Angel Face

THIRTY

The goodbye sex is great, but it’s still goodbye. Angel’s had enough. Something about watching the top and back of Bobby Ditto’s skull fly off while his face remained in front of her, eyes open, mouth fixed, has taken the wind out of her adventuring sails. She’s not psychologically qualified to live in Carter’s outlaw world, simple as that.

Angel saw and heard nothing before the bullet found its mark. There was no jet of flame, no crack of the rifle. One minute she was standing there, waiting for ... Angel doesn’t know what she was waiting for, only that one minute she was helpless, the next she was sprayed with ...

And that’s the problem. A part of her mind shies away from the moment when Bobby’s head exploded, coating her hair, her face, her shoulders with gore. Another part returns, again and again, to the instant of impact, after which she’d fallen to the sidewalk, limp as the dishrag in the bottom of her purse. If Carter hadn’t dragged her to the van and shoved her inside, she might still be there.

Meanwhile, Carter was all business, and maybe that was the scariest part. He stripped her when they got back to his apartment, stripped her as you’d strip a child, and pushed her into the shower. Then he collected everything they’d worn or used and packed it into four garbage bags, the .32, all of their clothing, including their shoes, the Glock, the rope, the grappling hook and all the tools, the spent cartridge from the M89, which he crushed with a tack hammer. Everything except the M89 itself.

Finished, he returned to the bathroom, dried her off and put her to bed. ‘Don’t move, Angel,’ he said as he drew the covers up to her neck. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

Carter didn’t tell her where he was going and Angel didn’t ask. But later she learned that he’d carried the bags to an eighty-unit apartment building in Queens where he once lived. Using a key he’d never surrendered to get inside, he’d ridden an empty elevator to the ninth floor, then dumped the bags into a chute leading to the trash collection room in the basement.

‘The room’s actually a compactor,’ he explained when he returned. ‘On whatever day the garbage is picked up, all the trash in that room will be compacted, wrapped in heavy plastic and carried to the curb. The city will do the rest.’

Angel listened to his explanation with one ear, unmoved even by the sight of all that money, piles and piles of money, a waterfall of money dropping from the interior of the suitcase to the comforter on the bed. But then Carter slipped out of his vest and his shirt, revealing a smoky-red bruise that virtually covered his ribs on the left side.

‘Close call. A few inches lower and it would have come through under my vest. In which case ...’ He winced as he probed the center of the wound.

‘You want to go to the hospital?’

‘The rib’s not displaced. There’s nothing a doctor can do. What’s that they say? Grin and bear it? No harm, no foul?’

Angel shakes her head. ‘Joke if you want, Carter, but you came within a few inches of dying in that basement. You’re what? Twenty-nine years old?’ She picks up a packet of hundred dollar bills and lays it on top of the slug in his hand. ‘Was it worth it?’ she demands.

A week later, Lieutenant Solly Epstein met them in Central Park. He’d come to collect his share of the loot, but his message was encouraging. The Organized Crime Control Bureau, his unit, had pronounced the incident drug related, which it definitely was, and they were looking at the usual mob suspects. Meanwhile, the media had taken OCCB’s theme a step further. The Red Hook Massacre was big time news, yet at no point, in the hundreds of articles and hours of airtime, did anyone suggest that the massacre was the work of a single individual. There were, on the other hand, several pieces linking Mexican drug cartels, in style and psychology, to the carnage.

‘Al Zeffri’s not talkin’,’ Epstein explained. ‘He claims he doesn’t remember anything about that night, which could be true because he didn’t regain consciousness until late the next day. You must have hit him pretty hard.’

‘I had to make sure he didn’t come up behind me.’

Epstein glanced at Angel and winked. ‘I woulda thought blowin’ his knee apart was enough guarantee. Anyway, you got nothin’ to worry about. Not only hasn’t your name been mentioned, it doesn’t appear in our database. As far as the NYPD’s concerned, you don’t exist. You’re still a ghost.’

Angel spells it out a week later, as she and Carter lie in bed. They’re going at it twice a day by now, the sex hard and fast and as necessary as breathing. Angel can’t get enough, and can’t wait to get away. Never has she been more attracted to a man, never more repelled. Carter’s death on two legs and she’s drawn to him like a junkie to a fix.

‘I’m leaving,’ she tells him.

‘When?’

‘As soon as you set up my account.’ The account in question will be established in a Cayman Islands bank. There’s a cost, ten percent of the principal, but Angel’s happy to pay. ‘You were right,’ she adds. ‘Eventually, you’ll be caught or killed. I don’t think you care all that much.’

‘But you do?’

‘I murdered a man.’ Angel hesitates before adding, ‘I’m not feeling guilty, not by a long shot. The Blade deserved what he got and the world is better off without him. But I can’t go back there again. Taking a life, it’s too big for me.’

Her independence finally declared, Angel returns to her pursuits. She completes her Art History paper, collects her diploma, purchases a spare-no-expense, hot-weather wardrobe. The surface of their dining room table quickly disappears beneath stacks of books on Caribbean art, exhibition notices, website printouts, travel brochures, real estate listings from a dozen nations. By early June, when she books an airline ticket to Piarco International Airport in Trinidad, she has everything in place: her bank account, a small rented townhouse in a resort community, plans to open an art gallery in Tobago, appointments with a dozen artists’ representatives.

If there’s a fly in this ointment, it’s Carter’s attitude. He’s not trying to dissuade her, not clinging to every moment of togetherness. No, Carter leaves the apartment shortly after breakfast and doesn’t return until evening. Angel assumes he’s off to one or another of his training sessions, but he doesn’t tell her where he’s going or where he’s been. He doesn’t tell and she doesn’t ask.

There’s a simple explanation, of course. Carter’s become indifferent. Stay or go – it’s all the same to him. But the evidence doesn’t add up. Their nights are spent in bed, Carter a one-man gang-bang, Angel urging him on. This proves especially true on their last night together, which they spend in Vincent Graham’s den on 37th Street. Carter’s taken, not to mention inspired, by the mirrored ceilings and Vincent’s toy collection, especially the restraints, the handcuffs and the shackles. They do argue, for just a moment, over who gets to play the prisoner and who the prison guard, but finally agree to take turns.

Long after midnight, when Angel and Carter are too sore and exhausted to do more than lie next to each other, Angel explains why she bought the two guns, the revolver she left for him to find and the little automatic, and why she’d arranged access to Graham’s apartment. Carter doesn’t blame Angel for not trusting him. In her position, he would certainly have done something similar and he tells her so.

A segue into their feelings for each other might easily follow this conversation, yet the hows and whys of their doomed relationship go unmentioned. They don’t discuss even the possibility of meeting again. No, in the end, they turn out the lights and roll on to their sides. Carter falls asleep within a few minutes, as usual, leaving Angel to her own thoughts.

Talk it out, resolve the conflicts. That’s the conventional wisdom, repeated hundreds of times each year on dozens of ‘talk’ shows. But that’s not happening here and Angel finally realizes that Carter’s reticence hasn’t impaired their communication, not at all. The Tibetan who painted the bhavacakra would have understood perfectly. Their unfolding karmas brought them together, two infinitely small particles, in order to complete some necessary transaction. That done, those same karmas are driving them apart. Call it fate. Hell, call it serendipity. Whatever business they had with each other is finished. Time to move on.

Carter watches the cab until it reaches 14th Street and turns right, on its way via New York’s system of antiquated highways to John F. Kennedy Airport. Most of what Angel Tamanaka still owns – her clothing, along with a few photographs, a knick-knack or two, a battered teddy bear named Slippy – has gone ahead of her, packed into a pair of antiqued steamer trunks. Every other possession has been sold or given away.

But not to Carter, who’s retained no personal items, not even a hazy photo on his cellphone, the single exception being Angel’s Ruger revolver. Its firing pin restored, the weapon now rests in a trunk in Carter’s Bronx storage room, too fine an instrument of death to be summarily tossed.

With no particular destination in mind, Carter heads west along 9th Street. The moist June air is warm enough to evoke the oncoming summer, but Carter doesn’t mind. He’s got a couple of hours to kill before heading over to the gym and the city sidewalks have long been a place of refuge. Carter’s feeling a familiar sensation, a sort of clutching around the heart, born not of love, but of the fear that seized him when the state took control of his life. At the same time, and he admits this to himself, he’s relieved. Carter’s had three acknowledged loves in his life, his mother and Janie, both dead, and the military, where he learned to kill without remorse. Each had abandoned him, leaving him to fight on his own. Or so he’s come to believe.

And Angel? Yeah, he’ll miss Angel, definitely. Even thinking her name produces a familiar warming in his crotch.

Carter laughs softly, catching the attention of a young woman coming from the other direction. The woman moves several feet to her right as they pass, an acknowledgement, Carter thinks, of just how many psychotic human beings roam through the city. Careful, careful, you never know, keep your distance.

What Carter can’t escape, though, relieved or not, is emptiness. There have been times in his life when he’s felt as cold and isolated as an asteroid traveling between planets, and this is one of them. What will he do? Where will he go? At present, Carter has more than seven hundred thousand dollars in three bank accounts. He can, if he chooses, live on his savings for many years. There’s no compelling reason for him to resume his gangster-killing career, or any other career.

Carter pauses for the light at Second Avenue, coming up behind two women, one of them pushing a stroller. He watches the traffic flow past, the cars, the trucks and all the busses – school busses, city busses, double-decker tourist busses. In the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Yemen, there was always a moment just before dawn when the world seemed to pause in its turning, the silence so deep you could hear the beating of your own heart. Not so in New York, the ultimate 24/7 city. No matter what the hour, somebody’s on the way to somewhere else. But Carter doesn’t have to stay in New York. He can go anywhere he wants, if he can only make himself want to go somewhere.

On the other side of the avenue, a woman sits on a square of cardboard with her back to a sunny brick wall. She’s somewhere in her twenties, dressed in a black sweatshirt, black cotton pants and black sneakers. Utterly forlorn, she stares down at the gray sidewalk, her little-match-girl expression firmly in place. A black dog, gray at the muzzle, its fur dull and dusty, lies beside her with its head between its paws.

A cardboard sign, hand-lettered, explains her situation: HOMELESS/ HELPLESS/HUNGRY. Just in case you haven’t gotten the point.

Carter’s run into this woman and her dog many times in the last few years. The mournful posture, the all-black costume, the wilting dog, the faded sign, the coffee container with a few pennies in the bottom – as performance art, her act is unforgettable. Carter takes a five dollar bill from his wallet and holds it over the coffee container.

‘Tell me where you go in the winter.’

The woman’s unhesitating response is as succinct as her sign. ‘Fuck off, asshole.’

Carter drops the five into the cup and heeds her advice. He continues west, to Broadway, then heads north to the farmer’s market in Union Square. Here the vendors face each other across a broad corridor on the western and northern edges of the Square, competing for the attentions of the shoppers who stroll between them. Carter passes vendors selling ostrich meat, bamboo flower honey, wheatgrass and lavender eye pillows. Two elderly women staff a long table stacked with fancy preserves. A bearded, one-eyed man pushes grass-fed Angus beef at thirty dollars a pound. The Fungus King displays thirty varieties of mushroom.

In no hurry, Carter shuffles along with the crowd. He’s visited markets on three continents, and always found them enticing, an exercise in mutual self-interest, buyers and sellers equally engaged. There’s a twist, though, when it comes to Union Square. The vendors post their prices and the customers don’t haggle. In Sierra Leone, buyers and sellers debated the value of every bean.

As he nears the eastern end of the market, Carter stops to buy a container of wild mint tea and a cranberry scone. He carries them past buckets filled with enough lilac blossoms to perfume even New York City’s carbon-soaked air, and into the park.

Union Square Park will never be confused with an English garden, but it’s reasonably well-tended and there’s always something in bloom, spring through fall. Just now, in early June, the tea roses have come into their own. Carter finds a bench near a blooming rose bush and takes a seat. There’s an elderly woman sitting at the other end of the bench. She’s cooing to a tiny chihuahua nearly hidden inside the handbag on her lap. When Carter unwraps the scone and the dog’s attention wanders, the woman gathers her bag and her dog and departs.

Left to himself, Carter’s own attention wanders back to Angel as he eats and drinks. He wonders where her plane is right now, but then glances at his watch. In fact, her plane’s still at the gate and won’t take off for another hour. How long, he wonders, before she fades? Perhaps he’ll always carry her with him, as he carries the boy soldiers, but that’s not what he thinks. His sister’s death punched a hole in his life, a hole Angel temporarily filled. Now the hole is back. Still, it’s a beautiful day and the park is crowded with workers in search of a quick lunch and a breath of fresh air.

Carter’s always been a people watcher, not to mention a paranoid death merchant who habitually monitors his back, his front and both sides. Nobody sneaks up on him, especially not Merwyn Thoma with his pronounced limp, his floppy bow tie and his ivory-handled walking stick.

Carter last saw Thoma six years ago, on the Afghan-Pakistan border. A spook who worked for some unidentified agency, he’d outlined the rules of engagement for a mission into the tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-west Frontier Province. Carter remembers listening with interest, but not because the rules applied to him or his comrades. It was Thoma’s earnestness that intrigued him. Did he really believe they’d offer their target an opportunity to surrender? On the one hand, there was nothing in Thoma’s manner that suggested otherwise. On the other, he wasn’t coming along to make sure the men whose lives were at risk complied with his instructions.

Merwyn’s only in his forties, but his hair is snow-white and so fine that strands float in the air even on this windless day. His face is criss-crossed with fine wrinkles, his eyelids folded at the corners, his mouth a firm, disapproving line. Though careful to maintain a respectful distance, he fixes Carter with a patented stare when he finally sits down.

Repressing a smile, Carter returns the stare for a moment, then says, ‘If you don’t get the fuck off this bench, I’ll cut your throat from one ear to the other.’

The threat is wasted, as Carter knew it would be. The psychological training for spooks is every bit as demanding as the physical training Carter endured on his path through the ranks to Delta Force. Still, he feels a little better as he watches Thoma dismiss the bluff with a shake of his head.

‘You should never have left us,’ he says. ‘You were among the very best of the very best.’

‘Maybe I got tired of killing.’

‘I doubt that very much, but I haven’t come to discuss your business. No, I’ve come to make two things clear.’ Thoma raises his walking stick and taps Carter’s knee. ‘Your country needs you, Carter.’

‘That’s one thing, Merwyn. What’s the other?’

‘You will answer the call of duty.’

Carter laughs as he hasn’t laughed in years, startling a flock of pigeons feeding on a dropped sandwich nearby. They rise a few feet into the air, their cooing distinctly accusatory, but quickly settle down as Carter shifts the cane away from his knee. Carter’s thinking that Merwyn’s probably right. Whatever the spooks have on him will be enough to secure his cooperation. Which, he supposes, leaves a single issue to be discussed.

‘What’s in it for me?’ he asks.