Angel Face

NINETEEN

Carter pushes into his apartment at three o’clock in the morning. Still awake, Angel’s on the computer. Carter lays the package he’s carrying on a table as she approaches. He’s expecting to take her into his arms, but Angel doesn’t reach out to hug him. Instead, she punches him in the chest.

‘Why didn’t you call me? I was worried sick.’

And what can he say to that? I was busy murdering three people and it slipped my mind? Angel’s standing in front of him, hands on hips, cheeks flaming. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reaches to mid-thigh, no bra and some marvelously erotic perfume that might be successfully marketed to victims of erectile dysfunction.

‘If you wanted a worry-free life,’ Carter finally says, ‘you should have gotten out of the van when I offered to let you go.’ He raises a hand to caress the side of her face. ‘The criminal life, it’s not given to serenity.’

Carter goes into the kitchen and takes a black, industrial-grade trash bag from the pantry. He strips out of his clothes and stuffs them in the bag. Then he marches naked into the living room where he retrieves the package he laid on the table. The package contains Louis Chin’s hard drive, along with several printed documents that outline Carter’s military, and post-military, careers. Carter’s already tossed the .22 automatic (but not the silencer) into the East River. Tomorrow, he’ll dump everything else, including the clothes and the shoes he wore.

As he flips the switch on a paper shredder next to the computer workstation, Carter glances at the computer’s monitor. The figure that stares back, some sort of monster clutching a giant wheel, more or less compels his attention. The monster’s three eyes bulge from his head and he wears a crown of five human skulls.

‘What’s that?’ he asks.

‘It’s Tibetan, a Wheel of Becoming.’ Angel lays a hand on Carter’s bare shoulder. ‘I have a paper to write, my last Art History paper, and I’m going to compare this painting with religious art of the Middle Ages.’

Carter begins to feed the documents into the shredder, but his attention remains on the image in the monitor. ‘What’s a Wheel of Becoming?’

‘I’m not a Buddhist, Carter, but I think it’s supposed to be about the different worlds and how we get into them. See here, these are the worlds, in the second circle. On top, the World of the Gods. On the bottom, the Hell World.’

‘The Hell World? In Africa, I worked with a mercenary from Nepal. His name was Lo Phet and he claimed we were already living in the Hell World.’ Carter examines the segment at the bottom of the wheel more closely. He finds cold and hot hells, humans boiling away in a cauldron. A dog tears at the flesh of a man impaled on the branch of a tree. And, yes, it does remind him of Africa where the boy soldiers routinely amputated hands and feet, arms and legs, noses, lips and ears. Where mass rape was the norm and enslaved villagers mined for diamonds under a sun hot enough to substitute for hellfire.

Carter finishes shredding the documents, then destroys the hard drive before adding what remains of both to his clothes in the trash bag. Finally, he puts the bag next to the front door and heads off to the shower. Close-in head shots produce blowback in the form of blood droplets and minute particles of bone. Carter can see bloodstains on his right forearm, and he assumes there’s trace evidence on his neck and in his hair. He doesn’t think himself pursued, but he’s taking no chances. Better to be sure.

Ten minutes later, Angel’s leaning against the towel rack, her eyes fixed on Carter’s soapy chest. ‘You’re pretty quiet tonight,’ she says, a clear invitation to unburden himself.

But Carter’s not about to confess – he’s not even tempted. He squeezes a dab of shampoo into his palm and begins to work it into his hair. Right now, he’s trying to feel something. Regret, triumph, relief, he doesn’t care. But that’s not happening. Maybe later.

Carter steps out of the shower to find Angel standing with a towel in her hands. Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, she ditched the T-shirt.

‘Why do I have the feeling,’ she asks, ‘that you’re going to be mean to me?’

Carter’s not mean to Angel. He revels in her beauty instead, as though, after many, many throws of the dice, nature had finally gotten it right. There’s no millimeter of her skin he doesn’t taste. His hands are everywhere, tracing the contours of her body, the arch of her breasts and her hips, the folds of her ears, the hollow spaces between the vertebrae on her spine. At one point, lost in his own pleasure, he thinks he might be imagining her.

Moments later, Angel re-establishes her corporeal nature by heading off to the bathroom, then to the kitchen. She returns with a container of peach yogurt, not the ice cream Carter was hoping for.

‘So,’ she asks as she settles, cross-legged, on the bed, ‘what’s it like in the Hell World?’

Carter mulls the question over, wondering exactly where to go, or whether to go anywhere. Angel’s Great Adventure. That’s what it’s about for her, a stepping-stone to her ultimate goal, a point of passage. Carter’s intimately familiar with points of passage. He knows that some of them are one-way only, and he decides to warn Angel.

‘There were eleven of us in Liberia,’ he begins, ‘chasing down a warlord named Tama Youboty and the blood diamonds he stole from another warlord named Togaba Kpangbah. I say warlord, but lord is too big a title for Youboty. He had about thirty men under his command, boy soldiers, none more than sixteen, a few no taller than the AK47s they carried.

‘Our commander was a Brit named Montgomery Thorpe who claimed to be educated at Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy. Some way, he got us out ahead of Youboty, so that we were waiting for the warlord when he drove up to this deserted village in the Nimba Mountains. I was stationed at the entrance to the village, me and two other men, Jerzy Golabek and Paul Ryan. We were concealed behind rocks on a hillside. Thorpe and the rest of our men, eight in all, were on the other side of the village. You understand, there were eleven of us and we were going up against thirty fighters with superior arms. Our advantages were concealment and surprise, but they were no guarantee.’

Carter leans against the headboard, his eye moving to the ceiling as he organizes the details. The boy soldiers have haunted him for years, the memories surfacing in bits and pieces, an image here, an image there, triggered by the face of a bewildered gang-banger on a perp walk, or the odor of blood in a butcher’s shop.

‘The plan belonged to Thorpe and it was simple enough. We’d let Youboty and his technicals—’

‘What’s a technical?’

‘Technicals are unarmored pickup trucks, usually Japanese, with large caliber weapons mounted in the beds, in this case fifty caliber machine guns. Anyway, the plan was to let Youboty turn into the village, then open fire from behind with small arms and a mortar. We were hoping that he’d retreat through the village and into an ambush on the other side.’

Carter stops long enough to accept a spoonful of yogurt. ‘The village was in the Nimba Mountains, above eight hundred meters, where the jungle bleeds into a mix of pine forest and grasslands. This was in midsummer, in equatorial Africa, and we were completely exposed to the sun, a ragtag collection of mercs from every continent except Antarctica. Even in the mercenary world, we were the lowest of the low, like the bandit Samurai in that movie. We served no master.

‘I remember the wind hissing over the rocks and a family of jackals that searched the huts in the village, one by one, and the sweat running from my hair to my toes, and the hours ticking by. Thorpe had made an educated guess, but a guess is still a guess. If Youboty took a different route – and there were others open to him – we’d have to fight our way back to the coast with nothing to show for the risk.

‘But Thorpe was right this time. Youboty and his boy soldiers arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon, crowded into four technicals. Youboty was in the cab of the lead vehicle. The boy soldiers were huddled around the fifty caliber machine guns in the truck beds. They wore rags and their eyes were hollow, their faces gaunt. I knew they were vicious. I’d seen, first hand, what they did when they happened on an occupied village. They were cruel, needlessly cruel, but there was a method to their cruelty. Little bands like Youboty’s had no access to supplies. They pillaged to survive.

‘Anyway, the first part went exactly as planned. Golabek fired off a mortar round just after Youboty’s technical cleared the first house. As luck would have it – bad luck – he scored a direct hit. Youboty and his lieutenant were blown to pieces. See, the boy soldiers couldn’t fight, even with their master alive. They had no training and no real experience defending against soldiers who did. That’s why they panicked when Paul and I eliminated the machine gunners with our M16s. Instead of retreating through the village, away from our fire, they jumped out of the technicals and ran into the mud huts.’

‘I think I might have done the same thing,’ Angel declares. ‘Duck for cover.’

‘The cover was an illusion because the roofs had fallen in and they were completely exposed to mortar fire from both ends of the village. The huts were death traps. But they still had options. They could have massed and attacked my position, or they could have dug in, forced us to come for them, or they could have surrendered. But they didn’t, Angel. No, what they did, in ones and twos and threes, was dash into the open and fire off their weapons. I don’t know what they expected to hit – not a single round came anywhere close to our position – but standing out in the open, only a few hundred yards off, they were as unprotected as targets on a shooting range. As far as I could tell, I never missed, not once.’

Carter pauses to ease the pressure in his diaphragm. He’s having trouble drawing a breath. Angel’s watching him, eyes wide, mouth open. She’s never seen him like this, and she doesn’t know what to make of his story. Carter doesn’t help matters when he finally says, ‘You know the expression that mob guys use? Making your bones? Like you’re one thing before you kill for the first time, then you become something else?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Well, I killed children for money, Angel, and not because they were vicious murderers, which they were. I killed them for the diamonds they were guarding. What does that make me?’