The Coptic Secret (5 page)

Then there was Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son, both dead, murdered in Paris. Across the void, he heard her laugh, scoffing at life's inconsistencies. Jeff still had his baseball cap on backward, was still clad in drooping shorts that almost reached his ankles. Forever Lang's ten-year-old best pal and frequent coconspirator against the established order.

They both seemed glad to see him.

Do the dead enjoy?

Then there were the people who were alive. At least, he thought they were.

They came only when Lang had his head above the dark tide, when he was in so much pain he could see them only through eyes he could barely open, hear not at all though they seemed to be speaking.

He was fairly certain some of them weren't even there.

Francis, the black priest, Janet's former confessor and Lang's best friend, was there more likely than not, his prayers doing Lang about as much good as they had Janet and Jeff. But Lang appreciated him coming even if visitation of the sick was part of the priest shtick anyway.

Sara, his secretary, came less frequently, for which Lang was grateful. The first two times, she dissolved into tears and had to be led away by a woman in white. The next couple of times she tried to speak but Lang could hear nothing. He was vaguely aware he had an office and a law practice that needed some sort of attention and that was probably where Sara went, but it all seemed very far away, remote from the black tides that engulfed him.

And he was probably dead anyway.

Then there was Gurt, the one he was fairly certain wasn't really there. A couple of years after Dawn died, Lang had been in Rome and taken up where he had left off with Gurt Fuchs, a German national and coworker at the agency.

Tall, blonde and looking like a travel poster for her native country, she moved through a crowd making men stare and women jealous. She had taken temporary leave from the agency to come to Atlanta and she and Lang had lived together for a year or so. Lang had dreamed of marriage and the family he had not had with Dawn. Gurt was not interested. She inexplicably announced she was going back to work in Europe. He had not seen her since.

Not till now anyway.

If she was really there.

Which he doubted.

Either way, they had exchanged more wisecracks than statements of affection. If he could, he would tell her how much he had loved her, although romantic conversation was hardly his forte or hers.

Now it might be too late.

Either Gurt in the flesh or as a chimera would enter the lenslike edge of his vision and stand at the foot of his bed, speaking words that to him were only silence. She hadn't aged since he last saw her, a time span he simply was unable to calculate, so it was unlikely she was real. Reinforcing the idea even more was the child that grasped her hand, a blond little boy with eyes the color of cornflowers.

There was something vaguely familiar about him, although Lang's pain-racked brain simply refused to figure out what. He peered at Lang with the curiosity a child might display toward an insect specimen skewered on pins in an exhibit box.

Then the White Angel would appear and Gurt and the child would leave.

The White Angel, the woman whose face changed frequently but who always presaged Lang's return to the Womb.

Lang had no idea how long he had been slipping from one world to the next. He only knew he woke up one morning, really woke up. He could hear voices and footsteps outside his room, fuzzy but sound nonetheless. He could see without the blurred edges at the perimeters of his vision. He recognized smells of a hospital, antiseptic, starch and, he thought, pain.

Father Francis Narumba sat next to the bed in full priestly regalia, reading what Lang could see was the sports section of the Atlanta paper.

"How're the Braves doing?" Lang asked, the first words he could remember
since ...
well, since he wound up here.

Wherever "here" was.

Francis looked up, as startled as if one of the icons on his altar had spoken.

Perhaps more so.

"God be praised! I
thought..."
He smiled.
"Debitum naturae."

Debt to nature, Latin euphemism for death.

Francis was also what Lang described as a victim of a liberal arts education. Lang and the priest made a game of Latin aphorisms.

"Debemur mori nos nostraque,"
Lang replied, surprised how easily he did so.

Francis put down the paper and came to stand over the bed. "Horace was right: we and our works may be destined for death, but it looks like you aren't quite due yet."

Lang struggled to sit up only to find he was too weak. That was when he discovered the tubes stuck into the back of his hand.

Francis gently pushed him against the pillows. "Take it easy!
Te hominem esse memento!"

The line a slave always whispered into a conquering general's ear as he rode a chariot through Rome's streets in a triumph; remember, you are but mortal.

"I may only be human, but I've been
here ...
how long?"

"Nearly a month."

"I need to get out and—"

"And what? At the moment you aren't strong enough to get out of bed."

"What happened? I had just come back from
England..."

"Likely you left the gas on your stove on. When you opened the door, something sparked."

Lang had no trouble remembering his last night before departing for London. He had dropped Grumps
off
at the kennel and met Alicia Warner, an assistant US attorney and fairly regular date for almost a year, for dinner at a Thai restaurant. The relationship was definitely on the wane. He had the feeling both of them were simply going through the motions before ending it.

The fact she had been kidnapped a year ago in an effort to lure Lang to his death hadn't exactly helped matters.

Lang banished her from his thoughts.

"Grumps?" he asked.

Francis shook his head slowly, not managing to suppress the ghost of a smile. "In an act of Christian charity, I took him in. He repays me by howling at choir practice, snapping at the chairperson of the women's auxiliary and raiding the garbage at the feed-the-poor soup kitchen."

"Centuries of persecution have made us heretics a surly lot.
Vivit post funera virtus."

"My deeds may survive the grave but I question if they will survive the bishop."

Lang's ribs ached when he chuckled but it felt good anyway. The fact Francis would give shelter to a mad dog rather than see it put down wouldn't stop him from complaining about being bitten.

He became serious again.

The stove. He hadn't used it the night before he left and he surely would have smelled gas when he came home that night if it had been on.

Then ... ?

"You were lucky," Francis observed. "For reasons I can't imagine, the angels were watching over you. Somehow you managed to get the apartment door between you and most of the blast. That kept you from burns that would have been fatal. You wound up with surprisingly few burns, but significant internal injuries and broken bones. Happily your skull was too thick to fracture, saving possible brain damage."

Lang smiled weakly. "I'm not sure if I'm being diagnosed or insulted."

The priest glanced at his watch. "I've got a midday prayer service to do but I'll be back this evening."

"That a threat or promise?"

This time Francis chuckled. "Careful or I'll have the folks at Manuel's cater you a meal."

Manuel's Tavern. Quite possibly the funkiest bar in town, the pair's favorite watering hole despite spectacularly bad food. It was a place the Zagat's people would hire Michael Shumacher to drive them past.

"I'll bet the chow here makes Manuel's taste good."

Francis opened the door. "A true miracle."

"Oh, Francis?"

The doorknob in his hand, the priest turned, a question on his face.

"Gurt. I dreamed of Dawn and Janet and Jeff, a number of people
who ...
who aren't here anymore. But
Gurt...
she seemed real enough. Did
she ... ?"

Francis face became immobile, the expression of someone unwilling to speak. "She's real enough."
"But... ?"

"I'll see you later."

Francis was gone.

More of a retreat than an exit.

V
.

Two Days Later

The White Angel propped Lang up enough to eat the equally unappetizing and unrecognizable meal from his bed tray. Its mere appearance made Lang nostalgic for the feeding tube that had been removed just that morning. With totally unjustifiable enthusiasm, she
set
it before him: there was some sort of mystery meat, into the origins of which Lang feared to inquire, green goo that might at one time have been string beans and a sickly sweet red mass he guessed was Jell-O.

He had discovered a cuisine to rank below airline food.

But it was food, the first he could actually eat rather than absorb through a plastic line.

"Doctor will be so pleased when he makes his rounds," she cooed. "You've really made a remarkable recovery."

"Doctor" was spoken in the same tone as she might have referred to the Deity.

Lang shoved the tray away, surprised at how much of the stuff he had eaten. "That mean I'm going home?"

She looked almost hurt at the suggestion. "Home?"

"You know, the place we sleep at night, keep our stuff. Usually a house or apartment."

She took the tray. "I'd guess you'll be moved out of the trauma and burn ward, probably to a private hospital."

Grady was publicly funded. Unlike most institutions in which the Atlanta/Fulton County government had a hand, it somehow managed to accomplish its function despite continual budget overruns, accusations of racism from both sides, scandals, mismanagement that would make Larry, Curly and Moe look like geniuses and a bureaucracy that could stifle a hurricane.

It did, however, have the area's premier trauma and burn centers and provided practical experience to the residents of both Emory and Morehouse medical schools.

No matter what its qualities, Lang didn't intend to remain a guest any longer than he had to. And he certainly didn't plan a lengthy convalescence at a private hospital. "But I need
to . .."

The White Angel exited, tray in hand, leaving him to stare at the open door.

It seemed almost preplanned. Seconds after her exit a slender black man in a suit walked in. "Unnerstan' you doin' much better, Mr. Reilly."

Franklin Morse, Detective Franklin Morse, Atlanta Police Department. He and Lang had a history.

"Who snitched, the nurse?"

Morse made himself at home in the chair Francis had occupied. "Now, that ain' a friendly way to start a conversation, Mr. Reilly."

"I don't recall any of our conversations being particularly friendly, Detective."

Morse sprung out of the chair and began inspecting a list of regulations posted on the back of the door. The man rarely sat still, Lang remembered. His age was at best a guess but he had the build of one of those African marathon runners. Lang would have bet he had run more than one felon down on foot.

Morse spun around to face the bed. "You prolly don' recall any time we had a conversation when there wasn't some sorta mayhem goin' on. Folks jumpin' outta your condo, gettin' murdered, blowin' up your car, stuff like that. Take a whole precinct to keep up with you, Mr. Reilly. Now yo' condo's exploded."

Lang knew the man was perfectly capable of speaking English instead of the dialect he usually chose. "Gas. They say I left the gas on."

The detective flopped back into the chair. "Thass what they say. Question I got, you leave the gas on, why wire a fire starter to the latch?"

Lang stared wide-eyed. "Fire starter?"

"Y'know, one of them gadgets you get what you pull the trigger an' it lights up to start yo' charcoal or fire. Get 'em in any hardware store."

Lang didn't have to think long about the implications of that.

"You found the fire starter?"

"Arson 'vestigator did. What was left of it. Sum'bitch fixed up so's you turns a key and disengage the lock, it clicks. Time you push the door
open ...
Boom! A blast furnace. 'Fraid everythin you had in there is so much ash."

"So you think someone's trying to kill me."

"Don' think it's an April Fool's prank. Lucky it didn't take out none o' your neighbors."

"No one was hurt?"

" 'Cept you. Made dust outta the crystal collection the lady 'bove you had, though. Like usual, I don' s'pose you got even a guess who the perp might be."