David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

“You wouldn’t mourn a stranger, would you?” Dyce demanded.

Helen was not sure of the implications of the questions. She shook her head slightly, which she hoped indicated encouragement as much as an opinion.

“Why would you?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Of course not. If a stranger dies, it’s nothing more than flesh. I don’t mean to sound indifferent, Helen, but really, who could care? We all must die, some earlier than others, but that doesn’t matter. But if it’s a loved one. If you lose someone you love…”

The sound of her name thrilled her. He had not glanced at her name tag; he had simply said “Helen”as if the word were always in his mind. She wondered if he had been fantasizing about her as she had about him. There was a need in Mr. Dyce, she could sense it. Perhaps a need to match her own.

“You are very sensitive,” she said. It was hard to hold his eyes. They kept moving around the room, but they would light on her sometimes, and when they did, Helen gave him her most sympathetic smile.

“I respond to that,” she said. “I mean, that is something we have in common. I’m sensitive, too. Most men are afraid to be sensitive.”

Dyce sipped his coffee and when he returned the cup to the saucer she had moved her hand so that it was impossible to avoid touching it again. Tentatively, startling himself, he brushed it with his fingers. Her hand turned over immediately and clutched his with a palm that was warm and moist.

“Can I tell you something? I think you’ll understand. My mother has really been gone a month. I told you a week because I thought it would sound silly for me to be acting this way after a month, but now I think you would understand.”

“Yes,” said Dyce.

“I knew you would understand. I’m not a liar, though. I don’t tell lies. This was just-you know.”

“Yes.”

“What you said about love. I agree with that, I believe that, but can I ask you a question?”

Dyce nodded. Her hand was soft and fleshy, like her face, but her touch was no longer just sympathetic. Somehow her fingers had become entwined with his own. As the waitress passed, Dyce thought she must see them as lovers. He wondered if Helen understood the implications of holding his hand in this way. She seemed so naive and trusting.

“Do you think it’s possible to love someone too much? Because that’s how I love. Completely. I give myself completely. Is that wrong?”

“No,” said Dyce. “Love is forever.”

She squeezed his hand so hard it hurt.

“ So it started when, exactly?”

Becker stopped pacing and looked out the window. He had to part the vertical blinds to see the building opposite his, where the blinds were discreetly closed. If he looked far enough to the side he could just glimpse a sorry-looking acacia sapling bound in a cement pot the size of an oil drum. Beautification was not the highest priority in the Bureau complex. The window covering was a muted purple, just about right for a remembered dream and thus appropriate for a shrink’s office, even if out of place in an FBI office. This, however, was both.

“It started with my mother. At least that’s standard theory, isn’t it? She weaned me too early, and I shall never forgive her for it.”

Gold drew a line down the margin of his notepad. “Is it me you dislike, or this process?”

“Aren’t you part of the process? Don’t I transfer my love and hostilities to you and allow you to soak them up like a saintly sponge?”

“In your case we can skip the transference if you like.” Gold drew a serpentine curve the length of the first line, intersecting it at regular intervals. “I’d rather not be the object of either your affections or your hostilities. Besides, this isn’t Freudian analysis. It isn’t primal scream therapy, either. For that matter, I’m not terribly interested in your relationship with your mother.”

“What are you interested in?” Becker asked.

“We just want to know why you felt you had to quit.”

“We?”

“They want to know. I’m supposed to find out. You’re supposed to tell me. It’s a team thing.”

“Why do they care?”

“Naivete doesn’t suit you, Mr. Becker. You’re too valuable for them to give up without an effort.”

Gold began to fill in the parabolas created by the intersecting lines.

“I retired because it was time.” Becker was pacing again.

“You’re still a relatively young man. You were in your prime, you were in heavy demand.”

“It was time for me.”

“But why?”

“You ever been shot at, Gold?”

“No.”

“Stabbed? Or even threatened? Ever have a terrorist point a gun at you, wave a grenade in your face, threaten to kill you and a hundred other people?”

“You know I haven’t. Is that supposed to justify you or put me in my puny civilian wimpish place?”

Becker felt suddenly weary and ashamed. He sat heavily on the sofa.

“I’m sorry, Gold. I didn’t mean to be attacking you personally. I’ve got nothing against you. I know you didn’t ask for this job.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“You did? Why?”

“I thought you’d be interesting. You’re something of a legend in certain circles, you know.” Gold tapped his pen on a folder on his desk. “Your history is fascinating.”

“Glad to ease the boredom of your days.”

“Did you think therapists don’t have favorites? I haven’t been shot at, thank God, but I have sat through some of the dreariest, mind-numbing sessions that would have killed a lesser man. Your colleagues are a pretty humdrum lot, Becker.”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Are you fishing? I don’t know if you are or not since you won’t talk to me, but my instinct tells me you are. It also tells me that you quit because you’re suffering from a very rare disease in this day and age.”

“I’m supposed to ask what.”

“II would help the flow.”

“What does your instinct tell you I’m suffering from?”

“A conscience. I think you quit your particular brand of work because you had a crisis of conscience.”

Becker laughed. Gold thought it was not a pleasant sound.

“Well, thank God,” said Becker. “I was afraid you were some sort of genius who could cut right to the heart of it and find out what I was really like. But I guess we have to do it the hard way after all.”

“What’s the hard way?”

“With me stalling and covering up and misleading you every step of the way.”

“That sounds about right,” said Gold. “So why not tell me how it started?”

“That should be in my fascinating file.”

“It would be revealing if you told me when it started.”

“When I think it started. The final decision will be yours, of course.”

“Who knows you better than I?”

Becker laughed again. “Nobody.”

Gold waited, drawing horizontal bars where the serpentine line met the vertical.

“I’d been in the Bureau for about eight years,” Becker said. “Routine work for the most part, nothing to set the world on fire. I don’t think I had any particular desire to set the world on fire, for that matter. I was basically just learning the job and I don’t know that I’d shown any greater aptitude for it than anyone else. My job evaluations should be on your desk, so in this case you know more about me than I do. Have you looked at them?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“Average, I’d say. Some of them thought you were a bit brighter than average-which your test scores confirm, by the way-but no flashes of brilliance in the beginning. Just another agent.”

“That’s fair… So. I was assigned to New York, working a counterfeit case, when a hostage situation developed in a bank robbery. Very bizarre situation. The cops had caught these two guys in the act, but the guys had the bank employees as hostages and they were demanding a plane to Libya. The television people found out about it and there was this freak-show atmosphere with the negotiations being held on camera and the media putting in calls to the clowns in the bank. A very wend situation. I was sent over to help Terry Dwyer who had taken over the negotiations from the local cop who had been giving away the store. This had been going on for hours, so we had time to prepare the limo that was supposed to take them to the airport. I wasn’t the only agent there, of course. There must have been a dozen of us, some of us with our badges showing, some dressed as cops, a couple in paramedics uniforms.