The Black Angel

PROLOGUE

The rebel angels fell, garlanded with fire.

And as they descended, tumbling through the void, they were cursed as the newly blind are cursed, for just as the darkness is more terrible for those who have known the light, so the absence of grace is felt more acutely by those who once dwelt in its warmth. The angels screamed in their torment, and their burning brought brightness to the shadows for the first time. The lowest of them cowered in the depths, and there they created their own world in which to dwell.

As the last angel fell, he looked to heaven and saw all that was to be denied him for eternity, and the vision was so terrible to him that it burned itself upon his eyes. And so, as the skies closed above him, it was given to him to witness the face of God disappear among gray clouds, and the beauty and sorrow of the image was imprinted forever in his memory, and upon his sight. He was cursed to walk forever as an outcast, shunned even by his own kind, for what could be more agonizing for them than to see, each time they looked in his eyes, the ghost of God flickering in the blackness of his pupils?

And so alone was he that he tore himself in two, that he might have company in his long exile, and together these twin parts of the same being wandered the still-forming earth. In time, they were joined by a handful of the fallen who were weary of cowering in that bleak kingdom of their own creation. After all, what is hell but the eternal absence of God? To exist in a hellish state is to be denied forever the promise of hope, of redemption, of love. To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography.

But these angels at last grew weary of roaming throughout the desolate world without an outlet for their rage and their despair. They found a deep, dark place in which to sleep, and there they secreted themselves away and waited. And after many years, mines were dug, and tunnels lit, and the deepest and greatest of these excavations was among the Bohemian silver mines at Kutna Hora, and it was called Kank.

And it was said that when the mine reached its final depth, the lights carried by the miners flickered as though troubled by a breeze where no breeze could exist, and a great sighing was heard, as of souls released from their bondage. A stench of burning arose, and tunnels collapsed, trapping and killing those beneath. A storm of filth and dirt emerged, sweeping through the mine, choking and blinding all in its path. Those who survived spoke of voices in the abyss, and the beating of wings in the midst of the clouds. The storm ascended toward the main shaft, bursting forth into the night sky, and the men who saw it glimpsed a redness at its heart, as though it were all aflame.

And the rebel angels took upon themselves the appearance of men, and set about creating a kingdom that they might rule through stealth and the corrupted will of others. They were led by the twin demons, the greatest of their number, the Black Angels. The first, called Ashmael, immersed himself in the fires of battle, and whispered empty promises of glory into the ears of ambitious rulers. The other, called Immael, waged his own war upon the church and its leaders, the representatives upon the earth of the One who had banished his brother. He gloried in fire and rape, and his shadow fell upon the sacking of monasteries and the burning of chapels. Each half of this twin being bore the mark of God as a white mote in his eye, Ashmael in his right eye and Immael in his left.

But in his arrogance and wrath, Immael allowed himself to be glimpsed for a moment in his true, blighted form. He was confronted by a Cistercian monk named Erdric from the monastery at Sedlec, and they fought above vats of molten silver in a great foundry. At last, Immael was cast down, caught in the moment of transformation from human to Other, and he fell into the hot ore. Erdric called for the metal to be slowly cooled, and Immael was trapped in silver, powerless to free himself from this purest of prisons.

And Ashmael felt his pain, and sought to free him, but the monks hid Immael well, and kept him from those who would release him from his bonds. Yet Ashmael never stopped seeking his brother, and in time he was joined in his search by those who shared his nature, and by men corrupted by his promises. They marked themselves so that they might be known to one another, and their mark was a grapnel, a forked hook, for in the old lore this was the first weapon of the fallen angels.

And they called themselves “Believers.”

CHAPTER ONE

The woman stepped carefully from the Greyhound bus, her right hand holding firmly on to the bar as she eased herself down. A relieved sigh escaped from her lips once both feet were on level ground, the relief that she always felt when a simple task was negotiated without incident. She was not old-she was barely into her fifties-but she looked, and felt, much older. She had endured a great deal, and accumulated sorrows had intensified the predations of the years. Her hair was silver-gray, and she had long since ceased making the monthly trek to the salon to have its color altered. There were horizontal lines stretching from the corner of each eye, like healed wounds, paralleled by similar lines on her forehead. She knew how she had come by them, for occasionally she caught herself wincing as if in pain while she looked in the mirror or saw herself reflected in the window of a store, and the depth of those lines increased with the transformation in her expression. It was always the same thoughts, the same memories, that caused the change, and always the same faces that she recalled: the boy, now a man; her daughter, as she once was and as she now might be; and the one who had made her little girl upon her, his face sometimes contorted, as it was at the moment of her daughter’s conception, and at other times tattered and destroyed, as it was before they closed the coffin lid upon him, erasing at last his physical presence from the world.

Nothing, she had come to realize, will age a woman faster than a troubled child. In recent years, she had become prone to the kind of accidents that bedeviled the lives of women two or three decades older than she, and took longer to recover from them than once she had. It was the little things that she had to look out for: unanticipated curbs, neglected cracks in the sidewalk, the unexpected jolting of a bus as she rose from her seat, the forgotten water spilled upon the kitchen floor. She feared these things more than she feared the young men who congregated in the parking lot of the strip mall near her home, watching for the vulnerable, for those whom they considered easy prey. She knew that she would never be one of their victims, as they were more afraid of her than they were of the police, or of their more vicious peers, for they knew of the man who waited in the shadows of her life. A small part of her hated the fact that they feared her, even as she enjoyed the protection that it brought. Her protection was hard bought, purchased, she believed, with the loss of a soul.

She prayed for him, sometimes. While the others wailed “Hallelujah” to the preacher, beating their breasts and shaking their heads, she remained silent, her chin to her chest, and pleaded softly. In the past, a long time ago, she would ask the Lord that her nephew might turn again to His radiant light and embrace the salvation that lay only in relinquishing violent ways. Now she no longer wished for miracles. Instead, as she thought about him, she begged God that, when this lost sheep at last stood before Him for the final judgment, He would be merciful and forgive him his trespasses; that He would look closely at the life he had lived and find within it those little acts of decency that might enable Him to offer succor to this sinner.

But perhaps there were some lives that could never be redeemed, and some sins so terrible that they were beyond forgiveness. The preacher said that the Lord forgives all, but only if the sinner truly acknowledges his fault and seeks another path. If this was true, then she feared that her prayers would count for nothing, and he was damned to eternity.

She showed her ticket to the man unloading the baggage from the bus. He was gruff and unfriendly to her, but he appeared to be that way to everyone. Young men and women hovered watchfully at the periphery of the light from the bus’s windows, like wild animals fearful of the fire yet hungry for those who lay within the circle of its warmth. Her handbag gripped to her chest, she took her case by its handle and wheeled it toward the escalator. She watched those around her, heedful of the warnings of her neighbors back home.

Don’t accept no offers of help. Don’t be talking to nobody seems like he just offerin’ to assist a lady with her bag, don’t matter how well he dressed or how sweetly he sings…

But there were no offers of help, and she ascended without incident to the busy streets of this alien city, as foreign to her as Cairo or Rome might have been, dirty and crowded and unforgiving. She had scribbled an address on a piece of paper, along with the directions she had painstakingly transcribed over the phone from the man at the hotel, hearing the impatience in his voice as he was forced to repeat the address, the name of the hotel near incomprehensible to her when spoken in his thick immigrant accent.

She walked the streets, pulling her bag behind her. She carefully noted the numbers at the intersections, trying to take as few turns as possible, until she came to the big police building. There she waited for another hour, until at last a policeman came to talk to her. He had a thin file in front of him, but she could add nothing to what she had told him over the phone, and he could tell her only that they were doing what they could. Still, she filled out more papers, in the hope that some small detail she provided might lead them to her daughter, then left and hailed a cab on the street. She passed the piece of paper with the address of her hotel through a small hole in the Plexiglas screen. She asked the driver how much it would cost to go there, and he shrugged. He was an Asian man, and he did not look pleased to see the scribbled destination.

“Traffic. Who knows?”

He waved a hand at the slow-moving streams of cars and trucks and buses. Horns honked loudly, and drivers shouted angrily at one another. All was impatience and frustration, overshadowed by buildings that were too high, out of scale with those who were expected to live and work inside and outside them. She could not understand how anyone would choose to remain in such a place.

“Twenty, maybe,” said the cabdriver.

She hoped it would be less than twenty. Twenty dollars was a lot, and she did not know how long she would have to stay here. She had booked the hotel room for three days, and had sufficient funds to cover another three days after that, as long as she ate cheaply and could master the intricacies of the subway. She had read about it, but had never seen it in reality and had no concept of its operations. She knew only that she did not like the thought of descending beneath the earth, into the darkness, but she could not afford to take cabs all the time. Buses might be better. At least they stayed above ground, slowly though they seemed to move in this city.

He might offer her money, of course, once she found him, but she would refuse any such offer, just as she had always refused it, carefully returning the checks that he sent to the only contact address that she had for him. His money was tainted, just as he was tainted, but she needed his help now: not his money, but his knowledge. Something terrible had happened to her daughter, of that she was certain, even if she could not explain how she knew.

Alice, oh Alice, why did you have to come to this place?

Her own mother had been blessed, or cursed, with the gift. She knew when someone was suffering, and could sense when harm had come to anyone who was dear to her. The dead talked to her. They told her things. Her life was filled with whispers. The gift had not been passed on, and for that the woman was grateful, but she wondered sometimes if a faint trace of it had not found its way into her, a mere spark of the great power that had dwelt in her mother. Or perhaps all mothers were cursed with the ability to sense their children’s deepest sufferings, even when they were far, far from them. All that she could say for sure was that she had not known a moment’s peace in recent days, and that she heard her daughter’s voice calling to her when sleep fleetingly came.

She would tell that to him when she met him, in the hope that he would understand. Even if he did not, she knew that he would help, for the girl was blood to him.

And if there is one thing that he understood, it was blood.

I parked in an alleyway about fifty feet from the house, then covered the rest of the distance on foot. I could see Jackie Garner hunched behind the wall bordering the property. He wore a black wool hat, a black jacket, and black jeans. His hands were uncovered, and his breath formed phantoms in the air. Beneath his jacket I made out the word SYLVIA written on his T-shirt.

“New girlfriend?” I said.

Jackie pulled open his jacket so I could see the T-shirt more clearly. It read, TIM ‘THE MAINE-IAC’ SYLVIA, a reference to one of our local-boys-made-good, and featured a poor caricature of the great man himself. In September 2002, Tim Sylvia, all six-eight and 260 pounds of him, became the first Mainer to compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, eventually going on to take the Heavyweight Championship title in Las Vegas in 2003, knocking down the undefeated champion, Ricco Rodriguez, with a right cross in the first round. “I hit him hahd,” Sylvia told a postmatch interviewer, making every Down-Easter with flattened vowel sounds feel instantly proud. Unfortunately, Sylvia tested positive for anabolic steroids after his first defense, against the six-eleven Gan “The Giant” McGee, and voluntarily surrendered his belt and title. I remembered Jackie telling me once that he’d attended the fight. Some of McGee’s blood had landed on his jeans, and he now saved them for special wear.

“Nice,” I said.

“I got a friend who makes them. I can let you have some cheap.”

“I wouldn’t take them any other way. In fact, I wouldn’t take them at all.”

Jackie was offended. For a guy who might have passed for Tim Sylvia’s out-of-condition older brother, he was pretty sensitive.

“How many are there in the house?” I asked, but his attention had already wandered onto another subject.

“Hey, we’re dressed the same,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re dressed the same. Look: you got the hat, the same jacket, the jeans. Except you got gloves and I got this T-shirt, we could be twins.”

Jackie Garner was a good guy, but I thought that he might be a little crazy. Someone once told me that a shell accidentally went off close to him when he was serving with the U.S. Army in Berlin just before the Wall came down. He was unconscious for a week, and for six months after he awoke he couldn’t remember anything that happened later than 1983. Even though he was mostly recovered, there were still gaps in his memory, and he occasionally confused the guys at Bull Moose Music by asking for “new” CDs that were actually fifteen years old. The army pensioned him off, and since then he had become a body for hire. He knew about guns and surveillance, and he was strong. I’d seen him put down three guys in a bar fight, but that shell had definitely rattled something loose inside Jackie Garner’s head. Sometimes he was almost childlike.

Like now.

“Jackie, this isn’t a dance. It doesn’t matter that we’re dressed the same.”

He shrugged and looked away. I could tell he was hurt again.

“I just thought it was funny, that’s all,” he said, all feigned indifference.

“Yeah, next time I’ll call you first, ask you to help me pick out my wardrobe. Come on, Jackie, it’s freezing. Let’s get this over with.”

“It’s your call,” he said, and it was.

I didn’t usually take on bail skips. The smarter ones tended to head out of state, making for Canada or points south. Like most PIs, I had contacts at the banks and the phone companies, but I still didn’t much care for the idea of tracking some lowlife over half the country in return for a percentage of his bond, waiting for him to give himself away by accessing an automated teller or using his credit card to check into a motel.

This one was different. His name was David Torrans, and he had tried to steal my car to make his getaway from an attempted robbery at a gas station on Congress. My Mustang was parked in the lot beside the station, and Torrans had wrecked the ignition in a doomed effort to get it started after someone boxed in his own Chevy. The cops caught him two blocks away as he made his getaway on foot. Torrans had a string of minor convictions, but with the help of a quick-mouthed lawyer and a drowsy judge he made bail, although the judge, to his small credit, did set bail at twenty thousand dollars to ensure Torrans made it to trial, and ordered him to report daily to police headquarters in Portland. A bondsman named Lester Peets provided the coverage for the bond, then Torrans skipped out on him. The reason for the skip was that a woman who had taken a knock on the head from Torrans during the attempted robbery had subsequently lapsed into a coma in some kind of delayed reaction to the blow she had received, and now Torrans was facing some heavy felony charges, and maybe even life in jail if the woman died. Peets was about to go in the hole for the twenty if Torrans didn’t show, as well as sullying his good name and seriously irritating local law enforcement.

I took on the Torrans skip because I was aware of something about him that nobody else seemed to know: he was seeing a woman named Olivia Morales, who worked as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in town and had a jealous ex-husband with a fuse so short he made old nitrol look stable. I had spotted her with Torrans after she finished her shift, two or three days before the robbery went down. Torrans was a “face” in the way that such men sometimes were in small cities like Portland. He had a reputation for violence, but until the robbery bust he had never actually been charged with a serious crime, more through good fortune than any great intelligence on his part. He was the kind of guy to whom other lowlifes deferred on the grounds that he had “smarts,” but I had never subscribed to the theory of comparative intelligence where petty criminals were concerned, so the fact that Torrans’s peers considered him a sharp operator didn’t impress me much. Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals, they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida. The fact that Torrans had tried to hold up a gas station armed with only a pool ball in a sock indicated that he wasn’t about to step up to the majors just yet. I’d heard rumors that he’d developed a taste for smack and OxyContin in recent months, and nothing will scramble a man’s intelligence faster than the old “hillbilly heroin.”

I figured that Torrans would get in touch with his girlfriend when he found himself in trouble. Men on the run tend to turn to the women who love them, whether mothers, wives, or girlfriends. If they have money, they’ll then try to put some ground between themselves and those who are looking for them. Unfortunately, the kind of people who went to Lester Peets for their bond tended to be pretty desperate, and Torrans had probably used all of his available funds just rustling up his share of the money. For the moment, Torrans would be forced to stick close to home, keeping a low profile until another option presented itself. Olivia Morales seemed like the best bet.

Jackie Garner had good local knowledge, and I brought him in to stay close to Olivia Morales while I was taking care of other business. He watched her buying her food for the week, and noticed her including a carton of Luckys in her buy, even though she didn’t appear to smoke. He followed her home to her rented house in Deering, and saw two men arrive a little later in a red Dodge van. When he described them to me over the phone, I recognized one as Torrans’s half brother Garry, which was how, less than forty-eight hours after David Torrans had first gone off the radar, we found ourselves hunched behind a garden wall, about to make a decision on how best to deal with him.

“We could call the cops,” said Jackie, more for form’s sake than anything else.

I thought of Lester Peets. He was the kind of guy who got beaten up by his imaginary friends as a child for cheating at games. If he could wheedle his way out of paying me my share of the bond, he would, which meant that I’d end up paying Jackie out of my own pocket. Calling the cops would give Lester just the excuse that he needed. Anyway, I wanted Torrans. Frankly, I didn’t like him, and he’d screwed around with my car, but I was also forced to admit that I was anticipating the surge of adrenaline that taking him down would bring. I had been leading a quiet life these past few weeks. It was time for a little excitement.

“No, we need to do this ourselves,” I said.

“You figure they have guns?”

“I don’t know. Torrans has never used one in the past. He’s small-time. His brother has no jacket, so he’s an unknown quantity. As for the other guy, he could be Machine Gun Kelly, and we wouldn’t find out until we hit the door.”

Jackie considered our situation for a time.

“Wait here,” he said, then scuttled away. I heard the trunk of his car opening somewhere in the gloom. When he returned, he was clutching four cylinders, each about a foot in length and with the curved hook of a coat hanger attached to one end.

“What are they?” I asked.

He held up the two cylinders in his right hand-“Smoke grenades”-then the two in his left-“and tear gas. Ten parts glycerine to two parts sodium bisulfate. The smokes have ammonia added. They stink bad. All home made.”

I looked at the coat hanger, the mismatched tape, the scuffed pipes. “Wow, and they seem so well put together. Who’d have thought?”

Jackie’s brow furrowed, and he considered the cylinders. He lifted his right hand. “Or maybe these are gas, and these are smoke. The trunk’s a mess, so they’ve been rolling around some.”

I looked at him. “Your mom must be so proud of you.”

“Hey, she’s never wanted for anything.”

“Least of all munitions.”

“So which should we use?”

Calling on Jackie Garner was looking less and less like a good idea, but the prospect of not having to hang around in the dark waiting for Torrans to show his face, or trying to gain access to the house and facing down three men and one woman, possibly armed, was certainly attractive.

“Smoke,” I said at last. “I think gassing them may be illegal.”

“I think smoking them is illegal too,” Jackie pointed out.

“Okay, but it’s probably less illegal than gas. Just give me one of those things.”

He handed a cylinder over.

“You sure this is smoke?” I asked.

“Yeah, they weigh different. I was just kidding you. Pull the pin, then toss it as fast as you can. Oh, and don’t jiggle it around too much. It’s kind of volatile.”

Far from Portland, as her mother made her way through the streets of an unfamiliar city, Alice emerged from a deep sleep. She felt feverish and nauseous, and her limbs and joints ached. She had begged, again and again, for a little stuff just to keep her steady, but instead they had injected her with something that gave her terrible, frightening hallucinations in which inhuman creatures crowded around her, trying to carry her off into the darkness. They didn’t last long, but their effect was draining, and after the third or fourth dose she found that the hallucinations continued even after the drug should have worn off, so that the line between nightmare and reality became blurred. In the end, she pleaded with them to stop, and in return she told them all that she knew. After that, they changed the drug, and she slept dreamlessly. Since then, the hours had passed in a blur of needles and drugs and periodic sleep. Her hands had been tied to the frame of the bed, and her eyes had remained covered ever since she was brought to this place, wherever it was. She knew that there was more than one person responsible for keeping her here, for different voices had questioned her over the period of her captivity.

A door opened, and footsteps approached the bed.

“How are you feeling?” asked a male voice. It was one that she had heard before. It sounded almost tender. From his accent, she guessed that he was Mexican.

Alice tried to speak, but her throat was so terribly dry. A cup was placed to her lips, and the visitor trickled water into her mouth, supporting the back of her head with his hand so that she did not spill any upon herself. His hand felt very cool against her scalp.

“I’m sick,” she said. The drugs had taken away some of the hunger, but her own addictions still gnawed at her.

“Yes, but soon you will not be so sick.”

“Why are you doing this to me? Did he pay you to do this?”

Alice sensed puzzlement, maybe even alarm.

“Who do you mean?”

“My cousin. Did he pay you to take me away, to clean me up?”

A breath was released. “No.”

“But why am I here? What do you want me to do?”

She remembered again being asked questions, but she had trouble recalling their substance or the answers that she gave in reply. She feared, though, that she had said something bad, something that would get a friend into trouble, but she couldn’t recall her friend’s name, or even her face. She was so confused, so tired, so thirsty, so hungry.

The cool hand passed across her brow, brushing the damp hair from her skin, and she almost wept in gratitude for this brief moment of solicitude. Then the hand touched her cheek, and she felt fingers exploring the ridges of her eye sockets, testing her jaw, pressing into her bones. Alice was reminded of the actions of a surgeon, examining the patient before the cutting began, and she was afraid.

“You have nothing more to do,” he said. “It’s nearly over now.”

As the taxi neared its destination, the woman understood the reasons for the driver’s unhappiness. They had progressed uptown, the area growing less and less hospitable, until at last even the streetlights grew dark, their bulbs shot out and glass scattered on the sidewalk beneath. Some of the buildings looked like they might have been beautiful once, and it pained her to see them reduced to such squalor, almost as much as it hurt her to see young people reduced to living in such conditions, prowling the streets and preying on their own.

The taxi pulled up in front of a narrow doorway marked with the name of a hotel, and she paid the driver twenty-two dollars. If he was expecting a tip, he was now a disappointed man. She didn’t have money to be giving people tips just for doing what they were supposed to do, but she did thank him. He didn’t help her to get her bag from the trunk. He just popped it and let her do it herself, all the time looking uneasily at the young men who watched him from the street corners.

The hotel’s sign promised TV, AC, and baths. A black clerk in a D₁₂ T-shirt sat behind a Plexiglas screen inside, reading a college textbook. He handed her a registration card, took her cash for three nights, then gave her a key attached to half a brick by a length of thick chain.

“Got to leave the key with me when you go out,” he told her.

The woman looked at the brick.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll try to remember.”

“You’re on the fourth floor. Elevator’s on the left.”

The elevator smelled of fried food and human waste. The odor in her room was only marginally better. There were scorch marks on the thin carpet, big circular black burns that could not have come from cigarettes. A single iron bed stood against one wall, with a space between it and the other wall just large enough for a person to squeeze through. A radiator sulked coldly beneath a grimy window, a single battered chair beside it. There was a sink on the wall, and a tiny mirror above it. A TV was bolted to the upper right-hand corner of the room. She opened what appeared to be a closet and discovered instead a small toilet and a hole in the center of the floor to allow water from a showerhead to drain away. In total, the bathroom was about nine feet square. As far as she could see, the only way to shower was to sit on the toilet, or to straddle it.

She set out her clothes on the bed and placed her toothbrush and toiletries by the sink. She checked her watch. It was a little early. All that she knew about where she was going she had learned from a single cable TV show, but she guessed that things didn’t start to get busy there until after dark.

She turned on the TV, lay on her bed, and watched game shows and comedies until the night drew in. Then she pulled on her overcoat, put some money in her pocket, and descended to the streets.

Two men came to Alice and injected her again. Within minutes her head began to cloud. Her limbs felt heavy, and her head lolled to the right. Her blindfold was removed, and she knew that it was coming to an end. Once her vision had recovered, she could see that one of the men was small and wiry, with a pointed gray beard and thinning gray hair. His skin was tanned, and she guessed that this was the Mexican who had spoken to her in the past. The other was an enormously fat man with a belly that wobbled pendulously between his thighs, obscuring his groin. His green eyes were lost in folds of flesh, and there was dirt lodged in the pores of his skin. His neck was purple and swollen, and when he touched her, her skin prickled and burned.

They lifted her from her bed and placed her in a wheelchair, then wheeled her down a decaying hallway until she was brought at last to a white-tiled room with a drain in the floor. They transferred her to a wooden chair with leather straps to secure her hands and feet, and there they left her, facing her reflection in the long mirror on the wall. She barely recognized herself. A gray pallor hung behind her dark skin, as though her own features had been thinly overlaid on those of a white person. Her eyes were bloodshot, and there was dried blood at the corners of her mouth and upon her chin. She was wearing a white surgical gown, beneath which she was naked.

The room was startlingly clean and bright, and the fluorescent lights above were merciless in their exposition of her features, worn down by years of drugs and the demands of men. For a second, she believed that she was looking at her mother in the glass, and the resemblance made her eyes water.

“I’m sorry, Momma,” she said. “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”

Her hearing became acute, a consequence of the drugs pumping through her system. Before her, her features began to swim, mutating, transforming. There were voices whispering around her. She tried to turn her head to follow them, but was unable to do so. Her paranoia grew.

Then the lights died, and she was in total darkness.

The woman hailed a cab and told the driver where she wished to be taken. She had briefly considered using public transportation, but had made the decision that she would use it only during daylight hours. By night she would travel by taxi, despite the expense. After all, if something were to happen to her on the subway or while waiting for a bus before she spoke to him, then who would look for her daughter?

The cabdriver was a young man, and white. Most of the others were not white, from what she had seen earlier that evening. Few were even black. The races that drove the cabs here could be found only in big cities and foreign lands.

“Ma’am,” the young man said, “are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

“Yes,” she said. “Take me to the Point.”

“That’s a rough area. You going to be long? You’re not going to be long and I can wait for you, take you back here.”

She didn’t look like any hooker that he had ever seen, although he knew that the Point catered to all tastes. The cabdriver didn’t like to think about what might happen to a nice gray-haired lady moving among the bottom dwellers of the Point.

“I will be some time,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll be coming back, but thank you for asking.”

Feeling that he could do nothing more, the driver pulled into traffic and headed for Hunt’s Point.

He called himself G-Mack, and he was a playa. He dressed like a playa, because that was part of what being a playa was all about. He had the gold chains and the leather coat, beneath which he wore a tailored black vest over his bare upper body. His pants were cut wide at the thigh, narrowing down to cuffs so small he had trouble getting his feet through them. His cornrows were hidden beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat, and he kept a pair of cell phones on his belt. He carried no weapons, but there were guns close to hand. This was his patch, and these were his women.

He watched them now, their asses barely hidden beneath short black imitation-leather skirts, their titties busting out of their cheap bustier tops. He liked his women to dress alike, felt like it was kind of his brand, m’sayin? Anything worthwhile in this country had its own recognizable look, didn’t matter you was buying it in Butt-freeze, Montana, or Asswipe, Arkansas. G-Mack didn’t have as many girls as some, but then he was just beginning. He had big plans.

He watched Chantal, this tall black hooker with legs so thin he marveled at how they could support her body, teeter on her heels as she headed over to him.

“Whatchu got, baby?” he asked.

“Hunnerd.”

“Hunnerd? You fuckin with me?”

“It’s slow, baby. I ain’t had but some blow jobs, and a nigga try to stiff me in the lot, makin like he goan pay me soon as I’m done, wastin my time. It’s hard, baby.”

G-Mack reached out for her face and held it tightly in his fingers.

“What’m I goan find and I take you down that alleyway and check you out, huh? I ain’t goan find no hunnerd, am I? I goan find bills hidden in all them dark places, ain’t I? You think I’m goan be gentle with you, huh, when I go lookin inside? You want me to do that?”

She shook her head in his grip. He released her, and watched as she reached under her skirt. Seconds later, her hand emerged with a plastic Baggie. He could see the notes inside.

“I’m goan let you get away with it this once, y’hear?” he said as he took the Baggie from her, holding it carefully with his fingernails so as not to sully his hands with the smell of her. She gave him the hundred from her handbag too. He raised his hand as if to strike her, then let it drop slowly to his side and smiled his best, most reassuring smile.

“That’s just cause you new with me. But you fuck with me again, bitch, and I will fuck your shit up so bad you be bleeding for a week. Now get yo ass back out there.”

Chantal nodded and sniffed. She stroked his coat with her right hand, rubbing at the lapel.

“Sorry, baby. I just-”

“It’s done,” said G-Mack. “We clear.”

She nodded again, then turned away and headed back onto the street. G-Mack watched her go. She had maybe another five hours before things got quieter. He’d take her back to the crib then and show her what happened to bitches who fucked with the Mack, who tried to embarrass him by holding back on him. He wasn’t about to discipline her on the street, because that would make him look bad. No, he’d deal with her in private.

That was the thing with these hos. You let one get away with something, and the next thing they were all holding out on you and then you weren’t nothing better than a bitch yourself. They needed to be taught that lesson early on, else they weren’t worth having around. Funny thing was, you fucked them up, and they still stayed with you. You worked it right, and they felt needed, like they was part of a family they’d never had. Like a good father, you disciplined them because you loved them. You could screw around on the ones who were sweet on you, and they wouldn’t say boo, because at least they knew the other whores you were seeing. In that sense, a pimp beat a square any day. It was all okay as long as you kept it in the family. They were your women, and you could do with them what you pleased once you gave them a sense of belonging, of being wanted. You had to get psychological with these bitches, had to know how to play the game.

“Excuse me,” said a voice to his right.

He looked down to see a small black woman in an overcoat, her hand inside her bag. Her hair was gray, and she looked like she might break in two if the wind was strong enough.

“What you want, Grandma?” he said. “You a little old to be trickin.”

If the woman understood the insult, she didn’t let it show.

“I’m looking for somebody,” she said, taking a photograph from her wallet, and G-Mack felt his heart sink.

The door to Alice’s left opened, then closed again, but the lights in the corridor beyond had also been extinguished, and she was unable to see who had entered. A stench assailed her nostrils, and she found herself retching. She could hear no footsteps, yet she was aware of a figure circling her, appraising her.

“Please,” she said, and it took all of her strength just to speak. “Please. Whatever I done, I’m sorry for it. I won’t tell nobody what happened. I don’t even know where I am. Let me go, and I’ll be a good girl, I promise.”

The whispering grew louder now, and there was laughter intermingled with the voices. Then something touched her face, and her skin prickled, and her mind was bombarded with images. She felt as though her memories were being ransacked, the details of her life briefly held up to the light, then discarded by the presence beside her. She saw her mother, her aunt, her grandmother…

A houseful of women, set on a patch of land by the edge of a forest; a dead man lying in a casket, the women standing around him, none of them weeping. One of them reaches for the cotton sheet covering his head, and when it is removed he is revealed to be near faceless, his features destroyed by some terrible vengeance wrought upon him by another. In a corner stands a boy, tall for his age, dressed in a cheap hired suit, and she knows his name.

Louis.

“Louis,” she whispered, and her voice seemed to echo around the tiled room. The presence beside her withdrew, but she could still hear its breathing. Its breath smelt of earth.

Earth, and burning.

“Louis,” she repeated.

Closer than brother to me. Blood to me.

Help me.

Her hand was clasped in the hand of another, and she felt it being raised. It came to rest upon something ragged and ruined. She traced the lineaments of what once was a face: the eye sockets, now empty; the fragments of cartilage where once was a nose; a lipless gap for a mouth. The mouth opened, taking her fingers inside, then closed softly upon them, and she saw once again the figure in the casket, the man without a face, his head torn apart by the actions of-

“Louis.”

She was crying now, crying for them both. The mouth upon her fingers was no longer soft. Teeth were erupting from the gums, flat yet sharp, and they tore into her hand.

This is not real. This is not real.

But the pain was real, and the presence was real.

And she called his name in her head once again-Louis-as she began to die.

G-Mack kept his face turned from her, taking in his women, the cars, the streets, anything to divert his attention and force her to go elsewhere.

“Can’t help you,” he said. “Go call Five-O. They be dealin with missin persons.”

“She worked here,” said the woman. “The girl I’m looking for. She worked for you.”

“Like I said, can’t help you. You need to be movin on now, else you goan get into trouble. Nobody want to be answering yo questions. People here want to make money. This is a business. This like Mickey D’s. It’s all about the dollar.”

“I can pay you,” said the old woman.

She raised a pathetic handful of ragged bills.

“I don’t want yo money,” he said. “Get out of my face.”

“Please,” she said. “Just look at this picture.”

She held up the picture of the young black woman.

G-Mack glanced at the photograph, then tried to look away as casually as he could, the sick feeling in his stomach growing suddenly stronger.

“Don’t know her,” said G-Mack.

“Maybe-”

“I said I ain’t never seen her.”

“But you didn’t even look prop-”

And in his fear, G-Mack made his biggest mistake. He lashed out at her, catching her on the left cheek. She staggered back against the wall, a pale spot against her skin where his open hand had struck her.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Don’t you be comin round here no more.”

The woman swallowed, and he could see the tears starting, but she tried to hold them back. Old bitch had some balls, he’d give her that. She replaced the photograph in her bag, then walked away. Across the street, G-Mack could see Chantal staring at him.

“The fuck you lookin’ at?” he shouted to her. He made a move toward her, and she backed away, her body eventually obscured by a green Taurus that pulled up alongside her, the middle-aged business type inside easing down the window as he negotiated with her. When they’d agreed on a price, Chantal climbed in alongside him, and they pulled off, headed for one of the lots off the main drag. That was another thing he’d have to talk about with the bitch: curiosity.

Jackie Garner was at one side of the window, and I was at the other. Using a little dentist’s mirror I’d picked up, I’d seen two men watching TV in the living room. One of them was Torrans’s brother, Garry. The drapes on what I took to be a bedroom nearby were drawn, and I thought I could hear a man and a woman talking inside. I signaled to Jackie that he should stay where he was, then I moved to the bedroom window. Using the raised fingers of my right hand, I counted three, two, one, then hurled the smoke canister through the window of the room. Jackie tossed his through the glass of the living room, then followed it with a second. Instantly, noxious green fumes began to pour from the holes. We backed away, taking up positions in the shadows across from the front and back doors to the house. I could hear coughing and shouting inside, but I could see nothing. Already, the smoke had entirely filled the living room. The stench was incredible, and even at a distance my eyes were stinging.

It wasn’t just smoke. It was gas too.

The front door opened, and two men spilled out into the yard. One of them had a gun in his hand. He fell to his knees on the grass and began to retch. Jackie came at him from out of nowhere, put one big foot on the gun hand, and kicked him hard with the other. The other man, Garry Torrans, just lay on the ground, the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes.

Seconds later, the back door opened and Olivia Morales stumbled out. David Torrans was close behind her. He was shirtless, and a wet towel was pressed to his face. Once he was away from the house he discarded it and made a break for the next yard. His eyes were red and streaming, but he wasn’t suffering as badly as the others. He had almost made it to the wall when I emerged from the darkness and swept his feet from under him. He landed hard on his back, the wind abruptly knocked out of him by the impact. He lay there, staring up at me, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name’s Parker,” I said.

“You gassed us.”

He vomited the words out.

“You tried to steal my car.”

“Yeah, but…you gassed us. What kind of sonofabitch gasses someone?”

Jackie Garner shambled across the lawn. Behind him, I could see Garry and the other man lying on the ground, their hands and legs bound with plastic ties. Torrans’s head turned to take in the new arrival.

“This kind,” I told him.

Jackie shrugged.

“Sorry,” he said to Torrans. “At least I know it works.”

G-Mack lit a cigarette and noticed that his hands were shaking. He didn’t want to think about the girl in the picture. She was gone, and G-Mack didn’t never want to see the men who took her again. They found out someone was asking after her, and then another pimp would be taking care of the Mack’s team, because the Mack would be dead.

The Mack didn’t know it, but he had only days left to live. He should never have hit the woman.

And in the white-tiled room, Alice, now torn and ruined, prepared to breathe her last. The mouth of another touched her lips, waiting. He could sense it coming, could taste its sweetness. The woman shuddered, then grew limp. He felt her spirit enter him, and a new voice was added to the great chorus within.

CHAPTER TWO

The days are like leaves, waiting to fall.

The past lies in the shadows of our lives. It is endlessly patient, secure in the knowledge that all we have done, and all that we have failed to do, must surely return to haunt us in the end. When I was young, I cast each day aside unthinkingly, like dandelion seeds committed to the wind, floating harmlessly from the hands of a boy and vanishing over his shoulder as he moved onward along the path toward the sunset, and home. Nothing was to be regretted, for there were more days to come. Slights and injuries would be forgotten, hurts would be forgiven, and there was radiance enough in the world to light the days that followed.

Now, as I look back over my shoulder at the path that I have taken, I can see that it has become tangled and obscured by undergrowth, where the seeds of past actions and half-acknowledged sins have taken root. Another shadows me along the path. She has no name, but she looks like Susan, my dead wife; and Jennifer, my first daughter, who was killed beside her in our little house in New York, walks with her.

For a time I wished that I had died with them. Sometimes that regret returns.

I move more slowly through life now, and the growth is catching up with me. There are briars around my ankles, weeds brush my fingertips as I walk, and the ground beneath my feet crackles with the fallen leaves of half-dead days.

The past is waiting for me, a monster of my own creation.

The past is waiting for us all.

I awoke to darkness, with dawn impending. Beside me, Rachel slept, unknowing. In a small room next to ours, our infant daughter rested. We had made this place together. It was supposed to be a safe haven, but what I saw around me was no longer our home. It was some composite, a collision of remembered places. This was the bed that Rachel and I chose, yet it stood now not in a bedroom overlooking the Scarborough marshes but in an urban landscape. I could hear street voices raised, and sirens crying in the distance. There was a dresser from my parents’ house, and on it lay my dead wife’s cosmetics. I could see a brush on the cabinet to my left, over Rachel’s sleeping head. Her hair was red. The hairs caught in the brush were blond.

I rose. I entered a hallway in Maine, and descended stairs in New York. In the living room, she waited. Beyond the window, the marshes shone with silver, incandescent with moonlight. Shadows moved across the waters, although there was a cloudless night sky above. The shapes drifted endlessly east, until at last they were swallowed up by the waiting ocean beyond. There was no traffic now, and no sounds of the city broke the fragile quiet of the night. All was stillness, but for the shadows on the marsh.

Susan sat by the window, her back to me, her hair tied with an aquamarine bow. She stared through the glass at a little girl who skipped on the lawn. Her hair was like her mother’s. Her head was down as she counted her steps.

And then my dead wife spoke.

You have forgotten us.

No, I have not forgotten.

Then who is that who sleeps beside you now, in the place where I once slept? Who is it that holds you in the night? Who is it that has borne you a child? How can you say that you have not forgotten, when the scent of her is upon you?

I am here. You are here. I cannot forget.

You cannot love two women with all of your heart. One of us must be lost to you. Is it not true that you no longer think of us in the silences between every heartbeat? Are there not times when we are absent from your thoughts while you twine yourself in her arms?

She spit the words, and the power of her anger sprayed blood upon the glass. Outside, the child stopped her skipping and stared at me through the pane. The darkness obscured her face, and I was grateful.

She was your child.

She will always be my child. In this world or the next, she will always be mine.

We will not go away. We will not disappear. We refuse to leave you. You will remember us. You will not forget.

And she turned, and once again I saw her ruined face, and the empty sockets of her eyes, and the memory of the agonies that she endured in my name were brought back to me with such force that I spasmed, my limbs extending, my back arching with such force that I heard the vertebrae crack. I woke suddenly with my arms curled around my chest, hands upon my skin and hair, my mouth open in agony, and Rachel was holding me and whispering-“Hush, hush”-and my new daughter was crying in the voice of the old, and the world was a place that the dead chose not to leave, for to leave was to be forgotten, and they would not be forgotten.

Rachel stroked my hair, calming me, then went to attend to our child. I listened to her cooing to the infant, walking with her in her arms until the tears ceased. She so rarely cried, this little girl, our Samantha. She was so quiet. She was not like the one that was lost, and yet I sometimes saw a little of Jennifer in her face, even in her first months. Sometimes, too, I thought I caught the ghost of Susan in her features, but that could not be.

I closed my eyes. I would not forget. Their names were written upon my heart, along with those of so many others: those who once were lost, and those whom I had failed to find; those who trusted me, and those who stood against me; those who died at my hand, and those who died at the hands of others. Each name was written, carved with a blade upon my flesh, name upon name, tangled one unto another, yet each clearly legible, each subtly engraved upon this great palimpsest of the heart.

I would not forget.

They would not let me forget.

The visiting priest at Saint Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church struggled to articulate his dismay at what he was seeing.

“What…What is he wearing?”

The object of his dismay was a diminutive ex-burglar, dressed in a suit that appeared to be made from some form of NASA-endorsed synthetic material. To say that it shimmered as its wearer moved was to underestimate its capacity for distorting light. This suit shone like a bright new star, embracing every available color in the spectrum, and a couple more that the Creator Himself had presumably passed over on the grounds of good taste. If the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz had opted for a makeover at a car-valeting service, he would have emerged looking something like Angel.

“It seems to be made of some kind of metal,” said the priest. He was squinting slightly.

“It’s also reflective,” I added.

“It is,” said the priest. He sounded almost impressed, in a confused way. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. Is he, er, a friend of yours?”

I tried to keep the vague sense of embarrassment out of my voice.

“He’s one of the godparents.”

There was a noticeable pause. The visiting priest was a missionary home on leave from Southeast Asia. He had probably seen a great deal in his time. It was flattering, in a way, to think that it had taken a baptism in southern Maine to render him speechless.

“Perhaps we should keep him away from naked flames,” said the priest, once he had given the implications some thought.

“That might be wise.”

“He will have to hold a candle, of course, but I’ll ask him to keep it outstretched. That should be all right. And the godmother?”

Now it was my turn to pause before continuing.

“That’s where things get complicated. See the gentleman standing close by him?”

Beside Angel, and towering at least a foot above him, was his partner, Louis. One might have described Louis as a Log Cabin Republican, except that any self-respecting Log Cabin Republican would have bolted the doors, pulled the shutters, and waited for the cavalry to arrive rather than admit this man to his company. He was wearing a dark blue suit and sunglasses, but even with the shades on he seemed to be trying hard not to look directly at his significant other. In fact, he was doing a pretty good impression of a man without a significant other at all, hampered only by the fact that Angel insisted on following him around and talking to him occasionally.

“The tall gentleman? He seems a little out of place.”

It was an astute observation. Louis was fastidiously turned out, as always, and apart from his height and his color there was little about his physical appearance that would seem to invite such a comment. Yet somehow he radiated difference, and a vague sense of potential threat.

“Well, I guess he would be a godfather too.”

“Two godfathers?”

“And a godmother: my partner’s sister. She’s outside somewhere.”

The priest did a little soft-shoe shuffle to emphasize his discomfort.

“It’s most unusual.”

“I know,” I said, “but then, they’re unusual people.”

It was late January, and there was still snow on sheltered ground. Two days earlier, I had driven down to New Hampshire to buy cheap booze in the state liquor store in preparation for the celebrations after the christening. When I was done, I walked for a time by the Piscataqua River, the ice still a foot thick by the shore but webbed by cracks. The center was free of encumbrance, though, and the water flowed slowly and steadily toward the sea. I walked against the current, following a wooded berm, thick with fir, that the river had created over time, cutting off a patch of bog land where early-budding blueberry and blackberry, and gray-black winterberry and tan winter maleberry, coexisted with spruce and larch and rhodora. At last I came to the floating area of the bog, all green and purple where the sphagnum moss was interwoven with cranberry vines. I plucked a berry, sweetened by the frost, and placed it between my teeth. When I bit down, the taste of the juice filled my mouth. I found a tree trunk, long fallen and now gray and rotted, and sat upon it. Spring was coming, and with it the long, slow thaw. There would be new leaves, and new life.

But I have always been a winter person. Now, more than ever before, I desired to remain frozen amid snow and ice, cocooned and unchanging. I thought of Rachel and my daughter, Sam, and those others who had gone before them. Life slows in winter, but now I wanted it to cease its forward momentum entirely, except for us three. If I could hold us here, wrapped all in white, then perhaps everything would be fine. If the days advanced only for us, then no ill could come. No strangers would arrive at our door, and no demands would be made upon us other than those elemental things that we required from one another, and that we freely gave in return.

Yet even here, amid the silence of the winter woods and the moss-covered water, life went on, a hidden, teeming existence masked by snow and ice. The stillness was a ruse, an illusion, fooling only those who were unwilling or unable to look closer and see what lay beneath. Time and life moved inexorably forward. Already, it was growing dark around me. Soon it would be night, and they would come again.

They were visiting more frequently, the little girl who was almost my daughter, and her mother who was not quite my wife. Their voices were growing more insistent, the memory of them in this life becoming increasingly polluted by the forms that they had taken in the next. In the beginning, when first they came, I could not tell what they were. I thought them phantasms of grief, a product of my troubled, guilty mind, but gradually they assumed a kind of reality. I did not grow used to their presence, but I learned to accept it. Whether real or imagined, they still symbolized a love that I once felt, and continued to feel. But now they were becoming something different, and their love was whispered through bared teeth.

We will not be forgotten.

All was coming apart around me, and I did not know what to do, so I sat instead among snow and ice on a rotted tree trunk, and willed clocks to stop.

It was warmer than it had been in many days. Rachel was standing outside the church, holding Sam in her arms. Her mother, Joan, was beside her. Our daughter was wrapped in white, her eyes tightly closed, as though she were troubled in her sleep. The sky was clear blue, and the winter sunlight shone coldly upon Black Point. Our friends and neighbors were scattered before us, some talking, smoking. Most had dressed up for the occasion, happy for an excuse to break out some colorful clothes in winter. I nodded greetings to a few people, then joined Rachel and Joan.

As I approached, Sam woke and waved her arms. She yawned, looked blearily about, then decided there was nothing important enough to keep her from another nap. Joan tucked the white shawl under Sam’s chin to keep out the cold. She was a small, stout woman who wore minimal makeup and kept her silver hair cut short against her skull. After meeting her for the first time that morning, Louis had suggested that she was trying to get in touch with her inner lesbian. I advised him to keep those opinions to himself, or else Joan Wolfe would try to get in touch with Louis’s inner gay man by reaching into his chest and tearing his heart out. She and I got on okay, most of the time, but I knew that she worried about the safety of her daughter and her new grandchild, and this translated into a distance between us. For me it was like being within sight of a warm, friendly place that could be reached only by traversing a frozen lake. I accepted that Joan had cause to feel concerned because of things that had happened in the past, but that didn’t make her implicit disapproval of me any easier to bear. Still, compared to my relations with Rachel’s father, Joan and I were bosom buddies. Frank Wolfe, once he had a couple of drinks inside him, felt compelled to end most of our encounters with the words “You know, if anything ever happens to my daughter…”

Rachel was wearing a light blue dress, plain and unadorned. There were wrinkles on the back of the dress, and a thread hung loose from the seam. She looked tired and distracted.

“I can take her, if you like,” I said.

“No, she’s fine.”

The words came out too quickly. I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest and forced to take a step back. I looked at Joan. After a couple of seconds, she moved away and went to join Rachel’s younger sister, Pam, who was smoking a cigarette and flirting with a group of admiring locals.

“I know she is,” I said quietly. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”

Rachel leaned against me for a moment, then, almost as if she were counting the seconds until she could put space between us once more, broke the contact.

“I just want this to be done,” she said. “I want all of these people to be gone.”

We hadn’t invited very many people to the christening. Angel and Louis were present, of course, and Walter and Lee Cole had come up from New York. Apart from them, the bulk of the little group was made up of Rachel’s immediate family and some of our friends from Portland and Scarborough. All told, there were twenty-five or thirty people present, no more, and most would come back to our house after the ceremony. Usually, Rachel would have reveled in such company, but since Sam’s birth she had grown increasingly insular, withdrawing even from me. I tried to recall the early days of Jennifer’s life, before she and her mother were taken from me, and although Jennifer had been as raucous as Sam was quiet, I could not remember encountering the kind of difficulties that now troubled Rachel and me. True, it was natural that Sam should be the focus of Rachel’s energy and attention. I tried to help her in every way that I could, and had cut back on my work so that I could take on some of the burden of caring for her and give Rachel a little time to herself, if she chose. Instead, she seemed almost to resent my presence, and with the arrival of Angel and Louis that morning it appeared that the tension between us had increased exponentially.

“I can tell them you’re feeling ill,” I said. “You could just take Sam upstairs to our room later and get away from everyone. They’ll understand.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. I want them gone. Do you understand?”

And in truth, I did not, not then.

The woman arrived at the auto shop early that morning. It stood on the verge of an area that, if it was not quite gentrified, then at least was no longer mugging the gentry. She had taken the subway to Queens and been forced to change trains twice, having mistaken the number of the subway line. The streets were quieter today, although she still could see little beauty in this place. There was bruising to her face, and her left eye hurt every time she blinked.

After the young man had struck her, she had taken a moment to recover her composure against the wall of an alleyway. It was not the first time that a man had raised his hand to her, but never before had she endured a blow from a stranger, and one half her age. The experience left her humiliated and angry, and in the minutes that followed she wished, perhaps for the first time ever, that Louis were near at that moment, that she could reach out and tell him what had occurred and watch as he humiliated the pimp in turn. In the darkness of the alleyway, she placed her hands on her knees and lowered her head. She felt like she was about to vomit. Her hands were shaking, and there was a sheen of sweat upon her face. She closed her eyes and began to pray until the feelings of rage went away, and as they departed her hands grew still, and her skin became cool once again.

She heard a woman moan close by, and a man spoke harsh words to her. She looked to her right and saw shapes moving rhythmically beside some discarded trash bags. Cars drifted slowly by, their windows lowered, the drivers’ faces rendered cruel and hungry by streetlights and headlamps. A tall white girl teetered on pink heels, her body barely concealed by white lingerie. Beside her, a black woman leaned against the hood of a car, her hands splayed upon the metal, her buttocks raised to attract the attention of passing men. Close by, the rhythmic thrusting grew faster, and the woman’s moans increased in pitch, false and empty, before finally fading entirely. Seconds later, she heard footsteps. The man emerged from the shadows first. He was young and white, and well dressed. His tie was askew, and he was running his hands through his hair to tidy it after his exertions. She smelled alcohol and a trace of cheap perfume. He barely glanced at the woman against the wall as he turned onto the street.

He was followed, after a time, by a little white girl. She looked barely old enough to drive a car, yet here she was, dressed in a black miniskirt and a cutoff top, her heels adding two inches to her diminutive stature, her dark hair cut in a bob, and her delicate features obscured by crudely applied cosmetics. She seemed to be having trouble walking, as though she were in some pain. She had almost passed the black woman by when a hand reached out, not touching her, merely imploring her to stop.

“Excuse me, miss,” she said.

The young girl paused. Her eyes were very large and blue, but already the older woman could see the light dying inside. “I can’t give you money,” she said.

“I don’t want money. I have a picture. I’d like you to take a look at it, maybe tell me if you know the girl.”

She reached into her bag and removed the photograph of her daughter. After some hesitation, the girl took it. She looked at it for a time, then handed it back.

“She’s gone,” she said.

The older woman stepped slowly forward. She didn’t want to alarm the girl. “You know her?”

“Not really. I saw her around some, but she went away a day or two after I started. I heard her street name was LaShan, but I don’t think that was her real name.”

“No, her name is Alice.”

“Are you her mother?”

“Yes.”

“She seemed nice.”

“She is.”

“She had a friend. Her name was Sereta.”

“Do you know where I can find her friend?”

The girl shook her head.

“She left too. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. I got to go.”

Before the woman could stop her, she had stepped out into the stream and was taken up by the flow. She followed her, watching her go. She saw the girl cross the street and hand some money over to the young black man who had hit her, then take up position once again with the other women lining the street.

Where were the police? she wondered. How could they let this continue on their doorsteps, this exploitation, this suffering? How could they allow a little girl like that to be used, to be killed slowly from the inside out? And if they could permit this to happen, how much could they care about a lost black girl who had fallen into this river of human misery and was dragged down by its currents?

She was a fool to believe that she could come to this strange city and find her daughter alone. She had called the police first, of course, before she had even decided to come north, and had given them what details she could over the phone. They had advised her to file a report in person once she came to the city, and she had done so the previous day. She had watched the policeman’s expression alter slightly as she spoke to him of her child’s circumstances. To him, her daughter was another addict drifting through a dangerous life. Perhaps he meant what he said when he told her he would do his best for her, but she knew that the disappearance of her little girl was not as important as a missing white girl, maybe one with money or influence, or simply one without puncture holes in the flesh between her fingers and toes. She had considered returning to the police that morning and describing the man who had struck her and the young prostitute with whom she had spoken, but she believed that it would make little difference if she did. The time for the police was gone now. She needed someone for whom her daughter would be a priority, not merely another name on an ever-growing list of the disappeared.

Although it was Sunday, the main door to the auto shop was half-raised, and music was playing inside. The woman crouched down and edged her way into the dimly lit interior. A thin man in coveralls was bent over the interior of a big foreign car. His name was Arno. Beside him, Tony Bennett’s voice came from the cheap speakers of a small, battered radio.

“Hello?” said the woman.

Arno turned his head, although his hands remained hidden in the workings of the engine.

“I’m sorry, lady, we’re closed,” he said.

He knew he should have pulled the shutter down fully, but he liked to let a little air in, and anyway he didn’t expect to be here for too long. The Audi was due to be picked up first thing Monday morning, and another hour or two would see it done.

“I’m looking for someone,” she said.

“The boss ain’t around.”

As the woman approached, he saw the swelling on her face. He wiped his hands on a rag and abandoned the car for the time being.

“Hey, you okay? What happened to your face?”

The woman was close to him now. She was hiding her distress and her fear, but the mechanic could see it in her eyes, like a scared child peering out of twin windows.

“I’m looking for someone,” she repeated. “He gave me this.”

She removed her wallet from her bag and carefully extracted a card from its folds. The card was slightly yellowed at the edges, but apart from this natural ageing it was in pristine condition. The mechanic reckoned that it had been kept safe for a long time, just in case it was ever needed.

Arno took the card. There was no name upon it, only an illustration. It depicted a serpent being trampled beneath the feet of an armored angel. The angel had a lance in his right hand, and its point had pierced the reptile. Dark blood flowed from the wound. On the back of the card was the number of a discreet answering service. Beside it was a single letter L, written in black ink, along with the handwritten address of the auto shop in which they now stood.

Few people had such cards in their possession, and the mechanic had never seen a card with the address of the shop added by hand. The letter L was the clincher. In effect, this was an “access all areas” pass, a request-no, an order-to extend any and all help to the person who possessed it.

“Did you call the number?” he asked.

“I don’t want to talk to him through no service. I want to see him.”

“He’s not here. He’s out of town.”

“Where?”

The mechanic hesitated before answering.

“Maine.”

“I’d be grateful to you if you’d give me the address of where he’s at.”

Arno walked to the cluttered office that stood to the left of the main work area. He flicked through the address book until he came to the entry he needed, then took a piece of paper and transferred the relevant details to it. He folded the paper and gave it to the woman.

“You want me to call him for you, let him know you’re on your way?”

“Thank you, but no.”

“You got a car?”

She shook her head.

“I took the subway out here.”

“You know how you’re going to get up to Maine?”

“Not yet. Bus, I guess.”

Arno put on his jacket and removed a set of keys from his pocket.

“I’ll give you a ride to Port Authority, see you safely onto the bus.”

For the first time, the woman smiled.

“Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”

Arno looked at her. Gently, he touched her face, examining the bruise.

“I got something for that, if it’s hurting you.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

He nodded.

The man who did this to you is in a lot of trouble. The man who did this to you won’t live out the week.

“Let’s go, then. We got time, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and a muffin for the trip.”

Dead man. He’s a dead man.

We were gathered around the font in a small group, the other guests standing in the pews a little distance away. The priest had made his introductions, and now we were approaching the meat of the ceremony.

“Do you reject Satan, and all his empty promises?” asked the priest.

He waited. There was no reply. Rachel coughed discreetly. Angel appeared to have found something interesting to look at down on the floor. Louis remained impassive. He had removed his shades and was focused on a point just above my left shoulder.

“You’re speaking for Sam,” I whispered to Angel. “He doesn’t mean you.”

Realization dawned like morning light on an arid desert.

“Oh, okay then,” said Angel enthusiastically. “Sure. Absolutely. Rejected.”

“Amen,” said Louis.

The priest looked confused.

“That would be a yes,” I told him.

“Right,” he said, as if to reassure himself. “Good.”

Rachel shot daggers at Angel.

“What?” he asked. He raised his hands in a “What did I do?” gesture. Some wax from the candle dripped onto the sleeve of his jacket. A faintly acrid smell arose.

“Awwww,” said Angel. “First time I’ve worn it, too.”

Rachel moved from daggers to swords.

“You open your mouth again, and you’ll be buried in that suit,” she said.

Angel went quiet. All things considered, it was the smartest move.

The woman was seated by a window on the right side of the bus. In one day, she was passing through more states than she had previously visited in her entire life. The bus pulled into South Station in Boston. Now, with thirty minutes to spare, she wandered down to the Amtrak concourse and bought herself a cup of coffee and a Danish. Both were expensive, and she looked with dismay at the little wad of bills in her purse, adorned by a smattering of change, but she was hungry, even after the muffin the man from the garage had so kindly bought for her. She took a seat and watched the people go by, the businessmen in their suits, the harried mothers with their children. She watched the arrivals and departures change, the names clicking rapidly across the big board above her head. The trains on the platform were silver and sleek. A young black woman took a seat beside her and opened a newspaper. Her suit was neatly tailored, and her hair was cut very short. A brown leather attaché case stood at her feet, and she wore a small matching purse upon her shoulder. A diamond engagement ring gleamed upon her left hand.

I have a daughter your age, thought the old woman, but she will never be like you. She will never wear a tailored suit, or read what you read, and no man will ever give her a ring like the one that you wear. She is a lost soul, a troubled soul, but I love her, and she is mine. The man who had her upon me is gone now. He is dead, and he is no loss to the world. They would call what he did to me rape, I suppose, for I surrendered to him out of fear. We were all afraid of him, and of what he could do. We believed that he had killed my older sister, for she went away with him and did not return home alive, and when he came back to us he took me in her place.

But he died for what he did, and he died badly. They asked us if we wanted them to rebuild his face, if we wanted to have the casket open for a viewing. We told them to leave him as he was found, and to bury him in a pine box with ropes for handles. They marked his grave with a wooden cross, but on the night he was buried I went to the place where he lay and I took the cross away, and I burned it in the hope that he would be forgotten. But I gave birth to his child, and I loved her even though there was something of him in her. Perhaps she never had a chance, cursed with a father like that. He tainted her, polluting her from the moment she was born, the seed of her own destruction contained within his own. She was always a sad child, an angry child, yet how could she leave us for that other life? How could she find peace in such a city, among men who would use her for money, who would feed her drugs and alcohol to keep her pliant? How could we have let that happen to her?

And the boy-no, the man, for that is what he is now-tried to look out for her, but he gave up on her, and now she is gone. My daughter is gone, and nobody yet cares enough about her to seek her out, nobody except me. But I will make them care. She is mine, and I will bring her back. He will help me, for she is blood to him, and he owes her a blood debt.

He killed her father. Now he will bring her back to this life, and to me.

The guests were scattered through the living room and the kitchen. Some had found their way outside and were sitting beneath the bare trees in our yard, wearing their coats and enjoying the open air as they drank beer and wine and ate hot food from paper plates. Angel and Louis, as always, were slightly apart from the rest, occupying a stone bench that looked out over the marshes. Our Lab retriever, Walter, lay at their feet, Angel’s fingers gently stroking his head. I went over to join them, checking as I went that nobody lacked for food and drink.

“You want to hear a joke?” said Angel. “There’s this duck on a pond, and he’s getting really pissed at this other duck who’s coming on to his girl, so he decides to hire an assassin duck to bump him off.”

Louis breathed out loudly through his nose with a sound like gas leaking under near-unendurable pressure. Angel ignored him.

“So the assassin arrives, and the duck meets him in some reeds. The assassin tells him that it will cost five pieces of bread to kill the target, payable after the deed is done. The duck tells him that’s fine, and the assassin says, ‘So, do you want me to send you the body?’ And the duck says, ‘No, just send me the bill.’”

There was silence.

“Bill,” said Angel again. “You know, it’s-”

“I got a joke,” said Louis.

We both looked at him in surprise.

“You hear the one about the dead irritating guy in the cheap suit?”

We waited.

“That’s it,” said Louis.

“That’s not funny,” said Angel.

“Makes me laugh,” said Louis.

A man touched me on the arm, and I found Walter Cole standing beside me. He was retired now, but he had taught me much of what I knew when I was a cop. Our bad days were behind us, and he had come to an accommodation with what I was and with what I was capable of doing. I left Angel and Louis to bicker, and walked back to the house with Walter.

“About that dog,” he said.

“He’s a good dog,” I said. “Not smart, but loyal.”

“I’m not looking to give him a job. You called him Walter.”

“I like the name.”

“You named your dog after me?”

“I thought you’d be flattered. Anyway, nobody needs to know. It’s not as if he looks like you. He has more hair, for a start.”

“Oh, that’s very funny. Even the dog is funnier than you.”

We entered the kitchen, and Walter retrieved a bottle of Sebago ale from the fridge. I didn’t offer him a glass. I knew that he preferred to drink it by the neck when he could, which meant anytime he was out of his wife’s sight. Outside, I saw Rachel talking with Pam. Her sister was smaller than Rachel, and spikier, which was saying something. Whenever I hugged her, I expected to be pierced by spines. Sam was asleep in an upstairs room. Rachel’s mother was keeping an eye on her.

Walter saw me follow Rachel’s progress through the garden.

“How are you two doing?” asked Walter.

“Three of us,” I reminded him. “We’re doing okay, I guess.”

“It’s hard, when there’s a new baby in a house.”

“I know. I remember.”

Walter’s hand rose slightly. He seemed on the verge of touching my shoulder, until his hand slowly fell away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, instead. “It’s not that I forget them. I don’t know what it is exactly. Sometimes it seems like another life, another time. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know just what you mean.”

There was a breeze blowing, and it caused the rope swing on the oak tree to move in a slow arc, as though an unseen child were playing upon it. I could see the channels shining in the marshes beyond, intersecting in places as they carved their paths through the reeds, the waters of one intermingling with those of another, each changed irrevocably by the meeting. Lives were like that: when their paths crossed, they emerged altered forever by the encounter, sometimes in small, almost invisible ways, and other times so profoundly that nothing that followed could ever be the same again. The residue of other lives infects us, and we in turn pass it on to those whom we later meet.

“I think she worries,” I said.

“About what?”

“About us. About me. She’s risked so much, and she’s been hurt for it. She doesn’t want to be scared anymore, but she is. She’s afraid for us, and she’s afraid for Sam.”

“You’ve talked about it?”

“No, not really.”

“Maybe it’s time, before things get worse.”

Right then, I found it hard to imagine how much worse circumstances could get. I hated these unspoken tensions between Rachel and me. I loved her, and I needed her, but I was angry too. The burden of blame slipped too easily onto my shoulders these days. I was tired of carrying it.

“Doing much work?” asked Walter, changing the subject.

“Some,” I said.

“Anything interesting?”

“I don’t think so. You never can tell, but I’ve tried to be selective. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. I’ve been offered more…complicated matters, but I’ve turned them down. I won’t bring harm upon them, but…”

I stopped. Walter waited.

“Go on.”

I shook my head. Lee, Walter’s wife, entered the kitchen. She scowled as she saw him drinking from the bottle.

“I turn my back for five minutes, and you abandon all civilized behavior,” she said, but she was smiling as she spoke. “You’ll be drinking out of the toilet bowl next.”

Walter hugged her to him.

“You know,” she said, “they named the dog after you. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, lots of people want to meet you because of it. The dog wants to meet you.”

Walter scowled as she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the garden.

“Are you coming outside?” she asked me.

“In a moment,” I said.

I watched them cross the lawn. Rachel waved to them, and they went to join her. Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a small smile. I raised my hand, then touched it to the glass, my fingers dwarfing her face.

I won’t bring harm upon you and our daughter, not by my choosing, yet still it comes. That’s what I’m afraid of. It has found me before, and it will find me again. I am a danger to you, and to our child, and I think you know that.

We are coming apart.

I love you, but we are coming apart.

The day drew on. People left, and others, who were unable to make the ceremony, took their places. As the light faded, Angel and Louis were no longer speaking, and were more obviously maintaining their distance from all that was taking place around them than before. Both kept their eyes fixed on the road that wound from Route 1 to the coast. Between them lay a cell phone. Arno had called them earlier that day, as soon as he had seen the woman safely onto the Greyhound bus from New York.

“She didn’t leave a name,” he told Louis, his voice crackling slightly over the connection.

“I know who she is,” said Louis. “You did right to call.”

Now there were lights on the road. I joined them where they sat, leaning slightly on the back of the bench. Together we watched the cab cross the bridge over the marsh, the sunlight gleaming on the waters, the car’s progress reflected in their depths. There was a tugging at my stomach, and my head felt as though hands were pressed hard against my temples. I could see Rachel standing unmoving among the guests. She too was watching the approaching car. Louis rose as it turned into the driveway of the house.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You got no reason to be concerned.”

And I wondered at what he had brought to my house.

I followed them through the open gate at the end of the yard. Angel stayed back as Louis walked to the cab and opened the door. A woman emerged, a large, multicolored bag clasped in her hands. She was smaller than Louis by perhaps eighteen inches, and probably no more than a decade or so older than he, although her face bore the marks of a difficult life, and she wore her worries like a veil across her features. I imagined that she had been beautiful when she was younger. There was little of that physical beauty left now, but there was an inner strength to her that shone brightly from her eyes. I could see some bruising to her face. It looked very recent.

She stood close to Louis and gazed up at him with something almost like love, then slapped him hard across the left cheek with her right hand.

“She’s gone,” she said. “You were supposed to look out for her, but now she’s gone.”

And she began to cry as he took her in his arms, and his body shook with the force of her sobs.

This is the story of Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole and never came back.

Martha was Louis’s aunt. A man named Deeber, now dead, had fathered a child upon her, a girl. They called her Alice, and they loved her, but she was never a happy child. She rebelled against the company of women and turned instead to men. They told her that she was beautiful, for she was, but she was young and angry. Something gnawed deep inside her, its hunger exacerbated by the actions of the women who had loved her and cared for her. They had told her that her father was dead, but it was only through others that she learned of the kind of man he was, and the manner in which he had left this world. Nobody knew who was responsible for his death, but there were rumors, hints that the neatly dressed black women in the house with the pretty garden had colluded in his killing along with her cousin, the boy called Louis.

Alice rebelled against them and all that they represented: love, security, the bonds of family. She was drawn to a bad crowd, and left the safety of her mother’s home. She drank, smoked some dope, became a casual user of harder drugs, then an addict. She drifted from the places that she knew, and went to live in a tin-roofed shack at the edge of a dark forest, where men paid to take turns with her. She was paid in narcotics, although their value was far less than what the johns had paid to sleep with her, and so the bonds around her tightened. Slowly she began to lose herself, the combination of sex and drugs acting like a cancer, eating away at all that she truly was, so that she became at last their creature even as she tried to convince herself that this was only a temporary aberration, a fleeting thing to help her deal with the sense of hurt and betrayal that she felt.

It was early one Sunday morning, and she was lying on a bare cot, naked but for a pair of cheap plastic shoes. She stank of men, and the hunger was upon her. Her head hurt, and the bones in her arms and legs ached. Two other women slept nearby, the doorways to their quarters blocked by blankets hung over ropes. A small window allowed the morning light to seep into her room, sullied by the dirt upon its pane and the cobwebs, freckled with leaves and dead bugs, that hung at its corners. She pulled the blanket aside, and saw that the door of the hut was open. Lowe stood in its frame, his giant shoulders almost brushing either side of the doorway. He was shirtless, his feet bare, and sweat glistened upon his shaved head and trickled slowly down between his shoulder blades. His back was pale and hairy. He had a cigarette in his right hand, and was talking to another man, who stood outside. Alice figured it was Wallace, the little “high yellow” man who ran his hookers and his small-time narcotics trade from out of this hut in the woods, with a little illicit whiskey for those of more conservative tastes. A laugh came, and then she saw Wallace as he moved across the large window at the front of the hut, zipping up his fly and rubbing his fingers upon his jeans. His shirt was open and hung loose upon his pigeon chest and his little belly. He was an ugly man, and rarely bathed. Sometimes he asked her to do things for him, and it was all that she could manage not to choke on the taste of him. But she needed him now. She needed what he had, even if it meant adding to her debt, a debt that would never be paid.

She put on a T-shirt and skirt to cover her nakedness, then lit a cigarette and prepared to pull the blanket fully across. Sundays were quiet. Some of the men who used this place would already be preparing for church, and they would sit in the pews and pretend to listen to the sermon, even as they thought of her. There were others who had not darkened a church door in many years, but even for them Sundays were different. If she could work up the energy, she might go to the mall, pick up some new clothes with the little money that she had, maybe some cosmetics too. She had been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks, but there were other distractions here. Still, even Wallace had recently commented on the state of her dresses and her underwear, although the men who came here weren’t too particular. Some even liked the squalor of it, for it added a certain spice to their sense of transgression, but Wallace generally preferred to pretend that his women were clean even if their surroundings were not. If she went out early, she could get her business done, then come back and relax for the afternoon. There might be some work for her in the evening, but it would not be as demanding as the night before, not by any means. Fridays and Saturdays were always the worst, with the threat of alcohol-fueled violence ever present. True, Lowe and Wallace protected the women, but they couldn’t stay with them behind that curtain while the men were being serviced, and it didn’t take more than a split second for a man’s fist to reach a woman’s face.

There came the sound of a car approaching. She could see it through the doorway as it turned. Unlike most of the cars that came to this place, this one was new. It looked like one of those German cars, and the chrome on its wheels was spotless. The engine growled briefly as it came to a stop. She saw doors opening, front and back. Wallace said something that she could not hear, and Lowe tossed his cigarette on the ground, his other hand already reaching behind his back to where the butt of the big Colt emerged from his jeans. Before he could grasp it, his shoulders exploded in a red cloud that billowed briefly in the sunlight, then fell wetly to the floor. Somehow he remained standing, and she saw his hands clutch at the doorframe, holding himself upright. Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside, then the second shot came, and part of Lowe’s head disappeared. His hands relinquished their grip, and he fell to the ground.

Alice stood frozen, rooted to the spot. Outside, she could hear Wallace pleading for his life. He was backing toward the hut, and she could see his body grow larger and larger as he neared the window. There were more shots, and the glass shattered into hundreds of pieces, the remaining shards in the frames edged with blood. Now she could hear the other girls responding. To her right, Rowlene was screaming repeatedly. She was a big girl, and Alice could almost picture her on her bed, her sheet pulled up to her chest, her eyes drowsy and flecked with red as she tried to make herself small in the corner of her bunk. To her left, she could hear Pria, who was half-Asian, strike the wall as she struggled to clear her head and find her clothes. Pria had partied with two johns the night before, and they had shared some of their buy with her. She was probably still high.

The figure of a man appeared in the doorframe. Alice briefly glimpsed his face as he entered, and the sight gave her the impetus she needed. She allowed the blanket to fall gently, then climbed on her bunk and pushed at the window. At first it would not move, even as she heard the man moving through the hut, coming closer to the whores’ quarters. She hit the frame with the base of her palm, and it swung out with barely a sound. Alice pulled herself up and squeezed herself through the gap, even as the next shot came from the stall beside her own and splinters burst from the wall. Rowena was gone. She would be next. Behind her, a hand grasped the blanket and pulled it to the floor as gravity took hold and Alice tumbled to the ground. She felt something snap in her hand as she fell awkwardly, then she was running for the cover of the trees, fallen branches snapping beneath her feet as she ducked and weaved into the forest. The shotgun roared again, and an alder disintegrated barely inches from her right foot.

She kept running, even though her feet were cut by stones and her clothing torn by briars and thorns. She did not stop until the pain in her side was so great that she felt as though she were being ripped in half. She lay against a tree and thought that she heard, distantly, the sounds of men. She knew the face of the man at the door. He was one of those who had taken Pria the night before. She did not know why he had returned, or what had led him to do what he did. All that she knew was that she had to get away from this place, for they knew who she was. They had seen her, and they would find her. Alice called her mother from a phone at a gas station, the pumps locked and the station closed, for it was still early on Sunday morning. Her mother came with clothing, and what money she had, and Alice left that afternoon and did not ever return to the state in which she was born. She called in the years that followed, mostly with requests for money. She called twice each week, and sometimes more often than that. It was Alice’s one unfailing concession to her mother, and even at her lowest she always tried to keep the older woman from worrying more than she already did. There were other small kindnesses too: birthday gifts that arrived early, or more often late, but arrived nonetheless; cards at Christmas, a little cash included in the early years, but later only a signature and a scrawled greeting; and, very occasionally, a letter, the quality of the script and the color of the ink varying in accordance with the lengthy process of the missive’s completion. Her mother cherished them all, but mostly she was grateful for the calls. They let her know that her daughter was still alive.

Then the calls ceased.

Martha sat on the couch in my office, Louis standing to one side of her, Angel seated quietly in my chair. I was by the fireplace. Rachel had looked in on us briefly, then left.

“You should have looked out for her,” Martha again told Louis.

“I tried,” he said. He looked old and tired. “She didn’t want help, not the kind I could offer her.”

Martha’s eyes ignited.

“How can you say that? She was lost. She was a lost soul. She needed someone to bring her back. That should have been you.”

This time, Louis said nothing.

“You went to Hunts Point?” I asked.

“Last time we spoke, she said that was where she was at, so that was where I went.”

“Is that where you got hurt?”

She lowered her head.

“A man hit me.”

“What was his name?” asked Louis.

“Why?” she said. “You gonna do for him like you done for others? You think that will find your cousin? You just want to feel like a big man, now it’s too late to do what a good man would have done. Well, that don’t wash with me.”

I intervened. The recriminations would get us nowhere.

“Why did you go to him?”

“Because Alice done told me she was working for him now. The other one, the one she was with before, he died. She said this new one was gonna take care of her, that he was going to find wealthy men for her. Wealthy men! What man would want her after all she’d done? What man…?”

She started to cry again.

I went to her and handed her a clean tissue, then slowly knelt before her.

“We’ll need his name if we’re to start looking for her,” I said quietly.

“G-Mack,” she said at last. “He calls himself G-Mack. There was a young white girl too. She said she remembered Alice, but she was calling herself LaShan on the street. She didn’t know where she’d gone to.”

“G-Mack,” said Louis.

“Ring any bells?”

“No. Last I heard she was with a pimp called Free Billy.”

“Looks like things changed.”

Louis stood and helped Martha from her chair.

“We need to get you something to eat. You need to rest up now.”

She took his hand and gripped it tightly in her own.

“You find her for me. She’s in trouble. I can feel it. You find her, and bring her back to me”

The fat man stood at the lip of the bathtub. His name was Brightwell, and he was very, very old, far older than he seemed. Sometimes he acted like a man who had recently woken from a deep sleep, but the Mexican, whose name was Garcia, knew better than to question him about his origins. He recognized only that Brightwell was a thing to be obeyed, and to be feared. He had seen what the man had done to the woman, had watched through the glass as Brightwell’s mouth closed on hers. It had seemed to him that some grave knowledge had shown itself in the woman’s eyes at that moment, even as she weakened and died, as though she realized what was about to occur as her body failed her at last. How many others had he taken in this way? Garcia wondered, his lips against theirs as he waited for their essence to pass from them. And even if what Garcia suspected of Brightwell was not true, what kind of man would believe such a thing of himself?

The stench was terrible as the chemicals worked on the remains, but Brightwell made no attempt to cover his face. The Mexican stood behind him, the lower half of his face concealed by a white mask.

“What will you do now?” said Garcia.

Brightwell spit into the tub, then turned his back on the disintegrating body. “I will find the other one, and I will kill her.”

“Before she died, this one spoke of a man. She thought he might come for her.”

“I know. I heard her call his name.”

“She was supposed to be alone. Nobody cared.”

“We were misinformed, but perhaps nobody cares anyway.”

Brightwell swept by him, leaving him with the decaying body of the girl. Garcia did not follow him. Brightwell was wrong, but Garcia did not have the courage to confront him further on the issue. No woman, as death approached, would cry out over and over again a name that meant nothing to her.

Someone did care.

And he would come.