Opening my eyes again, I study the corkboard Ugo kept on his wall. Pinned to it is a diagram he made. It resembles a caduceus: two serpentine lines braided around each other. One is labeled GOOD SHEPHERD, the other LAMB OF GOD. Beside each loop are gospel quotations.
Those words carve a swath of emptiness in me. The first time Jesus appears in the gospel of John, he is called “the Lamb of God.” No other gospel calls Jesus this, but the meaning is obvious. In the time of Moses, at the end of the ten plagues of Egypt, God protected the Jews from the Angel of Death by telling them to sacrifice a lamb and daub its blood on every door the angel should pass over. Now God was saving His people with a new Lamb: Jesus. Jesus saved us, spiritually, by his death. To this John adds a second metaphor: his Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd. A Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” There is a shepherd in the other gospels, a symbolic figure who finds joy in saving lost sheep, but the Good Shepherd in John is different. He will save his flock by dying. This diagram is morbid. Chilling. The Lamb and the Shepherd meet in death. One man dies so the rest may live. It seems ominous that this idea would’ve preoccupied Ugo just before he was killed. It reminds me of the e-mail he sent me. Ugo asked for help. I failed him.
In the kitchen I hear Peter rummaging for food in the refrigerator. But I can’t find the voice to tell him no. I remember, years ago, Mona returning home from the geriatric ward after an old man had died. She was in agony; for some reason, she blamed herself. A wrong medicine. A failed intervention. But no man ever died on my wife’s watch because he begged her for help and she refused him.
I lower myself into Ugo’s chair. Then suddenly I hear something. Peter, shouting.
“What’s wrong?” I call out, rushing into the kitchen.
He’s gone.
“Peter! ” I roar. “Where are you? ”
His head emerges beside a distant oriental screen. “Look!” he says.
I lumber toward him, disoriented. There, behind the screen, is one of the large west-facing windows that overlooks the library courtyard below. He’s standing near it, holding one of Ugo’s pieces of suet.
“Look at what?” I ask.
He points to the floor. There, pecking at the suet Peter took from the refrigerator, is a small bird. A starling.
“He just flew inside!” Peter says jubilantly.
But he’s lying. The handle on the window is cocked at the wrong angle. He’s been opening this window himself.
“Lock it,” I tell him sternly, feeling the nearness of something awful, narrowly averted. “Never do that again.”
It’s thirty feet down to the stone courtyard. I’m shaking at the thought.
“I didn’t,” Peter says crossly. And he stands on his tiptoes, raising his arm to prove it. He is inches from reaching the handle.
Then I see it. There is shattered glass on the floor behind him. The pane behind the window handle is broken.
“Did the bird do that?” I ask.
But I already know the answer.
“No,” Peter says angrily. “It was already broken.”
The front door refused to budge. So someone entered this apartment through the window.
I peer down again at the courtyard below. Thirty feet. I don’t even know how it could be done.
“Stay right here,” I tell Peter. “Don’t touch anything.”
Back in Ugo’s bedroom, I understand. Ugo didn’t leave the mess on this desk. He didn’t leave the chair pulled out.