Known to Evil

46

There's a man I know named Barry Holcombe. Barry's business is subletting various specialty properties around New York. People often need rooms for assignations, secret meetings, and other activities that have to be held off the grid. Sometimes these rooms need to be soundproofed and partitioned, with see-through, one-way glass between one space and the next.

I only ever call Barry from a pay phone.

"Hello," he answered on the first ring.

"It's Leonid. I need a place to interview a potential employee."

"I might have something. You want to see the property?"

"No time."

"Rent's gone up five hundred."

"That's not a concern."

"It's a pleasure doing business with you."

I DROVE DOWN TO Eighteenth Street near the West Side Highway, opened the trunk of Patrick's car, and was pleasantly surprised to find a large swath of burlap deposited back there. Then I went to the backseat and trussed the unconscious Patrick up, making him seem somewhat less than human. Then I waited seventeen long minutes-until no car or pedestrian was coming.

I hefted the little man, moving as quickly as I could, and installed him in the trunk. I used two more ties to secure his feet and hands to a hook under the latch. This greatly lessened his chances of noisily beating against the trunk lid.

There was an envelope waiting for me at the front desk of the Tesla. Barry Holcombe is an efficient and speedy landlord.

THE ADDRESS I WAS given was near the Brooklyn Naval Yards. The directions led me down an alley on a street of abandoned warehouses. I drove down the narrow lane, used the first of three keys on an outer door and the second one on a two-man elevator. I dragged Patrick's body into the lift and traveled three floors down to a hallway that ended at a maroon metal door. This led to two concrete rooms that were connected by a door and by a jury-rigged monitor and camera that allowed a man in one room to watch what happened in the other. The second of these rooms had an aluminum chair that was bolted to the floor replete with manacles and leg irons, also bolted down, for the prisoner's hands and feet.

Just when I'd finished chaining Patrick my cell phone sounded.

I went into the watcher's room, closing the door behind me, and answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"It's me," Diego said. "Baggage of American Airlines, international."

"Twenty-five minutes."

STANDING STRAIGHT, AN OLIVE duffel bag on the floor next to him, Diego was an image of something not of this world. His collarless jacket was black, as were his shapeless trousers. His shoes were of woven red-brown leather, and the straw hat he wore was an ancient ancestor of the Guatemalan-made Panama variety.

Diego's skin was the dusky color of dark-red brick that they made factories from when children still worked fourteen hours a day. His face was wide and filled with empathy for something long gone-or maybe just hidden.

"Hey, man," I said, approaching him. No names in public.

He was my height, with only a slightly smaller bone structure. There was a vitality to the South American that made me appear sleepy by comparison. His hands seemed powerful enough to crush single walnuts.

He held out a paw and we tested our strength with the show of friendship.

"Come on," I said.

"THERE'S ONLY ONE THING I need to know from this guy," I was saying as we rode toward the temporary hideout. "Who hired him to kill Angelique Lear?"

"That's all?"

"That's everything."

"How's Twill?" he asked then.

Twill and I had gone fishing with Diego up near Lake Tahoe a few years before. Dimitri refused to come along, and Shelly didn't like doing anything where she couldn't wear a dress.

"In trouble."

Diego grinned.

"He's a good boy," my very foreign friend said. "He will always be there for you like you are for him."

My emotional state at that time made the timbre of my voice untrustworthy, so I nodded and drove on.

WHEN WE GOT TO Barry Holcombe's rooms, Patrick was awake. We could see his eyes via the monitor. They were boring into the camera lens.

After looking at him for a quarter of an hour Diego picked up a three-legged wooden stool from a corner and walked into the room. I watched him as he set the stool in front of Patrick and squatted down.

A kind of jolt went through Patrick's body, giving the impression that the prisoner had something to say. He didn't speak, however, and neither did Diego.

For at least twenty minutes the men stared at each other. Finally Diego stood and moved closer to the prisoner. The left side of Patrick's jaw was swollen from the blows he'd received in our brief contest. When Diego reached over to touch that side, Patrick tried to bite him. But my friend was quicker. He pulled the fingers away and delivered a vicious slap with his other hand.

Again he tried to touch the swelling. Again Patrick snapped, and was slapped. Again…

Somewhere around the thirteenth or fourteenth attempt, Patrick allowed Diego to touch the swollen left side of his face. By this time the right side was puffed up, too. His mouth was bloody and his right eye almost closed.

Diego sat there, staring, for six or seven minutes more. Then he picked up the stool and exited the room.

He didn't talk to me at first, instead moving close to the CCTV to watch his unwilling penitent.

IT'S NOT EASY TO explain my relationship with Diego. We rarely talked, and yet a certain sympathy had formed between us on that job in L.A.

One day when we were following the actress's brother, mapping out his routine, we were sitting in a car near a big house. There was a team of men in the front yard hacking away at a broad and hunched-over old oak. The tree was gnarled with age. It took a lot of work to bring that old monster down.

"You see them?" Diego had said out of the silence of the ages.

"Uh-huh."

"Not one of them men is over thirty. That tree is two hundred years old, maybe three. It's been there since before their grandparents were born, but they still come at it with their axes and saws. Somebody said it's in the way. Somebody paid somebody, and life is torn from the ground."

That's the reason I called on Diego. Hush was like those axmen. He lived by a logic that was completely of the modern world. Hush had the sensibility of a long history of conquerors. His laws were man-made, while Diego's came from a deeper place.

"CAN I KILL HIM?" he asked me.

"No."

"You can see in his eyes that he's a killer. He might come after you."

"He doesn't know who I am. And I doubt if he could ever figure out who you are."

"You don't know who hired him, but you will before the sun rises."

"Do we have a problem?" I asked.

"No. I'm not afraid of him."

Diego looked into my eyes, seeking my response. Then he grinned. The light in his face spoke of innocence and strength, something that maybe I knew at one time, before the roots of New York had gotten tangled in my soul.

WHEN DIEGO ENTERED THE room again he was carrying my brutal knife. Without a word he began cutting off Patrick's clothes. First he followed the seams of his windbreaker, going from the left wrist up over the shoulders and down the right side. He pulled off the segmented jacket and then did the same with the dark-blue woolen shirt. After that he started in on the khaki pants.

Like some kind of mad tailor, working in reverse, Diego cut off all of Patrick's clothes, leaving him wearing only his socks, shoes, and chains.

It was cold in that room, very cold.

Patrick's skin grew pale. He shivered slightly but otherwise bore up under the divestment rather well.

Diego settled down and stared at his victim for over an hour.

Suddenly, without warning, Diego stood up, took Patrick's left wrist, and cut into it with the point of the knife. Then he calmly returned to his stool, and we both watched the blood trickle down onto Patrick's knee, flowing from there around his calf, past the ankle, to pool on the cold concrete around his feet.

The wait continued.

Half an hour later, Patrick could no longer control his shivering.

"What the fuck do you want?" the killer asked the human embodiment of twilight that sat before him.

Diego did not answer.

Something about the preceding silence kept me from any emotional attachment to the extreme interrogation. It didn't seem like torture, so long as the men were equals in silence. But hearing the pleading tone in Patrick's voice tore at me.

The sound brought me to my feet.

Ten minutes went by. In that time I began to have second thoughts about my actions. There was no question but that I needed to know why Patrick was on that street-and who had sent him-but I felt ashamed hiding in another room while Diego asked the questions. And, beyond shame, I felt guilty. There was no excuse for me putting the South American on Patrick. I was culpable, and I knew I would have to pay for it.

"Tell me!" Patrick screamed.

"I will only ask you once," Diego warned.

"Just ask me."

"And if you hesitate or if you lie, then I will leave you here to bleed. And believe me, my friend, no one will find you down here."

I was too close to an answer to break the trance.

"What?" Patrick barked.

"Who hired you to kill Angelique Lear?"

The question was an ominous hum on the quiet subterranean air. For a few beats the audio feed from the interrogation room was silent.

Patrick studied the face of his death and wondered… but not for long.

"Terry Lord," he said, shivering. "Terry Lord, from down in D.C."