Angel Face

SIX

Carter fires up his computer shortly after finishing breakfast on Monday morning. He’s expecting confirmation of a wire transfer to his bank in Panama, payment for a job well done. Sure enough, the money’s right where it’s supposed to be and Carter immediately transfers the full amount to a bank in Moscow. Instructions for the Moscow bank are already in place. After deducting their commission, the bank will move the cash to a smaller bank in the South Pacific that doesn’t record the money’s next – and final – destination.

His business concluded, Carter turns to his email box, deleting the spam before opening a heavily encrypted email from Paul Marginella, universally called Paulie Margarine. Paulie is Carter’s agent. He secures the jobs and makes the payments after deducting his commission. But not any more.

Hey kid, I got some bad news for you. Or maybe not. It depends on how you’re doin these days. But I ain’t been feeling right for a long time now and I’m gonna have to shut the operation down. No hard feelins, OK? We did good while we could (hey, that rhymes – I’m a poet who don’t know it) and we have to move on. Best of luck. Paulie.

Carter takes the message to Sweat & Strain, a gym on 10th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. He focuses on three words as he rides cross-town on the L Train: Or maybe not. For some time now, Carter’s been tempted to break off the relationship himself. In his own mind, he compares each job to a combat deployment. Maybe the odds against being killed or wounded in any given operation are great, but if you’re deployed over and over again ... Carter doesn’t bother to complete the thought. He’s killed twenty-three men in fourteen cities over the past two-plus years, and the cops investigated every death. Sure, he’s protected himself. The emails that pass between Carter and Paulie are the sum total of their contact, and they do not go directly from Paulie’s computer to his. Paulie’s emails are addressed to an email forwarder in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. From Minsk, they voyage to the websites of three forwarders on three different continents before Carter retrieves them. One of the spook agencies, the CIA or the NSA, might be able to track and decrypt the emails, but not a local cop shop.

But if Carter can’t be traced through Paulie Margarine, there’s still the possibility that he’ll be caught at the scene of the crime, say by a police cruiser turning on to the block at just the wrong time, or be tracked down because he missed a surveillance camera or left a minuscule bit of DNA behind, despite his many precautions.

In Carter’s opinion, there are no guarantees. In Carter’s opinion, the most remote outcome is rendered probable by enough repetitions.

So Carter’s relieved on the one hand. Paulie’s absolutely correct – it’s time to move on. But coming right after Janie’s passing, the prospect of a career change adds fuel to an already smoldering fire.

Carter doesn’t neglect his workout. He works harder than usual, in fact. S&S is run by a mixed martial artist named Jordan Boone who promotes his self-defense system, which includes a dozen manuals selling for ten dollars each on the gym’s website. Boone claims to have distilled his method from ‘every martial art on the planet.’

Forget about tactics that work in a ring or a cage. Self-defense is about protecting yourself from attack by incapacitating your opponent long enough to get away.

That’s all bullshit, of course, at least in Carter’s opinion. Half the patrons of Boone’s gym are serious knuckleheads far more likely to be the attacker than the attacked. But the system, with its kicks, strikes and throws, works as well as any other. You practice the moves, over and over and over, until each and every opening draws the appropriate counter-attack, until you see and strike before you’re conscious of what you’re going to do next. Then, if you’re Carter, you run away. Carter has no criminal record and the last thing he wants to do is draw the attention of the police.

Most of the regulars at Sweat & Strain outweigh Carter, especially the ones who juice with steroids. But Carter’s not only fast, he’s also fearless, and he’s acquired a bit of a reputation. He’s not surprised when a pro named Johnny ‘The Crusher’ Carpenter asks him to work out. They go at it for an hour, until Carpenter breaks it off and heads for the showers. Carter would like nothing more than to follow – he’s gotten much the worse of the exchanges – but he has one additional task ahead, one he absolutely hates, skipping rope. Which is why he forces himself to do it.

Six hours later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Carter approaches the front door of a house on a tree-lined street in Astoria, Queens. The single-story house isn’t much to look at – brick walls, shingled roof, a picture window in the living room – but it rests on a generous lot surrounded by a thick hedge in the back. Carter hesitates only for a moment before ringing the bell.

The man who opens the door is about Carter’s age, but that’s the only resemblance between the two. He’s fifty pounds heavier than Carter, with a serious gut and jowls befitting a man twice his age.

‘Can I help you?’ he asks.

‘I’m here to see Paulie Marginella.’ Carter knows this must be Paulie’s son, Freddy, who was in prison the last time Carter and Paulie met. ‘Does he still live here?’

‘And who are you?’

‘My name’s Carter.’

Freddy’s double take proves one thing: Paulie’s got a big mouth. Carter smiles. ‘I know I’m not expected, but I heard that Paulie’s not feeing well ...’

‘My dad’s in the backyard, catching a few rays.’ Freddy steps aside to let Carter into a small foyer. ‘This is about what exactly ...’

‘It’s about me paying my respects to a sick friend.’

Although Freddy fixes Carter with a hard stare, he’s not his father’s son. Carter’s not intimidated and he simply returns the stare, his eyes blank.

‘All right, hang out here for a minute. I’ll ask if he wants to see you.’

Freddy’s back two minutes later. He nods and leads Carter through the living room to a sliding glass door. The door’s open and he points through it to a man sitting in a wheelchair positioned on a small patch of sunlit grass. There’s a second chair next to him, a folding lawn chair with plastic webbing stretched across a tarnished aluminum frame.

‘Lemme know when you’re ready to leave,’ Freddy says. ‘Dad wants to talk to you alone.’

Paulie Margarine’s backyard is nicely sculpted. A small bed of yellow tulips, a cluster of intertwined birch trees, a Japanese maple, its spider-thin leaves barely opened, that might have been lifted from a Bonsai pot. Against the side of the house, an enormous lilac, more a tree than a bush, perfumes the warm May air.

Carter acknowledges the contrast as he crosses the lawn. Every living thing in Paulie’s yard has dedicated itself to renewal, except for Paulie Margarine. Paulie’s as thin as a rail and his skin is a shade of yellow that no tulip will ever reproduce. Emblazoned with the logo of the New York Mets, a thick blanket wraps his body from his neck to his feet. The hand that emerges from beneath the blanket is bony enough to be the claw of a diving raptor.

‘Hey, Carter, check this out.’ With great effort, Paulie manages to pull up the blanket to reveal a black boot. ‘I’m ready,’ he announces.

‘To die with your boots on?’

‘I gotta.’ Paulie’s grin reveals gums the color of bone. ‘It’s part of the culture. It’s our thing, our cosa nostra.’

Carter’s laugh is genuine. He’s always liked Paulie, a man true to himself, a genuine tough guy. ‘So, what’s up, what do you have?’

‘Hepatitis C, which is destroyin’ my liver. I’m on the list for a transplant.’ Paulie’s hand disappears beneath the blanket. ‘But it’s not lookin’ good. I turned down the last round of chemo. Whatever time I got, I don’t wanna spend it leanin’ over a toilet, which in fact I can’t even do any more. I gotta throw up in a bedpan.’

Carter lets that pass and they sit quietly for a few minutes, until Paulie asks, ‘So, whatta ya gonna do? Now that you’re outta work?’

‘I’m thinking you were right, Paulie, it’s time to move on. I don’t know to what exactly, but I’ve got money put away, so I’m not all that worried.’

‘I’m not worried, either. I know exactly what I’m gonna be doin’ six months from now and that’s breathin’ dirt. But my kid has big ideas. He’s gettin’ out of all the old businesses. The way it is now, with the Feds, you make a wrong move and they put you in jail for a thousand years. The money’s in computer crime and that’s where Freddy’s goin’. We’ll be done with our other businesses, including the business you and me had together, within a few months.’

Behind Paulie, a truck rattles up the block, its gears grinding when the driver shifts. ‘Hey, Carter, you wanna hear somethin’ funny?’

‘Anything.’

Paulie chuckles. ‘My hearing, it’s gotten better somehow. At night, I can’t sleep for the traffic on Ditmars Boulevard and that’s three blocks away. The planes at LaGuardia? They hit my ears like a toothache.’

‘You should try earplugs, or one of those machines that make white noise.’

‘I thought about that, but these days I’m not too crazy about sleepin’.’

Again, Carter doesn’t know what to say and they observe a second silence, this one prolonged. The afternoon warmth is seductive, in any event, a perfect spring evening. Carter’s eyes move to the bed of late-blooming daffodils, the tips of their feathered petals a smoky orange, and to a trellis covered by a climbing rose, its buds as green as peas this early in the year.

Carter’s always been comfortable with silence, a quality that served him well as a sniper. There’s an art to remaining both immobile and alert that begins with resisting the allure of your own thoughts. But this time Carter’s quiet because he’s remembering a Nepalese merc named Lo Phet. Lo Phet practiced Tibetan Buddhism and his belief in reincarnation approached the absolute.

‘Can go up or down,’ he’d explained. They were on their way from Kirkuk to Baghdad, their mission to ferry a suitcase filled with American dollars from one warlord to another. ‘Can have rebirth as bug. How you like that? To come back as flea on elephant’s ass? Or can go to world of Gods, or go down to world of hungry ghosts. Hungry ghost have big fat belly and tiny mouth. Can never get enough food.’

‘Is that the bottom?’ Carter had asked as they slowed to a stop at the end of a line of vehicles awaiting inspection at a checkpoint. ‘The world of hungry ghosts?’

‘No, bottom is Hell World. We in Hell World now.’

Carter had thought it over for a moment, then said, ‘You’re claiming that we died somewhere along the way and were reborn.’

‘Yes, die and go to Hell World.’

Lo Phet had moved on three weeks later when an improvised explosive device cut him in two. At the time, Carter had wondered if he’d be reborn into the Hell World, if he’d have to do it all over again. Carter now wonders the same thing about Paulie Margarine.

‘Paulie,’ Carter finally says, ‘any chance you’d be willing to give up your computer? Or the hard drive at least?’

‘Is that what you came for?’

‘I came for two reasons. To have a look around and to visit my partner, who told me that he was sick. I have to tell you, though, I wasn’t too happy when your boy recognized my name.’

‘So whatta ya gonna do, shoot me? He’s my kid. We got no secrets between us.’

In fact, Carter’s not carrying a gun. But he does have a combat knife strapped to the inside of his left calf. ‘You can’t blame me for tying up loose ends. Freddy can talk his head off and it won’t matter. With you gone, there’s no proof, except for the emails in that computer.’

‘I thought you said everything in the computer was encrypted?’

‘And you just told me your son’s going into the computer business.’ Carter’s voice drops. ‘Do you really want me sitting around worried that my back isn’t covered?’

Paulie sighs. When it really mattered, Carter had out-maneuvered him at every turn. What chance would Freddy have? Better they – meaning the Marginella family and Mr Carter – be quits forever.

‘All right, take it. But I should charge you. Now I gotta replace the computer.’

‘Tell you what, Paulie. I’ll get a new computer delivered to the house by the middle of next week. Something faster, with a hi-def screen.’

‘Don’t bother. The porno I watch ain’t gonna be improved by high definition.’

A robin drops on to the lawn, catching Paul Margarine’s attention. He watches its head swivel, watches the bird turn its eyes this way and that. There are lots of creatures that eat robins, creatures that slither and stalk and drop down out of the sky.

‘Hey, Carter, you wanna hear a funny story?’

‘Another one?’

‘This one’s better. The guy you whacked, Ricky Ditto? He’s got a brother named Bobby. What I heard, Bobby Ditto’s talkin’ revenge and he’s talkin’ it loud, which means he has to do something or look like an asshole. Anyhow, Bobby found out that Ricky had a date with a whore that afternoon and now he’s goin’ after the whore. Me, I wouldn’t wanna be in the whore’s shoes when Bobby Ditto comes callin’. The guy’s a complete jerk. But it’s good for you, right? There’s no way to get from the whore to you. The whore’s a dead end.’