up to the room, with his suitcase. They do have a porter in the Condesa Inn, but he does not want the porter to carry his suitcase, because he only has a small amount of money and cannot afford tips. It contains, along with two changes of outer clothes and five of sacred underclothes, his own copy of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written By The Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From The Plates of Nephi, his Dell PC laptop computer, the photograph of his sister, before she was raped by The Great Satan, wearing her favourite red-check dress, smiling and waving, looking so fine, and his gun. It is the gun, an Armscor 206 .38, which he bought online from GunsAmerica.com, for $308, as new, that has meant that he has to travel all the way from Utah by bus; the gun that has meant he cannot travel by airplane. There are ways of getting a gun on an airplane – he has learnt this from surfing the web, from reading the posts of some of the jihadis – but the ways are difficult and he decided against it. He goes up to the room alone.
Inside the room, the picture of Jesus is bigger than it looks in the photograph. The only window looks out onto the back of some kind of kitchen, and the picture itself is not that brightly painted – Jesus is in a sharp profile, like he might appear on a playing card, and wears a dark red toga, in sharp contrast to the bright blue of the angels’ dress – but still, when he turns to face the mural, it nearly blinds him with light. This is proof for him that it is the Lamb of God, Lucifer’s spirit brother, again. He has to shield his eyes, which hurt like staring at the sun, something he did once when he was a kid during an eclipse, even though his father had told him not to. He did that because he didn’t understand why, if the sun was covered by the moon, you couldn’t look at it. He looked at that eclipse for five minutes, and it was beautiful, so beautiful he didn’t feel the burn in his right eye that would leave the pupil fixed in the middle of the socket, and working always at no more than 20 per cent effectiveness. He thinks of it now as his first intimation that knowing God, really knowing God, always involves pain.
The light fades. He sits on the bed. He takes a deep breath. The room is dusty. He feels as if he can feel the motes in his nostrils. He should change, but there is a comfort in the sweat of his sacred under-clothes drying on him, as if warmed by the heat and light coming off this Christ. He takes out his Dell, and waits patiently as it boots up, and then more patiently as it finds the Condesa Inn wireless signal. Poor, it says, red bars flickering into green. There is something that has been bothering him, bothering him all the way here on the Greyhound, looking out of the window as the landscape flattened towards the east. Google has been key for his destiny – Earth has shown him New York, Street View the area around 1176 Fifth Avenue, Images the internal layout of Mount Sinai, and it was the main search box which led him to The Material, there on unsolved.com – so he has feared being without it. To test it, he types the words ‘death penalty states united states’. It takes a while, but then it comes. He goes to Wikipedia first, an entry: The Death Penalty in the United States. A map comes up, in which most of the states of the country are red, but along the top, blue, a geographical clustering of mercy. The colour of New York, though, is confusing – half yellow, half orange. He goes back to the search box, and replaces the words ‘states united states’ with the words ‘New York’ and presses return again. The sixth entry is called Death Penalty FAQs. Scrolling down, the question appears, in bold: Does New York have the death penalty? And the answer: The death penalty was reinstated in 1995.
Nineteen ninety-five. Two years after his sister died: was killed. He could have done it any time over those two years. And he didn’t. A voice that seems not his speaks in his head: does he regret it? That’s what people are often asked about on TV: regret. And this voice is like a TV interviewer’s voice: polite, friendly, softly spoken. He knows this is not ‘voices in his head’. It is just something a lot of people do, imagine themselves being interviewed on the TV.
– No, he says, speaking out loud. I don’t regret it. He continues in his head: because then I was grieving, and because I thought Janey might come back then and she didn’t, and because I didn’t know until I heard the news that he was dying that I understood what it was that I had to do. It was only then that I knew my destiny. And besides, he is expecting to be caught, and imprisoned, and executed. He is not trying to commit the perfect crime. He is trying to avenge it.
– I don’t regret it, he says again out loud. He raises his chin while saying it, in an act of untargeted defiance, and as he does he catches Jesus’ eye, which looks down upon him with love.
Chapter 2
On arrival at the Sangster, Harvey Gold finds it difficult not to feel a tiny bit disappointed. He was not a man used to staying in five-star hotels if his father (or his estate) were not paying, and it might perhaps have been expected that he would only be grateful; or, if not actually grateful, at least so unaccustomed to this level of luxury as to be mollified by it. There are, however, a number of problems:
1. The Sangster, although a very beautiful hotel, is not what Harvey had pictured in his mind when, in the taxi from the airport – as a check and balance in his head to the oncoming deathbed visit – he had mused expectantly about the prospect of staying in a Manhattan hotel. For Harvey, although himself born on that island and technically a citizen of it, a stay in Manhattan still required a certain amount of cliché: that is, a room at least seventy storeys up, with floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out on a glittering nightscape of Koyaanisqatsi skyscrapers. The lift at the Sangster, however, travels to a maximum only of twenty-two floors, fourteen of which were extraneous to Harvey anyway, as his room was No. 824. It is perfectly comfortable – more than perfectly comfortable – but has a view only of the internal courtyard of the hotel, and is furnished in a faintly European style. Harvey’s entrance into the room, once he’d got over the initial flummox of American tippage – such a pain in the arse, he thinks, handing over a five to a somewhat unsmiling, virtually fancy-dressed porter – is accompanied by a small sinking of the heart, that once again he’d come to America and wasn’t staying with Kojak.
2. He is still not sure who is paying for the room. At reception, he had been asked for his credit card, along, once again, with his passport, but knew that this was standard procedure. Then again, it may have meant that the room was paid for, but he had to provide a surety for any extras. On handing over his HSBC Visa, Harvey had puffed up the courage in his rather pigeon-like chest, and said, to the autumnally suited man behind the desk: ‘Sorry … can I just ask: has my room been paid for in advance?’
It was a question he didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking, since it clearly indicated a hope on his part that it had been, and therefore was likely to generate a sense in the autumnally suited man that this particular resident may not easily be able to pay for the room should the answer be ‘no’. Harvey knew this was the case from the way he raised the tiniest eyebrow and drummed some code out on the keyboard of his computer.
‘It’s been reserved on an AmEx card, sir … yours?’
‘No, I don’t have American Express. Well, I do, but I don’t use it.’ This was true: a lot of shops in Britain didn’t take it, and long, long ago, Harvey had forgotten the PIN. He sensed, on saying this, a suspicion from the receptionist, a resentment not unlike that he had felt at the airport from the immigration official when it had become clear that he owned an American passport but had chosen not to use it: why would you possess such a jewel and not offer it in your palm to demonstrate your kingliness? Harvey felt he could hear the resentment in the way the man went back to his computer, in the heavy dents his fingers made on the keys.
‘I’m afraid I can’t quite make out from the reservation whether or not all charges are to be drawn on the AmEx card, sir. This may be because the booking seems to be open-ended …?’
He phrased the surmise as a question. Harvey felt moved to answer with the information that his father was dying, but sadly not to a nailed-down schedule, hence his room would indeed have been booked for an open length of time. But instead he just nodded and
