picked up my spoon. The soup had gone lukewarm, but I was hungry again. Across the table, Claire pulled her bag closer with her foot and settled into her chair.
Two words kept pulsing in my mind like a heartbeat.
Mt. Shasta.
Boston. April 1995.
Finally, there she was.
Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Grant stood beside the courthouse’s main door, no doubt wondering whether I had dropped the ball on the O’Brian case. I crossed the street almost at a run. I had waited long enough to deliver the bad news, and I intended to enjoy it.
Everyone in Boston called her Eli. Outside the District Attorney’s office, she had made a name for herself as a pro bono champion of indigent insurance plaintiffs, taking on the city’s largest and best-represented insurers for nothing. Plaintiffs’ attorneys often took these cases on contingency, collecting a fee only if the insurer paid. Eli didn’t even take the fee. She covered the incidental costs and recouped them only if she won.
For years, she had seemed to bring half her cases against our firm’s clients, as if on a personal crusade. She had lost many of the big ones. It never slowed her down.
Elizabeth Grant was the most aggressive, no-nonsense attorney I had ever met. In all the years we had gone head to head, in court and out, I had never seen her smile or say a comforting word to anyone. She wore her sobriety like a uniform: dark slacks and silk blouses, short severe hair, a black Lincoln Town Car. She was not a woman you befriended, and she was worse as an enemy. I had kept her at arm’s length and treated her professionally, most of the time. But there were days when our rivalry turned ugly and we traded insults and condescension.
“Hi, Eli. How’s Legal Services treating you these days?” I said, with slight sarcasm. I knew she had taken the O’Brian case pro bono.
“Not as well as you’re treated, since I can’t afford a ten-thousand-dollar Armani, a playboy penthouse, or a custom-made Ferrari. But you know what, law-boy? At least I can look in the mirror in the morning. Something I’m sure you have trouble with.”
“Hey, I’m only doing my job, babe. It’s not my fault I do it better than you.”
“Enough bullshit, Xavier. What’s the deal?”
“That’s just it, sweetheart. There is no deal. Your client has a history of stroke, and I have records from two different hospitals to prove it. The accident had nothing to do with her recent stroke. In my view, and I’m sure in the court’s, she doesn’t even qualify as an eggshell plaintiff. My client won’t cover her medical bills or pay for pain and suffering. Simply put, she’s on her own.”
“Asshole.” She said it as if the matter were personal. “Mrs. O’Brian is in critical condition at City Hospital. She has no health insurance and no money of her own, and you hand me this?”
“Hey, hey, calm down, babe. I don’t make the law. I just read it.” I smirked.
She pulled a card from her jacket and pressed it into my hand. “Here’s my new business card. Call me if you ever gain some compassion. And if you don’t settle this one, I’ll see you in court.”
She walked away with measured steps.
I knew I had her. She had nothing left but the “I’ll see you in court” routine. “I wouldn’t recommend it!” I shouted after her. “I’ll ask for attorney’s fees, and the way things look, you may have to pay them out of your own pocket!”
I almost laughed as I watched her pick up her pace and fade into the distance.
I whistled softly as I walked back to my car, climbed in, and breathed in the smell of leather while Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in C minor filled the imported Alpine stereo.
Two weeks later, the judge granted my motion for summary judgment on Mrs. O’Brian’s claim. Our client, my firm, and our staff all knew the same thing: I, the golden boy of Boston insurance defense, could do no wrong.
Three days after my victory, Eli called.
“I hope you’re happy, Xavier.” Her voice was low and controlled, which was worse than shouting. “Mrs. O’Brian went into a coma last night. She couldn’t afford the treatment she needed. What am I supposed to tell her children, Xavier?”
The line went dead.
I sat there with the receiver in my hand, staring at the wall where my titles, degrees, and awards faced me in eerie silence.
Boston. January 1995.
The chandelier came first.
Crystal, enormous, it hung directly over the center of an oval, two-level room whose oak floors circled inward toward a small dance floor, where only the bravest members attempted the occasional waltz or tango. Silk curtains in faint turquoise draped the walls in one elliptical curve after another. In a corner, on a small triangular stage, a string quintet worked its way through the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic masters.
The exclusivity began outside, at a padded, medieval-looking double door of solid silver, as intimidating as it was intriguing. Two thick crimson ropes ran down a flight of marble stairs to a pair of silver posts, where a man in a tuxedo ordered another to open the gate, but only for those who carried an engraved card bearing a single word, “Member,” followed by their full name.
Inside was a small foyer, where a stylish and notoriously multilingual concierge took your coat, your umbrella, your briefcase, anything you cared to leave behind. Then the final double doors swung open, and a host led you reverently to your reserved table.
Each table was draped in white and pale green silk, with exotic fresh flowers at its center. The chairs were Argentine leather, as smooth as the first-class seats of a jumbo jet and nearly as wide.
There were no more than forty tables, perfectly spaced for privacy, and no more than two hundred members at any one time: heads of state, senators, Boston’s mayor, and a lucky few whose reputations and wealth earned them a yearly card. And, of course, my dear, overly ambitious Rachel, who had fought nearly two years to get us in and had finally paid a hefty price for the privilege.
Her local fame as an anchor at Boston’s NBC affiliate wasn’t nearly enough for a thirty-year-old to whom the world was never enough. I admired my sweetheart, even if she wasn’t always that sweet or didn’t always have much of a heart. She had raised the Type A personality to an almost unreachable level.
She ordered her usual glass of Château Haut-Brion, 1959, took a sip from the crystal, and said, “I want to go national.”
I looked at her, confused by the out-of-nowhere remark.
“Yes, love. I want to—” She stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was intense and decisive. “No. I don’t want to go national. I am going national, before the year is over, no matter what it takes. All I need is a big story, something that puts me in the national, even the international, arena. Damn it, my research team isn’t doing its job. By now I should have had pictures of our president having tea at the White House with Saddam Hussein.”
She went on. “I started as an investigative reporter, you know, and I was great at it. I’m not the station’s head anchor because of a pretty face.”
Fire burned in those green eyes. She was right, of course. She held a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University, and she had climbed the ladder rung by rung without a single stumble.
I remembered the first time I met her.
It was a hot summer afternoon. I had left my jacket in my car in the firm’s private garage and walked across the street to the debut celebration of a new theater, a party to which mostly attorneys and city officials had been invited. After a week of billing more than sixty hours, I had hoped for a respite. Instead, I found shoving crowds and endless chatter.
An orchestra played at the theater’s entrance, and an open bar offered everything from French champagne to German beer. I took a glass of red wine and waited for the mayor to cut the ceremonial ribbon.
Before I could take a sip, a petite, porcelain-skinned woman with short dark hair and green eyes stopped beside me. I was instantly struck by her beauty and her confident stance, and by a nagging feeling that I had seen her before. So, I summoned my courage.
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to intrude, but do I know you?”
She smiled, pleased to be recognized, and said nothing. Her friend answered for her.
“Are you kidding? This is Rachel Tullier, lead anchor at Boston’s NBC affiliate.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Tullier,” I said.
Rachel barely glanced my way. She walked off through the crowd toward the main platform.
At the microphone, she introduced herself, and the crowd greeted her with thunderous applause and a standing ovation, as if she were a movie star. Her friend, a woman in her mid-forties, leaned toward me and whispered, “I can’t believe you don’t know who she is. I’m Martha Rosenberg, Ms. Tullier’s personal assistant.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m an attorney. I have little time for television, and when I do watch, I limit myself to CNN.”
“Well, you’d better start paying attention to Ms. Tullier. She’s going to be one of America’s top broadcasters.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, listening to Rachel’s charismatic speech. Whatever else she was, the woman knew how to captivate an audience.
When the speech ended, Rachel left the podium, spoke privately with Martha, and stepped into an NBC limousine. Martha came back and pressed a card into my hand.
“She’s expecting your call.”
Then she climbed into the limo, and it pulled away.
She’s expecting my call? I couldn’t imagine why Rachel Tullier would want to hear from an insurance lawyer.
Back at my penthouse, I changed into comfortable clothes, sat on the leather sofa, and studied the card, undecided between calling and dropping it into the garbage compactor. I turned on the television. And there she was, in a pre-recorded newscast. One look at that model’s face settled the matter. I dialed.
“Hi, this is Xavier Armand. Your assistant gave me your private card and asked me to call. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Rachel paused, almost derisively. “The question isn’t what you can do for me, beauty. It’s what I can do for you.”
Beauty? Who in the world calls a man “beauty”?
“Would you like to have dinner with me?” she went on. “My place, in about an hour?”
Her boldness stunned me, and nothing excited me more than a woman in charge.
“Sure. Where do you live?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll have someone pick you up in an hour.”
She hung up.
An hour later, to the minute, as if timed by an atomic clock, a black stretch limousine pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Tower, and the concierge announced that a chauffeur was waiting. I came down in a white silk shirt and light-brown slacks and was shown into the back seat.
“Hi, I’m Xavier. May I ask where you’re taking me?”
The chauffeur said nothing. He raised the dark glass partition and left me alone. Moments later, the limo’s phone began to ring.
“Hello?” I answered, a little uneasy.
“Relax, beauty. I’m not kidnapping you. Well, perhaps I am, but it’s the kind of kidnapping you won’t regret. And don’t worry, there’s no torture involved. Unless you want there to be.”
She hung up. Twenty minutes later, an intercom crackled to life. “We’re here,” said the driver. “Wait until I open your door.”
Beyond the tinted windows I could see only darkness, punctuated by red and green lights flashing less than fifty feet away. When the door opened, I saw a vast expanse of pavement under fluorescent lights and, facing me, a small private jet with its stairs lowered. Rachel stood at the open hatch, waving.
“Is this your private plane?” I asked, settling into what looked like a state-of-the-art living room.
“Of course not. It’s a perk from NBC. They lent it to me for the weekend, and I thought it would be nice to have breakfast at a Parisian bistro in the company of a handsome Latin lover.”
I was speechless. “Have you ever heard of taking things slow?” I said, edging away.
“Of course I have. But life is too short, and I have no intention of taking this slowly.”
She moved closer, handed me a glass of champagne, and led me to the back of the plane, where an enormous all-white bedroom waited behind closed doors. The lights were dim. The bed was a low, circular double king.
Rachel slipped into a skin-tight red negligee, locked the door, and took charge of every aspect of what happened next.
That night, and the breakfast in Paris four thousand miles away, were only the beginning of a roller-coaster relationship with the uniquely capable Rachel Tullier.
From then on, we were nearly inseparable, and before long, seriously involved. But Rachel had no plans to stay in Boston. She was determined to reach the top: NBC headquarters in New York City. So we lived on standby, as far as any long-term commitment was concerned. She was waiting for one big story to launch her into stardom.
Little did I know that one day I would be the one to hand her what she coveted most: the biggest story of her life.
Boston. The evening of the encounter.
Claire had already finished her soup. She tapped her spoon against the table.
“What are you waiting for, an invitation from Governor Schwarzenegger? Let’s go to California already.”
I stopped chewing. “Governor Schwarzenegger? Arnold Schwarzenegger? The actor?”
“Yes, the actor. Formerly Mr. Universe, currently Governor of California.” She frowned. “What’s your problem, man?”
Governor of California.
My spoon clattered into the bowl. It dawned on me, and I could not believe how careless I had been. I jumped from my chair and strode through the cafeteria looking for a newspaper, a clock with a date, a calendar. Anything. There was nothing.
I went back to Claire and took her by the arms. Her blue eyes widened.
“Claire, this may sound insane, but what’s today’s date?”
She studied my face, and for a moment she seemed genuinely afraid. When she answered, she spoke slowly.
“It’s March twentieth. Two thousand nine.”
My hands fell away from her arms. I sank into the chair.
I looked down at my hands. They were an older man’s hands, veined and weathered, and they were trembling. It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. Time had skipped fourteen years. The bearded stranger in the mirror of my penthouse had not been a man of thirty-five, but a man of nearly fifty. And Rachel, the woman I had once loved, was probably in New York by now. Of course the number had been dead.
But how? What had happened to me during those lost years?
For the first time, El Cholo’s question made sense, and it rang in my ears.
Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?
That was the question that had terrified me. The question that needed an answer at any cost. And I was beginning to suspect the answer waited three thousand miles away, at the foot of a volcano.
“You frightened me,” Claire said.
She hadn’t moved. Her voice was quiet, and there was no anger in it, only a line, drawn clearly.
“Next time, just ask me. I’m listening.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t hold you like that again.” I drew a breath. “Claire, I’ve lost fourteen years of my life. I don’t know how or why. I have no money, no credit cards, no car, and everyone I once knew is probably gone. I can’t get to Mount Shasta on my own. But if you would rather not come with me now, I’ll understand.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then something in her face softened.
“I hear you, man. Everyone I know is gone, too.”
“So you’ll still come?”
“Of course I’ll come. Do you really think I’d miss hanging out with an amnesiac on a crazy trip up a volcano? Not in your life.” She grinned.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. Now I’m going to shower and change, and then we’ll plan our escape.”
“Our escape?” She laughed nervously. “Man, the country may be in a serious recession, but it’s still free. All we have to do is find transport and walk. Besides, this isn’t an escape. It’s an adventure. Some people collect baseball cards. I collect adventures.”
At the information desk, I asked for a shower and a way to shave. The staff gave me soap, razors, and a change of clothes, and pointed me toward the showers. When I came out, in clean blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, a young man waiting beside a chair asked if I wanted a haircut. I nodded and sat while he clipped away my long, tangled hair.
“All done,” he said. “You look like a million dollars, mister.”
I walked to the mirror, and there he was again, the man I used to know: the chiseled face, the full lips, the deep dark eyes, and seven thousand dollars of dental work that had left me with permanently straight, white teeth.
I found Claire at our table, staring at her empty bowl.
“Claire, are you ready?”
She glanced up without much interest. Then her jaw dropped.
“Man, is that you?” Her eyes traveled from my head to my shoes and back again, and lingered a second longer than they needed to. Then she looked away and picked at her sleeve. “You clean up good. I thought you were a movie star or something.”
I noticed that I had noticed.
“Thank you, Claire. But please do me a favor and don’t call me ‘man.’ My name is Xavier.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, let’s get moving, X-man.”
I suspected that was as close as she would ever come to my name. I let it go and headed for the door. When I stepped outside and looked back, she was running to catch up.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re definitely new at this, X. Look what I got.”
She opened a duffle bag stuffed with cans: beans, soups, some kind of food supplement.
“Good idea,” I said.
She grabbed my hand and nearly dragged me down the street. “Our first stop,” she shouted, “the C-train!”
Her hand was small and rough with cold, and she didn’t let go until we reached the tracks.
I had no idea what she was talking about. Later, I would wish I had never found out. We jogged for nearly forty minutes before we saw it, rusty and endless, parked between tangled arrays of railroad track: the infamous C-train. The night was moonless and bitter.
“What time is it?” I asked.
Claire pulled back her baggy sleeve and checked her Disney watch. “Eleven forty-five. We have to get on soon. It leaves in fifteen minutes.” She squeezed sideways between two coupled wagons, scanning the yard for guards.
“Wait. We’re going to stow away on this thing?”
“Oh, sorry, your highness. I forgot to get tickets for the Orient Express.”
I was in no position to demand a ticket, but this was insane. It wasn’t even a passenger train.
“Claire, may I ask you something?”
“You may,” she said, a little annoyed.
“Why do you call it the C-train?”
“Because it’s a ‘Cargo Train,’” she said bluntly. “It leaves Boston at midnight, and if we don’t get caught, we might make it as far as Chicago before we change transport.”
She slid open the door of one of the wagons, tossed in her duffle bag, and climbed inside. Then she turned and held out her arm. I gripped it, and she pulled me up after her.
It was colder inside than out. Wooden crates were stacked into a labyrinth of narrow passages, and deep in the maze we found a hollow formed by huge boxes on both sides and one overhead. We crouched there, side by side.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside.
Claire’s hand found mine in the dark and held it. A flashlight beam swept across the open doorway, crawled along the crates, and stopped. I did not breathe. Her fingers tightened around mine.
“Anybody in there?”
Silence. The beam hovered, then slid away. The footsteps moved on down the line, and somewhere ahead a door rolled shut.
Neither of us let go until they were gone.
A whistle shrieked. The wagon jolted, groaned, and began to roll. Boston slid away behind us.
The cold arrived all at once. Within minutes my body began to shake violently. It felt far below zero. My teeth chattered so hard that I couldn’t speak.
Claire cracked a glow-stick and shook it. A pale green light bloomed between us, and in it I saw her studying me with a frown.
“Okay. Come here.”
Before I could answer, she pulled me against her and wrapped her arms around me.
“Don’t get any ideas, X-man,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m just keeping you from going hypothermic on me.”
“No ideas gotten,” I said. “And thanks.” I held her closer.
Somewhere between Boston and the rest of my life, the shaking stopped. For the first time since I had woken on that marble floor, I wasn’t cold.
And I wasn’t alone.
New York City. Early 1995.
The Empire State Building had stood for more than six decades as a monument to engineering and a beacon of American financial power. And on its entire thirty-first floor, Michael Leonard Brown kept his secrets.
The company Brown had incorporated in New York was called Securities Enterprises, Inc. On paper, it was an international stock brokerage. On paper, it was also owned by a foreign conglomerate. Brown had made certain his own name appeared nowhere in the filings.
The floor itself was plain: four large offices on each side of the building and, facing the south end of the city, one enormous corner suite. When Brown was in town, the suite was his.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission is on our tail again,” said Epstein.
Epstein was Brown’s most trusted personal attorney, and he had carried the news down the hall on foot rather than trust it to a phone.
Brown turned from the window. At two hundred and fifty pounds, he turned slowly, and the room seemed to feel it. “We have a lot of people on the payroll. Is there anyone we can own inside the SEC?”
“Since the new chairman took over at the SEC, Washington has been going over questionable transactions with a magnifying glass,” Epstein said carefully. “And you ordered our last insider fired.”
Epstein knew that in Brown’s vocabulary, “fired” meant “murdered.” He kept the list of Brown’s professional assassins in the back of his mind, the way another man keeps the number for a doctor.
“Then damn it, keep trying!” Brown’s face flushed and his hands shook with rage.
A long moment passed. Then he lowered himself into his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm.
“It isn’t just the SEC, Epstein. The whole thing is starting to collapse.”
Brown swiveled to face his favorite view of the city. Epstein moved closer and spoke in a low, soothing voice.
“Give me three months to transfer the assets, and we close up shop, just as we discussed.”
Brown knew he was right. It would take at least three months to unload his illegally held shares in the insurance companies he controlled across the country. He had built shell corporation after shell corporation to buy them and keep a majority stake. His largest holding was Trust Mutual.
Brown also sat as Trust Mutual’s CEO, and he steered it toward profit by denying most large claims and by manipulating the legal system, buying and coercing anyone in authority. With his other companies, once he had pushed the stock high enough, he sold into the inflated market and walked away before the inevitable collapse. He had done it again and again. He had nearly perfected the craft.
But his skill and his luck were running out, and he knew it.
The office door opened. A tall woman entered carrying a silver tray with a glass of water and a pill.
His mood stabilizer.
Brown suffered from severe and dangerous mood swings. The medication had tamed the depression, but it had never tamed the temper.
“Thank you, Ms. Anderson,” he said. He swallowed the pill and drained the glass.
Years had passed, but Epstein had never forgotten what Brown did to Alfred Matos. Matos had stolen from one of Brown’s companies. Brown found him in an alley. When it was over, there was little left of the man’s face on the pavement. No one crossed Michael Brown, and Matos had learned that too late.
And Matos was not the worst of it. At fourteen, Brown had drowned his own mother in the family swimming pool. She had been harsh with him, physically and verbally abusive, and as Brown himself once told Epstein, she got what she deserved. He held her under until she stopped moving. Then he kept swimming beside her body, and he played in that water for hours.
Epstein feared him. But Epstein had learned to walk on eggshells without breaking them.
When the door closed behind Ms. Anderson, Brown looked back at him.
“Interpol. The SEC. The CIA. They’re all getting too close to our business.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s close up shop, Epstein. Move everything to the offshore accounts.”
Epstein looked like a man whose burden had just been lifted. He nodded again and again.
“A wise decision. We’ll start winding down from up here, as planned.” At the door, he turned. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Brown. Consider it done.”
“Good.” Brown rose and followed him toward the door. “I have a plane to catch to Boston. We’ll keep in touch about our progress.”
He walked out of his office and went straight to the elevator. He did not look back at the view he loved.
Within three months, there would be nothing left on the thirty-first floor to find.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Richard Lancy, the firm’s senior partner, stuck his head through my office door and asked for a private word in deposition room number one.
Deposition rooms had no windows, no phone lines, no teleconferencing equipment. They were practically hermetically sealed. It did not occur to me until much later to wonder why the partners had chosen one.
By the time I got there, Lancy, Berger, and Williams were seated around the table. With broad smiles, they congratulated me once more on the Trust Mutual account and the recent O’Brian ruling. Then Lancy slid a thick file across the table.
“The Morales case,” he said. “You’ll handle it to the exclusion of everything else.”
It was the biggest case Trust Mutual had ever sent us, and the client wanted it handled with care. The Moraleses were a couple who had died tragically in a car accident. The beneficiaries of their life insurance policy were their twin children, both of them seven years old. The policy’s double-indemnity clause, applied to each parent, put the payout at twelve million dollars.
Trust Mutual did not want to pay it.
My job was to prove in court that the accident had been no accident, but a suicide, staged by the Moraleses to leave their children a small fortune. In other words, the client wanted me to prove fraud and keep two orphans from seeing a dime.
“Is there any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Moraleses?” I asked.
“Not that we know of, Xavier, except that they were almost broke before the accident,” Lancy said. “But this is a big one, and Trust Mutual wants you on it. We couldn’t agree more. After all, you’re the insurance loophole master.”
He lit one of his illegally imported Cuban cigars. The stench filled the sealed room, and I started coughing as he went on.
“Work your magic, kid. We’re counting on you. Just get it done.”
He pressed the file into my hands and rose, and the other partners rose with him. At the door, Lancy turned back, smiling.
“Win this one, and I can guarantee a bonus that will make your head spin. Heck, you may even decide to trade the Ferrari for a Lamborghini.” His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “One more thing. Keep this case under wraps. We don’t want the more senior attorneys getting jealous. And remember, Mickey is at your disposal.”
Then he shut the door and left me alone with the smoke.
I opened the file. By the time I reached the last page, the firm I had worshipped looked different.
To the historic city of Boston, our old and venerable firm was a palace of justice, a place where fortunes and lives were made and destroyed, and where power and egos soared. For the first time, I saw it for what it was: a brutal world of greed and immorality. Of course the big three had chosen a windowless room. A meeting that demanded this kind of treachery, stealing from helpless children and leaving two orphans indigent, could only happen behind a sealed door.
I felt sick.
There had been countless cases where I had stripped honest people of their sense of security under an insurance policy. But I had never done it without a line of disclaiming fine print or an honest loophole to point to.
The case itself was simple. The Moraleses had taken out a life insurance policy when they married, twenty years earlier, naming each other as beneficiaries. After the twins were born, they added the children, in the unlikely event that both parents died. The policy wasn’t new. The amount of coverage had never changed.
There was no reason to believe they had planned fraud, and I could find nothing within the four corners of the contract to keep those children from collecting. When I finished reviewing the file, the answer was the same: no evidence, no precedent, no court ruling, no statute, no congressional comment that could make a case against the claim.
The men who paid my extravagant salary knew exactly what was in that file. They expected me to do what they wouldn’t do themselves: pull the trigger on two innocent children. They had asked me to fabricate a story, to doctor the evidence, to spin a lie so convoluted that a court would lose its way.
And yet it was my sworn duty to represent my client zealously, whatever the moral cost. I held on to one belief: the law could be bent, but not broken.
My office door opened, and Roxana came in to ask whether I wanted the usual team for the Morales case.
“Roxy, we don’t need a team for this one,” I said. “We need the hit man.”
She understood immediately what I meant. She also knew I had never once used him. She looked at me, puzzled, while I mumbled, “Lancy suggested it.”
“Should I have Mickey called?”
I looked grim, and I nodded.
Mickey, the hit man, was an anonymous dirtbag, perhaps a private detective. No one knew. He was used only as a last resort. The firm had kept him on retainer for years for his uncanny ability to find dirt where none existed, even on the most pious of people. The rumor was that if Mickey had been alive in Christ’s day, he would have dug up enough to convict Jesus himself.
Aboard the C-train. March 2009.
The train rattled west through the dark, and Claire fell asleep against my chest.
Sleep would not come for me. The wagon shuddered over every uneven stretch of track, and I lay awake, afraid to move. Her hand rested on mine. I could feel her slow, steady breath. The glow-stick she had shaken earlier had faded to a pale green, just enough to keep us from being blind inside the steel belly of the train.
I looked down at her hands. Her fingers were thin and pale, her small nails painted in mismatched colors: some yellow, some blue, others red. The polish was worn, chipped in places to show the natural pink beneath.
I studied her while she slept. Her hair met her face along a meandering border, and she was a true blonde, with no dark roots at all. A few long strands shone almost silver in the glow. Golden freckles dusted her pointed nose, and her closed eyes were fringed with long, nearly transparent lashes. She wore no makeup, and she looked beautifully natural. She was petite, no taller than five feet, and she weighed almost nothing against me. I wondered whether she had always been so slender, or whether she had been skipping meals while she looked for work in Boston.
If she knew who I was, or rather who I had been, a gluttonous bourgeois attorney who made his living denying claims to people like her, she would never have become my friend.
Holding her, I realized something else. Though I couldn’t recall the past fourteen years, I sensed that I hadn’t been close to a woman in a very long time, and that I had forgotten the warmth and completeness only a caring woman can give a man.
“Is everything okay?” Her voice was thick with sleep. Her watery blue eyes opened slowly.
“Yes. I just can’t sleep.”
She didn’t move away. After a while, she spoke again, softly.
“I’ve been wondering about something. You never told me who you were. Before.”
“A lawyer.”
“Huh.” A pause. “I would’ve guessed worse.”
“It may have been worse.”
She waited. I could have told her about the penthouse, the Ferrari, the woman on the phone who had hung up on me with Mrs. O’Brian’s name still ringing in my ears. I didn’t.
“Not tonight,” I said.
“Okay.” She settled her head back against my shoulder. “Someday, then.”
No one I could remember had ever let me off the hook that easily. I noticed it, and I noticed what it did to something in my chest.
“You’re definitely new at this, aren’t you?” She patted my chest gently.
“New at what?”
“At being a hobo. Taking uninvited rides on freight trains with a woman holding on to you.” She lifted her head and looked straight at me, smiling.
I had no answer. I stayed as still as a statue as her face came closer.
“Xavier,” she said, using my name instead of X-man. “Don’t be afraid. I promise I won’t bite.” Her voice dropped. “Is this okay?”
I nodded. I could not have spoken if I’d tried.
She kissed me softly, her lips warm against mine, and for a moment I forgot the train, the cold, and the missing years. Then I kissed her back.
Then she drew back, just far enough to look at me. Something crossed her face that I could not read. It was not regret. It was closer to restraint, as if she were holding a door shut with her whole weight.
“That’s all,” she whispered. “For now. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She laid her head back on my chest. The cold, which had nearly killed me an hour earlier, stopped mattering. As far as I could remember, it was the first time in over a decade that I had been held like that, and I had no way to prove otherwise and no wish to.
The glow-stick faded to a gentle luminescence, and we lay together in its twilight. I held her through the night. At last my exhaustion won, and I forgot that I was a stowaway on a cargo train and fell into a deep sleep. The wagon rocked and wobbled, its rumble a steady counterpoint. We rode that way through all of the next day and into a second night, sharing a can of cold soup and sleeping whenever the cold allowed.
Then, abruptly, a deafening screech tore through the wagon.
The floor lurched. The rumble died.
The train had stopped, and nothing about it felt right.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Roxana’s request set the wheels in motion.
The call had to be made from one phone: Norman Ross’s. The number was a secret cell-phone number, stored in a hidden file on the office manager’s computer under a single name: “Mickey.” The message was standard, and only one person at the firm was cleared to leave it.
“We need to meet,” Ross said into the handset.
Then he hung up and waited. Mickey would call back from a blocked line and set the time and place. The hit man met no one and spoke to no one except Ross himself.
Ross was not an attorney. He ran the secretarial and paralegal staff and, more importantly, resolved the endless internal problems that surfaced each day in a firm of more than one hundred lawyers. He was possibly the most powerful man in the building, second only to Richard Lancy. His power came from what he knew: the private affairs and secret troubles that flowed to him from every department. What gave him real leverage was his role as go-between, standing between what the attorneys needed and the people who supplied it.
Dealing with the hit man gave Ross access to the firm’s most sensitive files. He knew the dangerous details of his attorneys’ work product, details that, if revealed, could get most of the firm disbarred.
Nearly an hour later, the blocked line rang on Ross’s direct number. A monotone, digitally distorted voice gave its orders without a greeting and without waiting for an answer.
“In two hours. Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Third pew.”
The line clicked dead.
Ross hung up and looked at Roxana, who stood in his doorway. “Tell your boss I’ll need a copy of the file in less than two hours.”
Roxy relayed the message to me. Handing a client’s file to an outsider was an unequivocal breach of attorney-client confidentiality. I knew it. And somehow I found the nerve to do the unthinkable: I opened a drawer, took out our copy of the file, and set it in front of her.
“Are you sure about this?” Roxy asked, searching my eyes for an answer.
“Yes, Roxy. It’s beyond our control now.”
Once Mickey had set a meeting, that meeting could not be broken.
I don’t know what possessed me to follow Ross to the cathedral. I suppose I felt I had a right to see where my file was going. Guilt gnawed at me. It was one thing to bend the law. I had just broken it.
I tailed him without being noticed. Inside, the Gothic nave was dark, lit only by the glow of candles. I slipped behind a column near the entrance and watched Ross walk toward the front and sit in the third pew, beside a figure in a dark raincoat and hat.
Who wears a hat inside a church?
Mickey did, of course. Presumably to keep anyone but his contact from catching a glimpse of his face.
Ross handed over the file and left, faster than he had come. I stayed hidden. Then Mickey rose and started down the aisle toward the main door, toward the column where I stood.
And in a flash, I saw the impossible.
The hit man, Mickey, was Elizabeth Grant.
I gasped and turned my face to the stone. She didn’t see me. But I had clearly seen her profile beneath the dark hat, above the black coat.
My God.
Of course Mickey could work magic on impossible cases. Mickey worked with the District Attorney’s office. And Eli was most likely representing the Morales estate as opposing counsel, in the charade of pro bono work she did for the sheer glory of it. She worked closely with police officers, many of whom could be bribed to fabricate evidence and make false statements. She was also well connected with internal affairs at the bureau, where she had served as an agent for many years before turning to the law.
I waited a few minutes inside the church. Looking up at the Roman Catholic cross, I understood that I was only a pawn in the invincible complexity of a corrupt universe.
Dubuque, Iowa. March 2009.
I wore Claire’s I LOVE NEW YORK sweater, which did not reach my belt. She had pulled it over my head on the second night, when the shaking came back, and taken my thin white shirt in trade. On her, it hung to her knees.
We slipped off the C-train quickly and silently, pebbles and dirt crunching under our feet in the tangle of tracks and parked trains. The sun was rising on the horizon, and for the love of God, that horizon did not belong to Chicago.
“Where are we?” I asked as we ran for cover beyond the station.
“Dubuque, Iowa,” Claire said confidently.
Then I saw the rather obvious sign. Welcome to Dubuque, IA.
“What happened to Chicago?” I asked, as we walked away from the Mississippi.
“I miscalculated. Sue me.”
“I would,” I muttered beneath my breath, “but I doubt I’m still a member of the bar.”
The day was cold and bright. We stopped in Dubuque’s main square, an open plaza with benches and a clock tower at its center.
“Okay, this is nice. Now what do we do?” I asked, as if Claire were the keeper of the How to Be a Homeless Person manual.
“Now, we eat.”
She sat on a bench, opened her duffle bag, and took out two cans of beans and two plastic spoons.
“Strange spoons,” I said. They had small spikes along their front edge.
Claire held hers up against the rising sun. “It’s not just a spoon,” she said, and, as if about to reveal the great mystery of life and death, she paused. “It’s a spork!”
“A spork?” I exclaimed.
“Yes.” She swallowed a mouthful of beans. “You see, these babies are both spoons and forks at the same time. They’re not just one thing or the other. They’re both and neither.”
I paused, mid-bite, and looked at the utensil. For a moment I felt that perhaps Claire had just revealed the great mystery of life and death.
She had an enthusiasm and lightness I had never had in my own life. I had always carried myself seriously. I wore a tie and carried a briefcase even as a boy. Claire was whimsical, happy, and free. We were a clash of styles, and yet I was drawn to the transparency of her personality. She was simply clear, an adjective that translated perfectly to her name.
When we finished eating, she stood and held out her hand. “How about we walk for a while and see what we can find?”
The sun had warmed the air to a tolerable cool. After two nights on the train, I saw no reason not to stretch my legs.
“Sure.”
Spring was just beginning, and the trees and flowers had begun to bloom along the small walkways of the Midwestern town. Then Claire pointed at an unexpected sight: a high hill that rose like a wall out of an otherwise flat country.
We climbed it all the way to the top. From the summit, we could see the Mississippi spread out below us, and the whole town of Dubuque, and a clear blue sky above.
Claire slipped her arm around me and we stood there, quiet. After a while, she looked up, and I looked down. For the first time in memory, I felt something I could only describe as completeness.
I kissed her, softly, and she kissed me back.
“I don’t know what this is,” she whispered, “but I don’t want it to stop.”
I had the dizzy, unmistakable sense that I was beginning to fall in love. I wished I could stop time and let that instant drift into eternity.
Then she grinned. “Before we move on, we need to do some shopping. You need a sweater, because I want mine back, Mister X.”
“Shopping? We don’t have any money, remember?”
“Ah, that’s the problem with you amnesiacs. You forget the great bounty of our precious land.”
After we came down the hill, she asked a taxi driver where to find the nearest Red Cross center or Salvation Army truck. A few blocks later, we found one: a huge truck filled with used clothing and other things thrown away by a consumer society that couldn’t bear the thought of wearing an out-of-date pair of pants.
“I bet this is the first time you’ve ever pulled clothes out of a thick Glad bag,” Claire said, as we dug through the black garbage bags.
“Not exactly,” I said. “The bags were nicer.”
I was thinking of my walk-in closet and my collection of Italian suits. But the strange thing was that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t shopping at an exclusive boutique. I had never been happier in my life than I was here, with this astute companion. How different she was from the women of my past, from Rachel and her demanding taste for the finer things. It had never occurred to anyone I dated that the finer things in life could be sporks and a cool breeze in west Dubuque.
“Here we go! I love a man in a turtleneck.” Claire pulled a black long-sleeved turtleneck out of a bag and held it against my shoulders. “Go ahead. Try it on.”
By the time I had changed, I was also wearing a pair of black jeans and army boots I had picked out. Claire had gotten her I LOVE NEW YORK sweater back and was in blue jeans. She took a few steps back to admire my new look.
Then her eyes locked on something beyond my shoulder.
She yanked on my sleeve so hard that she nearly tore it off my arm.
“We have to leave,” she said, in a muffled voice. “Now.”
I turned. Across the street, a group of people was getting off a bus. Inside the bus, standing in line to step down, was someone I had seen before.
I knew that face. I could not say from where.
“Run!” Claire screamed.
She was already sprinting when I started after her. I was confused, and I had no idea of the danger we were in.
I would never have believed that little Claire could run like a marathoner in her final yards, but there she was, always a few steps ahead of me, gasping for air and perfectly certain where she was going.
“Through here!”
We ducked through an opening in the metal fence along the back of a small shopping center. We raced past parked cars, large green dumpsters, and a couple of supply trucks, until we reached a small tan door with no markings. Claire pounded on it three times, in a rhythm.
An electric buzzer sounded. The door opened onto a flight of steep stairs, and we ran down into a basement.
The door locked itself behind us with a series of heavy clicks. At the bottom, a small camera above the second door swiveled to follow us, studying who we were. Then the second door buzzed open, and three people rushed out to greet Claire with hugs and smiles.
Once they had welcomed her, a woman and two men turned and approached me, slowly, solemnly, stopping just short of handshake distance. They pressed their palms together, closed their eyes, and bowed nearly to the floor.
“Welcome back, Roshi.”
Boston. Spring 1995.
“The facts are the facts,” Roxana said. “The Morales accident was just that: an accident.”
She laid it out piece by piece. A patch of ice on the road, nearly invisible. The Moraleses’ small SUV skidded over it into the oncoming lane, where an eighteen-wheeler struck it head-on. The vehicle exploded.
She opened a file: police reports, photographs of the scene, and an autopsy report that identified the remains of the ill-fated couple through genetic testing. John Morales had been driving below the speed limit. Forensics showed that neither he nor his wife, Anna, had been intoxicated.
“By the way,” Roxana added, “the Moraleses were born in Uruguay. South Americans, like you.”
I looked at her coldly. “Is the fact that they’re Hispanic supposed to influence my duty to represent my client zealously?”
Roxy said nothing. Then, quietly: “Doesn’t the name ‘Morales’ make you think of morals? Would that influence you, counselor?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. She was right. It was ironic, almost unbearably so, that I was fighting against morality itself. And worse, I was about to harm innocent orphans, a subject that reminded me of my own painful history.
“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense, Roxy,” I said, abruptly changing the subject. “The policy has an extremely high payout per insured, even without the double-indemnity clause. We’re looking at three million dollars per person. According to the file, they were paying a thousand dollars a month by the time of the accident. Yet their financial records show the Moraleses were barely making ends meet. Anna was a schoolteacher, John a construction-site supervisor. Their combined income doesn’t justify those payments.”
I was arguing against my own devil’s advocate. Roxana and I had always taken opposite sides when we worked a case, to find the weak links in the argument.
“True,” she said. “And that may be your best argument in court, Xavier. But John Morales was a successful stock-market investor when they first arrived from Uruguay, until his investments collapsed a few years ago and they lost nearly everything. Besides, being almost broke hardly proves a desire to commit suicide for the sake of insurance fraud, never mind the resolve to leave two kids without parents or family in the United States.”
She paused. “Did you know the kids are in county-appointed foster care because no one has claimed them?”
“No, I didn’t. Why hasn’t anyone claimed them?”
“Their only aunt lives in South America. From what I could find, she’s very old and not in good health.”
She had barely finished the sentence when Mr. Ross knocked on my office door.
“I have Mickey’s report,” he said, in his usual matter-of-fact way. He set a file on my desk, left the room, and closed the door behind him.
Roxana and I stared at each other in silence. Neither of us touched the file.
Finally, I reached for it, opened it, and stared at what was inside.
Dubuque, Iowa. March 2009.
“Wait a second. Why did you just bow and call me Roshi?” I asked. I felt as if I had stepped into a Salvador Dalí painting.
“It means teacher,” Claire said quickly, trying to cut off one of the men who had bowed.
“No, it means Master,” said Jonathan, the oldest of the three, correcting her with an annoyed tone and a sideways glance.
Claire excused herself and herded the strangers into the next room. Through the wall came the sound of an agitated argument, low and heated. Then she came back alone.
“Sorry. We really need to get to Mount Shasta as soon as possible. Jonathan will drive us. We leave in an hour. If you want to wash up or rest a little, do it now.”
Her voice was sober and collected. She was not the carefree girl I had met in Boston.
“I may be suffering from partial amnesia, Claire, but I’m not a child,” I said coldly. “What’s going on?”
It was obvious that my amnesia was not the only thing keeping me in the dark. There were accomplices to my ignorance, and Claire, whom I had trusted, was one of them.
She sat on a sofa and asked me to sit beside her. She looked straight into my eyes, with a seriousness I had never seen in her.
“Roshi, during the last fourteen years, you saved many lives. I’m trying to save yours now.”
She looked down and took my hands in hers.
“My name is Claire. I didn’t lie to you about that. But I’ve known you for a long time, and we spent months looking for you after you disappeared from California. I know you have a lot of questions. But there’s only one person who can help you find the answers without putting your life at risk.” She held my gaze. “He’s a neurologist, and one of your students. He’s helped you before. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.”
She stopped.
“What do you mean, something like this?” I asked.
“The seizures. But they’ve never caused you to lose years of memory. No one knows exactly how or why it happens, but the doctors call it TLE, temporal lobe epilepsy, and it strikes you during altered states of consciousness, in deep meditation.
“We need to get you back to Mount Shasta to see your neurologist, Reverend Dr. Xu Yun,” she said. “He’s the only one who can help.”
I stayed silent for a moment. “Can you tell me what this place is?”
“A tornado shelter turned safe house for orphans. It’s one of many across the country that belong to a larger organization. You co-founded it about eight years ago.”
“I see.” I let the words settle. “And the man following us? Who is he?”
“We’re not sure who he is.” She said it reluctantly, as if the news might trigger a seizure. “Only that he wants you dead.”
I took a deep breath and looked into her blue eyes. “So I assume you knew we weren’t going to Chicago on the C-train. That we were coming here, to Iowa.”
“Actually,” she said, “yes.” Her voice was steady. “I knew we were being followed in Boston, and that the assassin was probably watching us. So I got us out of the shelter fast, and I said ‘C-train’ loud enough to confuse anyone listening. It doesn’t mean cargo train, like I told you. It means Chicago-bound train. I hoped that if we were being spied on, the hunter would go to Chicago instead. I was worried when we boarded the Iowa-bound train, so I made sure no one followed us. I have no idea how he found us.”
I felt suddenly tired. I closed my eyes to rest, and the flashes came: quick snapshots of memory, passing through my mind’s eye. The moment I shoved a woman carrying groceries. The moment I looked back and saw him.
The lanky white man with red, spiked hair. The same man I had seen getting off the bus across from the Salvation Army truck.
“The thin man with red hair,” I said calmly, and opened my eyes. Claire had turned pale.
“Yes,” she blurted. “That’s the man.”
I tightened my grip on her hands. “Claire, just one more question. I’m a ‘Master’ of what?”
“That’s a little more complicated. But I’m sure you’ll know the moment we arrive at Mount Shasta.”
She let go of my hands slowly and rose from the couch. She was clearly in charge as she turned to the group.
“It’s time to go.”
Boston. Spring 1995.
The file Ross had left on my desk was damning. It held enough ammunition to prove Trust Mutual’s claim of fraud against the policyholder. I shook my head in disbelief at what I was reading: an e-mail from John Morales’s private home computer, written to his wife, Anna. In it, he laid out a plan to cause their deaths and leave the insurance proceeds to their children. The letter was in Spanish, but it had been translated into English for the benefit of the firm and the court. It read:
Dear Anna,
My love, for years we have struggled to keep the family afloat, but this life of barely surviving is not the life we were meant to live. We once knew luxury, with servants and delights, and now we are little more than slaves in this country. There is nothing left for us here, and nothing left for us in Uruguay either, for to go back would mean a life of shame among our wealthy friends. We cannot allow our children to suffer our fate. They were not born for poverty any more than we were.
So I believe the best thing is what we have discussed for several months: to give our children what they deserve. Please don’t worry about when or how it will happen. I will take care of that. Just rest in the knowledge that our twins will have nothing to worry about for the rest of their lives. A beneficiary trust has been set up, and it will take effect upon our deaths. It will give our children far more than basic necessities. They will have the education and the future they deserve.
Forgive me, my love, but my decision is final. I know you understand, and may God have mercy on our souls. John Morales.
“What the hell? This setup stinks from a mile away!” I was practically screaming. “Who writes an e-mail to his wife, from his own home, about a fraud they’re about to commit, and signs it with his first and last name?”
Roxana took the file from me and kept reading. “If you didn’t like the e-mail, take a look at this,” she said, indignant. “Remember the initial autopsy report? Well, it seems there’s a new one.”
She watched me closely as she handed me a page from the file. It stated that John Morales had been intoxicated with large amounts of sedatives while driving on the day of the accident.
“Wait a second. Two autopsy reports? Who are the doctors who did them?”
“The same doctor,” she said, incredulous.
“And who requested the subpoena to search John’s computer at his house?”
“One of Trust Mutual’s in-house counsel. A man named Greg Epstein.”
“I thought we were the only ones representing Trust Mutual on the Morales case.”
“Apparently not,” Roxy said, clearly annoyed.
I closed the file. “Listen. I’m not going to bring this to Lancy or to the client. I’m not even going to interview Greg Epstein or the doctor who did the autopsy, because this is all bullshit and I’d be running in circles. But I need a favor, Roxy. After you tell me what I need to know, I promise I won’t ask anything else of you on this case.”
“What is it?” she asked, already certain that whatever I was about to ask would be dangerous, if not illegal.
She was right.
“Roxy, do you have a key to Mr. Ross’s office?”
“No, of course not,” she answered, worried. “The only key is on his keychain, in his pocket, with the master skeleton key and his personal keys.”
I nodded and pressed my hands over my face, elbows on the desk. Then I looked up. “Does the skeleton key open every office in the firm?”
“Yes. But…” She paused and lowered her voice, as though she were about to reveal a perilous secret. “There’s another skeleton key.”
“Does it open Ross’s office?” I asked.
“Yes,” Roxy said softly, looking down. She had already guessed my intentions.
“Where is it?”
“Lancy’s desk. The right-hand drawer, under the box of Cuban cigars.”
Lancy never left his office unlocked, except when he was walking the halls, in a short meeting elsewhere in the firm, or at a deposition on the premises. The moment he closed his door and set off toward deposition room five, I stepped out from behind the large plant at the entrance. I glanced around. Everyone was buried in the daily bustle of office work. I turned my back to his door and groped behind me for the knob.
It turned.
I eased the door open just wide enough for my body to slip through. My adrenaline surged at the thought of Lancy coming back for some forgotten file. For a moment I took in his large, opulent, neoclassical office, which desperately tried to resemble ancient Rome: Corinthian marble columns, bone-white walls. The whole place seemed to scream, The Emperor lives here.
I ran to the desk, opened the right-hand drawer as Roxana had directed, and lifted the box of Cuban cigars. Underneath lay the second skeleton key, the only one other than the key Ross carried in his pocket like a good-luck amulet.
Nothing in a law firm is as holy as an attorney’s office. It is where the private case files live. To be found there alone, behind closed doors, without the attorney’s permission was an unforgivable act of treason, not unlike being found in bed with someone else’s wife.
I closed the drawer and moved quickly toward the door. I pressed my ear against it, but the place was as soundproof as a sarcophagus. I was turning the knob when I heard voices approaching.
I panicked. I looked around for somewhere to hide. A door in the office led to Lancy’s private bathroom. I slipped inside, closed it behind me, climbed into the shower, and slid the frosted glass door shut.
Almost at once I felt claustrophobic, warm, and sweaty, though Lancy kept his office at no more than sixty-three degrees. He boasted that cold temperatures kept the brain sharp and fast, and liked to compare it to a computer running cool.
I heard him laughing on the other side of the bathroom door. I waited, afraid that he would walk in at any second for a pee, or worse, a shower. Instead, I heard only the occasional squeak of his overpriced leather chair, imported from Italy a few years earlier. Then a couple of friend-clients came in. I couldn’t make out much beyond sporadic, boisterous laughter and loud, punctuated remarks.
Hours passed. I sat on the shower floor with the key in my right pocket and my jacket in my lap, and I was about to doze off when the bathroom door opened slowly.
It was Lancy himself.
I practically lay flat. Lifting my head slightly, I could barely see his enormous silhouette through the frosted glass. He began to wash his hands, smoking one of his imported cigars. I clamped both hands over my mouth and nose in a desperate effort not to cough.
Finally, a door closed. The laughter stopped. The voices faded. I climbed out of the shower and pressed my ear to the bathroom door. Silence. I opened it carefully and found the office empty. I crept to the main entrance and opened it slowly, using one eye as a periscope. I saw no one.
I slipped out. Most of the lights were off, except for small pointed nightlights set into the molding along the floor, designed to keep late-working lawyers from tripping over the furniture. Walking among them was like walking down the aisle of a movie theater or an airplane.
I checked my watch. Eight in the evening. I had been trapped in that bathroom for nearly four hours.
As I turned a corner on my way to my office, I heard someone approaching. It was Roxana.
“Where the hell have you been? Your phone has been ringing off the hook, and Lancy was looking for you!”
“Long story,” I said. “Do you know who’s still on this floor?”
“Just Matthew and his secretary. They may be pulling an all-nighter on one of those boring tax cases.”
“How about Ross? Is he here?”
“He left right after Lancy walked out of the firm.”
“Good,” I said, and started toward Ross’s office. Roxana followed.
“Please, Xavier, think about what you’re about to do. It could spell the end of your career.”
I looked into her wide black eyes. “Roxy, if I don’t do this, it could spell the end of my sanity.”
She stayed quiet. Then she began to back away, still facing me.
“I’m sorry, Xavier. I can’t afford to get involved. I don’t know if you’ve lost your mind or found it, but I have a mother to take care of. I can’t help you anymore.”
“It’s all right, Roxy. You’ve already done enough for me. Thank you.”
She turned to leave. “Roxy,” I called. “Remember the limited-edition Ferrari you’ve been drooling over for the last year?”
“Xavier, please. Who could forget your pride and joy?” she said, tongue in cheek.
“It’s yours. Permanently. It’s paid in full. I’ll leave the signed title in your name on my desk, and it will be there tomorrow morning.” I was dead serious.
She stopped.
“Here are the keys.” I tossed them to her, on their silver prancing-horse keychain. “The registration and all the papers are in the glove compartment, along with an insurance card that covers drivers other than me.”
“Now I know you’ve lost your mind,” said Roxana.
“Maybe. But I need to borrow your car, just for tonight. And I need the contraption you took from your boyfriend last month. Where is it?”
She hesitated, then tossed me the keys to her dilapidated 1974 Cadillac. “In the trunk,” she said nervously. “Wrapped in a towel. I’d better not see my car on the morning news.”
“I promise to have it back intact in your parking space before you get to work. I just need something less notorious than a Ferrari tonight. And after tonight, I have a feeling I won’t need a car anymore.” I managed a small smile. “Consider the Ferrari a thank-you, for everything we’ve been through in ten years, and for your faithful friendship.”
Then I walked away quickly, in search of Ross’s office and the secret cell number.
Boston, 2000.
The girl had decided that she hated courtrooms.
She hated the smell of them, floor wax and old paper and the perfume of the lady from Social Services, who sat on her left and kept patting her knee as if she were a dog. She hated the high wooden bench and the flag that never moved and the clock above the door that ticked so loudly she could hear it from the fourth row. Most of all, she hated that everyone in the room talked about her mother and father as if they were a problem to be solved.
They had been talking that way for five years.
She had been seven when the car went off the road. She remembered almost nothing of that night, only the rain on the window of the neighbor’s house and the policeman kneeling down to her height, which was how she knew, even before he said anything, that something had broken that could not be fixed. She remembered her sister’s hand in hers. She remembered that neither of them had cried until much later, in a strange bed, in the dark.
And she remembered the bracelets.
Their parents had given them the bracelets on their seventh birthday, only a few weeks before the crash. Two strings of small wooden beads, painted by hand, one for each of them. Her father had tied them on himself, very seriously, the way he did everything, and told them in Spanish that they stood for a love that would never end.
She had not taken hers off since. Not to bathe, not to swim, not to sleep. Neither had her sister. It was the one rule nobody had ever had to give them.
After the funeral, the insurance company had refused to pay.
She had not understood it then. She understood it a little better now, at twelve, though she wished she did not. The company said her father had planned the accident. They had a letter, in Spanish, that they said he had written to her mother. They had lawyers in expensive suits who said it in court, and a judge who listened to them, and that had been the end of it. All that talk on television about crooked insurance men had changed nothing for the girls.
There had been no money for the house. There had been no family in Boston to take them, and the family in Uruguay had not wanted them. There had been a group home in Dorchester, and then another one in Somerville, and then a foster family who were kind enough but who had three children of their own and made it clear, in a hundred small ways, that two more was a favor.
Through all of it, she and her sister had stayed together. That had been the second rule.
And then, last spring, a man and a woman named Brandon and Lara Pierce had come to see them and asked them questions about school and books and what they liked to eat, and come back the next week, and the week after that. And one evening Mrs. Pierce had sat down on the edge of her bed and told her that there might be a hearing. That someone had come forward. Someone who had kept a copy of everything.
“Who?” the girl had asked.
Mrs. Pierce had hesitated. “Someone who knew your parents’ case a long time ago,” she said. “From the other side.”
The man walked into the courtroom at ten minutes past nine.
She noticed him because everyone noticed him. The room, which had been rustling and murmuring, went suddenly still. At the long table on the right, where the insurance company’s lawyers sat, one of them actually stood up, and then seemed not to know why he had, and sat down again.
He was not what she had expected.
She had expected someone like the lawyers at the other table: tall and loud and shiny, with a gold watch and a hard face. This man was slim and quiet. His suit was plain and gray and a little too large for him, as if he had borrowed it. His head was shaved almost to the skin. He walked to the witness stand without looking at anyone, and when the clerk asked him to raise his right hand, he did it slowly, and then he did something she had never seen a witness do.
He bowed. Just slightly, from the waist, toward the judge.
Then he sat down and told the truth.
She did not understand all of it. There were words about clauses and depositions and something called work product. But she understood enough. She understood that he had once worked for the people at the other table. She understood that the letter, the terrible letter in Spanish, had not been written by her father at all. She understood that someone had wanted it to look as though her parents had died on purpose, so that the company would not have to pay.
And she understood that this man had known it, a long time ago, and had kept the proof.
“Why didn’t you come forward sooner?” the insurance company’s lawyer asked him. His voice was sharp. “If you knew all this, why wait five years?”
The man was quiet for a moment.
“Because five years ago,” he said, “I was not the kind of man who would have come forward. I was the kind of man who sat at your table.” He looked at the lawyer, and his voice was not angry at all. It was almost gentle. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”
The girl’s sister squeezed her hand very hard.
A heavy man in a brown raincoat sat alone in the last row. He had a policeman’s patient face, and he had not taken his eyes off the witness all morning. He wrote nothing down.
When the man in the gray suit stepped down from the stand and walked up the aisle, the man in the raincoat stood. For a moment, the two of them faced each other. The girl could not hear what was said. She saw the man in the raincoat put a small white card into the witness’s hand, and she saw the witness bow his head, the way he had bowed to the judge, as if he were agreeing to something.
Then the man in the raincoat stepped aside and let him pass.
The judge ruled the next morning.
She did not hear most of it. She heard “fraud” and “bad faith” and a number so large it made the lady from Social Services gasp out loud. Outside the courtroom, Mrs. Pierce took both girls by the hand. She had news of her own, and it came down to a word the girl had stopped letting herself hope for.
Adoption.
That afternoon, they moved into a white house with green shutters in Brookline, with a garden behind it and a bedroom of their own that they had not yet decided how to share. Mrs. Pierce made spaghetti. Mr. Pierce, who was a stockbroker and nothing like the lawyers she had seen in court, laughed at everything they said, even the things that were not funny.
And at six o’clock, the man came to say goodbye.
He did not stay long. He stood in the front hall in his too-large gray suit and spoke quietly with Mr. Pierce, and once he looked over at the two girls sitting on the stairs, and he smiled. It was a strange smile, the girl thought. Happy and sad at the same time, like the last day of summer.
Then he shook Mr. Pierce’s hand, and bowed to Mrs. Pierce, and went out.
She watched him from the front window, her sister beside her.
He walked down the path, through the little garden, and stopped for a moment by the gate, where a tree was in flower. Big white blossoms, soft as paper, with a smell so sweet it came in through the glass. He stood under the tree with his eyes closed, breathing it in, as though he had found something there he had lost a long time ago.
Then he opened the door of his car.
She did not decide to do it. Afterward, she could never explain it, not to her sister, not to the Pierces, not even to herself. One moment she was at the window, and the next she was running: through the hall, out the front door, down the steps, barefoot on the cold stone path, calling after him. She knew only the name she had heard in the courtroom. “Mr. Armand!”
He turned.
She stopped in front of him, out of breath, under the white tree. She looked up at him, and he looked down at her, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
Then she did the thing that broke the first rule.
She worked the knot loose with her fingers, and she took off her bracelet, for the first time in five years, and she pressed it into his hand.
He looked at the beads. Then he looked at her. She saw that he understood exactly what it was, and exactly what it cost, and that it frightened him a little.
“I can’t take this,” he said softly.
“You have to,” she said. “It means a love that never ends. My papá said so.”
For a long moment he did not move. Then he knelt on the stone path, so that his eyes were level with hers, the way the policeman had knelt five years before. But this time nothing was broken. This time, something was being mended.
“Then I’ll keep it,” he said. “Always.”
He closed his hand around the beads.
She ran back up the path without looking back, because she was suddenly afraid that she would cry, and she did not want him to see. At the top of the steps she stopped and turned anyway.
The car was already pulling away. Under the white tree, a few petals had fallen onto the path where he had knelt.
In the window above her, her sister was watching, with her own bracelet still on her wrist, and an expression on her face that the girl would not understand for many years.
Interstate 80, Nebraska. March 2009.
Jonathan drove the way he bowed: with total commitment.
The van was a white Ford Econoline with a dented sliding door and a child’s booster seat still strapped into the back row. We had left Dubuque within the hour, exactly as Claire had promised, and by dark we were deep into Nebraska, where Interstate 80 runs so straight that the headlights of oncoming trucks seem to hang in the distance for minutes before they pass.
I sat in the middle row. Claire sat beside me with a road atlas open on her knees, although I never saw her look at it.
“How did he find us?” I asked.
She did not pretend to misunderstand. “I’ve been asking myself that since Dubuque. He never went to Chicago. He must have been in the yard, watching us climb on. After that, all he needed was a yardman willing to say where that train was headed, and a bus ticket.” She closed the atlas. “A bus is faster than a freight. It got him to Dubuque about the same time we got there.”
“Then he’ll know about the van.”
“Probably.”
“And where we’re going?”
She was quiet a moment too long.
“Anyone hunting you knows where home is,” she said.
I waited for more. None came. Up front, Jonathan’s eyes met mine in the mirror and slid away.
A little before ten, the fuel light came on, and Jonathan took the exit for a truck stop outside North Platte.
It was an island of sodium light in an ocean of dark prairie: twenty diesel pumps, a diner, a wall of idling rigs. Claire went inside for coffee. Jonathan worked the pump. I stood beside the van in my black turtleneck and army boots, stretching my back and breathing in the cold, and that was when the man at the next island fell down.
He was a big man in a quilted vest, a trucker by the look of him, sixty or so. One moment he was reaching for the squeegee. The next he had dropped to his knees, as though someone had cut his strings, and rolled onto his side on the oil-stained concrete.
Someone shouted. A woman ran out of the diner with a phone at her ear. A young man in a feed-store cap knelt, felt the trucker’s neck, and looked up with a face gone white.
“He’s not breathing. I can’t find a pulse. Does anybody know CPR?”
I did not know CPR. I had taken a course once, at the firm, and spent it reading a brief.
But I was already walking.
I cannot explain it better than that. I did not decide. My legs carried me across the concrete, and my knees bent, and my right hand went out, flat, to the center of the man’s chest, as though it had done so a hundred times.
What are you doing? You’re a lawyer.
The tingling began just above my ears.
It spread inward, a fine electric shimmer. Behind my eyes, the lights of the truck stop went dark, and in that darkness a single point of brightness appeared, far away, and pulsed. A warmth gathered in my chest. It ran down my arm like water finding a channel. It passed through my palm.
The trucker’s body jerked once beneath my hand.
Then he dragged in a breath, a huge, ragged, astonished breath, and opened his eyes.
Nobody spoke. The young man in the cap sat back on his heels. The woman from the diner had lowered her phone, and I noticed, distantly, that it was pointed at me.
“What did you do?” the young man whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truest thing I had said in days.
I tried to stand, and the truck stop tipped sideways. A band of pain had closed around my temples, tight and hot. Then there were hands under my arms, Jonathan’s on one side and Claire’s on the other, and coffee was running across the concrete from the two cups she had dropped.
“Van,” she said. “Now.”
They got me into the middle row. Jonathan hung up the nozzle with the tank still half full. As we pulled out, I saw the trucker sitting up against a pump with a blanket around his shoulders, staring after us, and the woman from the diner still holding up her phone.
For twenty miles, nobody said a word.
The pain ebbed slowly. When I could open my eyes without wincing, I found Claire watching me. She did not look surprised. That frightened me more than anything that had happened at the pump. She looked the way a nurse looks when a patient’s fever comes back: worried, and not surprised at all.
“You’ve seen me do that before,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Is that one of the seizures you told me about?”
“It’s connected.”
“Connected how? Claire, that man had no pulse.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Dr. Yun made me promise. Not until he’s seen you. He says if it comes at you too fast, we could lose you again.” She took my hand in both of hers. It was the first time I had seen her afraid for me, and not for us. “I know what I’m asking. Four more states, X. That’s all. Then you can be as angry at me as you like.”
In the mirror, Jonathan was looking at me again. This time he did not look away. It was the look he had given me in the basement in Dubuque, just before he bowed.
I looked down at my right hand. It was an older man’s hand, veined and weathered, and an hour earlier I would have said I knew everything it had ever done.
I did not know that the woman from the diner had already sent her forty seconds of video to a sister in Omaha, or that by breakfast it would be on a television station’s website under the words MIRACLE AT THE PUMPS. I did not know who would be watching.
I only knew that my hand was still warm.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Ross’s office stood at the east end of the firm, at the end of a long corridor. His door sat alone in a kind of cul-de-sac, facing an empty hallway that seemed to stretch longer with every step I took.
At the door, I felt a creeping paranoia. What if there was a hidden camera? Or worse, a silent alarm that would trigger the moment I opened this sacrosanct office? I put my fears aside, thought about what was at stake, and slowly inserted the stolen skeleton key.
The lock turned.
I closed and locked the door behind me. Without turning on the lights, I felt my way to his chair and sat down in front of his dark computer. I had been careful to wear my tight leather winter gloves before going in, to leave no fingerprints, and I kept them on as I switched the machine on.
The firm’s network prompt demanded Ross’s password. I pressed the escape key, and it dropped me out of the network and into the microcomputer’s operating system. Somehow I doubted that Ross would keep Mickey’s number on the network, where anyone with a little hacking skill could break in from another office and read his files. No. The number had to live on Ross’s own machine, so I began to look for a private database.
After a few minutes, I found it: Ross’s private D-Base, filled with names I didn’t recognize. One name leaped out at me.
Mickey.
I clicked on it. The computer demanded a password, and my heart sank. I had no idea what it could be.
I leaned back in the chair. My options were few, but I had come too far to stop. I typed the obvious first: “hit-man.” The screen returned to its bland ENTER PASSWORD. I typed “Eli.” Nothing. “Elizabeth.” Nothing. “Grant.” Nothing. “Elizabeth H. Grant.” Nada.
I was running out of options. I stopped, and in my mind I repeated her full name, over and over. Elizabeth H. Grant.
Wait. What’s her middle name?
I opened my wallet and found the business card she had given me at our O’Brian meeting. There it was: Elizabeth Hamint Grant, J.D.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Hamint.”
It was an anagram of the dreaded word.
Hit-man.
I typed Hamint.
The database opened, and it gave me far more than I had come for: phone numbers. Names of cases Eli had resolved. Names implicating officers and directors of insurance companies. The secret cell number. And, to top it all, cash amounts adding up to millions of dollars, all paid by the firm to Ms. Grant over the years.
I printed the entire file at once: fifteen pages of case names and cash payments. Enough to destroy Eli, the firm, several prominent men, powerful corporations, and, if I wasn’t careful, myself.
It was nearly nine-forty at night. I wasn’t worried about the time. I needed to meet with the Good Samaritan hit man as soon as possible. I lifted Ross’s private phone, dialed the number, and practiced his uninterested monotone. It rang once. A machine answered and asked me to leave a message after the tone.
“We need to meet,” I said, imitating Ross’s voice as well as I could. Then I hung up and waited.
Ten minutes later, Ross’s line rang. A digitized voice gave its order.
“One hour. Hamilton Building. Front entrance.”
The line clicked off.
She had taken the bait.
I printed two more copies of the long roster of case names, payments, and assigned crimes, all linking Elizabeth H. Grant, J.D., to her part-time illicit hobby.
One copy went into a manila envelope to take with me to the meeting. A second went into a FedEx envelope addressed to my reporter girlfriend, Rachel, with a signed, handwritten letter explaining that if she didn’t hear from me within twenty-four hours, or if anything strange happened to me, anything involving my death or serious impairment, she was to broadcast and publish the information through NBC. The third went into an envelope for my friend and broker of many years, Brandon Pierce. I enclosed copies of the Morales letter and both reports. I marked it Confidential and typed, Do Not Open Unless Requested by Sender.
Seconds before I turned off the computer, the door opened.
Ross stood in the doorway. His coffee cup slipped from his hand and burst on the floor. He demanded, furiously, to know what I was doing in his office.
I was speechless. He crossed the room in long, rapid strides, heading straight for the glowing screen.
I panicked. In a flash, I weighed my options. If I ran, it was all over. I would lose my job. I would never talk to Eli, because he would call her and cancel the meeting. I would be disbarred for life.
On the other hand…
Instinct took over. I picked up the heavy brass balance-of-justice ornament that sat on the credenza behind me and, with brutal force, raised my arm. As Ross looked at the computer, I brought it down on his right temple.
“Justice comes to all of us sooner or later,” I said, in a voice I did not recognize.
Ross fell to the floor like a lump.
For a moment, I stared at his motionless body. Then I came to my senses, and a current of inevitable doom engulfed me.
Winnemucca, Nevada. March 2009.
Jonathan had been awake for thirty-one hours when Claire finally made him stop.
We had crossed Wyoming in blowing snow and the salt flats of Utah under a white noon sun, and late that night we reached Winnemucca, Nevada, a strip of casinos and gas stations on the high desert. By then he was steering with the fixed stare of a man driving in his sleep.
The motel was a single story of doors around a gravel lot, under a neon sign with one dead letter. Claire paid cash for one room. Number nine, at the far end, where the van could be parked behind a dumpster, out of sight of the road.
“Four hours,” she told Jonathan. “Then we go.”
He was asleep on the nearer bed before she had finished the sentence, still in his shoes.
Claire took the other bed. She lay down on top of the covers, fully dressed, facing the door. I took the chair by the window. I said I was not tired, which was a lie, and that I wanted to think, which was not.
Since the truck stop, I had done little else. A hand that knew something I did not. A girl who had seen it before. A basement full of strangers who bowed. I turned it all over the way I used to turn over a hostile witness’s testimony, looking for the seam, and I found none.
Sometime after midnight, I gave up and went out for ice.
I did not need ice. I needed air, and the machine was an excuse, humming under a yellow bulb at the far end of the walkway. The night was bitterly cold and perfectly still. Beyond the gravel, the desert ran off toward black mountains under more stars than I had ever seen.
There was a car in the lot that had not been there before.
It was parked nose-out beside the office, a dark sedan, its engine ticking as it cooled. Iowa plates.
I knew what that meant before I let myself think it.
The driver’s door opened.
He unfolded from the seat, tall and thin, and stood with one hand on the roof. The yellow bulb caught his hair. It was red, cut short, standing up in spikes.
I should have run. I should have shouted for Claire. I did neither, because something was happening that I did not understand. I was not only afraid of him. I knew him. I knew the stoop of his shoulders and the way he held his head a little to one side, the way you know a tune whose words are gone.
He walked toward me across the gravel and stopped ten feet away. He was younger than I had thought, in his thirties, with the gray, scraped look of someone who has not slept in a bed for a long time.
“Nine days,” he said.
His voice was hoarse. I said nothing.
“I told her you were coming. Every morning. I held her hand and I told her.” His mouth worked. “Nine days. You know what that’s like?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know who you are.”
He stared at me.
For a moment, I saw something move behind his eyes that might have been doubt. Then it was gone, and what replaced it was so much worse that I stepped back and felt the ice machine against my spine.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t you do that. Not you. Not with me.”
“I’m telling you the truth. Something happened to me. I can’t remember—”
“You remembered enough to run.”
His hand went into his coat and came out holding a revolver, old and heavy and black.
And in that instant, for no reason I could name, I was not in a motel parking lot at all. I was in a garden. Small trees with broad, glossy leaves. A stone bench. A man kneeling in front of me with his face turned down and both his hands in mine, and my own voice saying, with total certainty, I promise.
Then it was gone, and there was only the gun.
Headlights exploded across the lot.
The van came around the end of the building in a spray of gravel, engine screaming, and slewed to a stop between us with its sliding door already open. Claire was braced in the doorway, one arm out.
“Xavier!”
I jumped. She caught a fistful of my turtleneck and hauled, and I landed on the floor of the van as Jonathan stamped on the gas. The door was still open. I heard the first shot as a flat crack, and the second as a bang and a shower of glass as the rear window came apart over our heads.
Then we were on the road, and then on the ramp, and the motel sign was shrinking behind us.
“He’s coming,” Jonathan said. In the mirror, a single pair of headlights had swung out of the lot.
“I know.” Claire had crawled forward between the seats. “There’s a ranch exit in about six miles. No lights, no services. When I say, kill everything.”
“Everything?”
“Lights. Brakes too, if you can. Just coast.”
I lay on the floor among cubes of safety glass and watched her count mile markers. She was twenty or twenty-one years old, a girl who painted her fingernails in three colors, and she was giving orders like a field commander.
“Now.”
The world went black. The van dropped off the interstate onto a gravel ramp, running blind at sixty, then fifty, then forty, and rolled to a stop in the shadow of a cattle underpass. Jonathan cut the engine.
We sat in the dark and listened to ourselves breathe.
Ninety seconds later, the sedan went by above us, fast, heading west. Its taillights dwindled to two red sparks and went out.
Nobody moved for a long time.
“He knew me,” I said at last.
Claire did not answer.
“He said nine days. He said he told someone I was coming.” I sat up. Glass slid from my shoulders. “Claire, in Dubuque you said you didn’t know who he was.”
“I don’t.” Her voice was very small. “None of us do. That’s the truth.”
“But I do. Don’t I? Somewhere in those fourteen years, I knew that man. And I promised him something.”
She turned around. In the starlight I could just make out her face, and the wet on it.
“If you did,” she said, “you never told anyone what it was. Not Jonathan. Not me. Not even Dr. Yun.”
I looked at this girl who knew secret knocks and freight schedules and unlit ranch exits. Who had watched my hand bring a dead man back and had not been surprised. Who cried without making a sound.
“How do you know how to do all this?”
It took her a moment.
“You taught me most of it,” she said.
Then she reached out in the dark and found my wrist, not my hand but my wrist, and closed her fingers around the beaded bracelet as if it were the only solid thing in the van.
Jonathan kept to back roads for the rest of the night, north and west across empty country where we did not see another car for an hour at a time. I finally slept, sitting up, with Claire’s head against my arm. I woke because the light had changed.
It filled the windshield. A single white mountain, alone, immense, rising out of dark forest into a sky the color of the inside of a shell. The first sun had just touched its summit and set it on fire.
A volcano.
As a boy, I had sworn that I would never go near one.
“Mount Shasta,” Claire said softly.
I opened my mouth to answer, and the tingling began above my ears.
It was not gentle this time. It came like a wave, and the point of light came with it, rushing toward me out of the dark, swelling, white. I heard Claire say my name, and I heard Jonathan say something that sounded like a prayer.
After that, nothing.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Twenty minutes.
That was all the time I had to hide a body and keep an appointment with a killer.
I knelt beside Ross. I did not check for a pulse. I told myself there was no time, but the truth was simpler: I did not want to know. I took him under the arms and dragged him behind the desk, folded him into the dark hollow beneath it, and pushed his chair in after him.
The brass scales lay on the carpet where they had fallen.
Then I did something I could not have explained at the time. I picked them up with my gloved hands, wrapped them in my handkerchief, and slipped them into my coat pocket.
I locked Ross’s door with Lancy’s skeleton key, stopped at my office for an overcoat and a black tennis bag, and took the elevator down. In the lobby, I dropped Rachel’s FedEx envelope into the overnight box. Brandon’s went in after it.
The third copy stayed with me.
Roxy’s Cadillac smelled of vinyl and spearmint gum. I moved the towel-wrapped bundle from the trunk into the tennis bag, set the manila envelope on the passenger seat, and drove to the Hamilton Building.
She was there.
Eli stood at the front entrance in the black coat and hat she had worn in the cathedral, waiting for a man who was lying under his own desk.
I parked behind the building and came at her on foot, slowly, from behind. When I was close enough, I rolled the envelope into a tight tube and pressed one end hard against the small of her back.
“Don’t move.”
She didn’t. She didn’t turn, either.
“I know who you are,” I said. “I know who pays you. As you’ve probably worked out, I’m not Ross. Now, either we make a deal, or I bury you.”
She turned around slowly. If she was surprised to see me, she did not give me the pleasure of showing it.
“I always knew you were stupid, Xavier. I didn’t realize you were this stupid.” She glanced at the tube in my hand. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”
“A corrupt assistant district attorney who—”
“You moron.” She said it almost gently. “This isn’t about me. I don’t work for myself, and I certainly don’t work for your three-hundred-dollar-an-hour law firm. People like you and me are pawns, counselor. I work for people who stopped recognizing boundaries a long time ago. Financial or moral.” She paused. “You’ll be dead before the night is over.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a forecast.” She tilted her head toward the street. “Why do you think I chose this place? Did you really believe I’d meet anyone without protection? There’s a man in the building across the street, and right now he’s looking at your pretty Latin head through a very expensive scope. All I have to do is nod.”
She raised her right hand an inch.
A red dot appeared on my chest. It slid up my tie and out of sight.
I did not move. I am not sure I could have.
“Go ahead,” I said, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Nod. I’m sure he won’t miss. But before you do, you should know that I’m not quite as idiotic as you think. If I don’t turn up alive in twenty-four hours, everything in this envelope goes to every newspaper and every news desk in the country, from CNN to the BBC.” I unrolled the envelope and held it out. “Read it first. Then decide what to do with my head.”
She took the pages and tilted them toward the streetlight. She read every one. Case names. Dates. Payments. Her own middle name, spelled out in the files of the man she had trusted to protect her.
Not a flicker crossed her face.
“What do you want?”
“What do you think I want? A paid weekend at Disney World?” I took the pages back. “I want a cut. And don’t try to cheat me, Eli. I know exactly what you’re paid.”
“How much of a cut?”
“Fifty percent of whatever the firm pays you per case.”
I knew fifty percent was out of the question. So did she. But every settlement begins with a number nobody believes, and the ritual has to be observed.
She almost smiled. “Twenty. And as you may have noticed, I’m not wearing my lawyer’s hat tonight, so take it or leave it.”
“Twenty-five, and we have a deal.”
“Fine. From now on, anything that comes from your firm is twenty-five percent yours.”
“One more thing.” I held her gaze. “If anything happens to me, anything at all, a strange car accident, a fall into the Charles, a peaceful death in my sleep, this gets published.”
“So now I’m your bodyguard? I’m supposed to make sure you look both ways before you cross the street?”
“I always look both ways, Eli.”
“Is that all?”
“No. I want to meet tomorrow to work out the logistics of our new arrangement. Deposition room A1 at the courthouse. Six in the morning.”
“Fine.”
She turned and walked away with her usual measured step. I moved quickly out of the light and looked down at my chest.
The red dot was gone.
My bluff had worked. For now.
But I knew better than to trust her. There would be no meeting at six. Elizabeth Grant did not negotiate with men who threatened her. She buried them. If I let her reach a telephone and a quiet room tonight, I would never see the sunrise.
I circled the block on foot, climbed into Roxy’s Cadillac, and pulled out in time to see the black Lincoln slide away from the curb. I followed a block behind, lights low, close enough to keep her taillights in sight and far enough, I hoped, to stay invisible. Through her rear window, I could see the glow of a car phone pressed to her ear.
Making arrangements, no doubt. For me.
She drove into the Back Bay and stopped across from a brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street. I parked at the end of the block, grabbed the tennis bag, and ran.
She was already at the top of the stairs. The door swung open. The door began to close.
I jammed my foot into the gap.
Before she could turn, I had one arm around her neck and her right arm pinned behind her back. I kicked the bag across the threshold and shoved us both inside. The door clicked shut behind us.
She kicked. She screamed. No one answered. The house was empty.
“Stop fighting,” I said, close to her ear. “I only want to ask you a few questions.”
“Goddamn it, you scared me half to death, you son of a bitch!”
I steered her into the kitchen and pushed her down onto a heavy wrought-iron chair. Still holding her with one arm, I pulled a length of rope from the bag. I tied her wrists behind the backrest and each ankle to a leg of the chair.
“Now listen to me, Ms. Hamint, and listen carefully.” I crouched in front of her. “Who do you really work for?”
She spat in my face.
“Go to hell.”
I wiped my cheek with the back of my glove.
“Since you’ve chosen not to cooperate,” I said, “I’ll ask the court’s permission to treat you as a hostile witness.” I reached into the bag and unwrapped the towel. “And I have something here that may help refresh your recollection, counselor.”
It looked harmless, almost like a child’s toy pistol. Roxy had confiscated it from her boyfriend after an argument she had never fully explained. A stun gun. Fifty thousand volts.
I pressed the switch. A thin blue arc snapped between the two metal probes with a sound like an angry insect.
Eli’s eyes went wide.
“You’re not going to use that on me. People have died from those things. Heart attacks—”
“I won’t need to, if you behave.” I moved it closer. “Who do you work for?”
She stared at the blue spark and said nothing.
I did not have time for this. In a few hours, someone at the firm would call a locksmith to open Ross’s door, and my life as I knew it would end. Before that happened, I needed everything she knew.
I pressed the probes against her stomach.
One second. No more.
Her body arched against the ropes. When it released her, she doubled forward and vomited onto the kitchen floor. She was gasping, half-conscious, a thread of saliva swinging from her lip.
“Please,” she choked. “Stop. Stop.”
“Who?”
“Trust Mutual.” The words came out in bursts. “I answer to the CEO. Directly. Trust Mutual pays your firm, and your firm pays me.”
Trust Mutual. The client I had brought in. The account that had made me a partner.
“Can you prove it?”
“My computer.” She was crying now. “Under Trust Mutual. The password is Ross.”
Of course it was.
I left her tied to the chair and found the computer in a small study off the hall. The Trust Mutual folder was exactly where she had said, and inside it was enough to bankrupt the largest insurer in Boston, sink Lancy, Berger, and Williams, and end Elizabeth Grant’s career several times over. I printed all of it.
I was reaching to turn the machine off when I noticed a second folder, nested inside the first.
Its title was My Insurance Policy.
I opened it.
What I read over the next ten minutes changed the shape of everything. Eli had been building a file of her own, quietly and meticulously, for years. It named the man at the top: Michael Leonard Brown, chief executive of Trust Mutual, and the head of a criminal organization built on insider trading. The records tied him to at least two dozen companies through which he had illegally acquired shares in public corporations where he sat on the board or held some other position of influence. The file even gave the address of his headquarters in New York City.
And then there was the list.
It was titled simply On Payroll. Nearly one hundred names, each with a job title beside it. Patrol officers. Detectives. City inspectors. Clerks. Judges.
She had been telling the truth. She worked for people who recognized no boundaries at all.
The file told me the rest. For eight years, my firm had represented Brown’s smaller insurers, one after another, under names that never led back to him, and for eight years it had used Mickey. Trust Mutual was only the latest and the largest. I had not brought Brown to the firm at all. He had simply let me believe I had. Eli had played every part the work required: she had tainted evidence and fabricated it, appeared as opposing counsel in cases she had already arranged to lose, and carried bribes to officials on Brown’s behalf.
She was no pawn. She was one of Brown’s lieutenants.
And she had kept insurance against the man she served. In my profession, I knew all about insurance policies. I had spent ten years making sure they never paid.
I printed the hidden file and slid it into the manila envelope with the rest.
“Untie me,” Eli said when I came back into the kitchen. Her voice had recovered some of its iron.
“Not yet.”
I was still wearing my gloves. I took the heavy object from my coat pocket, unwrapped it behind her back, and pressed it into her bound hand.
“Hold this for a moment while I see to your feet.”
Her fingers closed around it. She could not turn her head far enough to see what it was.
I knelt and worked at the knots on her ankles, then shook my head.
“Too tight. I’ll find something to cut them.”
I stood behind her, took the object carefully by its edges, wrapped it again, and slid it into the tennis bag.
She never saw what she had been holding.
In time, she would wish she had.
I untied her wrists and left her there, working at the ropes around her ankles, while I let myself out the front door. I drove away the long way, through side streets, checking my mirror at every turn.
It was nearly midnight when I rang Rachel’s bell.
She opened the door in a silk robe, annoyed at being woken. Then she saw my face, and the annoyance became something else.
The FedEx would reach her in the morning and explain some of it. I could not wait until morning. I sat her down, put the envelope in her hands, and told her everything: the Morales file, Mickey, the cathedral, the database, the Hamilton Building, the brownstone.
She listened without interrupting, which was not like her.
“You have to broadcast this, Rachel,” I said when I had finished. “All of it. The evidence is right there. Your story is the only thing that will keep these people from killing me.”
She looked down at the pages, then back at me.
“And lead with the Morales case,” I said. “If you don’t, those twins will end up in an orphanage. Please. If it’s the last thing you ever do for me.”
“What do you mean, the last thing?”
I kissed her softly.
“I may have to disappear for a while.”
“Why?”
I sat down on the edge of her sofa and put my face in my hands.
“Rachel, I think I killed a man tonight.”
For a moment, she said nothing at all.
“What? Who?”
“It’s too complicated.” I stood. “I have to go. I need to pack, and first thing in the morning I have to close my accounts and get some cash. I’ll call you as soon as I’m on the road.”
“Xavier—”
“I know how it sounds. I know. But this is going to be the scandal of the year, and you have every source you need. You’ll be putting crooked men in prison and saving two orphans from poverty.” I took her hands. “And you’ll be saving my life. Promise me you’ll run it.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“If the sources check out,” she said, “it’ll be on the air from here to Istanbul by noon.”
I kissed her once more and ran out the door.
I did not see what happened after it closed. I learned later.
Rachel stood alone in her living room with the pages in her hands, trembling, though not from fear.
“This is it,” she whispered. Then, louder: “This is my story.”
Within minutes, she had an editor at NBC News in New York on the phone. She told him she had the biggest story of the year. She told him she had dug it up herself.
Somewhere in that call, she must have mentioned that her source was a man who might be dead by morning.
If she did, no one remembered it.
Mount Shasta. Spring 2009.
“…five, four, three, two, one.”
“Good. Very good. Now open your eyes, slowly. You feel peaceful. Rested. That’s it.”
The voice was gentle and seemed to come from a long way off. I opened my eyes. Soft light gathered at the edges of my vision, and I found myself breathing deeply, evenly, as though someone had been counting my breaths for me.
A face hovered above mine. At first it was only a blur. Then it sharpened, line by line, until it was as clear as it had been on the day I first saw it.
The stranger from the park.
El Cholo.
I sat up slowly. I had been lying in a deep reclining chair in a small, quiet room: pale-blue curtains drawn against the daylight, a desk, two chairs, a rug laid over polished parquet, a long sofa against one wall. The lamps were dimmed. Somewhere, very softly, a cello was playing Bach.
El Cholo stepped back and settled onto the sofa. He was looking at me with the same expression I remembered from the bench: friendly, patient, and something more than friendly.
“Welcome back, Roshi,” he said. “My name is Dr. Xu Yun. I am your neurologist.”
He paused.
“And your disciple.”
My eyes went to the wall on my right, where a row of cherry-wood frames displayed the record of a distinguished life: medical association awards, a presidency of some research society devoted to clinical ethics. The frame in the center held a diploma from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Doctorate in neuroscience. Magna cum laude.
On a shelf beneath the frames, in a glass case of its own, sat something I could not place: a kind of skullcap woven from copper coils and tiny circuit boards, with padded straps hanging loose at the sides. It looked like a prop from an old science-fiction film.
“What is that?” I asked.
Dr. Yun followed my glance, and for a moment something closed in his face. “An old experiment,” he said. “I call it God’s Helmet. Some people in Washington were very interested in it once.” He turned back to me. “I don’t use it anymore. Certainly not on you.”
“Where am I?”
“You still don’t recognize me. Except from the park in Boston.” He smiled, unconcerned. “That’s all right. The mind is a tricky organ. It returns things in its own order, and in its own time.” His voice softened. “You’re at Mount Shasta, Roshi. You’re home. This is your monastery, and you are its abbot. Here, your name is Xava Xun.”
“Then why can’t I remember it?”
“Because the mind has not decided to give it back to you yet. We have to let it.”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Roshi, you have a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy. TLE. I want you to understand something before you begin to fear it. It is not only an illness. It is also the most remarkable gift I have ever encountered.”
“A gift?” I heard the edge in my own voice. “Doctor, so far all it has given me is confusion and pain.”
“Sit with me. There is a great deal we need to talk about.”
I crossed the room and sat at the far end of the sofa. He turned to face me.
“The temporal lobes,” he said, touching his own head just above each ear, “are where the brain keeps memory, emotion, the sense of meaning. In TLE, small storms of electrical activity break out there. In most patients, the storms bring blackouts, distorted time, hallucinations. You have experienced all three.” He held up a finger. “But in a small number of people, they bring something else.”
“Such as?”
“Some of my patients report premonitions so precise they frighten me. Some see the world so differently that they become painters or writers. And a very few experience an overwhelming sense of union with everything that exists.” He hesitated. “In your case, there is something more. Healing.”
I said nothing.
“I know how that sounds. I have spent my whole life studying what the ancients called the sacred disease. In the 1970s, a Harvard neurologist named Norman Geschwind described a pattern in certain TLE patients: intense religious feeling, an urge to write constantly, a profound sense of personal significance. Doctors still call it Geschwind syndrome.” He spread his hands. “Once you know the pattern, you begin to see it everywhere in history.”
“Where?”
“Moses at the burning bush. Saint Paul, struck down by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Joan of Arc and her voices. Some scholars have made the same argument about the Prophet Muhammad. Others have argued it for Pascal, for Newton, for Van Gogh, for Dickens. Dostoevsky had epilepsy, and he left no doubt. He wrote that in the few seconds before a seizure, he felt a happiness so complete he would have given ten years of his life for it. Perhaps all of it.”
He let that settle.
“A few years ago, researchers in Montreal scanned the brains of Carmelite nuns while they relived their deepest experiences of union with God. Among the regions that came alive was the temporal lobe.”
I raised a hand to stop him.
“Wait. Are you telling me that every spiritual experience in history was a symptom? That Christ was insane? That anyone who has ever claimed to know God was simply ill?”
Dr. Yun looked at me gravely. I had the impression that he had been asked the question many times, and had never once found it easy.
“I am telling you that every experience a human being has leaves a footprint in the brain. Love does. Grief does. Prayer does. That doesn’t make any of them less real.” He tapped his temple. “Show me exactly where the mind ends and the soul begins, Roshi. No one has ever been able to. Perhaps the mind is the soul.”
He stood and walked slowly to the window.
“As for illness, that is only a word for being far from the average. Consider Albert Einstein. When he died in 1955, the pathologist who performed the autopsy removed his brain without the family’s permission, cut it into some two hundred and forty blocks, and sent pieces of it to researchers around the world. What did they find? An unusual concentration of support cells in certain regions. Parietal lobes, the areas tied to mathematical and spatial thinking, that were shaped unlike any they had seen.” He turned back to me. “By any clinical definition, Einstein’s brain was abnormal. And yet who would call it a disease?”
“Abnormal brains also produce monsters.”
“Of course. Abnormality is a door. Hitler walked through one door. Einstein walked through another. But normal only means common, Roshi. It means that most brains happen to be alike. Very little has ever been discovered by the common mind.”
I looked up at him.
“And what makes me so uncommon, Doctor?”
He came back and sat beside me, closer this time, his eyes holding mine.
“You came to Zen late, and as a beginner. Under a respected master, it took you less than three months to reach what our tradition calls enlightenment. Most devoted monks spend decades. Many never arrive at all.”
He rose again and began to walk a slow circle around me. When he spoke, his voice was quieter and more careful.
“But that is not your most extraordinary ability. Like a handful of people throughout history, you have the power to heal. Even the dying. People with illnesses every other doctor had declared terminal.”
“How?”
“By entering a deep meditative state that triggers a TLE event. Deliberately.” He stopped in front of me. “That is what makes you unique, Roshi. Some of your seizures come without warning. But there are others you provoke. Those you can control. Nothing like it has ever been recorded in the literature of neuroscience. And that is why your life matters more than you can possibly imagine.”
He picked up a cup of green tea from the side table and drank, slowly, with complete attention, as if nothing else in the room existed.
“When you do it deliberately, you meditate for one purpose and one purpose only: to heal someone. But the last time was different. You spent nearly two months meditating alone in a cave on the mountain. You pushed yourself deeper than ever before, into a state you could barely control. And when you came down, you came to me.”
“What did I say?”
“That you had to go away. That you doubted you would come back once the healing was done.”
He set down the cup.
“That could mean only one thing. Someone you cared about was close to death, and you had decided to save them. You knew what it would cost. To heal a patient that close to the end, you would have to give away nearly all of your own neural activity.” He folded his hands. “In plain terms, Roshi, you would save that life, and you would become irreversibly brain-dead.”
The room was very quiet. Even the cello had stopped.
“What we were doing when you woke,” he said, “was hypnotic regression. We are trying to bring your buried memories back to the surface, so we can learn who you were prepared to die for. You’ve done well. You’ve recovered a great deal. But we had been working for nearly three hours, and more than that can damage the pathways we are trying to restore. We’ll continue after you’ve rested.”
I had a hundred questions. I asked the smallest one.
“How did I get here? I don’t remember arriving.”
“Claire brought you. Against my advice.” For the first time, something like reproach crossed his face. “I went to Boston to bring you home myself. I found you in the park, and you ran from me. After that, she convinced me to let her try.”
He hesitated.
“There is something you should know, Roshi. Claire has loved you since she was a girl of twelve, long before she first came to us. She is a grown woman now. But you are her teacher. And when you became a monk, you took a vow of celibacy. You must keep your distance from—”
“A celibate monk?”
I said it far too loudly.
“Yes.” He smiled at my disbelief. “Nearly ten years ago, you succeeded Roshi Deshan as abbot here. Under your guidance, Dharma Mountain grew into one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the Western Hemisphere. People come here from all over the world. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has walked these gardens.”
He went on, naming visitors and honors, but I had stopped listening.
None of it seemed as impossible as the simple fact at the center of it all: that an insurance defense attorney had become a monk.
And beneath that fact, lodged like a splinter in my mind, was the one thought I could not pull free.
The abbot of this monastery had taken a vow of celibacy.
And he had fallen hopelessly in love with his own disciple, in the dark, on the cold steel floor of the C-train.
Boston. Before the westward journey, 2009.
Dr. Xu Yun had been looking for his teacher for eleven weeks.
He had started in the obvious places. The hospitals first: Massachusetts General, Beth Israel, Brigham and Women’s, Boston Medical Center, every emergency room and psychiatric intake desk in the city, with a photograph and a story that sounded, he knew, like the beginning of a bad joke. A Zen abbot from California. Nearly fifty. Shaved head, or it was when he left. He may not know who he is.
No one had seen him.
Then the shelters. The Pine Street Inn. St. Francis House. The Salvation Army on Massachusetts Avenue. Then the police, who were polite and took a report and looked at him the way the police in every country look at a foreigner reporting a missing grown man.
Eleven weeks, and nothing.
It should never have come to this.
Xavier had left the mountain in early winter, after two months alone in the cave, with his eyes too bright and his hands too warm and a promise to keep. To whom, he would not say. Yun had argued against it. He had argued against the cave, against the length of the retreat, against the strange, focused hunger he had seen growing in his friend for weeks. He had shown him the EEGs. He had shown him the numbers.
Your temporal lobes are running at a level no human brain was built to sustain. You are not charging a battery, Roshi. You are overloading a circuit.
Xavier had only smiled and put his hands on Yun’s shoulders, the way he did, and Yun had felt the current go through him like warm water.
Then you will have something new to write about, Doctor.
Xavier had flown out of Redding on a Tuesday. He had called from Logan Airport that evening, sounding tired and happy. He had never called again.
A week went by. Then two. Xavier had told him the city. He had never told him the name, or the street, or whose life he had decided was worth his own.
After that, Yun had packed one bag and gone to Boston himself.
At the end of the eleventh week, Claire found him a lead.
She had been searching too, from the other end, through the network of safe houses Xavier had founded. Her people worked the streets. They knew the soup kitchens and the church basements and the steam grates where men slept in January. And one of them, a woman who ran a free-meal program out of a parish hall in the South End, had seen a man who matched the photograph.
“He comes in most days,” Claire told Yun on the telephone. Her voice was shaking. “He wears a suit. A filthy old suit. He talks like he’s late for court. He told one of the volunteers he was a partner at Lancy, Berger, and Williams.”
Yun closed his eyes.
Lancy, Berger, and Williams had not existed for fourteen years.
He saw Xavier for the first time on a gray morning in the Public Garden.
He was walking fast along the path by the pond, in the remains of a dark suit that someone must have given him, or that he had found. His shoes were split. His face was bearded and gaunt. He carried a cheap plastic briefcase under his arm the way he had once carried a Louis Vuitton, and he moved through the crowd with the hard, impatient stride of a man who was billing by the hour.
Yun’s first impulse, as a friend, was to run to him.
His second, as a neurologist, stopped him dead.
He stood very still by the bridge and watched his teacher pass within ten feet of him without a flicker of recognition, and he made himself think.
Retrograde amnesia, almost certainly. A dissociative fugue, perhaps, laid over a physical injury: a temporal lobe pushed so far past its limits that something had given way. The mind had protected itself the way minds do. It had gone back to the last place it felt safe and in control, and it had closed the door behind it. In Xavier’s mind, it was 1995. He was thirty-five. He was a lawyer. Nothing after that had happened.
And if a stranger in a monk’s robe ran up to him now, calling him Roshi, telling him he was nearly fifty and the abbot of a monastery three thousand miles away?
Yun had seen what happened to fugue patients who were confronted too quickly. Panic. Flight. Sometimes something worse. A mind that had fled once could flee again, farther, and not come back.
No. Xavier could not be told.
He would have to be led.
It took Yun three days to prepare.
He let his beard grow. He bought clothes at a thrift store on Washington Street and slept in them for two nights so that they would look as though he had lived in them for months. He found a bench along the path where Xavier passed every morning, at almost exactly the same time, on his way to a courthouse that would not recognize him.
And before dawn on the fourth day, he did one last thing.
In his bag, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a small bottle he had brought from the mountain without quite knowing why. One of the young monks had pressed it into his hands at the gate. Oil, distilled from the magnolias in the little private garden outside the abbot’s quarters, the garden Xavier had planted with his own hands. Xavier had loved that smell more than any other. He had told Yun once that it was the scent of the walled yard of his childhood in Ecuador, the one place he had ever felt completely safe.
The olfactory bulb, Yun knew, connects directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus. It is the oldest road into memory in the human brain, older than language and older than reason. A smell can reach places a word cannot.
He touched a few drops of the oil to his wrists and his collar.
Then he lay down on the bench, pulled a layer of old newspapers over himself against the cold, and waited.
Xavier came at twenty past eight.
Yun watched him through a gap in the newspapers. He watched him slow, and glance over, and look away with the particular disgust of a successful man for a vagrant. He watched him walk on.
Then he watched him stop.
Yun smiled. Not the polite smile of a beggar, but the one he had given his friend across a thousand cups of tea. He let it be as wide and as bright as it wanted to be, and he held Xavier’s eyes with it, and he did not look away.
After a long moment, Xavier turned around and came back.
As he drew near, Yun sat up and threw off the newspapers, and he saw it happen: the faint frown, the hesitation, the slight lift of the head as the scent reached him. Xavier did not know what it was. But some part of him, the oldest part, did.
He stopped in front of the bench, puzzled and wary, and looked down.
Yun had rehearsed a hundred things to say. In the end, he said almost none of them. He let his friend take his measure, and call him what his old Ecuadorian pride needed to call him, and he laughed with real delight when he heard it.
El Cholo.
It was perfect. It was exactly the kind of name Xavier would have given him, before. Proof that the old man was still in there, arrogance and all.
And somewhere beneath the arrogance, the teacher.
They sat together in silence. Yun felt Xavier’s breathing slow, felt him settle, felt the restless lawyer’s energy beside him go quiet for a moment, the way it did on the cushion. A sparrow crossed the sky. A squirrel climbed a tree.
Now, Yun thought. While the door is open.
He reached out and gripped his friend’s arm, and looked straight into his eyes, and asked him the only question that mattered.
“Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?”
Boston. Spring 1995.
Three in the morning.
In a few hours, Rachel would tell the world what Michael Brown had built, and by tonight there would be no Lancy, Berger, and Williams left to speak of. There would also be no Xavier Armand, attorney at law. The scandal would bring down the firm, and the firm would bring me down with it. I would be arrested, disbarred, or worse.
I did not intend to be in Boston when it happened.
I tore through my own penthouse like a burglar. Suits lay across the bed. Shirts hung from the stair railing. A drawer of silk ties had spilled across the marble floor, and I stepped over it without a second glance. In the end, everything I needed fit into one small suitcase: two pairs of sweatpants, a few T-shirts, a toothbrush, a razor.
A man’s whole life, it turned out, could be carried in one hand.
By seven, I was out the door in yesterday’s wrinkled suit, the suitcase in one hand and the Ferrari’s title in the other. I drove Roxy’s Cadillac to the firm and eased it into her parking space, exactly as I had promised.
Before I got out, I did one last thing.
I set the black tennis bag on the passenger seat. Inside it, beside the wrapped bundle, I left Lancy’s skeleton key and a sealed envelope with Roxy’s name on the front. On the back I had written three words.
Read this alone.
Upstairs, the floor was still nearly empty. I signed the Ferrari over to Roxana in my best signature, left the title on my desk, and walked out again before the first early-bird associate looked up from his coffee.
Across the street, my bank opened at eight.
It had started opening early the year before, a courtesy to the downtown professionals who could not spare a lunch hour. I was the first one through the door. I asked for my personal banker. He had not arrived. I asked for anyone with the authority to close my checking and savings accounts, issue a cashier’s check for the combined balance, and take an order to sell my stock.
Then I waited.
I had to be gone before the morning broadcast. Rachel had warned me that she would need to clear her sources with New York before going on the air, but that was little comfort. My career was over. I had no idea where I was going. The only thing I knew was that it had to be far from New England.
I sat on a purple plastic chair for nearly an hour while the speakers overhead played an endless loop of elevator music. At one point, someone’s idea of a joke drifted down from the ceiling: an orchestral “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
Almost nine. Still no banker.
Above the tellers, three television sets glowed silently, showing the weather, a stock ticker, a commercial for a car I had once considered buying.
“Maybe I can help you, sir.”
A young woman had appeared at the desk in front of me. She did not look old enough to close an account, let alone liquidate a portfolio, but I was in no position to be particular. She asked for two forms of identification. I gave her my driver’s license and my American Express card.
“And may I ask why you’re closing your accounts, Mr. Armand?”
My eyes were on the televisions.
“I need the money.”
“We could arrange a loan, sir. Your credit is excellent.”
“No!” Heads turned. I made myself smile. “No, thank you. I’d just like my money. Please.”
“Of course. It will only be a few minutes.”
She disappeared into the back. A moment later, my cell phone rang.
“You’re insane,” Roxy said. “You know that, don’t you? I can’t accept a Ferrari, Xavier. That car is worth more than my house.”
“It’s yours.”
“Where are you?”
“At the bank. As soon as they give me my money, I’m renting a car and leaving town.”
“Leaving for where?”
“I don’t know. West.”
“Then go to Car-Rent, the place across from the office. They know you there.” She lowered her voice. “Xavier, listen to me. There’s something you need to know. This morning—”
“Oh my God.”
On every screen above the tellers, the same image had appeared.
A swirl of red and blue. A logo. Then the words I had been waiting for all night, white letters on a black field.
NBC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT.
I hung up on Roxy without another word.
Ronald Randolph, the network’s national anchor, gazed gravely into the camera from New York.
“Good morning. We interrupt our regular programming with an NBC News exclusive. Rachel Tullier, of our Boston affiliate, has uncovered what may prove to be one of the largest corporate fraud schemes in American history.”
Then Rachel filled the screen.
She looked magnificent. She had not slept, and it did not show. She told the country that she had personally uncovered a monstrous insurance fraud, and then she laid it out for them, name by name. Corporations. Executives. A Boston law firm. She had even had the graphics department build a diagram, a glowing network of names and lines connecting every player to every other, and she had given it a name.
The Web of Corruption.
I could not look away.
The coverage cut to the steps of the District Attorney’s office, where the District Attorney himself pushed through a crowd of reporters with a newspaper held over his face. Someone shouted Elizabeth Grant’s name. Then another. No one had seen her since the night before.
Then came Michael Leonard Brown: his photograph, his companies, his place at the center of the web.
And then, finally, Richard Lancy, cornered at the elevator of our own building, his face the color of old putty.
“This is clearly a misunderstanding,” he said. “This firm has never been involved in any wrongdoing of any kind.”
The elevator doors closed on him. A dozen reporters waved copies of the list that said otherwise.
“Mr. Armand?”
The young banker had returned, entirely unaware that the man in front of her was the source of the story playing over her head. She handed me a cashier’s check for a little under three hundred thousand dollars.
I took it, along with my license and my credit card, and ran.
Outside, Boston’s morning rush hour had turned the streets into a parking lot. I found Car-Rent on the corner where Roxy had said it would be and asked for anything they had, but nothing in a large city happens quickly, not even escape. It was another hour before I pulled out of their garage in a white Ford Taurus.
I turned left onto a side street to avoid the traffic.
A red Corvette convertible skidded sideways across the road in front of me and stopped.
I stood on the brakes.
The driver wore a dark ski mask. He turned in his seat, calmly, almost lazily, and raised a large automatic pistol until it was aimed through my windshield at my face. Five feet. Perhaps less.
So this is how it ends.
Who had sent him? Brown? Eli? Someone on the list whose name I had not even bothered to read? It did not matter. In less than a day, I had made enough enemies to fill a firing squad. I had believed that putting the story on the air would be my insurance policy, that no one would dare kill the man who had exposed them.
It had been a fantasy. A Hollywood daydream. I had taken fortunes from very rich men, and now it was time to pay.
I closed my eyes and waited for the bullet.
What I heard instead was a crash so loud it seemed to come from inside my own skull.
I opened my eyes.
Roxy’s Cadillac had come out of nowhere and plowed into the side of the Corvette at full speed. Two tons of 1974 Detroit steel against a fiberglass sports car. The Corvette had folded like a red accordion, and the man in the mask lay slumped against its shattered windshield.
Roxy sat behind the wheel, seat belt fastened, grinning at me through her open window.
“Who needs this old wreck,” she shouted, “when she owns a Ferrari?”
I could not speak. I only smiled at her, the way a drowning man smiles at whoever has pulled him out. Then I steered the Taurus around what was left of the Corvette, climbed the ramp onto the expressway, and headed west.
Ten miles later, my hands had stopped shaking enough to dial.
“How did you find me?”
Roxy sighed. “If you had let me finish when you were at the bank, you’d know. A man came into the office this morning asking for you. He said he was a friend of yours. I’ve worked for you for ten years, Xavier. I know all your friends, and I’d never seen him before. There was something wrong about the way he moved. So I followed him out to the parking garage and watched him sit in that Corvette, waiting. That’s when I called you.”
“And I hung up on you.”
“You hung up on me. So I drove to the bank and followed you. When I saw him point that gun at you, I stepped on the gas.” She paused. “They really don’t make cars like they used to, do they?”
“Roxy—”
“Don’t worry about the Cadillac. I didn’t stay to chat. Mark has a friend with a garage near the pier. He’ll get it fixed and painted brown, and if that man doesn’t propose after this, he never will.”
I laughed, and it came out closer to a sob.
“Thank you, Roxy. You’re my guardian angel.”
“Just drive,” she said. “And Xavier? I found the bag.”
The line went quiet.
Four words, and I understood. She had opened it. She had read the letter. And Roxy, who balanced the firm’s petty cash to the penny and had never so much as left work early, had already decided to do what it asked.
A woman who had never broken a rule in her life was about to break the law for me.
I wanted to call her back and tell her not to. I did not. If I made her choose twice, she might choose differently, and I would not live to the end of the week.
I drove west, as fast as the Taurus would take me, and did not look back.
Mount Shasta. Spring 2009.
The last regression session of the day ended at sunset.
Some of what I had lost had begun to surface. Fragments. Faces without names, rooms without addresses. But the questions that mattered were still unanswered, and something told me that the answers were not in Dr. Xu Yun’s office.
They were somewhere inside these walls.
His door opened onto a small garden on the western side of the cloister. From there, as from almost anywhere in the monastery, the mountain filled the sky.
Mount Shasta.
At more than fourteen thousand feet, it is one of the tallest volcanoes in the Cascade Range, and one of the most revered mountains in America. The Native peoples of the region had considered it sacred for thousands of years. Pilgrims of every faith had followed them. And as a boy, standing with my grandfather beside two empty graves, I had sworn never to go near a mountain like it.
Now it towered over me, dormant, snow-covered, catching the last of the setting sun in bands of rose and gold.
I felt no fear at all.
I walked slowly, breathing deeply, letting the sound of running water and birdsong quiet the endless chatter in my head. It was early spring, but snow still lay in the shaded corners of the gardens, and the whole place had the hushed, expectant feeling of Christmas Eve.
The paths were narrow and winding, laid out, it seemed, to keep human feet from disturbing anything that grew. As I followed them toward the main square, I noticed a small group of monks watching my approach.
That was when I noticed something else.
I was wearing a robe.
I had not given it a thought until that moment. It had felt entirely natural. But it was not like the others. Theirs were black. Mine was deep blue, and over it hung a strange gray panel of cloth, like an apron, falling from my shoulders to my waist.
When I reached the square, the monks bowed deeply. They were smiling, the way people smile at an old friend come home.
“Welcome back, Roshi,” said a woman in her sixties.
I bowed back. It seemed the right thing to do.
Beyond the square stood a large wooden hall. I walked toward it, and by the time I reached its doors, at least a dozen more monks had stopped to bow and murmur their welcome. I pushed open the door.
Claire was inside.
She was standing alone in the center of the long room. She turned slowly, bowed, and spoke with a calm formality that stopped me where I stood.
“It’s been a long time. I’m glad you’re back. We missed you.”
Something was wrong.
Her braids were gone. Her hair was cropped close to her head. And the golden freckles I had studied by the light of a dying glow-stick on the C-train were not there.
Dr. Xu Yun appeared at my side.
“I see you and Anna are getting along again.”
“Anna?” I stared at him. “You mean Claire.”
The young woman smiled.
“No, Roshi. I’m Anna. Anna Morales.” She tilted her head. “You must be thinking of my sister.”
Morales.
I put one hand over my mouth. The other found Yun’s shoulder and held on.
“Claire and Anna,” I said through my fingers, “are the Morales twins?”
“Yes, of course,” Yun said, as though I had asked whether the sun was out.
Footsteps came running from the back of the hall.
Braids. Freckles. A blur of blonde hair.
Claire threw herself at me, rose onto her toes, and wrapped her arms around my neck until her feet left the floor. She weighed nothing at all. Ninety-six pounds, I would have guessed. An angel’s wing.
I did not hold her.
In my mind, the Morales twins were two children in county foster care, two names in a file I had been paid to destroy. The last memory I trusted was fourteen years old, and in it, Claire was a little girl.
She was not a little girl now. She was a grown woman. I knew that.
But she had known exactly who I was from the moment she slid a piece of cardboard under my table at St. Catherine’s. She had known on the train. She had known on the hill above the Mississippi. And she had said nothing.
I took her hands and gently unlocked them from my neck. Then I leaned close and spoke so that only she could hear.
“I don’t want to see you again. Please go. What you’ve done to me is unforgivable.”
She did not argue.
Tears ran down her face without a sound. She turned and walked toward the back door of the hall, and I watched her small figure grow smaller.
Beside me, Anna had seen everything. Perhaps twins always know. She raised her left arm and pushed back her sleeve.
Around her wrist was a beaded bracelet.
It was identical to mine.
“Roshi,” she said softly, “when Claire and I turned seven, our parents gave us these. One each. They said they stood for a love that would never end. After the accident, we never took them off. Not until you came back to Boston.”
She looked toward the door through which her sister had gone.
“When we were twelve, you came back to Boston and testified for us against Trust Mutual. You had kept a copy of everything. Because of you, the court ordered the insurance money paid to us. And your friends Brandon and Lara Pierce adopted us. They have been the most loving parents we could have asked for.”
Brandon Pierce. The third envelope.
Do Not Open Unless Requested by Sender.
“The day after the hearing,” Anna went on, “we were at the window of our new house, watching you get into your car. Claire ran outside after you. She called your name, and she took off her bracelet for the first time since our father tied it on, and she gave it to you. I knew then how much she loved you.” She hesitated. “She still does. More than ever. But not the way a grateful child loves the man who saved her. She loves you the way a woman loves a man.”
I looked down at the beads around my wrist. The mysterious bracelet. The one I had found in a police envelope in a Boston precinct with no memory of where it had come from.
Then I looked up at the back door, where Claire had disappeared into the evening.
The light came without warning.
It was white and blinding, and it flooded everything. My knees buckled. Yun caught my arm. And in that single, endless instant, every lost year came rushing back.
All of it.
I remembered.
The safe houses for orphaned children I had helped found, with the Morales twins as trustees. My training under Roshi Deshan. The morning the world fell away and I saw it, truly saw it, for the first time.
And I remembered the bench.
The day in the park had not happened in 1995. It had happened only days ago. I had gone to Boston with a single purpose, and somewhere between Mount Shasta and that city, my mind had come loose from time. For months I had wandered the streets of Boston, sleeping in doorways and eating in shelters, which was why St. Catherine’s had felt so strangely familiar. And on that last day, my mind had gone back to my old life as a lawyer. I had walked through pieces of it again as though I were still living it. My partnership. Mrs. O’Brian’s claim. Eli. The bench.
And on the bench, the one person who had come to bring me home.
Most important of all, I remembered why I had gone to Boston in the first place.
The garden. The stone bench under the magnolias. The man kneeling in front of me with his hands in mine was no longer faceless. I knew his name now. I knew who lay in that bed in Boston. I knew exactly what I had promised him, and what it would cost.
And I remembered that I had failed.
There was no time to lose. I had to go back and finish what I had started, before it was too late.
The hall where I stood was the zendo, the meditation hall, the heart of the monastery. Here our sangha, the community of monks and lay trainees, sat in silence each morning before dawn. Here I gave my dharma talks, my teachings on the nature of reality, of love, of compassion. More than sixty monks lived within these walls, and more than three hundred lay trainees came and went. Reverend Dr. Xu Yun was my second. If I were ever unable to lead them, he would take my place.
I looked at Anna, and a question rose that I was almost ashamed to ask.
“Anna, there’s one thing I still don’t understand. You and Claire were born in Uruguay. How is it that you look Swiss? Pale skin, blue eyes, hair that’s almost silver. In a thousand years, I would never have guessed you were the Morales twins.”
She smiled as if at a child.
“Roshi, you were born in Ecuador. How is it that you look like a Spaniard and not an Inca?”
She had answered my question with a question, the way a good student of Zen always does.
Of course. All across South America there were families of unmixed European blood. The Moraleses had clearly been among them. I had grown up behind walls built on that very distinction, and I had spent the first half of my life sorting people by the color of their skin and the size of their houses.
I had learned better since. I had simply forgotten it for a while.
“Thank you, Anna,” I said.
Then I ran after Claire.
I loved her. I was a monk, and I had taken a vow, and I loved her anyway. And soon, I knew, it would no longer matter what I had vowed or whom I loved.
My time was almost over.
I wanted to spend every minute of what was left of it with her.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Michael Leonard Brown watched the end of his life on a hotel television.
The presidential suite on the fourteenth floor had cost him four thousand dollars a night, and from its windows he could see the whole of the Public Garden, the swan boats tied up at their dock, the gold dome of the State House catching the morning light. He saw none of it. He sat on the edge of the bed in a white hotel robe, two hundred and fifty pounds of him sunk into the mattress, and stared at the screen.
At the screen, and at the woman on it.
She was beautiful. He would give her that. Small and pale and fierce, with green eyes that looked straight through the camera and into his room. She spoke his name the way a prosecutor speaks a defendant’s name, slowly, so that the jury would remember it.
Michael Leonard Brown.
Then his photograph. Then his companies, one after another, the shells he had spent twenty years building so that his name would never appear on anything. Securities Enterprises, Inc. Trust Mutual. A dozen others he had nearly forgotten himself. A glowing diagram spread across the screen, a web of names and lines, and at its center, where every line led, was his face.
The Web of Corruption.
He did not move for a long time.
At nine-fifteen, he called Epstein.
The phone in the New York office rang eleven times. No one answered. He called Epstein’s apartment on Park Avenue, and a recording told him the number was no longer in service. He called the car phone, the beach house in the Hamptons, the private line Epstein kept for emergencies, the one Brown had paid for himself.
Nothing.
At nine-forty, he called the bank in the Caymans.
The voice on the other end was polite and Caribbean and very sorry. The account had been closed. All of the accounts had been closed. The funds had been transferred, on the instructions of the authorized signatory, over the course of the past three weeks.
“Which signatory?” Brown said.
A pause. A rustle of paper.
“Mr. Gregory Epstein, sir.”
Brown set the phone down very gently in its cradle. Then he picked up the whole apparatus, cord and all, and threw it through the screen of the television.
The glass burst. Sparks. A thin curl of smoke. Somewhere beneath the smoke, very faintly, Rachel Tullier’s voice kept talking, until it crackled and stopped.
The pills were in a small leather case on the marble counter of the bathroom. Ms. Anderson had packed them, as she always did, one for the morning and one for the night, each in its own little compartment, labeled in her neat handwriting.
He opened the case and looked at them.
For eleven years, those small white tablets had stood between him and the thing that lived at the bottom of his mind. The doctors had a name for it. Brown had his own. When he was a boy he had called it the water, because that was where it had first come up, on a hot August afternoon in the backyard in Greenwich, with his mother’s hands in his hair and her voice in his ear, telling him what a disappointment he was.
He had held her under until she stopped moving.
And then, for the first time in his life, he had felt calm.
The pills gave him a smaller, duller version of that calm, every day, without anyone having to drown. It had seemed like a fair trade. Without them, he would not have built anything. He would have been just another angry fat man with a temper, in a prison or a grave.
He tipped the morning pill into his palm and looked at it.
Then he turned on the tap and let the water carry it down the drain. The evening pill followed.
He watched the water swirl in the white basin until it was clear.
He knew it would take time. It always had, the few times he had stopped before. A day, sometimes two, before the medication drained out of him and the water rose. He did not need two days. He did not need the water. He needed only to stop pretending.
He dressed with care. A charcoal suit. A white shirt. A tie the color of dried blood that Ms. Anderson had chosen for him in London. He shaved, slowly, and looked at himself in the mirror while he did it, and he found that he was not afraid. He was not even angry anymore. The anger had gone somewhere very deep and very still, the way a shark goes still before it turns.
Everything had been taken from him. His companies. His money. His name. By a mediocre in-house lawyer who used to fetch his files, and by a woman with green eyes reading words off a teleprompter.
And by whoever had given her the story.
He thought about that for a moment, and then he set it aside. There would be time for the source later. There were people for that kind of work. There always had been.
But not for her.
He wanted to do her himself.
From the leather briefcase at the foot of the bed, he took out the small silver pistol he had carried for twenty years and had never once fired. It had been a gift from a man in Miami who was now dead. He fitted the long silencer to the barrel, the way the man had shown him, and turned the weapon over in his hands. It was lighter than he remembered.
Then he opened the slim black address book that went everywhere with him and ran his thick finger down a column of names until he found the one he wanted.
A security guard. Night shift and day shift at the NBC studios on Soldiers Field Road. Two hundred dollars a month, every month, for six years, in exchange for an occasional look at the studio schedules and an occasional unlocked door. Brown had bought him years ago, along with a hundred others like him, the way another man might buy insurance. Small men. Cheap men. Men who had never in their lives expected to be asked for anything that mattered.
The guard’s name had been on Rachel Tullier’s list that morning. Brown had seen it scroll across the screen, along with the modest monthly figure beside it.
He dialed the number on the suite’s other phone.
The guard answered on the second ring, and when he heard who it was, his voice went thin and high with fear.
“Mr. Brown, sir, I swear to God I didn’t tell her anything. I don’t know how she got my name. I’ve been sick all morning, they’re going to fire me, they’re going to—”
“Listen to me,” Brown said softly. “Is she doing another report today?”
“Noon. At noon, sir. Live.”
“Then at eleven-thirty you will open the rear door, and you will let me in, and you will show me where to stand. And afterward, I promise you, no one will ever ask you about your name again.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Yes, sir,” the guard said.
At eleven o’clock, Michael Leonard Brown walked out through the lobby of the hotel, past the doormen and the flower arrangements and the bellhops who did not recognize him, because they had not yet looked up at the televisions above the bar.
His driver was waiting at the curb with the engine running. Brown climbed into the back seat of the black Lincoln, set the briefcase on his knees, and gave the address.
As the car pulled away into the late-morning traffic, he leaned back against the leather and closed his eyes.
For the first time in many years, he felt the water rising.
With it came the old calm, the kind he remembered from the pool.
Boston. Spring 1995.
Noon.
On the NBC set, the lights were up, the teleprompter was loaded, and three cameras stood ready for Rachel Tullier’s second report.
In less than three hours, the story had outgrown Boston. Every major network in the country had picked it up, along with the BBC and the Associated Press, and every one of them was using Rachel’s name for it. The Web of Corruption. Her face was on screens from Boston to Bangkok.
She finally had what she had wanted all her life.
The network’s opening graphics swept across the monitors, all brass and color, and the title appeared beneath her: BREAKING NEWS: THE WEB OF CORRUPTION SCANDAL CONTINUES.
No one on the crew noticed the heavyset man standing in the shadows behind the curtain to Rachel’s right. He had been waved through the studio’s rear entrance half an hour earlier by a security guard whose name appeared, with a modest monthly figure beside it, on a list Rachel had broadcast that morning.
The man raised a small silver pistol fitted with a long silencer. He leveled it at Rachel’s temple.
The red light on the center camera came on.
“Good afternoon,” Rachel said. “New details have emerged this morning in what—”
Two muffled shots.
The cameras kept rolling.
Rachel slumped forward against the news desk. Two dark wounds had opened just above her right ear.
For a long moment, no one in the studio moved.
Then came a third shot.
The curtain swayed open, and a large body toppled out onto the studio floor. It was Michael Leonard Brown. The barrel of the silver pistol was still lodged in his mouth. Beneath the back of his head, a dark pool was spreading across the polished floor.
The broadcast went on for eleven more seconds before someone in the control room thought to cut the feed.
It was long enough.
By nightfall, the footage had been played, paused, and played again on every network in the world. A murder and a suicide, live, on national television. NBC’s ratings went through the roof. The Web of Corruption was no longer merely the story of the year.
It was the story of the decade.
At almost the same moment the footage first aired, Richard Lancy was climbing the steps of a chartered Learjet at Hanscom Field, twenty miles northwest of Boston. He had a flight plan filed for Panama City and a suitcase full of bearer bonds.
The jet reached the end of the taxiway. It never reached the runway. Three state police cruisers and two unmarked federal sedans had pulled across it.
Lancy was led down the steps in handcuffs, still holding an unlit Cuban cigar.
Some men pay for their crimes. Others merely postpone the bill.
Greg Epstein had postponed his.
At that hour, he was stretched out on a lounge chair on a private terrace overlooking Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, watching the same footage on a small television, with a glass of something cold in his hand.
For weeks, he had been quietly moving Brown’s fortune offshore, exactly as instructed. Brown had given him three months. He had needed less than one. What Brown had not known, and would now never know, was where the money had finally come to rest. Billions of dollars had passed through a maze of shell companies and numbered accounts and emerged, one transfer at a time, in accounts that bore Epstein’s name alone.
And now Brown was dead.
The mediocre in-house lawyer who had once fetched files for Michael Brown was now a very rich man in a country where, for someone with his kind of money, extradition was a word, not a threat. Courts could be persuaded. Judges could be rewarded.
Epstein raised his glass to the television.
Back in Boston, the offices of Lancy, Berger, and Williams were in chaos. Phones rang unanswered. Associates huddled in doorways. Partners were not answering their pagers. And in all the confusion, no one could find Norman Ross.
His office door was locked. His keys, it seemed, were wherever he was. And the only other key to that door, the master key that had lived for years beneath a box of Cuban cigars in Richard Lancy’s desk, had vanished.
By midafternoon, someone finally called maintenance to force the lock.
They found Ross curled beneath his own desk.
Within minutes, the floor was swarming with Boston police and homicide detectives. Outside, news vans had already gathered at the curb. A body at the very law firm at the center of the Web of Corruption. It was almost too good to be true.
It did not take the detectives long to find the murder weapon. It lay on the carpet near the body: a heavy brass ornament in the shape of the scales of justice, its base stained dark.
Across the hall, Roxana stood among the other stunned employees, her arms folded tightly across her chest.
No one noticed how pale she was.
Early that morning, alone in her own car, she had opened the black tennis bag and the envelope inside it. She had read my instructions twice. Then, long before the maintenance crew or the police arrived, she had let herself into Ross’s office with Lancy’s skeleton key, unwrapped the brass scales without touching them, and set them down on the floor beside him. She had locked the door behind her.
That night, she would drop the key off the end of a pier into Boston Harbor.
The police had their weapon. They also had a perfect set of fingerprints, and when the department’s computer ran them, it returned a match within the hour, complete with a photograph and a home address.
Detective Paul Maurice studied the file in disbelief. The prints belonged to an assistant district attorney. And she had a motive that any jury would understand. Ross had been her go-between. Ross knew everything.
The warrant was signed before five.
At dusk, a Boston SWAT team rammed open the front door of a brownstone in the Back Bay.
Elizabeth Grant was lying just inside it.
Two packed suitcases stood beside her, as though she had been on her way out. She had not made it. There was a single bullet hole between her eyes. Whoever had done it had been a professional.
Maurice could think of only one candidate.
That morning, on a side street not far from Car-Rent, police had found a red Corvette with its side caved in like a crushed can, its driver dead behind the wheel in a ski mask. There had been a gun in his hand. It would later be matched to the bullet that killed Elizabeth Grant.
Maurice would have very much liked to ask the man some questions.
But the dead do not answer questions, and no witness to the crash had come forward. And there was no sign of the other car.
One thing bothered him more than the missing car. He kept going back to the brass scales.
The prints on them were perfect. Four fingers and a thumb, as clean as a booking card. In nineteen years on the job, Maurice had never lifted a perfect set from a weapon that had been swung in anger. Hands sweat. Hands slip. And nobody, he thought, picks up a pair of scales to kill a man and holds them like a teacup.
He wrote that in the margin of the file. Then his lieutenant closed the case, and the country moved on to the next thing.
Paul Maurice did not.
Rio de Janeiro. March 1996.
Michael Leonard Brown had spent his whole life in the insurance business, and he had never once neglected his own coverage.
Greg Epstein had forgotten that.
For eleven months, he had lived exactly as he had promised himself he would. A penthouse above Ipanema with a terrace that looked out over the whole curve of the beach. A housekeeper, a driver, a boat he did not know how to sail. A young woman from São Paulo who laughed at his jokes, and a Brazilian lawyer who assured him, every month, for a very large fee, that the American extradition request was going nowhere. Courts could be persuaded. Judges could be rewarded. He had been right about that.
He slept well. He had always slept well. It was one of the things Brown had valued in him.
On a warm evening in early March, he came home from dinner a little drunk and found the door to the terrace standing open.
There was a man sitting in his favorite chair.
He was small and neat and gray-haired, in a pale linen suit, with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap. He might have been a retired dentist, or a minor official from the consulate. On the low glass table in front of him lay a folded copy of the Wall Street Journal, eleven months old, open to a photograph of Michael Leonard Brown.
“Mr. Epstein,” the man said pleasantly. “Please. Sit down.”
Epstein did not sit down. He took one step back toward the door, and found that there was another man standing in it.
“Who sent you?” His voice had gone thin. “Brown is dead.”
“Yes. A terrible business.” The man in the chair nodded sympathetically. “But Mr. Brown was a careful man. Many years ago, he made an arrangement with my employers. A policy, you might say. The premium was paid in full, in advance. The terms were very simple.”
He unfolded the newspaper and turned it so that Epstein could see the photograph.
“If anything should ever happen to Mr. Brown, and his money should ever happen to go missing, we were to find out where it had gone.” He smiled. “And with whom.”
Epstein’s mouth had gone completely dry.
“I can pay you,” he said. “Whatever he paid you. Double. Triple. I have—”
“Oh, we know exactly what you have, Mr. Epstein. Down to the last centavo. It took us some time to trace, I will admit. You were very good. Mr. Brown always said you were the best he ever had.” The man stood up and smoothed the front of his linen jacket. “But he was also very clear on one point. He did not want the money back.”
Epstein stared at him.
“He knew he would not be needing it.” The man picked up his hat from the arm of the chair. “He only wanted the bill paid.”
Out over the dark water, the lights of a cruise ship were moving slowly along the horizon. Down on the beach, someone was playing a guitar.
Later, the police in Rio would call it a robbery, and then an accident, and then, when the American newspapers lost interest, nothing at all. A wealthy foreigner, too much wine, a terrace railing. It happened.
Some men pay for their crimes. Others merely postpone the bill.
But sooner or later, every policy comes due.
Western Massachusetts. Spring 1995.
Rachel was dead.
I heard it on the radio somewhere in western Massachusetts, and then I heard it again on every station I turned to, until it seemed the whole country was saying it to me at once, in stereo, through the cheap speakers of a rented Ford.
I turned the radio off.
It did not help. The silence said it too.
Depression. Guilt. Shame. Horror. Grief. None of the words came close. I had given Rachel the story. I had begged her to run it. I had told her it would save my life, and it had cost her hers.
As far as I was concerned, I had killed her.
At first, I had not known where I was going. Now I began to think that driving straight into the Pacific Ocean might not be the worst idea I had ever had.
The hours passed, and so did the miles. Small towns. Cities. Endless stretches of nothing at all. I stopped only for gasoline and the occasional restroom, and then I drove on, west, always west.
Somewhere in Nebraska, the storm of feeling burned itself out, and what replaced it was worse. A numbness so complete that I could not have said what I felt, or whether I felt anything at all. For the first time in my life, I had no plan. No direction. No idea who I was.
Who am I?
A killer? A fugitive? A man with three hundred thousand dollars in his pocket and nowhere to spend it?
Or simply a lawyer, the kind Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote the most famous line ever spoken about my profession? The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. People quote it as a joke. Few remember who says it: Dick the Butcher, one of Jack Cade’s followers. Shakespeare was not mocking lawyers. He was warning what happens when no one is left to defend the law.
I had not defended it. I had sold it by the hour.
All I had left was the road in front of me, unrolling endlessly toward nowhere.
But every road ends somewhere. Mine ended in Redding, California, in a small diner off the interstate, where I sat at the counter with a drink I did not want and stared at the man in the mirror behind the bar.
The bell over the door jingled.
A small, lean man with a shaved head came in and took the stool two seats down from mine. He did not order. Without a word, the bartender set a small salad and a glass of water in front of him.
The stranger looked at me in the mirror.
“There’s a great deal more to you,” he said, “than what you see in there.”
I looked at him dully. My eyes were red from three days without sleep.
“What did you say?”
“There’s no black and white. Not in the world, and not in you.” He picked up his fork. “If you believe the man in that mirror is one thing or the other, then you’ve already traded the joy of being alive for hell.”
“Who are you?”
He smiled. “My name is Deshan. And you are clearly in hell.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“He knows more about you than you do,” the bartender said. He had been listening the whole time. “That’s a Zen master you’re talking to, mister. He can see through you better than an MRI.”
I looked back at the stranger, but he had stopped looking at me. He was eating his salad.
I knew nothing about Zen masters. I knew even less about Eastern philosophy. But this man had just told me exactly what I needed to hear, and I could not have said how he knew to say it. So I moved to the stool beside him, introduced myself, and began to tell him my story.
I did not get halfway through.
Deshan raised his hand.
“I don’t care about your story. Everyone has a story. Everyone has his drama and his unnecessary suffering.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and stood. “If you enjoy your drama, you’re welcome to it. But if you’re ready to stop looking in the mirror, go up the mountain and find me.”
He laid a few coins on the counter and walked out.
The bartender let out a low whistle.
“You’re a lucky man. Roshi Deshan doesn’t invite anybody.”
“Invite me where?”
“To his monastery. Dharma Mountain. Up north, toward Shasta, a long way back into the hills. He’s only got five students up there.” He picked up Deshan’s plate. “Looks like he just offered you a sixth spot.”
I had nothing left to lose except the wish to end my life.
So I asked him for directions.
When I closed the car door, the Taurus greeted me with the smell that every rental car on earth seems to share: new vinyl and old cigarettes. For a moment I sat with my hands on the wheel and considered what I was about to do. Drive into the wilderness to look for a monk I had known for five minutes in a diner. It sounded insane.
Then the fear passed. I turned the key.
The bartender’s directions had made the trip sound simple. It was not. Somewhere I missed a turn, and within an hour the pavement had given way to gravel, and the gravel to dirt, and I was climbing through dense forest with no sign of another human being. The road narrowed until it was little more than a ledge cut into the side of the mountain. On my left, there was no guardrail, no shoulder, nothing but loose stones sliding over the edge into empty air.
I did not look. I shifted into low gear and let the engine claw its way upward.
Then, abruptly, the mountain leveled into a broad plateau, and on the far side of it stood something that did not belong there.
A wall.
It was made of rough timber, thirty feet high, and it ran in an enormous circle around the center of the plateau. The Great Wall of China, I thought, absurdly.
I parked the dusty Taurus near what appeared to be a gate. Beside it, a copper bell hung from a wooden post. I pulled the rope. Twice. Four times. Three more. Each stroke rang out across the plateau and echoed back from the trees.
The gate did not open.
I rang it until my arm ached and my ears hummed and a headache had settled behind my eyes. Nothing.
I was exhausted, thirsty, and starving. Behind me, the Taurus sat with its fuel needle resting on empty; I had watched it fall the whole way up the mountain. I was a hundred miles from anything I would have called civilization, and night was coming. Walking down was out of the question.
I pounded on the gate with both fists.
No one came.
I sat down with my back against the wood and waited. After ten hours, I made a decision. If the gate did not open, I would die here. If I had to end my life, at least I would end it at the gate of redemption.
What I did not know then is that I was keeping a very old appointment. For centuries, Zen monasteries in Asia have turned away those who come to their gates. A would-be monk might be left outside for days, kneeling on the stone in the rain, to see whether he truly wanted what was inside. Most go home. The few who stay are let in.
Twenty hours passed. Thirty.
At forty hours, I had gone without food, water, or sleep, and I could feel myself fading. The shame and terror that had pursued me all the way from Boston began to fall away, one piece at a time, like a coat I no longer needed. I did not know whether I was dying. I found that I did not mind.
Then a hand touched my shoulder.
“Now you may come in,” said a gentle voice. “You have started to look past the mirror.”
Roshi Deshan and two monks lifted me and carried me through the gate. They gave me water, and later broth, and later still a bed.
And as my strength came back over the days that followed, I felt something I had no word for yet, something as still and unmovable as the mountain itself.
It felt like being called home.
Mount Shasta. Spring 1995.
The stillness lasted eleven days.
On the twelfth, my strength came back, and with it came everything else.
It arrived at four in the morning, in the shape of a bell. A monk I had not yet met walked the length of the dormitory striking a small brass bell with a wooden mallet, three strokes, then three more, and I sat up in the dark with my heart pounding and my hand reaching for a nightstand that was not there. For one disoriented second I was back in my penthouse, and the bell was my phone, and Ross was calling to tell me the deposition had moved.
Then the cold reached me. The dormitory had no heat. My breath hung in front of my face.
I was not in my penthouse. I was a fugitive in a borrowed robe, on a mountain in Northern California, and Norman Ross would never call anyone again.
I lay back down.
The bell came back, closer this time, and stopped directly over my head.
“Zendo,” said the monk. He was a heavyset man in his fifties, with a gray beard and the forearms of someone who had spent most of his life lifting things. “Five minutes.”
“I’m not feeling well,” I said.
“Nobody is,” he said, and walked on.
The zendo was a long wooden hall with a polished floor and a row of black cushions on each side. Five students sat on them, facing the wall. A sixth cushion waited at the end of the row.
Mine.
I had seen people meditate in movies. It looked restful. I folded my legs the way the others had, rested my hands in my lap, and faced the bare plank wall a foot from my nose.
Within ten minutes my knees were on fire.
Within twenty, the fire had spread to my hips and the small of my back, and my right foot had gone numb, and I had begun to understand that this was not going to be restful at all.
At the far end of the hall, Roshi Deshan sat facing the room, motionless. I could not see him without turning my head, but I could feel him there, the way you can feel a judge watching you from the bench even while you are reading your notes.
Follow the breath, he had told me the night before. Only that. When the mind wanders, come back.
I followed it for perhaps three breaths.
Then I was in Boston.
I was in Ross’s office, kneeling beside his body, and I was building my defense. Self-defense was weak; there was no weapon. Accident was better. A man with a heart condition, an argument, a fall. Who had seen me go down that corridor? The receptionist. The cleaning crew, maybe. Were there cameras on our floor? I could not remember, and the not remembering sent a jolt of panic through my chest so sharp I almost stood up.
I came back to the breath.
One breath. Two.
The Taurus. The rental agreement was in my name. My real name. Every police department in Massachusetts would have it by now. How long before someone traced it to Redding? How long before a sheriff’s deputy drove up that dirt road and found the car parked outside the gate?
I came back to the breath.
The bell rang. Forty minutes had passed. I had followed my breath for perhaps a minute of it, in total. The rest of the time I had been in court, arguing a case I could not win, in front of a jury that was not there.
We stood and walked slowly around the hall in a single line, and then we sat again.
It was not yet five in the morning.
By the end of the first week, I had a name for what was happening inside my head. The Buddhists had beaten me to it by about two thousand years.
Monkey mind, Deshan called it, smiling, when I described it to him in our first private interview. The mind that swings from branch to branch, never resting, chattering the whole time.
“Mine isn’t a monkey,” I said. “It’s a trial lawyer.”
“Same animal,” he said. “Better suit.”
I did not laugh. I was not ready to laugh at anything. I sat across from him in the small interview room, on another cushion that hurt, and I looked at him the way I had looked at hundreds of witnesses across a deposition table.
He was small and lean, somewhere past sixty, with a shaved head and very clear eyes. He did not fidget. He did not fill silences. In my experience, people who did not fill silences were either very honest or very well rehearsed.
I had not yet decided which he was.
So I did what I knew how to do. I investigated.
There were five of them besides me, and I studied each one the way Mickey, our firm’s investigator, would have, looking for the angle. Everyone has one. Ten years of law had taught me that much. The pious ones most of all.
The heavyset monk with the bell was Walt. He had driven long-haul trucks for twenty-two years, and now he ran the kitchen, and he chopped vegetables with a speed and silence that unnerved me. A woman named Hannah, maybe thirty, had been a nurse in Sacramento. Two brothers, Caleb and Sam, had come out from Ohio together. And there was Tenzin, a young monk from China, barely twenty, who spoke almost no English and seemed to spend every spare moment sweeping things that were already clean. He was the only one I never bothered to investigate. A boy with a broom, I decided, had no angle worth finding.
I looked for the money first. There had to be money. Somebody owned this land. Somebody paid for the rice and the timber and the fuel for the generator. I asked questions at meals, casually, the way I would have opened a cross-examination, until Walt set down his bowl and reminded me that meals were eaten in silence.
I looked for the sex next, and the power. A charismatic older man, a handful of devoted followers, an isolated compound behind a thirty-foot wall. I had read enough newspapers to know how that story usually ended.
I found nothing.
The books, which Hannah kept in a ledger in the kitchen, showed donations from a few dozen people scattered across California, most of them former students. Most entries were for less than fifty dollars. Deshan slept in a room smaller than mine. He ate less than anyone. He scrubbed the latrines on Thursdays.
It made me furious.
I could not have told you why at the time. Now I think it was because a con would have made sense to me. A con would have meant the world still worked the way I had always believed it did, that everyone was working an angle, and that the only difference between Michael Brown and me was that I had been better at hiding mine.
If these people were exactly what they seemed to be, then I had no excuse at all.
In the third week, I started planning my escape.
I did it at night, lying on my thin mattress in the freezing dormitory, listening to Walt snore three beds down. It was the only time my mind felt clear, because it was doing the only work it had ever been trained to do.
I had three hundred and twelve dollars left. I had counted the bills twice in the latrine and tucked them back in my wallet. The monks had returned it to me along with my clothes, washed and folded, the morning after they carried me in. Folded behind the bills was the cashier’s check from the bank, a little under three hundred thousand dollars, made out in my name. It was the most money I had ever held in my hand, and it was worth nothing at all. The moment I tried to cash it, every police department in the country would know exactly where to find me.
The Taurus was useless; the tank was empty, and it was a beacon besides. But Walt drove the monastery’s old pickup down to Redding every other Saturday for supplies. From Redding there were buses. From the buses there was Sacramento, and from Sacramento there was anywhere. Mexico, maybe. I spoke decent Spanish. A man with a little cash and no past could disappear in Baja for years.
I told myself I was only staying until the heat died down.
I told myself that every night.
During the day, I went through the motions. I rose at the bell. I sat facing the wall and argued my case. I raked the gravel paths and chopped wood and scrubbed pots, and I did all of it badly and resentfully, and I knew that every one of them could see it.
Nobody said a word.
That was the worst part. At the firm, resentment was a currency. You spent it, you traded it, you used it to make people flinch. Here, it bought nothing. I would slam a pot down in the sink and Walt would simply hand me the next one.
Only once did Deshan comment on it. We were walking back from the woodpile, and I was carrying an armload of split pine and complaining, under my breath, about the cold.
“You carry a great deal,” he said.
“It’s firewood,” I said. “That’s the job.”
He glanced at the logs in my arms, and then at my face.
“I was not talking about the wood.”
The silence did the rest.
I had always thought of silence as an absence. Up there, I learned that it was a pressure, like deep water. The longer you stayed in it, the harder it pressed, and sooner or later everything you had buried began to float up toward the surface.
Ross came first. I had expected that. More than once on that cushion I saw him fall, and each time I pushed him back down into the dark and went back to arguing my case.
Rachel I did not let in at all. Whenever her face began to rise toward the surface, I found something else to think about: the money, the pickup, the road to Mexico.
I was getting good at it. I did not yet know that the silence was patient, and that it could wait.
When the bell rang, I stood up with the others and walked the slow circle around the hall, and I did not look at anyone.
That night, I decided it was time to go.
I waited until Walt’s snoring had settled into its deepest rhythm. Then I dressed in my own clothes, which felt stiff and foreign after three weeks in a robe, and I put the wallet in my pocket and carried my shoes in my hand.
The dormitory door made no sound. I had oiled the hinge myself that afternoon with a rag from the kitchen. Old habits.
Outside, the cold was ferocious. The sky over the plateau was the clearest I had ever seen, so thick with stars it seemed less like a sky than a spill of salt across black stone, and the great white shoulder of Shasta glowed in the moonlight above the wall.
The gate was barred from the inside with a single timber beam. I had watched Walt lift it a dozen times. I could lift it myself.
The pickup’s keys hung on a nail inside the kitchen door. I had watched that too.
I crossed the courtyard in my socks, put on my shoes at the kitchen step, and reached for the door.
There was a light on inside.
I stopped. Through the small window, I could see the long kitchen table, and a single candle burning on it, and, sitting at the far end with a cup of tea between his hands, Tenzin.
I had never once seen him in his bed. I had assumed he rose before the rest of us. Now I wondered whether he slept at all. He looked up, and through the glass his eyes met mine, and he took in the street clothes and the shoes and the hand that was reaching for the door.
I waited for him to stand up. To call out. To ring the bell and bring Deshan and the others.
He did none of those things.
Instead, he reached across the table, picked up a second cup, and filled it from the pot.
Then he pushed it, very gently, toward the empty chair across from him.
I stood in the cold for a long time.
I could see the nail by the door from where I stood. I could see the keys hanging from it. Ten seconds, and they would be in my hand. Tenzin was slight and barely twenty, and he would not try to stop me. I was suddenly certain of that. By the time anyone else woke up, I would be halfway down the mountain.
On the table, the steam rose from the second cup and curled away into nothing.
I thought about Baja. About a room in a town where no one knew my name, and the bottle I would buy to help me forget it. About Ross, and Rachel, following me down that road and across the border and into every room I would ever sleep in, because there was no bus in the world fast enough to leave them behind.
I thought about the gate, and the forty hours, and the hand on my shoulder.
You have started to look past the mirror.
I opened the kitchen door.
The warmth inside was like a held breath let go. Tenzin did not say anything. He had almost no English to say it with, and I understood, sitting down, that he did not need any. He did not look at my clothes again. He waited until I had sat down across from him, and then he nodded once toward the cup.
I picked it up. My hands were shaking so badly that the tea spilled over the rim and burned my fingers.
We sat there together until the candle burned down, a disgraced Boston lawyer and a boy who swept clean floors, at a kitchen table in the middle of the night, saying nothing at all.
At four o’clock, the bell rang.
Tenzin stood up, rinsed both cups, and set them upside down on the rack to dry.
“Zendo,” he said, in his careful English, and for the first time since I had known him, he smiled. “Five minutes.”
I went back to the dormitory, took off my street clothes, folded them, and put on the robe.
And for the first time since I had come through the gate, I walked to the hall because I wanted to.
Mount Shasta. Spring 1995.
Wanting to sit, I discovered, was not the same as being able to.
For the first few days after the night in the kitchen, I carried my new resolve into the zendo like a man carrying a lantern into a cave. I sat straighter than anyone. I counted my breaths with the care of a bookkeeper. One on the inhale, two on the exhale, up to ten, then back to one. Deshan had said it was the simplest practice in the world.
By the fourth day I had not once reached ten.
I would get to three, sometimes four, and then I would be somewhere else entirely: in a deposition room on State Street, in the back seat of a car on Storrow Drive, in a courtroom where a jury foreman was rising slowly to his feet. I would come back to myself minutes later, still breathing, still upright, and realize I had no idea what number I was on. Or whether I had been counting at all.
Back to one.
The knees went next. In the first weeks, pain had been something I could resent, and resentment had kept me warm. Now that I had chosen to be there, I had no one to blame for it. By the second period of each morning sitting, a hot wire ran from my left hip to my ankle. By the third, my right foot had gone so completely dead that when the bell rang and we rose for walking meditation, I stumbled into the monk beside me.
It was Walt, the heavyset former trucker who ran the kitchen. He caught my elbow without looking at me and kept walking, as if this happened every day. Perhaps it did.
At the end of my first week back on the cushion, Deshan called me to the interview room.
The room was small and nearly bare: two cushions facing each other across a strip of worn tatami, a single candle, a brass bell. Deshan sat with his back to the window. In the gray light before dawn he looked older than he did in the hall, and somehow larger.
I bowed, sat, and waited.
“Counting breath,” he said. “How is it?”
“I can’t get to ten.”
He nodded, as if I had told him something pleasant. “Good. Now you know your mind.”
“That’s good?”
“Most people never find out.” He looked at me for a long moment. “You are ready for a question.”
I felt something in my chest sharpen, the old feeling from law school when a professor called on me and I knew the answer. A question. Finally, something I could work with.
“Who am I?” Deshan said. “Not your name. Not your work. Not your story. Before all of that. Who is the one who is breathing? Who is the one who cannot get to ten?”
He rang the bell. The interview was over.
I went at the question the only way I knew how. I built a case.
I was not my name. Fine. Names were labels. I had changed enough clients’ names in confidential filings to know that. I was not my career. I had left that behind in Boston, along with my office and my reputation. I was not my body. I’d read somewhere that you got a whole new body every seven years, and I was proud of remembering it.
So who was left?
The mind, obviously. The one doing the asking.
I brought this to Deshan three mornings later, laid out in order like a closing argument. I had rehearsed it on the cushion for two full days.
He listened to the whole thing without moving. When I finished, he picked up the bell and rang it.
“Very clever,” he said. “Go back.”
The next time, I argued the opposite. There was no self at all; the question was a trap; the answer was that there was no one to answer. I had found that idea in a book in the monastery library, and I quoted it nearly word for word.
Deshan rang the bell before I had finished.
“Book,” he said. “Go back.”
The third time, I tried silence. I bowed, sat, and said nothing, letting the stillness speak for itself, the way I imagined a real Zen student would.
Deshan waited a long time. Then he leaned forward and said, quite gently, “You are performing for a jury, Xavier. There is no jury here.”
He rang the bell.
The sheriff’s deputy came on a Tuesday.
I heard the engine before I saw the car. It was a sound I had not heard in weeks, grinding up the last switchback in low gear. I was at the woodpile outside the gate with Walt, loading the cart, when a tan cruiser with a light bar rolled onto the plateau and stopped beside the Taurus.
The Taurus had not moved since the evening I arrived. It sat where I had left it, coated in dust and pine needles, with a Boston rental sticker in the corner of its windshield.
Every muscle in my body told me to run. Walt put a split log in my arms, which made it difficult.
“Keep stacking,” he said, without moving his lips.
The deputy was young and sunburned and polite. He walked around the Taurus twice, wrote down the plate, and looked through the driver’s window. By then Deshan had come out through the gate, unhurried, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Morning, Roshi.”
“Good morning, Tom.”
“This vehicle belong to one of your people?”
“It came to our gate some weeks ago,” Deshan said. “A man drove it up from Redding. The tank was empty by the time he got here.”
“Rental outfit in Boston reported it overdue. There’s a note on the wire, too. Boston PD would like a word with the fellow who signed for it. A lawyer. Something to do with that insurance mess that was all over the news.” The deputy pushed back his hat. “Name of Armand. You know where I could find him?”
I had stopped breathing. I was standing twenty feet from them in a gray work robe, with a month’s beard and my hair cropped to the scalp, holding a piece of pine.
Deshan considered the question with great seriousness.
“The man who drove that car sat outside this gate for forty hours,” he said. “Without food. Without water. I have not seen him since.”
“He just walked off?”
“I could not tell you where he went. I can tell you that he is not here.”
The deputy looked at the wall, and the woodpile, and at Walt, and at me. His eyes rested on my face for perhaps a second. Then they moved on.
“Well,” he said. “If he turns up.”
“You will be the first to know, Tom.”
A tow truck came that afternoon and took the Taurus away. I watched from the top of the wall as the car that had carried me out of Boston went down the mountain on a hook.
I found Deshan in the garden, weeding.
“You lied for me,” I said.
He did not look up. “Did I?”
“You told him I wasn’t here.”
“I told him the man who drove that car is not here.” He pulled a weed and shook the dirt from its roots. “Is he?”
I started to answer and found, to my irritation, that I could not.
“That is your koan, Xavier. I only lent it to the deputy for a moment.” He handed me the weed. “Do not mistake it for a favor. A man the police cannot find still has to find himself. It is the harder search, and no one will tow anything away for you.”
I could not have said exactly when I began watching Tenzin.
He was barely twenty, the youngest person at Dharma Mountain by ten years at least, and he had almost no English. He swept the walkways each morning before the first sitting, and again after the noon meal, and again before evening service, though as far as I could tell the walkways were never dirty. He worked in the kitchen. He rang the wake-up bell when the monk who usually did it was ill. He did not appear to have any particular rank or any particular ambition.
And he sat like a mountain.
In the zendo, I would steal glances at him during the long second period, when my knees were screaming and my mind was arguing with Deshan in the interview room that existed only in my head. Tenzin never moved. Not a shift of weight, not a scratch, not a sigh. His face was neither strained nor blissful. It was simply there, the way the morning light on the floorboards was there.
One afternoon I found him sweeping the long path between the dormitory and the woodshop, and I stopped him.
“How do you do it?” I asked. “Sitting. How do you sit so still?”
He looked at me, then at the broom, then back at me. I saw him reach for words he did not have.
Finally he held up the broom and swept, once, a long, slow stroke across the clean stones.
“Only this,” he said.
Then he went back to sweeping, and I stood there feeling, absurdly, as if I had just lost an argument to a boy of twenty with a vocabulary of forty words.
A late spring snowstorm came in the middle of the night, and by morning the mountain had disappeared behind a white wall of cloud. The zendo was unheated except for a single woodstove at the far end, and in the hour before dawn our breath hung in front of us in the candlelight.
I had now been sitting with the question for nearly four weeks. Deshan had rung me out of the interview room so many times that I had stopped counting. I had stopped rehearsing answers, too, not out of wisdom but out of exhaustion. I simply did not have any left.
What I had instead was a kind of low, constant fury.
It was not aimed at Deshan, not exactly. It was aimed at the question itself, at its smugness, its refusal to be solved. In ten years of practice I had never met a problem I could not take apart if I worked hard enough. I had cross-examined surgeons and engineers and a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and I had found the hole in every one of their stories. And now I was being beaten, morning after morning, by three words.
Who am I?
One morning, during the third period, I realized I had been clenching my jaw so hard my teeth ached. I unclenched it. A minute later I found it clenched again.
That was the morning I first noticed the pressure.
It was nothing, really. A faint tightness at the temples, the kind of thing I had felt a thousand times at the end of a long trial day. I put it down to the cold and the poor sleep and the anger, and by the time the bell rang for breakfast it was gone.
It was Walt, of all people, who finally told me what was happening to me.
We were splitting firewood behind the woodshop, the axe ringing in the frozen air, when he stopped, leaned on the handle and looked at me with the patient expression of a man about to explain something obvious.
“You’ve hit the wall,” he said.
“What wall?”
“Everybody hits it. Some people at two weeks. Some at two years.” He set another log on the block. “It’s when you finally run out of things to try. All your tricks stop working, and you realize you can’t think your way through.”
“And then what happens?”
Walt shrugged and swung the axe. The log split cleanly in two.
“Then you either leave,” he said, “or you stop trying to get over it.”
“That’s it? Stop trying?”
“Not stop sitting. Stop trying.” He smiled for the first time since I had known him. “Took me four years to figure out the difference. Maybe you’re faster.”
That night, I lay awake in the dormitory listening to the wind push against the windows, and for the first time since I had arrived at Dharma Mountain, I did not rehearse anything for the morning. I did not prepare an answer. I did not plan a strategy.
I just lay there, a man who did not know who he was, in the dark.
It was the most frightening thing I had ever done.
And somewhere underneath the fear, so faint I almost missed it, was something that felt almost like relief.
Mount Shasta. Late spring 1995.
I had expected that when I stopped trying, the mind would finally go quiet.
It did. For about a day.
Then, like a pond whose surface has stopped moving, it began to show me what was at the bottom.
The first time, it was only a sound. During the second period of the morning sitting, somewhere between one breath and the next, I heard the soft, heavy thud of brass meeting bone. It was so clear that I opened my eyes and looked around the zendo, certain that someone had dropped something.
No one had moved. The candle burned straight. Tenzin sat across from me like a stone in a river.
I closed my eyes again, and Norman Ross fell to the floor of his office.
After that, he came every day.
Not as a ghost in a white sheet. Nothing so theatrical. He came the way the past always comes, in pieces, out of order, without permission. The glow of his computer screen. The smell of his aftershave. The way his eyes had moved, at the very last moment, from the monitor to me, and the small, puzzled frown that had crossed his face, as if I had interrupted him in the middle of something important.
And the scales. Always the scales. The brass weight of them in my hand, the cool edge of the base, the sound.
Justice comes to all of us sooner or later.
In Boston, I had told myself that Ross deserved it. That he was the go-between for a hired killer, that he had blood on his hands long before I ever touched him. As a lawyer, I could have argued it before any jury in the Commonwealth. Self-defense. Provocation. Necessity.
On the cushion, there was no jury. There was only a man sitting in the dark, and the sound.
I tried to do what Deshan had taught me. I noticed the thought, named it, and let it go. Remembering. Remembering. Then I came back to the breath.
Ross fell again.
Rachel came later, and she was worse.
Ross I could at least be angry with. Rachel had done nothing but believe me.
She came back as she had been that January, under the crystal chandelier of the club she had fought two years to get us into, the string quintet playing somewhere behind her. Green eyes. Short dark hair. A glass of Haut-Brion in her hand, and that fire in her voice.
She came back, too, as she had been the very first time, on a hot summer afternoon outside a new theater, smiling and saying nothing while her friend told me who she was. I had been holding a glass of red wine I never got to drink.
I want to go national, love. All I need is a big story.
I had given her one. The biggest story of her life.
She had not always been sweet, my sweetheart, and she had not always had much of a heart. But she had loved me in her own fierce, impatient way, and I had loved her.
I had begged her to run it. I had told her it would save my life.
On the cushion, I watched myself say it, again and again, and every time I wanted to reach across the years and shut my own mouth.
The voice on the car radio in western Massachusetts came back too, flat and professional, reading her name. Then the silence after I turned it off.
Some mornings I sat through all three periods with tears running down my face and into the collar of my robe. No one said anything. At Dharma Mountain, it was not unusual. I learned later that almost everyone who stayed long enough wept in the zendo sooner or later. It was considered, if anything, a good sign.
It did not feel like a good sign.
I brought it to Deshan, because I did not know what else to do.
This time I did not build a case. I did not prepare. I sat down on the cushion across from him and, before he could ask me anything, I told him the truth: that every time I sat, I saw a man I had struck down and a woman I had sent to her death, and that I could not make them leave.
Deshan listened without moving.
“Who is it,” he asked at last, “that sees them?”
I stared at him. For a moment, I hated him.
“That’s not an answer,” I said. “That’s the koan again.”
“It is always the koan.”
“I killed a man, Roshi.”
It was the first time I had said it out loud without leaving myself room for doubt. The words hung in the cold air of the little room, and I waited for something to happen. For him to recoil. For him to tell me to leave the mountain. For the walls to fall in.
Nothing happened. The candle burned. Outside, very faintly, I could hear Tenzin’s broom on the stones.
“Yes,” Deshan said. “And now you are here.”
“That doesn’t change what I did.”
“No. Nothing will change what you did.” He leaned forward slightly. “Do not sit to make it go away, Xavier. It will not go away. Sit to see who is carrying it.”
He rang the bell.
I could not do it.
That was the truth of the next two weeks. I understood what Deshan had said, or thought I did, and I could not do it. Every time I sat down to look at Ross and Rachel without flinching, I flinched. Every time I tried to see who was carrying them, I found only the weight.
And the pressure at my temples was no longer faint.
It came most mornings now, a dull band of tightness that began during the second period and lingered through breakfast. It sat, I noticed with a kind of grim amusement, almost exactly where I had struck Ross. I told myself it was guilt finding a way into the body. I had read about that sort of thing, too.
I did not mention it to anyone.
On the morning of the sesshin, the week-long silent retreat that Dharma Mountain held each spring, when a dozen or so lay students drove up from Sacramento and the Bay Area and filled every cushion in the hall, I sat down in the zendo at four o’clock with the headache already there, and with something else I had not felt since the night I tried to leave: panic.
Seven days. Fourteen hours a day on the cushion. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing but Ross falling and Rachel lifting her glass under the chandelier, over and over, for seven days.
I lasted until the afternoon of the third day.
It happened in the middle of the fourth period.
The zendo was utterly silent. Snow had been falling since dawn, muffling everything, and the only sounds were the tick of the woodstove and the breathing of nineteen people. I was sitting with my eyes half open, the way Deshan had taught me, staring at the floorboards a few feet in front of the cushion.
And I saw blood on them.
I knew it was not real. Some part of my mind, the lawyer’s part, sat back and calmly observed that I was exhausted, that I had not slept more than four hours a night in weeks, that sensory deprivation produced hallucinations in perfectly sane people. The rest of me did not care. The blood spread slowly across the wood toward my knees, dark and glossy in the candlelight, and with it came the sound, the thud, louder than it had ever been, and the light from Ross’s computer screen, and Rachel’s voice saying all I need is a big story.
I stood up.
In the middle of a period, during sesshin, in total silence, it was the one thing you did not do. Eighteen heads did not turn, but I felt every one of them not turning.
I walked out of the zendo. Then I ran.
I did not get far. There was nowhere to go. The road down the mountain was buried under a foot and a half of snow, and I was wearing a robe and straw sandals.
I ended up behind the woodshop, where Walt and I had split logs a few weeks before, and I sat down on the chopping block in the falling snow and put my head in my hands.
I had failed. Not the koan; I had been failing the koan for weeks. I had failed at the one thing I had promised myself I would do, which was to stop running.
The pain at my temples was a hammer now.
I do not know how long I sat there. Long enough for the snow to settle on my shoulders and in my hair. Long enough to think, quite clearly and without any drama, that I would leave in the morning. Walk down the mountain when the road was clear. Go to the police in Redding and tell them everything. At least that would be an ending.
When I looked up, Tenzin was standing a few feet away, holding a blanket.
He should not have been there. He should have been in the zendo; everyone should have been in the zendo. He had walked out of sesshin too, for me, and he would have to answer to Deshan for it.
He put the blanket around my shoulders. Then he sat down in the snow beside the chopping block, crossed his legs, straightened his back, and closed his eyes.
He did not say anything. He did not need to.
After a long time, I got down off the block and sat beside him.
The snow kept falling. The pain kept pounding. Ross fell, and Rachel spoke, and the blood was there on the white ground in front of me if I wanted to see it.
I let it be there.
I did not push it away, and I did not chase it. For the first time, I simply sat with all of it: the man, the woman, the scales, the sound, the cold, the boy beside me, and the one who was sitting in the middle of it all, whoever that was.
We stayed until the bell rang for evening service.
When we stood, Tenzin brushed the snow off my shoulders the way he brushed the walkways, slowly and with great care, as if it mattered.
I did not leave in the morning.
Mount Shasta, 1995.
Nothing came naturally. But after that afternoon in the snow, it began to come.
The crossing of the legs. The following of the breath. The slow, patient silencing of the mind.
I went back into the zendo the next morning expecting to be sent away. I had broken sesshin. So had Tenzin, because of me. At the first interview of the day, I bowed and sat down across from Deshan and waited for my sentence.
He looked at me for a long time.
“Where did you sit yesterday?” he asked.
“Behind the woodshop. In the snow.”
“And who sat there?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and nothing came out. Not because I was searching for something clever. Because, for the first time, I genuinely did not know, and the not knowing did not frighten me.
Deshan nodded slowly, as if I had said something after all.
“Good,” he said. “Stay there.”
He rang the bell. He never mentioned the sesshin again. Neither did anyone else.
Life at Dharma Mountain was as demanding as any boot camp. We rose at four. We sat in meditation for hours at a time, then worked in silence, then sat again. Our meals were small and our sleep was short. Like soldiers, we were in training for a war. But ours was the strangest war of all: a campaign to end conquest itself. Our one desire was to be free of desire. To end suffering in ourselves, and then to help others end theirs.
The ghosts did not leave. Deshan had been right about that. Ross still fell, some mornings. Rachel still lifted her glass under the chandelier. But something had changed in the way I sat with them. I no longer fought them, and I no longer begged them to stay away. They came, and they were there, and then, like weather over the mountain, they moved on.
And underneath them, slowly, something else began to show through. A quiet I had never known. Not the absence of thought, but a kind of wide, still space in which thoughts came and went, the way birds cross an empty sky.
I stopped counting the days.
I had been sitting under Roshi Deshan’s guidance for nearly three months when distance came to an end.
It did not happen in the zendo. It happened on an ordinary morning in early summer, after breakfast, when Deshan sent me out to help Tenzin sweep the long path between the dormitory and the woodshop. The last of the snow along the path had melted, and the stones were wet and dark and, as always, perfectly clean.
Tenzin handed me a broom without a word, and we began at opposite ends.
I swept. The bristles whispered across the stone. A jay called somewhere up the slope. Water dripped from the eaves of the woodshop, one drop, then another.
Only this.
I do not know what happened next. There is no clear way to explain it. Every attempt falls short. But in one ordinary instant, with a broom in my hands and the sound of water dripping, the space that puts you over there and me over here simply dissolved, and beneath it lay something far simpler.
You and I were one and the same.
The broom, the stone, the jay, the water. Tenzin, at the far end of the path. Ross, falling to the floor of his office. Rachel, under the chandelier. The man who had struck the blow and the man who was sweeping. None of it was separate. None of it ever had been.
Space and time were real enough to live in, useful, even necessary. The mind had invented them to survive. But they were not the deepest truth. In that instant, the secret revealed itself, beyond reason and beyond sight, and it was so simple and so beautiful that I laughed out loud on the silent path.
At the far end, Tenzin stopped sweeping and looked up. Then he smiled, the same smile he had given me in the kitchen that first night, and went back to his broom.
Compassion. Tenderness. Love. None of them had to be pursued. They were not virtues to be practiced. They were what reality was made of. They were simply what was left when everything false had fallen away.
I understood, then, what Deshan had meant. I had not been forgiven. Nothing would change what I had done. But the one who carried it was not the small, frightened, clever man I had taken myself to be. And from where I now stood, I could finally look at Ross and Rachel without flinching, and what I felt for both of them was not guilt, and not horror, but a grief so vast and so tender that it had room for everything.
I went to the interview room that afternoon. I did not prepare anything. I bowed, sat down, and before Deshan could speak, I picked up the bell from the floor between us and rang it.
Deshan laughed, a deep, delighted laugh I had never heard from him before. Then he took the bell back from me, very gently, and set it down.
“So,” he said. “Now the real practice begins.”
In Zen, this first awakening is called kensho, seeing into one’s own nature. Deshan told me afterward that some of his students had sat for twenty years without it. Some never reached it at all.
I had reached it faster than anyone he had ever trained.
But something else had come with it. Something unexpected.
Something wrong.
Even after Ross and Rachel had gone for the morning, the pressure at my temples stayed.
If anything, it grew. Whenever I silenced my mind, a pain began to build, always in the same place, just where I had struck Ross. At first it was only a pressure. Then it became a throbbing, and then a blade. Each time I sat, it grew stronger, until I dreaded the meditation hall as much as I had once longed for it.
I told myself it was the body catching up with the mind. Old guilt, stored in old muscles, finally letting go. I had heard monks talk about such things. I told Deshan nothing, and I told Tenzin nothing, though more than once I caught him watching me across the zendo with a small crease of worry between his eyes.
One morning, during the first sitting before dawn, the pain became a white light.
I do not remember falling.
When I came to, I was strapped to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, its siren wailing down the mountain toward the hospital in Redding.
Machu Picchu, Peru. December 2003.
The tourists saw only the ruins.
Every day, they came by the thousands, by train and by bus and on foot along the Inca Trail, to stand on the terraces of the fifteenth-century citadel and photograph the mists drifting off the peaks. None of them knew what lay beneath their feet.
Deep under the mountain, in a chamber cut into solid granite, a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs stood guard over a laboratory that did not officially exist. A second platoon patrolled the surface, out of sight of the tourist paths, watching a single unmarked service entrance. Behind it, a military elevator dropped more than a thousand feet into the heart of the mountain.
In 1995, with considerable embarrassment, the CIA had declassified and shut down a program code-named Stargate. For more than twenty years, the American government had paid psychics to spy on its enemies by means of something called remote viewing. The program had been ridiculed in the press, and Washington had declared it a failure.
Some programs end.
Others simply move somewhere no one will think to look.
The laboratory had been built at enormous expense for a single purpose: to locate, understand, and ultimately harness what the scientists who worked there called, only half jokingly, the power of God. If they succeeded, they would change science’s understanding of reality forever. They would also give the American military an advantage so great it would border on the supernatural.
The main research chamber was a monument to insulation. Every wall was lined with thick polymer padding. The chairs were vinyl, the tables molded plastic, and every instrument that did not need metal had been built without it. The technicians wore latex suits and gloves. Nothing in the room could be allowed to interfere with the delicate magnetic fields the experiment required.
Among themselves, the staff called it the Divinity Room.
An elevator door slid open, and Dr. Xu Yun stepped out between two American scientists and a pair of German neurosurgeons.
The Ecuadorian-born neurologist was the most celebrated man in his field. His work on the temporal lobes had won him a Nobel Prize and made him the world’s leading authority on the young science of neurotheology: the study of what happens in the brain when a human being encounters the divine. He had left a monastery in Northern California four days earlier, telling its abbot only that an old obligation required him to travel. Born to a poor mestizo mother in Guayaquil, he had been adopted as an infant by a Chinese couple who ran a small grocery near the waterfront, and they had given him their name, their language, and their stubborn belief that a poor boy could become anything.
He did not look happy to be here.
He was introduced at once to two volunteers. Then he set a metal case on the table, unlocked it, and opened the lid. Inside lay a strange helmet, a lattice of copper coils, microchips, and padded straps.
Dr. Schultz, one of the German neurosurgeons, leaned over it with open fascination.
“A magnetic field generator?”
“Yes,” Yun said. “I call it God’s Helmet.”
The idea was not entirely his. In the 1980s, a Canadian researcher had built a crude device that bathed the temporal lobes in weak, shifting magnetic fields, and some of his subjects had reported sensing an invisible presence in the room with them. Yun’s helmet was something else: precise, programmable, and far more powerful. It produced a rotating magnetic field of between ten nanoteslas and one microtesla, thousands of times weaker than a refrigerator magnet. In the right brain, it was enough to open a door.
Below the observation gallery, in a glass room ringed with scanners, waited two reclining beds and a steel tray of instruments that, Yun noted with distaste, would not have looked out of place in a 1940s lobotomy ward.
The two volunteers looked perfectly ordinary. One was Susan, a twenty-year-old woman. The other was Richard, a man of thirty-two. They had only one thing in common.
Both had temporal lobe epilepsy.
General Archer, the commanding officer, ordered the experiment to begin with Susan.
He was in a hurry. For eight months, American forces in Iraq had been hunting Saddam Hussein, and for eight months he had eluded them. Every week he remained free, more American soldiers came home in flag-draped coffins.
Yun watched an assistant fit the helmet over Susan’s head while he reviewed her medical history. Then he opened a channel to the general’s earpiece.
“General, I don’t believe she is a good candidate. I strongly recommend we start with Richard. His neural architecture appears considerably more stable.”
“Request denied, Doctor. Proceed.”
Yun switched on the helmet.
Within minutes, Susan’s parietal activity had collapsed and her temporal lobes were firing wildly. Then her body arched on the bed, and she went into violent convulsions.
Yun killed the power at once. A medical team rushed into the glass room. Susan was in a full grand mal seizure, and it went on for a long time.
“Bring in Richard,” the general said.
“General, I must protest—”
“This is a matter of life and death, Dr. Yun. This war has to end. The lives of countless soldiers and innocent civilians depend on it.”
Richard was led in, strapped onto the second bed, and blindfolded. An orderly lowered God’s Helmet over his head. Yun switched it on again and slowly raised the rotating fields, pulse by pulse, around Richard’s temporal and parietal lobes.
Ten minutes passed. No dangerous symptoms. But on the monitors, Richard’s parietal lobes had gone almost completely dark, and his left temporal lobe was firing at three times its normal rate.
The door of the control booth opened, and General Archer stepped in.
“What’s happening?”
“It’s working,” Yun said, without taking his eyes from the screens.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“The parietal lobes are how the brain locates the self in space and time. They draw the line between me and everything else. His have shut down. As far as his brain is concerned, he is no longer bound to one place or one moment.” Yun hesitated. “He is no longer only an individual. He has begun to dissolve the boundaries.”
The general smiled. “Can we start the questioning?”
“Not yet. I need at least another fifty percent from the temporal lobe before remote viewing is possible.”
A few minutes later, Yun nodded. The general keyed a microphone that fed directly into the glass room.
“Richard. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been focusing on the target?”
“Yes. I have.”
On Yun’s monitors, Richard’s alpha waves held steady, but the activity in his temporal lobe had become erratic.
“Tell me what you see.”
Richard spoke slowly, as though describing something glimpsed through fog.
“An open area. A farm. There’s a farmhouse. It’s dusty. There are chickens nearby.”
“What else?” The general was recording every word.
“A rug. Yes. A rug, and bricks. They’re covering something. A hidden space. Underground. He’s hiding. He’s afraid. And he’s sick. He’s in a small room. No. Not a room. It’s more like a hole in the ground.”
“His neural pathways are firing erratically,” Yun said sharply. “At this level of stimulation, he could slip into a coma.”
The general ignored him.
“Richard. Can you see anything that tells you where this is?”
Richard was silent. On the screens, his temporal activity spiked far past anything Yun considered safe.
Then he spoke one last sentence.
“A few miles south of Tikrit.”
His head fell forward. He was unconscious.
General Archer was already reaching for a secure phone.
“We’ve got him,” he told the field commander. “A few miles south of Tikrit, near his hometown. Search every farm. He’s hiding in a hole or a cellar, probably covered with a rug and bricks. Don’t stop until you find him. Offer money if you have to. And move whatever you need out of Baghdad. He’s not there.”
He hung up and clapped Yun on the shoulder.
“Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done your country a great service. I suspect we’ll be needing your talents again.”
“With respect, General, I am a scientist. My purposes are nobler than warfare. I would like to leave now.”
Archer’s face hardened. “There’s no nobler cause than defending your country and preserving our way of life, Dr. Yun.”
“General,” Yun said quietly, “have you ever stopped to ask whether our way of life is worth preserving?” He closed his case. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
An hour later, a military helicopter carried him over the Andes toward Lima, where a plane was waiting.
Two days later, on a farm outside the town of ad-Dawr, fifteen kilometers south of Tikrit, American soldiers lifted a rug, cleared away a layer of dirt and bricks, and pried open a lid hidden beneath it. At the bottom of a narrow hole, they found a frightened, bearded old man.
Yun heard the news on a car radio somewhere in Northern California. He did not feel triumphant. He felt only tired, and he wanted very much to be home.
As he drove north toward the mountain, he thought, as he so often did, about the helmet. It had never been more than a catalyst. It could open a door in a gifted brain, but it could not create the gift. Something far more complex was at work in the minds of the spiritually gifted, something he had spent his whole life trying to understand.
In all those years, he had found only one person who did not need a helmet at all.
He thought of the general’s hand on his shoulder. I suspect we’ll be needing your talents again. For eight years, he had kept that one person’s name out of every paper he published, every lecture, every grant application. He had told himself it was to protect a patient’s privacy. Now, driving north in the dark, he understood the real reason. It was to keep him safe from men like Archer.
And he remembered the night he had found him.
Baltimore, Maryland. July 1995.
It was after midnight, and Dr. Xu Yun was still at his desk at Johns Hopkins.
A stack of case files sat in front of him: patients referred from across the country, all with temporal lobe epilepsy, all reporting experiences their doctors could not explain. Most were minor. Simple partial seizures. Strange smells, sudden waves of déjà vu, flickers of light at the edge of vision. No loss of awareness.
His helmet had shown that such experiences could be amplified, that in a brain already prone to them, a carefully tuned magnetic field could open the door wider. But the helmet was only a key. It was not the room behind the door.
To Yun, spirituality was a gift, perhaps written into human genes. Perhaps it was even the next step in evolution, already present in a few and waiting for the rest of the species to catch up. He thought of the temporal lobe as an antenna: a receiver tuned to a frequency most human beings could not hear. Mozart had been born with a gift for music. Einstein had been born with a gift for physics. And a rare few, Yun believed, had been born with a gift for God. They were not merely capable of experiencing the divine. They were capable of carrying it.
But for all his years of research, he had never found a single subject who could prove it. Not without the helmet. Not without some device to coax the gift into the open.
The telephone rang.
He looked at his watch. No one called at this hour.
“Dr. Xu Yun?” The voice on the line was urgent.
“Yes. Speaking.”
“I’m sorry to call so late, Doctor. My name is Dr. Carl Banks. I’ve followed your work on neurotheology for years.” The man drew a breath. “I need you to come to Redding, California. As soon as you possibly can. There’s something here you have to see.”
Redding, California. July 1995.
They rushed me into the emergency room, and the doctors came and went, one after another, each more baffled than the last.
No one could tell me what was wrong.
A brilliant light was pouring into my vision from every side. A trembling energy ran through my body like current through a wire. And with it came a feeling I could not explain and could not resist: an overwhelming need to touch someone. Anyone. Another living being.
As the orderlies wheeled my gurney down a crowded corridor from one room to the next, we passed a woman sitting in a wheelchair against the wall.
I reached out with my right hand and took hold of her arm.
At once, the migraine was gone. The trembling stopped. The light went out like a switched-off lamp.
And the woman in the wheelchair stood up.
A nurse dropped a tray. Someone called for a doctor. The woman stood there in the corridor, holding the arm of her chair, staring down at her own legs as if they belonged to someone else. Every physician on that floor knew her case. A car accident years earlier had severed her spinal cord. She had been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.
She was never supposed to walk again.
What had happened was medically impossible and scientifically inexplicable.
That was why Dr. Banks called the neurologist who flew in from Johns Hopkins to see me.
His name was Dr. Xu Yun.
From the moment he walked into my room, he never really left. Within a few weeks, he had moved into a cell at Dharma Mountain so that he could study my brain every day. He sat beside me through my meditations, monitoring my temporal lobes with EEGs. Later he compared the tracings with my MRI scans. He filled notebook after notebook. He cross-referenced every published case he could find, working through the night while the rest of us slept.
He never once used his helmet on me.
“You don’t give steroids to Samson,” he said.
Unfortunately, word of what had happened at Redding Hospital spread faster than any of us could have imagined. Within a month, television crews had set up camp at the foot of Deshan’s mountain. Soon after came the sick and the dying. Hundreds of them. They lined the road to the monastery gate, day and night, hoping I could cure them of everything from blindness to AIDS.
One network ran a special. They called it The New Savior. Its centerpiece was grainy footage, shot without my knowledge, of me laying my hand on a hemophiliac boy who was hemorrhaging, and of the bleeding stopping.
Three thousand miles away, in a dark, cramped room in Boston, the same footage was playing on a small television set.
The man watching it was young, lanky, and thin, with red hair that stood up in spikes.
He recognized me at once.
He hurled his wine bottle at the screen. The picture tube exploded in a shower of glass and sparks, and a small fire flickered up from the back of the set.
He did not bother to put it out.
He knew where to find me now.
And he would stop at nothing until he did.
Mount Shasta. October 1995.
By October, Yun had put me on a ration.
Three a day. No more. He had set the number after the morning I laid hands on eleven people between breakfast and noon and woke two days later on the cot in his cell, with electrodes glued to my scalp. Each healing took something out of me, he said, and he did not yet know whether it grew back.
So every morning, after the second sitting, I walked down to the gate with Tenzin on one side and Walt on the other, and I chose three.
I had defended insurance companies. I knew what it was to decide who got paid and who did not. Nothing in that work had prepared me for the road outside Dharma Mountain.
They lined it for half a mile. Tents. Station wagons with the seats folded down. Wheelchairs, oxygen bottles, children asleep on coolers. When the gate opened, the sound that went up was not a cheer. It was lower than that, and it never entirely stopped: hundreds of people saying please.
I had learned not to look at all of them. If I looked at all of them, I could not move. I looked at the ground, and then at one face, and then at the next.
That morning, the first was a logger with a crushed hand. The second was a grandmother whose eyes had clouded over. The third was a girl of six or seven with no hair, who patted my cheek while I knelt in front of her and asked whether it tickled.
When I stood up, the pain was already building at my temples, and the road was tilting. Walt had my elbow. Tenzin was turning me toward the gate.
“Mr. Armand!”
Nobody on that road called me that. To them I was the healer, the monk, the man from the television. I kept walking.
“Mr. Armand. Please. Just look at it.”
A hand thrust something in front of me. A photograph, creased down the middle. I saw it for perhaps a second: a hospital bed, a woman with a tube taped to her mouth, a child’s drawing pinned to the wall above her head.
The hand holding it belonged to a tall, thin boy of nineteen or twenty with red hair. He had pushed through from the back, and he was out of breath.
“She can’t come here,” he said. “She’s in Boston. They can’t move her. You’d have to come to her. I’ve got bus fare for both of us, I’ve got—”
Boston.
The word went through me like cold water. Boston was Ross under a desk. Boston was a detective I had never met and a question I could not answer. In six months on the mountain, I had not once let myself imagine going back.
“I can’t leave the mountain,” I said. It was what I told everyone who asked me to travel. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand. You know her. You—”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. Walt moved between us, large and gentle, the way he did forty times a day, and the gate was three steps away, and I took them.
Behind me, the boy’s voice cracked across the crowd.
“You don’t even remember her name, do you?”
I stopped.
I turned around. But the gate was already swinging shut, and the crowd had closed over him like water over a stone. I saw a flash of red hair, far back, and then not even that.
“What name?” I asked Tenzin.
He did not have the English. He only looked at me, with that small crease of worry between his eyes.
I told myself the boy had mistaken me for someone else. Then I told myself that everyone on that road believed I knew them, that it was a thing desperation did to people. Then I went to the zendo and sat down facing the wall, and for the first time since the morning with the broom, I could not follow a single breath.
I never saw him at the gate again.
I did not ask Walt whether he had left a name. I did not send anyone down the road to look. I had three more to choose in the morning, and three the morning after that, and it is astonishing how much good a man can do while he is avoiding one thing.
More than twelve years would pass before I learned whose photograph he’d held up to me.
By then, the boy with the red hair was a grown man.
Mount Shasta. Autumn 1999.
Deshan was dying, and he would not let anyone make a fuss about it.
He had been ill since the spring. A cough that would not leave, then a weariness that sleep did not touch, then the morning in August when he could not rise from his cushion at the end of the first sitting and Tenzin and I carried him back to his room between us. He weighed almost nothing. He apologized the whole way for the trouble.
Dr. Xu Yun examined him that afternoon and came out of the little room with his face carefully empty. In the four years since he had followed me up the mountain from Redding, Yun had become a monk in everything but his robe. But he was still a doctor, and he still could not hide from me what doctors know.
“Weeks,” he said quietly. “Perhaps a month or two. He refuses the hospital.”
“Of course he does.”
“You could try.” He did not look at me when he said it. He did not have to. Down at the gate, as there was every day now, a line of the sick and the hopeful stretched along the dirt road, waiting for the man from the television.
I went in to see Deshan that evening.
He was propped up on two thin pillows, looking out the window at the mountain. When I sat down beside him, he did not turn his head.
“No,” he said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were about to put your hands on me.” He smiled at the mountain. “I can feel you thinking it from across the room. It is very loud.”
“Roshi, if I can—”
“You can. I know you can. I have watched you do it at the gate for four years.” Now he turned and looked at me, and his eyes were as clear as they had been in the diner in Redding, the night he had told me I was in hell. “And that is exactly why I am asking you not to.”
I did not understand. I said so.
Deshan was quiet for a while. Outside, the light was going gold on the snowfield near the summit.
“When you came to me,” he said, “you were a man who could not stand to lose. Every case. Every argument. Even the koan, you wanted to win.” He coughed, and waited for it to pass. “Then you stopped. You let it all fall. That is why you woke up. Not because you fought your way through. Because, for one morning, on a path with a broom, you stopped fighting.”
“I remember.”
“Now you have this gift. A real one. I do not understand it, and Yun does not understand it either, though he fills a great many notebooks pretending.” A faint smile. “And with it, you can win again. Against sickness. Against pain. Against death, a little. It is a beautiful thing, Xavier. I have seen children walk out of that gate who were carried in.”
He reached out and laid his thin, dry hand over mine.
“But be careful. A man who can win against death may start to believe that he must. That every loss is his failure. That he is the only thing standing between the world and its suffering.” His fingers tightened. “That is the old lawyer, wearing a robe. He will not come to you as an enemy. He will come as compassion.”
I looked down at our hands.
“So you want me to just let you go.”
“I want you to let me do the last thing I have to teach you.” His eyes were gentle and absolutely immovable. “I am going to die. It is nothing special. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. And I would like my student to sit beside me while it happens, and not do anything at all.”
He gave me Dharma transmission on the first Sunday in October.
There was no audience. Only the two of us in the little interview room where he had rung me out a hundred times, with the candle and the worn tatami and the brass bell between us. Tenzin had carried him there in his arms, and settled him on the cushion, and propped him upright with a folded blanket at his back, and then bowed and gone out and closed the door.
Deshan could barely hold his own posture anymore. But when he lifted the old black robe from the lacquered box beside him, his hands did not shake.
It had belonged to his teacher, and to his teacher’s teacher before him, a lineage that ran back across an ocean and through more than a thousand years. It was patched at both elbows and faded almost to gray along the shoulders. It smelled of incense and woodsmoke and, very faintly, of the man in front of me.
He laid it across my open hands. Then the bowl, black lacquer, chipped at the rim. Then a single sheet of rice paper on which he had written, in a hand I hardly recognized, the names of every teacher in the line, ending with his own, and beneath it, still wet, mine.
“Now you are a link in the chain,” he said. “Do not be a heavy one.”
I tried to say something. I could not.
Deshan looked at me for a long time. Then, with what was clearly an enormous effort, he reached forward and picked up the brass bell.
I thought he was going to ring me out, the way he always had.
Instead, he held it out to me.
“Your turn,” he said.
He lived eleven more days.
I sat with him through most of them. Yun came twice a day to check on him, and each time he took Deshan’s pulse and said nothing and went out again. Tenzin brought tea that no one drank and swept the floor of the little room, which was always clean.
Twice, in the long nights, I felt the current rise in my hands without my asking it to. Both times I felt Deshan stir on his pillow, as if he knew, and both times I set my hands flat on my knees and let it go back down. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than the wall. Harder than the ghosts.
On the last evening he asked me to make him a salad.
I looked at him, and he looked back at me with something very close to mischief in his face, and I understood. I went down to the kitchen and made it myself, lettuce and a few slices of tomato and a little oil, the way the bartender in Redding had made it, and brought it back on a plate with a glass of water.
He ate two bites. Then he set down his fork.
“There is no black and white,” he said. “Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“Not in the world. And not in you.” He closed his eyes. “Not even in this.”
In the morning, Tenzin went in before the bell to help him dress for the first sitting, as he had every day for a month.
He came out again almost at once, and found me in the corridor, and could not find any English at all. He did not need it.
Deshan was sitting upright on his cushion, facing the window and the mountain beyond it. Somehow, alone, in the dark, he had found the strength to get there. His legs were crossed. His hands rested in his lap, thumbs lightly touching, in the cosmic mudra he had taught me on my first morning. His eyes were half open, the way he had always said to keep them: not looking at anything, and not looking away.
He was not breathing.
On the low table beside him lay a sheet of rice paper, folded once. His last poem. Monks in his lineage have written them for a thousand years, in the final hours, the way other men write wills.
I unfolded it. There were only four lines.
Sixty-six years
of trying to step outside
the mirror. This morning,
no one there to step.
I stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then I went to the zendo, where the others were waiting in the dark, and I took my place for the first time on the cushion at the head of the hall, and I picked up the brass bell, and I rang it.
Mount Shasta. Spring 2009.
Claire climbed the slope to the knoll above the cave, sat down in the grass, crossed her legs, and tried very hard not to cry.
She did not manage it. She had never been good at that part.
Down in the zendo, she had felt him watching her as she walked away. She had not turned to see his face. She had seen it once already that evening, when he leaned close and told her that what she had done was unforgivable, and she did not think she could survive seeing it twice.
So she came here, to the place where he had sat alone for two months before Boston. It was the only place on the mountain that still felt like him.
She closed her eyes and straightened her back, the way he had taught her.
And because the mind does what it wants on a cushion, or on a hill, it went back.
It went back, first, to a window.
She was twelve, barefoot, standing at the front window of the white house in Brookline, watching a man in a borrowed gray suit stop under the magnolia tree by the gate and close his eyes. She remembered the exact moment she started running. She remembered the cold stone on her feet, and the knot of the bracelet coming loose in her fingers, and the way he had knelt down to her height.
Then I’ll keep it. Always.
She had not known his full name. Mr. Pierce told her that night: Francis Xavier Armand. Once a lawyer, now a monk, at a monastery in California with a name like something out of a fairy tale. Dharma Mountain.
She had written it on the inside cover of her math notebook. Then, a week later, ashamed, she had scribbled it out.
She had written it again the week after that.
She was nineteen the first time she saw the mountain.
By then the safe houses had begun, a network of shelters for orphaned children, founded with the money the court awarded them and with his name on the papers, and she and Anna sat on the board as trustees, two serious young women in borrowed blazers who had been those children once. When the board met for the first time at Dharma Mountain, Claire told herself she was going for the meeting.
She knew it was a lie before the plane left Logan.
He met them at the gate himself. He was older, of course, and thinner, and his head was shaved, and he wore the old patched robe that had been his teacher’s. He bowed to Mr. and Mrs. Pierce. He bowed to Anna. Then he bowed to her, and smiled the same strange smile she remembered from the hall in Brookline, happy and sad at the same time.
And she saw the bracelet on his wrist.
He had kept it. Seven years, and he had kept it, just as he promised.
She did not hear a word of the board meeting.
She stayed for the summer. Then for a year. Then, in the way these things happen, she simply stopped leaving.
He taught her to meditate. He taught everyone, but it felt to her as though he taught her. He showed her how to sit, and how to breathe, and how to come back, gently, every time the mind wandered off. In those first years she was often angry, at her parents, at the insurance company, at the whole unfair machinery of the world. He would listen to all of it and then say, very kindly, You didn’t come all this way to stay angry, Claire.
She loved him the whole time.
She loved him the way you love the sun, without any hope of being loved back in the same way, because the sun does not love anyone in particular. It just shines on everything. That was what he was, on the mountain. Compassion without edges. Kindness for the man at the gate with the tumor, and for the boy with the bleeding, and for the trucker in the kitchen, and for her. All exactly the same.
She knew he did not see her the way she saw him. To him, she would always be the little girl who ran barefoot down a path. She told herself that it was enough to be near him.
It was almost true.
Then came the months he spent in the cave.
She watched him climb this slope every morning for two months, and come down every evening a little thinner, a little brighter, with something in his eyes that frightened her. She heard Yun arguing with him in the office late at night, in a voice she had never heard Yun use. She heard the words overload and circuit.
On the morning he left for Boston, she walked him to the gate.
She had decided to tell him. She had rehearsed it for a week. Then he turned to her at the gate, and put his warm hands on her shoulders, and said, Look after the children while I’m gone, and she lost her nerve completely and said only, Come back soon.
He never called.
She found him at St. Catherine’s.
Yun had told her what to expect. He had told her what she must not do. He believes it is 1995, Claire. In his mind, you are seven years old. He’s never met you. If you tell him, you could lose him for good.
She had promised.
And then she walked into the dining hall of a homeless shelter on a cold night and saw him sitting alone at a crooked table, in a ruined suit, staring at a bowl of watery soup as though he did not know what it was. And every part of her wanted to run across the room and throw her arms around him and tell him who he was, who she was, everything.
Instead she picked up a folded piece of cardboard and walked over and said, Here. Lift your end.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done.
It got harder.
On the train, when he shook with cold and she pulled him against her, she had to pretend she was a stranger keeping a stranger warm. In the dark, with his heart beating against her cheek, she had to listen to him call her by her name and know that he did not know it. And when she kissed him, she knew that she was kissing a man who did not remember her, who could not have chosen her, who would perhaps never forgive her when he did.
She kissed him anyway. She was not proud of it. She was not sorry, either.
But she had stopped there. That much, at least, she had managed. Whatever else might happen between them would have to wait for a man who knew her name.
On the hill above the Mississippi, with the whole river spread out below them and his arm around her, she nearly told him. The words were in her mouth. It’s me. The girl at the window. I gave you the bracelet. I have loved you since I was twelve years old.
But he had looked down at her with an expression she had waited half her life to see, and he had said that, for the first time he could remember, he felt complete.
And she could not bring herself to take it away from him.
On the knoll, the light was going. The air was turning cold. Below her, the stream ran under the little wooden bridge, and somewhere in the cloister a door banged shut.
She opened her eyes.
She thought about leaving. Anna would drive her. She could be in Redding by midnight, and in Boston by tomorrow, and she would never have to see that look on his face again.
Then she thought about the thing he had taught her, years ago, in the zendo, when she was nineteen and angry at everything.
Only this.
Not the past, which was over. Not the future, which might never come. Only this hill, and this evening, and this breath. And whatever came up that path next, she would meet it here.
So she closed her eyes again, and straightened her back, and sat.
Below her, someone was running across the wooden bridge.
She heard Yun shouting from somewhere behind, and then footsteps on the slope, coming fast, scattering stones, the uneven, out-of-breath footsteps of a man pushing fifty.
Then, very close, her name.
“Claire!”
She did not open her eyes right away. She let herself have one more breath. Just one. The last breath of the girl at the window.
Then she opened them, and smiled.
Mount Shasta. Spring 2009.
I ran out of the zendo and across the little wooden bridge over the stream.
Claire was nowhere in sight.
“She’s at the cave!” Yun shouted from somewhere behind me.
Of course. The cave.
I knew exactly where to go. I had sat there for nearly two months before leaving for Boston, preparing for what I had to do. I climbed the slope toward the small grassy knoll that faced the mouth of the cave, and there she was, sitting at its top in full lotus, her eyes closed, her back straight, perfectly still.
“Claire!”
Her eyes opened slowly, aquamarine in the late light, and she smiled.
I climbed the last few yards and stopped in front of her.
“You’re not angry with me?” I asked.
“Of course not.” She tilted her head. “You didn’t teach me to meditate so I could stay angry. Remember?”
“Yes.” I sat down beside her. “I remember. I remember everything now.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Including a certain young lady who once ran out of a house and gave me this.” I held up my wrist.
She looked at the bracelet for a long moment. Then she looked at me.
“Let’s meditate together,” she said. “Just the two of us. We’ve never done that.”
We turned to face each other on the crown of the hill, crossed our legs, and fell silent.
What happened next lies beyond words. Anything I say will fall short of it.
The inner chatter stopped. Then even the faint stirrings that come before a thought dissolved, and nothing remained but an immense and silent witness. Time and space seemed to hang suspended. A vast, dark openness, like an infinite amphitheater, spread out in every direction.
Far away, a point of light appeared.
It pulsed slowly, and with every pulse it grew brighter. In the endless darkness of that inner universe, it swelled into a small, shining orb. And as it did, I felt a strange tingling at the sides of my head, just above my ears.
My temporal lobes.
Something told me to open my eyes.
Claire was gone.
Then I heard her laugh, behind me. I turned. She was standing there, and she was surrounded by a soft luminescence, and I felt for her an adoration and a tenderness so vast that it seemed to contain the whole world.
I stood and took her in my arms.
An electric warmth flowed out of me and into her. I felt it go. Her eyes fluttered and she went limp in my arms, a smile of pure bliss on her face. For a moment, I was afraid. Then she drew a long breath and opened her eyes.
“Heavenly,” she whispered.
Down the slope, Yun was calling our names. The whole monastery had gathered in the zendo for my welcome-home dharma talk, and they were waiting.
We ran back together. Claire went inside first. Yun caught my sleeve at the door.
“You know that loving her this way breaks the vow of celibacy you took when you received the precepts,” he said quietly. “But that is not what worries me. What worries me is that it will make what you are planning far harder. For both of you.”
He was right, of course.
The way I loved Claire was not the impartial compassion of a monk. It was passion. Attachment. The very thing I had spent years teaching others to set down. But worse, far worse, was the question Yun had not asked aloud.
When the moment came, how would I ever let her go?
Because the moment was coming. Soon. I could feel it.
I looked at him: my disciple, my doctor, my counselor, my dearest friend.
“Xu Yun, I can no more stop loving her than I can stop breathing. It’s too late. I love her. And when the moment comes to let go, I pray you’ll help us through it.”
He shook his head slowly.
“My dear friend, no one can help anyone let go. All I will be able to do is stand there and watch two people who love each other suffer. And perhaps offer a few words of comfort that will sound, by then, completely empty.”
I put my hands on his shoulders. Even then, I could feel a little of the current pass from my body into his.
“That’s all I’m asking. When the time comes.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he nodded. Perhaps it was the warmth he had felt through my hands. Or perhaps he understood that when the time came, letting go would be nothing more than that. Just letting go.
We walked into the zendo together.
Hundreds of people sat waiting on their cushions. Some had taken the full lotus. Others sat in half lotus, knelt, or took chairs at the back of the hall. They were waiting for my talk, for the teaching that might help them a step further along the path.
I stood on the low platform and looked at them and said nothing.
This would be my last talk to the sangha. I knew it, even if they did not.
I looked down at my robe, hanging loosely over the jeans and T-shirt I wore beneath it. Slowly, in front of all of them, I took it off. I folded it and laid it on the platform. Then I stood before them in ordinary clothes.
“Today is my last day as abbot of this monastery,” I said. “I have given Dharma transmission to Reverend Dr. Xu Yun. From tonight, he is your abbot.”
The hall was perfectly silent. To my right, Yun smiled faintly and bowed his head in acceptance.
“For nearly ten years,” I went on, “I have given hundreds of dharma talks to thousands of you. But tonight I have nothing to say, because I finally understand that there is nothing that can be said. Every teaching, every instruction you will ever need, is already in front of you. This miraculous show of sound and light that surrounds us every moment is what we are. Add nothing to it. Just witness the preciousness of your life, moment by moment. That is all the instruction you will ever need.”
I looked across the rows of faces.
“And whatever you do, don’t betray the unfathomable marvel of here and now, this precious gift we call the moment, with poisonous thoughts about tomorrow or painful longing for yesterday. My friends, here it is. This is it. Live it. This is enlightenment.”
I stepped down from the platform and walked out through the back door of the zendo.
I knew I would never see it again.
I went to my quarters to pack for Boston, to finish what I had set out to do but failed to accomplish.
I knew now why I had failed. I had pushed my meditation too far, for too long, and too far from where I needed to be. By the time I reached Boston, the power I had built in that cave had overwhelmed me, and I had lost myself in the endless country of my own mind.
At the entrance to my quarters, I stopped.
A scent.
Sweet, intimate, unmistakable. It carried me back to a garden behind tall stone walls, to a childhood I had nearly forgotten, and to a bench in a Boston park.
I looked around. I was standing in a small private garden I had planted with my own hands.
Magnolias.
I smiled.
I had barely closed the door when it opened again.
“Am I interrupting?”
Claire stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She was smiling, a little shyly. I looked at her, at the beauty inside her and out, and for a moment neither of us moved.
Then we did.
We came together in a rush of embraces and kisses and lay down on my narrow bed, and we made love slowly, tenderly, as though we both knew it would be our first and last chance to cross the border of our own skin.
Afterward, we lay in each other’s arms.
“I love you, Mister X,” she said.
“I will always love you,” I said, and my voice was not entirely steady, “my whimsical, beautiful Claire.”
Mount Shasta. Spring 2009.
We were still lying in each other’s arms when someone began hammering on the door.
“He’s here!” It was Yun, and he was close to shouting. “Roshi, the killer is here!”
I was on my feet and dressing before he had finished. Claire scrambled for her clothes. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely manage the buttons, and then she was sobbing.
“They’re going to kill you. We have to run. Please, we have to run!”
I took her face in my hands.
“No one out there is going to kill anyone,” I said.
Then I opened the door.
Yun stood just outside it, and he was not alone. A tall, thin man held him from behind, one long arm locked across his chest. In his other hand was a revolver, old and heavy and black, its muzzle pressed into the soft place beneath Yun’s jaw. The man had red hair cut short and standing up in spikes, and he was looking past Yun, straight into my eyes.
The man from the Boston street. The man from the bus in Dubuque. The man from the motel in Winnemucca.
I met his gaze.
“Randy,” I said. “Let Dr. Yun go. I’m on my way back to Boston now. I’m going to do what I promised.”
Behind me, I heard Claire’s breath catch.
“You know this man?” she whispered.
“Yes.” I did not take my eyes off his. “His name is Randy O’Brian.”
“Don’t.” Randy’s voice was hoarse, as though he had not used it in days. “Don’t you say my name like we’re friends. You don’t get to do that. Not again.”
The revolver pressed harder. Yun closed his eyes. His lips were moving, very slightly, and I knew without hearing that he was reciting the Heart Sutra.
“You promised me,” Randy said. “A year ago. You sat in that garden out there and you held my hands and you looked me in the eye and you promised me. And I believed you. You know what that cost me? To believe a man like you?”
“I know.”
“You don’t know anything.” His face twisted. “I drove to Boston. I sat by her bed for nine days, waiting for you. I told her you were coming. I told a woman in a coma that the man who killed her was coming to bring her back, and I held her hand and I told her to hang on just a little longer. Nine days. And you never came.”
“I was in Boston, Randy. I lost myself. I didn’t know who I was.”
“I saw you!” The shout cracked against the wooden walls. “On the street. On Boylston Street that morning, running right past me like I was nothing. Like she was nothing. Same as before.”
He was breathing hard. “I was nineteen the first time. I stood at your gate with her picture in my hand, and you wouldn’t even look at it. Then last year I came back, like a fool, and you held my hands.”
Behind me, Claire made a small sound. I did not turn around.
I did what I had come back to the mountain knowing how to do.
I let my mind fall silent. Every thought, every fear. I gathered my attention into a single point, as narrow and steady as a beam of light, and I aimed it at the man in front of me.
“Randy,” I said softly. “Be at peace.”
For a moment, I felt it begin. The tingling above my ears. The faint, warm current gathering in my chest.
Then Claire said my name.
Only that. Barely a whisper, from somewhere behind my left shoulder. But in that one word was everything we had been to each other an hour before, and my mind turned toward it the way a flower turns toward the sun.
The beam shattered.
Pain came instead. It came the way it had come in the zendo fourteen years before, a blade driven in at the temple, white and blinding. I staggered and caught the door frame. The room tilted. For a second, I could not see.
When my vision cleared, Randy had taken a step forward, dragging Yun with him, and the revolver was no longer at Yun’s throat.
It was pointed at my chest.
“What was that?” he said. “What did you just try to do to me?”
I could not answer him. The pain was still ringing in my skull like a struck bell.
“You were going to do your little trick on me. Weren’t you? The thing you did on TV. Make me calm. Make me nice.” He laughed, and it was a terrible sound. “That’s what you people do. Lawyers. Monks. Same thing. You find the loophole.”
He cocked the hammer.
“Xavier, please,” Claire said. “Please.”
There is a moment, in every trial, when the lawyer knows his case is lost. Every argument has been made. Every witness has been heard. There is nothing left in the briefcase. The good lawyers know what to do in that moment. They sit down.
I had been a good lawyer.
I let go of the door frame. I did not try to reach for the silence again, or for the light, or for any of the things I had learned in the cave. I simply stood there, a man pushing fifty in jeans and a T-shirt, with a headache and a gun pointed at his heart.
“You’re right,” I said.
Randy blinked.
“You’re right. I was going to use it on you. It was a trick. It was the same thing I did to your mother, fourteen years ago. I found a way around you instead of facing you.” I took a breath. “So let me face you now.”
The revolver did not move. But he was listening.
“Your mother was a single mother,” I said. “She was in an accident, and afterward she had a stroke, and she lay in critical condition at City Hospital with no health insurance and no money of her own. My client should have paid for her care. Instead, I dug up records from two different hospitals showing an earlier stroke, and I used them to argue that the accident had nothing to do with it. I knew how to make that argument sound stronger than it was. The judge gave me summary judgment.”
Randy’s mouth had begun to tremble.
“Before the hearing, her lawyer stood outside the courthouse and told me to call her if I ever grew some compassion. I laughed at her, walked back to my car, and put Bach on the stereo. Two weeks later I won.” My voice broke, and I let it. “I never once asked what had become of her. Not even when a boy held her photograph in front of my face at the gate.”
The revolver had begun to shake.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I don’t deserve it, and nothing I do in Boston will change what I did. But you were right about one thing. I have spent my whole life finding the loophole. I’m done. There isn’t one here. There’s only your mother, in a bed, and a debt I owe her.”
I held out my open hands.
“If you need to shoot me, Randy, I understand. But if you do, there will be no one to go to Boston. And she has waited long enough.”
For a long time, nobody moved.
The only sound in the room was Claire, crying quietly behind me, and somewhere outside, very far away, the wind moving through the magnolia leaves.
Then Randy made a sound I had heard only once before in my life, in a hospital corridor, from a man who had just been told his wife would not wake up. It was not quite a sob. It was something older than that.
His arm fell away from Yun’s chest. The revolver tipped toward the floor. He did not drop it; he simply forgot he was holding it. Yun reached over, very calmly, and took it out of his hand, the way he might have taken a scalpel from a nervous intern.
Randy sank down onto his knees in the doorway and put his face in his hands.
I knelt in front of him. I did not touch him. I did not use the current, or the light, or anything else. I only stayed there, where he could see me, until he was ready to look up.
When he finally did, his eyes were red and wet and very young.
“A single mother,” he said. “How did you know she raised us on her own?”
“Because it was in her file,” I said. “I saw it in 1995 and turned the page. Last year, after you came, I read every word. I wanted to know who she was.”
He nodded slowly. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“She would have liked you,” he said. “That’s the hell of it. She liked everybody.”
“Thank you, Randy.”
Yun slipped past me into the room and sat down heavily on the bed beside Claire.
I looked at the two of them.
“It’s time for me to go. I’m taking the next flight to Boston.”
“Then I’m coming with you,” Claire said instantly.
“So am I,” said Yun.
I glanced at Randy. “Then it seems the four of us are going. Is that all right with you?”
Randy nodded.
“First,” Yun said, “I need a word with you. In private.”
I asked Claire to show Randy around the monastery while I spoke with our new abbot. She hesitated, and I did not blame her. But when Randy smiled at her, shyly, almost apologetically, I saw her shoulders ease. This was not a hired killer. This was a son who had spent fourteen years watching his mother lie in a bed, and who would have done anything to bring her back.
The moment Yun’s office door closed, he rounded on me.
“You are not God!”
He was not shouting at his teacher. He was shouting at his friend, and in that moment he had forgotten every vow he had ever taken about equanimity and nonattachment.
“You will not survive this. Do you understand me? To restart another person’s brain, you would need to channel more electromagnetic energy than your own synapses can possibly withstand. They will burn out. And even if you could hold the state long enough, there is no guarantee she will wake up. You could give your life for nothing.”
He lowered his voice. “And if you do survive it, it will be worse. A woman wakes up after fourteen years in a coma, in a house in Somerville, with a famous healer kneeling at her bed. Do you think the newspapers will miss that? Do you think the men under that mountain in Peru will miss it?”
“Xu Yun.” I kept my voice quiet. “The woman in that coma is Mrs. O’Brian. The man outside is her son. Fourteen years ago, I took his mother from him, as surely as if I had buried her, and I did it willingly. Happily. I pulled the plug on his mother’s only chance and put Bach on the stereo for the drive home.” I held his gaze. “This is what we call karma. I am not going to turn my back on the suffering I caused that family. Trying to save her is my responsibility as a Buddhist and my duty as a human being. Even if it kills me.”
For a long moment, Yun said nothing.
Then he stood, crossed the room, and put his arms around me.
“Abbot or not,” he said, “it seems I will never stop being your disciple.”
I held him tighter.
“There are no masters and no disciples here,” I said. “Not in this room. Not now.”
We stood there in silence, and we both understood that when true unity arises, there are not two people in a room.
There is only one.
Boston. Spring 2009.
We took the bus down from Mount Shasta to the airport in Redding and flew east. We changed planes for Boston.
Yun and Randy sat a few rows behind us. Claire and I lifted the armrest between our seats and leaned into each other, and for the first few hours, the flight was exactly what I had hoped for: long, quiet, and uneventful. The sky outside the window was a clean, unbroken blue, and the country slid by beneath us like a map.
Then, somewhere over the Great Plains, a baby began to cry.
At first it was only a whimper near the front of the cabin. Within minutes it had become a series of shrieks so piercing that passengers were turning in their seats and flight attendants were hurrying up the aisle.
I got up and walked forward.
A young mother was rocking a baby in her arms. The child’s face was red and wet and twisted with pain, and he was drooling and screaming as though something inside him were on fire.
“It’s nothing, really,” she told me, before I could ask. She looked exhausted. “It’s colic. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
“His stomach hurts?”
She nodded.
“May I hold him for a moment?”
She looked at me for a long second. Then, with the desperation of a parent who has run out of ideas, she handed him over.
I sat down in the empty seat beside her and laid my right hand gently on the little boy’s belly. I felt Claire come up the aisle and stand behind me. She did not say anything. She knew what I was about to do.
I closed my eyes and breathed. A few slow, measured breaths. My mind fell silent. The dark, endless space opened, and the point of light appeared within it, right on schedule.
This time I did not let it grow. I held it at the size of a coin.
The familiar tingling began at my temples. I opened my eyes, and I felt the warmth leave my right hand and flow into the child.
He stopped crying.
Just like that. In the middle of a scream. He gave a long, shuddering sigh. His eyes drifted closed, and within seconds he was asleep.
His mother stared at him. Then at me.
“His attacks last for hours,” she whispered. “Sometimes all night.”
I handed him back to her. “Would you mind if I sat here for a minute?”
“Of course not.” She was holding him as though he might break. “Thank you. Thank you. You have a magic touch, sir.”
Claire’s hand rested on my shoulder. She bent down and quietly asked if I was all right.
“I will be,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
The cabin seemed to tilt a little when I stood. Claire took my arm and walked me back to my seat, and a few of the passengers who had watched the whole thing broke into soft applause.
As I sat down, Yun came up the aisle and leaned between the seats.
“If calming a baby’s colic leaves you this dizzy,” he said, “what do you imagine will happen when you try to bring Mrs. O’Brian back to life?”
I turned around.
“First, Mrs. O’Brian is not dead. Second, I prepared for two minutes to help that child. I have prepared for two months for her.” I softened my voice. “My friend, I know you’re afraid for me. I’m grateful for it. But this is no longer open to debate. You know that I must do this, and that I will.”
Yun looked at me for a long moment. Then he bowed his head and returned to his seat.
I leaned against Claire, and she held my hands in both of hers and rested her head on my chest. Somewhere over Ohio, we fell asleep.
Night had fallen by the time we landed in Boston. In the taxi line at Logan, I asked the others to go on ahead to Somerville without us. Yun looked at me sharply, and then at Claire, and then he understood, and he did not argue. Randy wrote the address on the back of a boarding pass and pressed it into my hand.
“One hour,” he said. “Please.”
“One hour.”
Claire and I took a second cab across the harbor and into the city, and I asked the driver to let us out at the corner of Arlington and Boylston.
The Public Garden was nearly empty. The lamps along the paths made small gold islands in the dark, and the wind came off the pond with the last of the winter in it. Claire put her arm through mine. She did not ask where we were going. I think she already knew.
The bench was where it had always been. In my mind I had put the Roxbury courthouse across the path. I had been waiting for Eli again.
I had sat on it a hundred times in the lost weeks, I knew now, in a filthy suit, on my way to a courthouse that had forgotten me. And I had sat on it once, with a stranger who smelled of my childhood, and been asked the only question that mattered.
We sat down.
Behind us, along the path, the magnolias were just beginning to open. Most of the buds were still closed tight, like small fists. But a few had loosened in the warm week before, and the scent of them drifted to us on the cold air, faint and sweet and impossibly familiar.
Claire leaned her head on my shoulder.
“This is where Yun found you,” she said.
“This is where I started to come back.”
For a long time we did not say anything. A couple walked past, arm in arm, laughing at something. A dog barked on Beacon Street. Somewhere across the pond, a bell in one of the old churches struck the half hour.
I wanted to tell her. I had rehearsed it on the plane, after the cabin went quiet, while she slept against my chest. I had built the case, the way I always had. And sitting on that bench with her, I found that I could not make a single word of it come out.
So I told her the only thing that was true.
“I love you, Claire. Whatever happens tonight, I want you to remember that I was happy. Here. Now. With you.”
She lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were very clear, and I saw that I had not needed to tell her anything at all. She had known since the cave. Perhaps since the train.
“Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t say goodbye. You taught me there’s only this. So let’s just have this.”
She took my wrist and turned it over, so that the old beaded bracelet lay across my palm, and she held it there between both her hands.
We stayed until the hour was almost gone. When we stood, she reached up and broke a single half-open blossom from the nearest branch and tucked it into the pocket of my jacket, over my heart.
“For luck,” she said.
Then we walked back to Boylston Street.
At the corner there was a pay phone that still worked. I made one call, to a number I had carried on a small white card for nine years. It lasted less than a minute.
A little after ten, a cab carried us across the river into Somerville, a working-class city just north of Cambridge, and stopped in front of a narrow two-story Victorian on a side street. Its paint, white with pale-yellow trim, was peeling.
An old gray Buick was parked across the street with its lights off. A man got out of it as we pulled up: heavy, white-haired, in a raincoat that had once been brown.
“Wait for me on the porch,” I told Claire.
Paul Maurice had retired from the Boston Police Department four years earlier. He had aged the way big men do, all at once. But the eyes were the same ones that had watched me from the last row of a courtroom in 2000.
“Counselor,” he said. “Or is it Reverend?”
“Xavier will do.”
“You said on the phone you had something for me.”
I took the envelope from inside my jacket. I had written the statement that morning in the departure lounge at Redding, while the others went for coffee: six pages in longhand, signed and dated. It said that on a spring night in 1995, I had struck Norman Ross with a brass ornament and killed him. It said that I had put that ornament into the bound hand of Elizabeth Grant, so that it would carry her fingerprints and not mine. It did not say how the scales had found their way back to the floor of Ross’s office. It never would.
Maurice did not open it. He weighed it in his hand.
“Fourteen years,” he said. “I had a perfect set of prints on a pair of brass scales, and I never believed them for a day. Nobody holds a murder weapon like a teacup.” He looked at me. “I asked you about it once.”
“In the aisle. You asked whether I had anything to tell you about Norman Ross.”
“And you said, ‘Not yet.’”
“It’s yet.”
He almost smiled. Then he looked up at the one lit window on the second floor.
“What’s in the house?”
“A woman I owe more than I owe you.”
“I ought to put you in that car.”
“I know. I’m asking you for one hour. After that, I won’t give you any trouble.” It was the truth. I did not tell him why.
Maurice was quiet for a while. He had spent a long career listening to people ask him for one hour. Then he tucked the envelope inside his coat, unopened.
“One hour,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”
I bowed to him. He looked embarrassed. Then, stiffly, the old detective inclined his head.
Randy was waiting on the porch with Claire when I crossed the street. “This is it,” he said.
Winter was giving way to spring, but the night was cold and the wind was sharp. Inside, the house had the high ceilings and carved moldings of its era, but almost no furniture, and very little light. It had not been neglected. It had simply been allowed to fall into the slow disrepair that comes when every dollar goes to something else.
Randy lit a candle and led us up the stairs.
The electricity in that house, I realized, was reserved for one room.
At the end of the upstairs hall stood a closed door with light leaking from beneath it. Through it, I could hear the rhythmic hiss of a ventilator and the steady beep of a heart monitor.
Randy opened the door.
What had once been the master bedroom had become a hospital room. Machines stood on both sides of the bed. A young Black nurse sat in a padded chair beside it, reading aloud from a paperback to the woman lying there. Her name, I would learn, was Ashley. She worked one of the two shifts.
The other belonged to the young woman who stood up as we came in.
Carla O’Brian was twenty-four years old. She had been ten when her mother went into the coma, and she had spent most of the years since as her mother’s nurse. She was pale, with long hair the same red as her brother’s, and dark brown eyes that found mine and filled with a hatred so pure that I felt it physically.
“I don’t believe in your voodoo, Mr. Armand. I don’t expect anything from you. If it weren’t for my brother, I’d have you thrown out of this house.”
“May I go to her?”
“Do what you came to do,” she said. “And do it quickly, before I change my mind.”
I approached the bed.
Mrs. O’Brian’s condition was far worse than I had imagined. She was sixty years old, and she looked eighty. Tubes fed her. A machine breathed for her. Every piece of technology modern medicine could offer was keeping her body alive.
But I could feel at once that her mind was gone.
“I’ll need about thirty minutes of absolute silence,” I said to Carla, “before I try.”
She did not hesitate.
“Take all the time you need.” Her eyes filled with tears. “If this doesn’t work, they’re disconnecting her tomorrow.”
“It’s been fourteen years, Mr. Armand,” Randy said quietly. “We can’t do it anymore. You’re our last hope.”
“There’s one more thing.” I chose my words with care. “When I’m ready, I’ll need you to disconnect her from the machines. All of them. Just for a few seconds.”
Carla’s face went white, then crimson.
“Is that why you’re here?” She was in front of me in two steps, inches from my face, screaming. “To finish the job? You couldn’t kill her the first time, so you came back to make sure?”
Randy put himself between us.
“Carla. Listen to me. I’ve watched her fade in that bed every day, same as you. But I’ve looked into this man. I’ve seen what he can do. I can’t explain it. Please. Trust me. Let him do what he asks.”
Carla stared at her brother. Then she threw up her hands, as though surrendering, and walked out of the room.
I turned to the others.
“Now, please,” I said. “I need silence.”
The room went still. The only sounds were the hiss and beep of the machines keeping Mrs. O’Brian’s body alive.
I sat on the floor beside the bed and took the full lotus. Right foot on the left thigh, left foot on the right. Spine straight, as though a steel rod ran from my tailbone to the crown of my head. Chin slightly lowered. Ears aligned with my shoulders. Shoulders loose. Arms forming a gentle circle, not quite touching my sides. And in my lap, my hands formed the cosmic mudra: the left resting in the right, the tips of the thumbs barely touching, making an oval of empty space.
The silence came quickly. It always did now. But before the light could rise, something else rose to meet it.
A question.
Why are you here?
I knew that voice. It was not Deshan’s, though it had his patience. It was my own.
To save her, I answered.
Are you sure?
And there, in the dark behind my eyes, I saw him: the man I had been. Thirty-five years old, in a ten-thousand-dollar suit, standing on the courthouse steps with a smirk on his face while Eli walked away. The golden boy who could do no wrong. The man who had never in his life walked into a room he did not intend to win.
He was here too. Of course he was. He had come all the way from the mountain with me, as Deshan had warned me he would, and he was not dressed as an enemy. He was dressed as compassion.
This is your case, he whispered. The one that wipes the slate clean. Win this, and you’re forgiven. Win this, and the O’Brians, Ross, Rachel, all of it is paid. One last verdict, counselor. Go get it.
I sat with him. I did not push him away. I had learned that much, behind a woodshop, in the snow.
I looked at what he wanted. Not her life. His acquittal.
And I let him have his say, and then I let him go.
I am not here to win, I told him. I am not here to be forgiven. There is a woman in this bed, and her children are suffering, and I can help. That is all. If it works, it is not my victory. If it fails, it is not my defeat.
Deshan’s last lesson came back to me then, as clear as if he had been sitting beside me on the floor: an old man upright on his cushion, facing the mountain, his student’s hands resting quietly on his knees.
Sit to see who is carrying it.
I looked. And for the second time in my life, there was no one there.
Only the woman in the bed. Only her children. Only this.
Somewhere behind me, very softly, the bedroom door opened and closed again. I did not turn to look. I did not need to.
I began to breathe.
I let my lungs find their own rhythm, and I followed each breath in and each breath out. The vast, dark amphitheater opened and expanded in every direction. The pulsing point of light appeared.
This time, I let it grow.
With every breath it swelled, turning, gathering brightness, until it was a spinning orb of impossible radiance. I let it keep growing. Larger. Larger. Until there was only a thin rim of darkness around it, and the infinite space was gone, and in its place blazed a sun.
My temporal lobes no longer tingled. They pounded. The pain was beyond anything I had known, beyond anything I had believed a body could hold.
I knew the moment had come. One more breath, and I would lose consciousness.
I raised my hand.
Across the room, a figure moved out of the shadow by the door. Carla. I had not seen her come back in. Her arms were folded and her face was wet.
She looked at her brother. Then at me. Then at her mother.
Then she crossed to the wall, put her hand on the switches she had guarded for fourteen years, and turned them off, one by one.
The ventilator sighed and stopped.
Yun and Claire lifted me to my feet. I could barely stand. I could barely see. I laid both my hands on Mrs. O’Brian’s head.
The energy left me in a flood.
I could not see it, but I could feel it, rushing out through my palms and into her. Beneath my hands, her body began to convulse violently. Someone screamed. Then everyone was screaming. It went on for nearly a minute.
And as it went, I felt my own life draining out with it, steadily, irreversibly, toward its end.
For one moment, I was afraid.
Then I looked at Claire. Her innocent beauty. The lessons she had taught me without ever trying. The train, the hill above the Mississippi, the cave, our last night. My endless love for her.
With the last of my strength, I turned to my Cholo. My best friend. Reverend Dr. Xu Yun.
He looked into my half-closed eyes and must have seen in them what I had seen in his on a park bench in Boston: the soft glimmer, the tenderness, of a dying man.
And he spoke, very clearly.
“Even what you treasure most must be surrendered. It’s the only way to secure the continuing course of compassion.”
I smiled.
Then I fell.
Claire was on her knees beside me before I reached the floor, weeping, holding my face in her hands, the face she had loved.
I knew I was dead.
I was above them, looking down. I saw Yun sobbing as he checked his watch and formally pronounced the time of my death. I saw Claire bent over my body.
I saw her hand go to the pocket of my jacket, over my heart, and draw out the magnolia blossom she had put there for luck. In the warmth of that room, in the last hour, it had opened all the way. She held it against her cheek, and the scent of it filled the room, and for one moment it carried me back to a walled garden in Ecuador, and a bench in a Boston park, and a girl running barefoot down a stone path under a white tree.
And I saw Randy and Carla cry out as their mother opened her eyes, looked at them, and spoke their names.
“Randy,” she said. “Carla.” Her voice was a dry whisper, fourteen years unused. She lifted one hand an inch from the blanket, toward the daughter who had been ten years old the last time she saw her. “Look at you. When did you get so tall?”
I saw, through the wall as though it were glass, an old detective standing beside a gray Buick under a streetlight. He had heard the screaming, and then the other sound, the one that was not grief. He took an envelope from his coat and looked at it for a long time. Then he took off his hat.
I smiled without a face. I had no boundaries now. I was held in a love and a beauty that had no edges at all.
You did all right, Francis Xavier, I thought. Attorney turned monk.
And I understood everything.
Then the orb of light appeared one last time.
Without the slightest hesitation, I surrendered, and went home.
Quincy, Massachusetts. Spring 2009.
Roxana Delgado Sullivan read about it in the Boston Globe, at her kitchen table in Quincy, on a Sunday morning, with her reading glasses on and a cup of coffee going cold at her elbow.
It was not a long article. Page nine, below the fold. Former Boston Attorney, Turned Monk, Dies at Somerville Home. She hardly recognized him in the photograph: a gaunt man with a shaved head and very gentle eyes. Then, beneath it, a smaller one she would have known anywhere. A thirty-five-year-old in an Armani suit, grinning on the courthouse steps, the golden boy of Boston insurance defense.
The last paragraph was the one she read slowest. In a signed statement delivered to a retired Boston police detective shortly before his death, it said, Armand had confessed to the 1995 killing of Norman Ross, office manager of the defunct firm of Lancy, Berger, and Williams, a crime long attributed to the late Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Grant. According to the detective, the statement named no accomplice.
No accomplice. Fourteen years, and he had still found a way to leave her out of it.
She read the article three times. Then she took off her glasses and sat for a long while without moving.
Mark found her there twenty minutes later, when he came in from the garden with dirt on his knees.
“Rox? What is it?”
She turned the paper around so he could see. He read it standing up, one hand on the back of her chair, and then he set it down gently and put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.
Fourteen years. They had been married for thirteen of them. Mark had proposed in the hospital parking lot the week after the accident on the side street, exactly as she had told Xavier he would, with a ring that had cost him two months’ pay and a speech he forgot halfway through. They had two daughters now. When the girls were old enough for college, the money would be there. Roxy had set it aside in the spring of 1996, when she sold the silver Ferrari to a dentist from Connecticut.
She had never told the girls where the money came from.
After Mark went back out to the garden, she went upstairs to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of her dresser.
Under the winter sweaters, in a shoebox, was an envelope with her name on the front in his handwriting, and on the back, three words.
Read this alone.
She had burned his instructions the same night she followed them. But she had kept the letter. She had never been able to explain why, not even to herself. It was the most dangerous piece of paper she owned.
She unfolded it now, on the edge of the bed, and read it again for the first time in many years.
Most of it she knew by heart. The careful, lawyerly sentences. The apology, which went on longer than it needed to. The plea, at the end, for her to throw the letter away the moment she had read it.
And then, at the very bottom of the page, the last line. Written, she had always thought, in a slightly different hand, as if he had added it at the last minute, after everything else was done.
You were the only honest person in that building, Roxy. Someday I hope to deserve you.
She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time with the letter in her lap.
Then she went downstairs and out through the side door and across the yard to the garage, where Mark was repotting tomatoes, and past him, without a word, to the old car under the canvas cover at the back.
She pulled the cover off.
It was a 1974 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, painted a deep, unfashionable brown, with a faint wrinkle along the driver’s side door where the body shop near the pier had never quite got the metal straight. It had not been on the road in six years. Mark kept saying he would sell it. He never did.
Roxy opened the door and sat down behind the wheel.
It still smelled, very faintly, of vinyl and spearmint gum.
She put both hands on the steering wheel, the way she had on that morning in 1995, when she had seen a man in a Corvette raise a gun at the windshield of a white Ford Taurus and had not stopped to think at all.
“You did, you know,” she said quietly, to no one. “You did deserve it. In the end.”
Then she laid her forehead against the wheel, and for the first time in fourteen years, Roxana Delgado Sullivan allowed herself to cry for Francis Xavier Armand.
Mount Shasta. Spring 2017.
A small boy ran across the wooden bridge, over the stream, and up the slope toward a grassy knoll that faced the mouth of a cave.
“Careful, Francis!” his mother called after him, laughing. “Now come here. Let’s meditate together.”
They sat facing each other at the top of the knoll and crossed their legs into full lotus, the boy copying his mother with great seriousness. Behind them, the snowy peak of Mount Shasta caught the morning sun and blazed with color. The air was clean and cold and very still.
They closed their eyes.
A few minutes later, Claire opened hers.
Her son was no longer sitting in front of her.
For one terrible instant, her heart stopped.
Then she heard him laughing.
Behind her.
She turned. He was standing there in the sunlight, delighted with himself. She scooped up her seven-year-old son and held him close, and he locked his arms around her neck until his feet swung high above the grass.
And in that instant, a radiant warmth passed from the child into his mother.
She knew it at once. She had felt it before.
Claire closed her eyes, smiled, and whispered into his ear.
“Heavenly.”
From the veranda of the abbot’s quarters, Xu Yun watched them come down the hill hand in hand, the young woman and the boy, and felt what he felt every morning: gratitude, and underneath it, like a stone in a shoe, fear.
He had done what he could. The week after Boston, he had carried fourteen years of notebooks behind the woodshop and burned them, every tracing, every page. He had taken a splitting maul to the helmet in its glass case. There was no longer a single sheet of paper on the mountain that said what Francis Xavier Armand had been able to do, or how.
There was only a seven-year-old who had begun, last winter, to complain of a tickling above his ears.
A sound made him turn.
An engine, on the switchbacks below the plateau, climbing in low gear. It was not the supply truck; that came on Saturdays. He waited. A dark gray sedan rolled out of the trees and stopped outside the gate, and two men got out. They wore suits, not uniforms. One of them carried a slim metal case.
Yun knew the case. He had designed its foam lining himself, in another life, under another mountain.
The older of the two men looked up at the wall, found him on the veranda, and raised a hand, pleasantly, like a neighbor.
On the hill path, Francis laughed at something his mother had said.
Even what you treasure most must be surrendered.
Not this, thought the abbot of Dharma Mountain. Not this one.
He straightened his robe and went down to meet them at the gate.
THE END
