Without Rachel and Sam around, I fell into a black place. I don’t recall much of the twenty-four hours that followed their departure. I slept, I ate little, and I didn’t answer the phone. I thought about drinking, but I was already so consumed by self-loathing that I was unable to lower myself further. Messages were left, but none that mattered, and after a time I just stopped listening to them. I tried to watch some television, even flicked through the newspaper, but nothing could hold my attention. I pushed thoughts of Alice, of Louis, of Martha far from me. I wanted no part of them.
And as the hours crept slowly by a pain grew inside me, like an ulcer bleeding into my system. I lay fetally upon the couch, my knees drawn into my chest, and spasmed as the hurt ebbed and flowed. I thought that I heard noises from upstairs, the footsteps of a mother and a child, but when I went to look there was nobody there. A towel had fallen from the clothes dryer, the door of which now stood open, and I could not recall if it was I who had left it that way. I thought about calling Rachel every second minute, but I did not lift the phone. I knew that nothing would come of it if I did. What could I say to her? What promises could I make without doubting, even as I spoke the words, that I would be able to keep them?
Again and again, Joan’s words came back to me. I had lost so much once; such a loss would be unendurable a second time. In the new and unwelcome quiet of the house, I felt time slipping once more, so that past and present blurred, the dams that I had tried so hard to erect between what was and what yet might be weakening still further, spilling agonizing memories into my new life, mocking the hope that old ghosts could ever be laid to rest.
It was the silence that brought them, the sense of existences briefly halted. Rachel still had clothes in the closets and cosmetics on her dressing table. Her shampoo hung in the shower stall, and there was a strand of her long red hair lying like a question mark on the floor beneath the sink. I could smell her on the pillow, and the shape of her head was clear on the cushions of the couch by our bedroom window, where she liked to lie and read. I found a white ribbon beneath our bed, and an earring that had slipped behind the radiator. An unwashed coffee cup bore a trace of her lipstick, and there was a candy bar in the refrigerator, half-eaten.
Sam’s little crib still stood in the center of her room, for Joan had retained the one used by her own children, and it was easier to simply retrieve that from her attic rather than disassemble Sam’s own crib and transport it to Vermont. I think, perhaps, that Rachel was also reluctant to remove the crib from our house, knowing the pain it would cause me with its unavoidable implications of permanence. Some of Sam’s toys and clothes lay on the floor by the wall. I picked them up and put the dirty bibs and tops into the laundry basket. I would wash them later. I touched the place where she slept. I caught her baby smell on my fingers. She smelled as Jennifer once did.
And I remembered: all of these things I did before, when blood lay drying in the cracks on the kitchen floor. There was discarded clothing upon a bed, and a doll on a child’s chair. There was a cup on a table, half-filled with coffee, and a glass bearing traces of milk. There were cosmetics and brushes and hair and lipstick and lives ended in the middle of tasks half-done, so that for a moment it seemed as though they must surely return, that they had merely slipped away for a few moments and would come back eventually to finish their nighttime drinks, to place the doll on the shelf where it belonged, to resume their lives and permit me to share that place with them, to love me and to die with me and not leave me alone to mourn for them, until at last I grieved so long and so hard that something returned, phantasms conjured up by my pain, two entities that were almost my wife and child.
Almost.
Now I was in another house, and again there were reminders of lives around me, of tasks left unfinished and words left unsaid, except that these existences were continuing elsewhere. There was no blood on the floor, not yet. There was no finality, here, merely a pause for breath, a reconsideration. They could go on, perhaps not in this place, but somewhere far away, somewhere safe and secure.
Fading light, falling rain, and night descending like soot upon the earth. Voices half-heard, and touches in the darkness. Blood in my nose, and dirt in my hair.
We remain.
Always, we remain.
∗ ∗ ∗
I awoke to the sound of the telephone. I waited for the machine to pick up the message. A man’s voice spoke, vaguely familiar but nobody I could place. I let the cassette roll on.
Later, after I had showered and dressed, I walked Walter as far as Ferry Beach and let him play in the surf. Outside the Scarborough Fire Department, men were cleaning down the engines with hoses, the winter sunlight occasionally breaking through the clouds and causing the droplets to sparkle like jewels before they disintegrated upon the ground. In the early days of the fire department, steel locomotive wheels were used to summon the volunteers, and there was still one outside Engine 3’s station over at Pleasant Hill. Then, in the late 1940s, Elizabeth Libby and her daughter, Shirley, took over the emergency dispatch service, operating out of the store on Black Point Road, where they lived and worked. They would activate their Gamewell alarm system when a call came in, which in turn set off air horns at the station houses. The two women were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and in their first eleven years in charge of the service they went away together only twice.
One of my earliest memories of Scarborough was of watching old Clayton Urquhart presenting a plaque to Elizabeth Libby for long service in 1971. My grandfather was a volunteer member of the fire department, helping out when the need arose, and my grandmother was one of the women who worked the mobile canteen that provided food and drink to the firefighters when they were tackling big blazes, or fires of long duration, so they were both there for the presentation. Elizabeth Libby, who used to give me candy when we visited her, wore winged glasses and had a white flower pinned to her dress. She dabbed happily at her eyes with a small lace handkerchief as people she’d known all her life said nice things about her in public.
I tied Walter to the cemetery gate and walked to the place where my grandfather and grandmother were interred. She had died long before he, and I had few lasting memories of her apart from that occasion when Elizabeth Libby received her plaque. I had buried my grandfather myself, taking a spade after the mourners had gone and slowly covering the pine casket in which he lay. It was a warm day, and I hung my jacket upon a headstone. I think I talked to him while I worked, but I don’t remember what I said. I probably spoke to him as I had always done, for men are ever boys with their grandfathers. He was a sheriff’s deputy once, but a bad case poisoned him, taking hold of his conscience and tormenting it so that he knew no rest from the thoughts that pursued him. In the end, it would be left to me finally to close the circle and help to bring an end to the demon that had taunted my grandfather. I wondered if he left those agonies behind him when he died, or if they followed him into the next world. Did peace come to him with his last breath, finally silencing the voices that had haunted him for so long, or did it come later, when a boy that he had once danced upon his knee fell on the snow and watched as an old horror bled away to nothing?
I pulled a weed from beside his headstone. It came away easily, as such plants will. My grandfather taught me how to distinguish the weeds from the plants: good flowers have deep roots, and the bad ones dwell in shallow soil. When he told me things, I did not forget them. I filed them away, in part because I knew that he might ask me about them at some future date, and I wanted to be able to answer him correctly.
“You have old eyes,” he used to tell me. “You should have an old man’s knowledge to match them.”
But he slowly began to grow frail, and his memory began to fail him, the Alzheimer’s stealing him away, little by little, relentlessly thieving all that was valuable to him, slowly disassembling the old man’s memory. And so it was left to me to remind him of all that he had once told me, and I became the teacher to my grandfather.
Good flowers have deep roots, and bad ones dwell in shallow soil.
Shortly before he died, the disease gave him a temporary release, and things that had seemed lost forever returned to him. He remembered his wife, and their marriage, and the daughter they had together. He recalled weddings and divorces, baptisms and funerals, the names of colleagues who had gone before him into the last great night that glows faintly with the light of a promised dawn. Words and memories rushed from him in a great torrent, and he lived his life over again in a matter of hours. Then it was all gone, and not a single moment of his past remained, as though that flood had scoured away the final traces of him, leaving an empty dwelling with opaque windows, reflecting all but revealing nothing, for there was nothing left to reveal.
But in those last minutes of lucidity, he took my hand, and his eyes burned more brightly than they had ever done before. We were alone. His day was drawing to a close, and the sun was setting upon him.
“Your father,” he said. “You’re not like him, you know. All families have their burdens to bear, their troubled souls. My mother, she was a sad woman, and my father could never make her happy. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t hers. She was just the way that she was, and people didn’t understand it then. It was a sickness, and it took her in the end, like cancer took your mother. Your father, he had something of that sickness in him too, that sadness. I think maybe that was part of what attracted your mother to him: it spoke to something inside of her, even if she didn’t always want to hear what it said.”
I tried to remember my father, but as the years passed after his death it grew harder and harder to picture him. When I tried to visualize him, there was always a shadow across his face, or his features were distorted and unclear. He was a policeman, and he shot himself with his own gun. They said that he did it because he couldn’t live with himself. They told me that he killed a girl and a boy, after the boy seemed about to pull a weapon on him. They couldn’t explain why the girl had also died. I guess there was no explanation, or none that could suffice.
“I never got to ask him why he did what he did, but I might have understood it a little,” said my grandfather. “You see, I have some of that sadness too, and so do you. I’ve fought it all my life. I wasn’t going to let it take me the way that it took my mother, and you’re not going to let it take you either.”
He gripped my hand tighter. A look of confusion passed across his face. He stopped talking and narrowed his eyes, trying desperately to remember what it was that he wanted to say.
“The sadness,” I said. “You were talking about the sadness.”
His face relaxed. I saw a single tear break from his right eye and slip gently down his cheek.
“It’s different in you,” he said. “It’s harsher, and some of it comes from outside, from another place. We didn’t pass it on to you. You brought it with you. It’s part of you, part of your nature. It’s old and—”
He gritted his teeth, and his body shook as he fought for those last minutes of clarity.
“They have names.”
The words were forced out, spit from his system, ejected like tumors from within.
“They have names,” he repeated, and his voice was different now, harsh and filled with a desperate hatred. For an instant he was transformed, and he was no longer my grandfather but another being, one that had taken hold of his ailing, fading spirit and briefly reenergized it in order to communicate with a world it could not otherwise reach. “All of them, they have names, and they’re here. They’ve always been here. They love hurt and pain and misery, and they’re always searching, always looking.
“And they’ll find you, because it’s in you as well. You have to fight it. You can’t be like them, because they’ll want you. They’ve always wanted you.”
He had somehow raised himself from his bed, but he fell back, exhausted. He released his grip, leaving the imprint of his fingers on my skin.
“They have names,” he whispered, the disease surging forward like ink clouding clear water and turning it to black, claiming all of his memories for its own.
∗ ∗ ∗
I dropped Walter back at the house and played my unheard messages for the first time. The walk had cleared my head, and the time spent tending to the grave had brought me a little peace, even as it had reminded me of why Neddo’s words about the names of the Believers had seemed familiar to me. It might also have been the fact that I had come to a kind of decision, and there was no point in agonizing any longer.
None of the messages came from Rachel. One or two contained offers of work. I deleted them. The third was from Assistant SAC Ross’s secretary in New York. I called her back, and she told me that Ross was out of the office, but promised to contact him in order to let him know that I’d called. Ross got back to me before I had time to make a sandwich. It sounded like he was in Stark’s Veranda again. I could hear dishes banging behind him, the tinkling of china against crystal, and people talking and laughing as they ate.
“What was the big hurry with Bosworth, if it was going to take you half a day to call back?” he asked.
“I’ve been distracted,” I said. “Sorry.”
The apology seemed to throw Ross.
“I’d ask if you were doing okay,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want you to start thinking that I cared.”
“It’s fine. I’d just view it as a moment of weakness.”
“So, you still interested in this thing?”
It took me a while to reply.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m still interested.”
“Bosworth wasn’t my responsibility. He wasn’t a field agent, so he fell under the remit of one of my colleagues.”
“Which one?”
“Mr. ‘That Doesn’t Concern You.’ Don’t push it. It doesn’t matter. Under the circumstances, I might have dealt with Bosworth the same way that he did. They put him through the process.”
“The process” was the name given to the Feds’ unofficial method for dealing with agents who stepped out of line. In serious cases, like whistleblowing, efforts were first made to discredit the agent involved. Fellow agents would be given access to the personnel file for the individual involved. Colleagues would be questioned about the agent’s habits. If the agent had gone public with something, potentially damaging personal information might in turn be leaked to the press. The FBI had a policy of not firing whistleblowers, as there was a danger that by doing so the Bureau might lend credence to the individual’s accusations. Hounding a recalcitrant agent, and smearing his or her name, was far more effective.
“What did he do?” I asked Ross.
“Bosworth was a computer guy, specializing in codes and cryptography. I can’t tell you much more than that, partly because I’d have to kill you if I did, but mostly because I can’t explain it to you anyway since I don’t understand it. It seems he was doing a little personal work on the side, something to do with maps and manuscripts. It earned him a reprimand from OPR”—the Office of Professional Responsibility was responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct within the FBI—“but it didn’t go to a disciplinary hearing. That was about a year ago. Anyway, Bosworth took some leave after that, and next thing he popped up in Europe, in a French jail. He was arrested for desecrating a church.”
“A church?”
“Technically, a monastery: Sept-Fons Abbey. He was caught digging up the floor of a vault in the dead of night. The legate in Paris got involved and managed to keep Bosworth’s background out of the papers. He was suspended with pay when he returned and ordered to seek professional help, but he wasn’t monitored. He came back to work in the same week that an interview with an ‘unnamed FBI agent’ appeared in some UFO magazine alleging that the Bureau was preventing a proper investigation of cult activities in the United States. It was clearly Bosworth again, burbling some nonsense about linked map references. The Bureau decided that it wanted him gone, so he was put through the process. His security clearance was downgraded, then pretty much removed entirely, apart from allowing him to switch on his computer and play with Google. He was shifted to duties beneath his abilities, given a desk beside a men’s room in the basement, and virtually cut off from contact with his colleagues, but he still wouldn’t break.”
“And?”
“In the end, he was given the option of a ‘fitness for duty’ examination at the Pearl Heights Center in Colorado.”
Fitness for duty examinations were the kiss of death for an agent’s career. If the agent refused to submit to one, he or she was automatically fired. If the agent submitted, then a diagnosis of mental instability was frequently the outcome, decided long before the agent even arrived at the testing center. The evaluations were carried out in medical facilities with special contracts to examine federal employees, and usually stretched over three or four days. Subjects were kept isolated, apart from their interactions with medical personnel, and required to answer up to six hundred yes-or-no questions. If they weren’t already crazy when they went in, the process was designed to make them crazy by the time they left.
“Did he take the test?”
“He traveled to Colorado, but he never made it to the center. He was automatically dismissed.”
“So where is he now?”
“Officially, I have no idea. Unofficially, he’s in New York. It seems that his parents have money, and they own an apartment up on First and Seventieth in a place called the Woodrow. Bosworth lives there, as far as anyone can tell, but he’s probably a basket case. We haven’t been in contact with him since his dismissal. So now you know, right?”
“I know not to join the FBI, then start dismantling churches.”
“I don’t even like you walking by the building, so recruitment is hardly a concern for you. This stuff didn’t come for free. If Bosworth is tied in with this thing in Williamsburg, then I want a heads-up.”
“That’s fair.”
“Fair? You don’t know from fair. Just remember: I want to be informed first if Bosworth smells bad on this.”
I promised to get back to him if I found out anything he should know. It seemed to satisfy him. He didn’t say good-bye before he hung up, but he didn’t say anything hurtful either.
The most recent call was from a man named Matheson. Matheson was a former client of mine. Last year, I’d looked into a case involving the house in which his daughter had died. I couldn’t say that it had ended well, but Matheson had been satisfied with the outcome.
His message said that someone was making inquiries about me and had approached him for a recommendation, or so they claimed. The visitor, a man named Alexis Murnos, said he was calling on behalf of his employer, who wished to remain anonymous for the present. Matheson had a highly developed sense of suspicion, and he gave Murnos as little to go on as possible. All he could get out of Murnos, who declined to leave a contact number, was that his employer was wealthy and appreciated discretion. Matheson asked me to call him back when I got the message.
“I wasn’t aware that you’d added discretion to your list of accomplishments,” Matheson said, once his secretary had put me through to him. “That’s what made me suspicious.”
“And he gave you nothing?”
“Zilch. I suggested that he contact you himself, if he had any concerns. He told me that he would, but then said that he’d appreciate it if I kept his visit strictly between the two of us. Naturally, I called you as soon as he left.”
I thanked Matheson for the warning, and he told me to let him know if there was anything more that he could do. As soon as we were done, I called the offices of the Press Herald and left a message there for Phil Isaacson, the paper’s art critic, once they’d confirmed that he was due in later that day. It was a long shot, but Phil’s expertise extended from law to architecture and beyond, and I wanted to talk to him about House of Stern and the auction that was due to take place there. That reminded me that I had not yet heard back from Angel or Louis. It was a situation that was unlikely to last very much longer.
I decided to drive into Portland to kill some time until I heard from Phil Isaacson. Maybe tomorrow I would leave Walter with my neighbors and return to New York, in the hope that I might be able to get in touch with former special agent Bosworth. I set the alarm system in the house and left Walter half-asleep in his basket. I knew that as soon as I was gone he would make a beeline for the couch in my office, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to have him around, and his hairs on the furniture seemed like a small return for the company.
“They all have names.”
My grandfather’s words came back to me as I drove, now echoing not only Neddo but also Claudia Stern.
“Two hundred angels rebelled . . . Enoch gives the names of nineteen.”
Names. There was a Christian bookstore in South Portland. I was pretty certain that they’d have a section on the apocrypha. It was time to take a look at Enoch.
The car, a red 5 Series BMW, picked me up at Route 1 and stayed with me when I left the highway for Maine Mall Road. I pulled into the parking lot in front of Panera Bread and waited, but the car, with two men inside, headed on by. I gave them five minutes, then moved out of the lot, keeping an eye on my rearview mirror as I drove. I saw the BMW parked over by the Dunkin’ Donuts, but it didn’t try to follow me this time. Instead, after making a couple of loops of the area, I spotted its replacement. This time the BMW was blue, and it had only one man in the front, but it was clear that I was the object of his attentions. I almost felt resentful. Twin BMWs: these guys were being hired by the hour and being paid cheap. Part of me was tempted to confront them, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to control my temper, which meant there was a good chance that things could end badly. Instead I made a call. Jackie Garner answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Jackie,” I said. “Want to break some heads?”
I sat in my car outside Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. The blue BMW was in the Maine Mall’s lot across the street, while its red sibling waited in the parking lot of the Sheraton. One at each side of the road. It was still amateurish, but it showed promise.
My cell phone rang.
“How you doing, Jackie?”
“I’m at the Best Buy.”
I looked up. I could see Jackie’s van idling in the fire lane.
“It’s a blue BMW, Mass. plates, maybe three rows in. He’ll move when I move.”
“Where’s the other car?”
“Over by the Sheraton. It’s a red BMW. Two men.”
Jackie seemed confused.
“They’re using the same badge?”
“Same model, just a different color.”
“Dumb.”
“Kind of.”
“What are you going to do about the guys in red?”
“Let them come, I guess, then we can deal with them. Why?”
I got the sense that Jackie had an alternative solution.
“Well,” he said, “you see, I brought some friends. Do you want this done quietly?”
“Jackie, if I wanted it done quietly, would I have called you?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So who did you bring along?”
He tried to avoid the question, but I pinned him down.
“Jackie, tell me: who did you bring?”
“The Fulcis.” He sounded vaguely apologetic.
Dear God: the Fulci brothers. They were mooks for hire, twin barrels of muscle and flab with more chips on their shoulders than all the employees of the Frito company put together. Even the “for hire” part was misleading. If the situation offered sufficient scope for mayhem, the Fulcis would happily offer their services for free. Tony Fulci, the elder of the two brothers, held the record for being the most expensive prisoner ever to have been jailed in Washington State, calculated on a length-of-stay basis. Tony did some time there at the end of the nineties, when a lot of prisons were hiring out their inmates to large corporations to do telesales and call-center work. Tony was given a job phoning people on behalf of a new ISP named FastWire, asking its rivals’ customers to consider switching service from their current provider to the new kid on the block. The sum total of Tony Fulci’s only conversation with a customer went pretty much as follows:
Tony (reading slowly from an idiot card): I am calling on behalf of FastWire Comm—
Customer: I’m not interested.
Tony: Hey, let me finish.
Customer: I told you: I’m not interested.
Tony: Listen, what are you, stupid? This is a good deal.
Customer: I told you, I don’t want it.
Tony: Don’t you hang up that phone. You hang up that phone, and you’re a dead man.
Customer: You can’t talk to me like that.
Tony: Hey, fuck you! I know who you are, I know where you live, and when I get out of here in five months and three days I’m gonna look you up, then I’m gonna tear you limb from limb. Now, you want this piece-of-shit deal or not?
FastWire quickly abandoned its plans to extend the use of prisoners as callers, but not quickly enough to prevent it from being sued. Tony cost Washington’s prisons $7 million in lost contracts once the FastWire story got around, or $1.16 million for every month Tony was incarcerated. And Tony was the calm one in the family. All things considered, the Fulcis made the Mongol hordes look restrained.
“You couldn’t have found anyone more psychotic?”
“Maybe, but they would have cost more.”
There was no way out of it. I told him I’d head toward Deering Avenue and try to draw the solo tail away, with Jackie following. The Fulcis could intercept the other guys wherever they chose.
“Give me two minutes,” said Jackie. “I just gotta tell the Fulcis. Man, they’re juiced. You don’t know what this means to them, getting to do some real detective work. Tony just wished you could have given him a little more notice. He would’ve come off his meds.”
∗ ∗ ∗
The Fulcis didn’t have to go far to take the red BMW. They simply blocked it off in the Sheraton’s lot by parking their truck behind it. The Fulcis drove a customized Dodge 4X4 inspired by the monster-truck DVDs that they watched when they weren’t making other people’s lives more interesting in a Chinese way.
The BMW’s doors opened. The driver was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in a cheapish gray suit that made him look like an executive for a company that was struggling to make ends meet. He weighed maybe 150, or roughly half a Fulci. His companion was bigger and swarthier, possibly bringing their combined weight up to a Fulci and a quarter, or a Fulci and a half if Tony was abusing his diet pills. The Fulcis’ Dodge had smoked-glass windows, so the guy in the suit could almost have been forgiven for what he said next.
“Hey,” he said, “get that fucking tin can out of the way. We’re in a hurry here.”
Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, while the Fulcis’ primitive, semimedicated brains tried to equate the words they’d heard spoken with their own vision of their beloved truck. Eventually, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a very large, very irate Tony Fulci jumped gracelessly from the cab to the ground. He wore a polyester golf shirt, elastic-waisted pants from a big-man store, and steel-toed work boots. His belly bulged under his shirt, the sleeves of which stopped above his enormous biceps, the material insufficiently Lycraed to make the stretch demanded of it by his pumped arms. Twin arcs of muscle reached from his shoulders to just below his ears, their symmetry undisturbed by the intrusion of a neck, giving him the appearance of a man who had recently been force-fed a very large coat hanger.
His brother Paulie joined him. He made Tony look a little on the dainty side.
“Jesus Christ,” said the BMW’s driver.
“Why?” said Tony. “Does he drive a fucking tin can as well?”
Then the Fulcis went to work.
∗ ∗ ∗
The blue BMW stayed with me all the way to Deering Avenue, hanging back two or three cars but always keeping me in sight. Jackie Garner was behind him at every turn. I had picked the route because it was guaranteed to confuse anyone who wasn’t a native, and the fact that he was still within the Portland city limits, instead of being led into open country, would make the tail less likely to believe that he had been spotted and was about to be confronted. I reached the point where Deering becomes one-way, just before the intersection with Forest, forcing all traffic heading out of town to make a right. I took the tail with me as I turned, then went left onto Forest, left again back onto Deering, and took a hard right to Revere. The BMW had no choice but to stick with me every time or risk being dumped, so that when I braked suddenly he had to do the same. When Jackie shot in behind him he realized what was happening. There was no other option for the BMW except to try to use the bread company’s lot to buy himself some space and time. He pulled in fast, and we came at him in a V, trapping him against the wall.
I kept my gun tight against my body as I approached. I didn’t want to scare anyone who might happen by. The driver kept his wrists on the wheel, his fingers slightly raised. He wore a baggy blue suit with a matching tie. The wire of his cell phone earpiece was clipped to the lapel of his jacket. He was probably having trouble raising his buddies.
I nodded to Jackie. He had a little snub-nose Browning in his right hand. He kept it fixed on the driver as he opened the door.
“Get out,” I said. “Do it slowly.”
The driver did as he was told. He was tall and balding, with black hair that was just a little too long to look good.
“I’m not armed,” he said.
Jackie pushed him against my car and frisked him anyway. He came up with a wallet, and a .38 from an ankle holster.
“What’s this?” said Jackie. “Soap?”
“You shouldn’t tell lies,” I said. “They’ll turn your tongue black.”
Jackie tossed me the wallet. Inside was a Massachusetts driver’s license, identifying the man before us as one Alexis Murnos. There were also some business cards in his name for a company named Dresden Enterprises, with offices in the Prudential in Boston. Murnos was the head of corporate security.
“I hear you’ve been asking questions about me, Mr. Murnos. It would have been a lot easier to approach me directly.”
Murnos didn’t reply.
“Find out about his friends,” I told Jackie.
Jackie stepped back to make a call on his cell. Most of it consisted of “uh-huh’s” and “yeahs,” apart from one worrying interjection of “Jesus, it broke that easy? Guy must have brittle bones.”
“The Fulcis have them in the bed of their truck,” he told me when he was done. “They’re rent-a-cops from some security agency in Saugus. Tony says he thinks they’ll stop bleeding soon.”
If Murnos was troubled by the news, he didn’t show it. I had a feeling that Murnos was probably better at his job than the other two jokers, but somebody had asked him to do too much too quickly, and with limited resources. It seemed like time to prick his professional pride.
“You’re not very good at this, Mr. Murnos,” I said. “Corporate security at Dresden Enterprises must leave a little something to be desired.”
“We don’t even know what Dresden Enterprises is,” said Jackie. “He could be responsible for guarding chickens.”
Murnos sucked air in through his teeth. He had reddened slightly.
“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me what this is about, maybe over a cup of coffee, or do you want us to take you to meet your friends? It sounds like they’re going to need a ride home, eventually, and probably some medical attention. I’ll have to leave you with the gentlemen who are currently looking after them, but it’ll only be for a day or two until I find out more about the company you’re working for. That will mean paying a visit to Dresden Enterprises, possibly with a couple of people in tow, which could be very professionally embarrassing for you.”
Murnos considered his options. They were kind of limited.
“I guess coffee sounds good,” he said, finally.
“See?” I said to Jackie. “That was easy.”
“You got a way with people,” said Jackie. “We didn’t even have to hit him.”
He sounded mildly disappointed.
∗ ∗ ∗
It transpired that Murnos was actually empowered to tell me a certain amount, and to deal with me directly. He just preferred to sneak around until he was certain of all the angles. In fact, he admitted that he had amassed a considerable quantity of information on me without ever leaving his office, and he had partly guessed that Matheson would contact me. If worse came to worst, as it just had, he would then get a chance to see what I did when my feathers were ruffled.
“My colleagues aren’t really bleeding in the back of a truck, are they?” he asked. We were sitting at a table in Big Sky. It smelled good in there. Behind the counter, the kids who did the baking were cleaning down baking trays and freshening the coffee.
I exchanged a guilty look with Jackie. He was eating an apple scone, his second.
“I’m pretty certain that they are,” I said.
“The guys that took care of them, they ain’t too particular about these things,” said Jackie. “Plus one of your people said something insensitive about their truck.”
I was grateful to Jackie for all that he’d done, but it was time to get him out of the way. I asked him to find the Fulcis and make sure they didn’t inflict any further damage on anyone. He bought them a bag of scones and went on his way.
“You have interesting friends,” said Murnos, once Jackie was gone.
“Believe me, you haven’t even met the most entertaining ones. If you have anything to share with me, then now’s the time.”
“I work for Mr. Joachim Stuckler. He is the CEO of Dresden Enterprises. Mr. Stuckler is a venture capitalist specializing in software and multimedia.”
“So he’s wealthy?”
“Yes, I think that would be a fair comment.”
“If he’s wealthy, why does he hire cheap labor?”
“That was my fault. I needed men to help me, and I’d used those two before. I didn’t expect them to be beaten for their trouble. Neither did I expect to be cornered in a parking lot and relieved of my weapon by someone who then offered to buy me coffee and a scone.”
“It’s been one of those days for you.”
“Yes, it has. Mr. Stuckler is also a collector of note. He has the wealth to indulge his tastes.”
“What does he collect?”
“Art, antiques. Unusual material.”
I could see where this was leading.
“Such as little silver boxes from the fifteenth century?”
Murnos shrugged. “He is aware that you were the one who found the remains in the apartment. He believes that your case may impinge upon something of interest to him. He would like to meet you to discuss the matter further. If you were free, he would appreciate a few hours of your time. Naturally, he will pay you for your trouble.”
“Naturally, except I’m not really in the mood for a trip to Boston.”
Murnos shrugged again.
“You were looking for a woman,” he said matter-of-factly. “Mr. Stuckler may be able to provide you with some information on those responsible for her disappearance.”
I glanced over at the kids behind the counter. I wanted to hit Murnos. I wanted to beat him until he told me all that he knew. He saw that desire in my face.
“Believe me, Mr. Parker, my knowledge of this affair is limited, but I do know that Mr. Stuckler had nothing to do with whatever happened to the woman. He merely learned that you were the one who killed Homero Garcia, and discovered human remains in his apartment. He is also aware of the opening of the chamber in the basement of the building. I made some inquiries on his behalf, and discovered that your interest lay in the woman. Mr. Stuckler is happy to share whatever insights he may have with you.”
“And in return?”
“You may be able to fill some gaps in his own knowledge. If you cannot, then Mr. Stuckler is still willing to talk with you, and to tell you whatever he feels may be of help to you. It is a win-win situation for you, Mr. Parker.”
Murnos recognized that I had no choice, but he had the decency not to gloat. I agreed to see his employer over the next couple of days. Murnos confirmed the arrangement in a cell phone conversation with one of Stuckler’s assistants, then asked me if it was okay if he left. I thought it was nice of him to ask, until I realized that he was only looking for his gun back. I accompanied him outside, emptied the bullets down a drain, and handed the gun to him.
“You should get another gun,” I said. “That one isn’t much use to you on your ankle.”
Murnos’s right hand flexed, and I was suddenly looking down the barrel of a Smith & Wesson Sigma .380, four inches long and a pound in weight.
“I have another gun,” he said. “It looks like I’m not the only one who hires cheap.”
He kept the muzzle trained on me for just a second longer than necessary before allowing it to disappear back into the folds of his coat. He smiled at me, then got into his car and drove away.
Murnos was right. Jackie Garner was a lunkhead, but not as big a lunkhead as the guy who employed him.
∗ ∗ ∗
I drove back toward Scarborough, stopping off first at the Bible store. The woman behind the counter was happy to help me, and seemed only slightly disappointed when I didn’t add some little silver angel statues or a MY GUARDIAN ANGEL SAYS YOU’RE TOO CLOSE bumper sticker to my purchase of two books on the apocrypha.
“We sell a lot of those,” she told me. “There’s a heap of folks who think that the Catholic Church has been hiding something all these years.”
“What could they be hiding?” I asked, despite myself.
“I don’t know,” she said, speaking slowly as she would to an idiot child, “because it’s hidden.”
I left her to it. I sat in my car and flicked through the first of the books, but there wasn’t much that was of use to me. The second was better, as it contained the entire Book of Enoch. The names of the fallen angels appeared in Chapter 7, and, in this particular edition Ashmael’s was among them. I glanced quickly through the rest of the book, much of which seemed fairly allegorical in nature, apart from the early descriptions of the angels’ banishment and fall. According to Enoch, they were not subject to death, even after they fell, nor would they ever be forgiven for what they had done. Instead, the fallen angels set about teaching men to make swords and shields, and lecturing them on astronomy and the movements of the stars, “so that the world became altered . . . And men, being destroyed, cried out.” There were also some details about the Greek theologian Origen, who was anathematized for suggesting that the angels who fell were those “in whom the divine love had grown cold” and that they were then “hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men.”
I saw again the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop; the figure of the Captain; the bloody grapnel on the dead monks’ robes; and the grossest body of all—the fat, distorted creature marching by his leader’s side, all bloodied and grinning with the joy of killing.
∗ ∗ ∗
I picked up a sandwich at Amato’s on Route 1 and filled up on gas before heading east for home. At the pump beside me, two men, one bearded and overweight, the other younger and trimmer, were consulting a map in their grimy black Peugeot. The bearded man was wearing a gray hand-knitted sweater. A clerical collar was visible at his neck. They didn’t pay me any attention, and I didn’t offer them any help.
As I drew near my house, I saw a car parked in front of the driveway. It wasn’t quite blocking me, but it would be difficult to go around it without slowing down. A man was leaning against the hood, and the weight of his body had forced the front of the car down so that the fender was on the verge of nuzzling the ground. He was taller than I by five or six inches, and massively, obesely overweight, shaped like a great egg, with a huge wad of fat at his belly that hung down over his groin and lapped at his thighs. His legs were very short, so short that his arms appeared longer than they were. His hands, far from being flabby and awkward, were slim and almost delicate, although the wrists were heavy and swollen. Taken together, the various parts of his body appeared to have been inexpertly assembled from a variety of donors, as though a young Baron Frankenstein had been let loose in his toy box with the leftovers from a massacre at Weight Watchers. He wore plain black shoes on small feet, and tan trousers that had been altered at the legs to fit, the ends folded inside and inexpertly stitched, making it possible to judge the extent of the alterations by the circle of holes halfway up his shins. The bloating at his stomach was too big, or too uncomfortable, to encompass, so the waistband of the trousers ran underneath it, thereby allowing it to hang free beneath his billowing white shirt. The shirt was buttoned almost to the neck, constricting it to such an extent that the great swelling concealing the collar was a violent reddish purple in color, like the terrible discoloration that occurs in a corpse when the blood has gathered at the extremities. I could see no hint of a jacket under his brown camel-hair overcoat. There were buttons missing from the front, possibly after some futile and ultimately doomed attempt to close it. His head balanced finely on the layered fats of his neck, narrowing from a very round skull to a small, distinctly weak chin, an inverted sparrow’s egg atop the larger ostrich egg of his body. His features should have been lost in jowls and flab, sunken into them like a child’s drawing of the man in the moon. Instead, they retained their definition, losing themselves only as they drew nearer his neck. His eyes were closer to gray than green, as though capable only of a monochrome version of human sight, and no lines extended from them. He had long eyelashes, and a thin nose that flared slightly at the end, exposing his nostrils. His mouth was small and feminine, with something almost sensual about the curvature of the lips. He had small ears with very pronounced lobes. His head was closely shaved, but his hair was very dark, so that it was possible to see the imprint of the faded widow’s peak above his forehead. His resemblance to the foul creature in the painting at Claudia Stern’s auction house was startling. This man was fatter, perhaps, and his features more worn, but it was still as though the figure with the bloodied mouth had detached himself from the canvas and assumed a new existence in this world.
I stopped my Mustang a short distance from him. I preferred not to draw up alongside him. He didn’t move as I stepped from my car. His hands remain clasped below his chest, resting upon the upper slope of his belly.
“Can I help you?” I said.
He thought about the question.
“Perhaps,” he said.
His washed-out eyes regarded me. He did not blink. I felt a further slight glimmer of recognition, this time more personal, as when one hears a song playing on the radio, one that dates from one’s earliest childhood and is recalled only on the faintest of levels.
“I don’t usually conduct business at my home,” I said.
“You don’t have an office,” he replied. “You make yourself difficult to find, for an investigator. One might almost suspect that you didn’t want to be traced.”
He moved away from his car. He was strangely graceful, seeming almost to skate across the ground rather than to walk. His hands remained clasped on his belly until he was only a couple of feet away from me, then his right hand extended toward me.
“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Brightwell. I believe we have matters to discuss.”
As his hand moved through the air, the sleeve of his coat dangled loosely, and I glimpsed the beginnings of a mark upon his arm, like twin arrowheads recently burned into the flesh. Immediately I backed away, and my hand moved for the gun beneath my jacket, but he was faster than I, so fast that I barely saw him move. One moment there was space between us, the next there was none, and he was pressed hard against me, his left hand digging into my right forearm, the nails tearing through the fabric of my coat and into my skin, drawing blood from the flesh. His face touched mine, his nose brushing against my cheek, his lips an inch from my mouth. Sweat dropped from his brow and fell upon my lips before slowly dripping onto my tongue. I tried to spit it away but it congealed inside, coating my teeth and adhering to the roof of my mouth like gum, its force so strong that it snapped my mouth closed, causing me to bite the tip of my tongue. His own lips parted, and I saw that his teeth came to slightly blunted points, as though they had gnawed too long on bone.
“Found,” he said, and I inhaled his breath. It smelled of sweet wine and broken bread.
I felt myself falling, tumbling through space, overcome by shame and sorrow and a sense of loss that would never end, a denial of all that I loved that would stay with me through all eternity. I was aflame, screaming and howling, beating at the fires with my fists, but they would not be extinguished. My whole being was alive with burning. The heat coursed through my veins. It animated my muscles. It gave form to my speech and light to my eyes. I twisted in the air and saw, far below, the waters of a great ocean. I glimpsed my own burning shape reflected in them, and others beside me. This world was dark, but we would bring light to it.
Found.
And so we fell like stars, and at the moment of impact I wrapped the tattered remnants of charred black wings around me, and the fires went out at last.
I was being dragged somewhere by the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to go. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, so that the world drifted between darkness and half-light. I heard myself speaking, muttering the same words over and over.
“Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
I was almost at Brightwell’s car. It was a big blue Mercedes, but the backseat had been removed to enable him to push back the driver’s seat and give him room to enter. The car stank of meat. I tried to fight him, but I was weak and disoriented. I felt drunk, and the taste of sweet wine was upon my tongue. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with burning flesh. My eyes closed for the last time.
And a voice called my name.
“Charlie,” it said. “How have you been? I hope we’re not interrupting.”
I opened my eyes.
I was still standing at the open door of my Mustang. Brightwell had moved a few steps from his car, but had not yet reached me. To my right was the black Peugeot, and the bearded man with the clerical collar had jumped from the car and was now pumping my hand furiously.
“It’s been a long time. We had some trouble finding this place, let me tell you. I never thought that a city boy like you would end up out in the boonies. You remember Paul?”
The younger man stepped around the hood of the Peugeot. He was careful not to turn his back on the huge figure watching us from a short distance away. Brightwell seemed uncertain of how to proceed, then turned around, got in his car, and drove in the direction of Black Point. I tried to make out the license plate, but my brain was unable to make sense of the numbers.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Friends,” said the bearded man.
I looked down at my right hand. There was blood dripping from my fingers. I rolled up my sleeve and saw five deep puncture wounds upon my arm.
I stared at the road ahead, but the Mercedes was gone from sight.
The cleric handed me a handkerchief to stem the bleeding.
“On the other hand,” he said, “that was definitely not a friend.”