The Black Angel

CHAPTER THREE

The celebration of Sam’s christening continued around us. I could hear people laughing, and the startled hiss of bottles opening. Somewhere a voice began singing a song. It sounded like Rachel’s father, who tended to sing when he was in his cups. Frank was a lawyer, one of those hearty, hail-fellow-well-met types who liked to be the center of attention wherever he went, the kind who thought that he brightened up people’s lives by being loud and unintentionally intimidating. I had watched him in action at a wedding, forcing shy women to dance on the grounds that he was trying to take them out of their shells, even as they trembled awkwardly across the dance floor like newborn giraffes, casting longing glances back at their chairs. I supposed it could be said of him that he had a good heart, but unfortunately he didn’t have a sensitivity toward others to go with it. Aside from any concerns he might have had about his daughter, Frank seemed to regard my presence at such convivial events as a personal affront, as though at any moment I were going to burst into tears, or beat someone up, or otherwise rain on the parade that Frank was trying so hard to organize. We tried not to be alone together. To be honest, it wasn’t too difficult, as we both put our hearts into the effort.

Joan was the strong one in the marriage, and a soft word from her could usually make Frank take things down a notch. She was a kindergarten teacher, and an old-style liberal Democrat who took very personally the way the country had changed in recent years under both Republicans and Democrats. Unlike Frank, she rarely spoke about her worries for her daughter directly, at least not to me. Only occasionally, usually when we were leaving them at the end of another sometimes awkward, sometimes mildly pleasant visit, would she take me lightly by the hand, and whisper, “Look after her, won’t you?”

And I would assure her that I would take care of her daughter, even as I looked into her eyes and saw her desire to believe me collide with her fear that I would be unable to fulfill that promise. I wondered if, like the missing Alice, there was a taint upon me, a wound left by the past that would somehow always find a way to infect the present and the future. I had tried, in recent months, to discover a means of neutralizing the threat, mainly by declining offers of work that sounded like they could involve any serious form of risk, my recent evening with Jackie Garner being the honorable exception. The trouble was that any job that was worth doing necessitated risk of some kind, and so I was spending time on cases that were progressively sapping my will to live. I had tried to walk this path before, but I was not living with Rachel when I followed it, and I did not last long upon it before I found the lure of the dark woods impossible to ignore.

Now a woman had come to my door, and she had brought with her her own pain, and the misery of another. It was possible that a simple explanation would arise for her daughter’s disappearance. There was little merit in ignoring the realities of Alice’s existence: her life at the Point was dangerous in the extreme, and her habit made her more vulnerable still. The women who worked those streets disappeared regularly. Some were fleeing their pimps or other violent men. Some tried to leave the life before it consumed them entirely, sick of robbery and rape, but few of those women succeeded, and most trudged back to the alleys and the parking lots with their hopes of escape entirely gone. The women tried to look out for one another, and the pimps monitored their movements too, if only to protect their investments, but these were gestures and little more. If someone was determined to hurt one of these women, then he would succeed.

We brought Louis’s aunt into the kitchen and entrusted her to the care of one of Rachel’s relatives. Soon she was eating chicken and pasta and sipping lemonade in a comfortable chair in the living room. When Louis went to check on her a little later, he found her asleep, exhausted by all that she had tried to achieve for her daughter.

Walter Cole joined us. He knew something of Louis’s past and suspected more. He was more knowledgeable about Angel, as Angel had the kind of criminal record that merited a sizable file all to itself, although its details pertained to the relatively distant past. I had asked Louis if we could involve Walter, and he acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Louis wasn’t the trusting kind, and he most certainly did not like involving the police in his affairs. Nevertheless, Walter, although retired, had connections with the NYPD that I no longer had, and was on better terms with serving officers than I was. Admittedly, that wasn’t difficult. There were those in the department who suspected that I had blood on my hands and would dearly have liked to call me to account for it. Cops on the street were less problematical for me, but Walter still had the respect of those higher up who might be in a position to offer assistance if it was needed.

“You’ll go back to the city tonight?” I asked Louis.

He nodded. “I want to find me that G-Mack.”

I hesitated before I spoke.

“I think you should wait.”

Louis’s head tilted slightly, and his right hand slapped lightly against the arm of his chair. He was a man of few unnecessary movements, and this pretty much qualified as an explosion of emotion.

“Why would you think that?” he said evenly.

“This is what I do,” I reminded him. “You go in there all fired up with your guns blazing, and everybody with even a passing concern for their own personal safety will disappear, whether they know you or not. If he gets away from you, we’ll need to tear the city apart to find him, and we’ll waste valuable time doing it. We know nothing about this guy. We need to change that before we go after him. You’re thinking about revenge for what he did to the woman in there. That can come later. What concerns us is her daughter. I want you to hold off.”

There was a risk involved in doing this. G-Mack now knew that someone was asking questions about Alice. Assuming that Martha was right, and something bad had befallen her, then the pimp had two options: he could sit tight, plead ignorance, and tell the women under him to do the same; or he could run. I just hoped that his nerve held until we got to him. My guess was that it would: he was new, since Louis knew nothing of him, and young; which meant that he was probably arrogant enough to consider himself a “playa” on the street. He had managed to establish some kind of operation at the Point. He would be reluctant to abandon it until it became absolutely necessary to do so.

There was a long silence as Louis considered his options.

“How long?” he said.

I looked to Walter.

“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “By then, I should have what you need.”

“Then we’ll move on him tomorrow night,” I said.

“We?” asked Louis.

“We,” I said.

He locked eyes with me.

“This is personal,” he said.

“I understand.”

“We need to be clear on that. You got your way of doing things, and I respect that, but your conscience got no part to play in this. You start doubting, I want you to walk away. That goes for everyone.”

His eyes flicked momentarily toward Walter. I could sense that Walter was about to respond, so I reached out and touched his arm, and he relaxed slightly. Walter would not involve himself in anything that violated his own strict moral code. Even without the badge, Walter was still a cop, and a good one. He had no need to justify himself to Louis.

Nothing more was said. We were done. I told Walter to use the office phone, and he began making some calls. Louis went to wake Martha so that he could bring her back to New York with him. Angel joined me at the front door.

“Does she know about you two?” I asked.

“I’ve never met her before,” said Angel. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t even sure that the family existed. I figured someone bred him in a cage, then released him into the wild. But I think she’s smart. If she doesn’t know now, she’ll guess soon enough. Then we’ll see.”

We watched as Rachel walked two of her friends to their car. She was beautiful. I loved the way that she carried herself, her poise, her grace. I felt something tear inside me, like a weakness in a wall that slowly begins to expand, threatening the strength and stability of the whole.

“She won’t like it,” said Angel.

“I owe Louis,” I replied.

Angel almost laughed. “You got no debt to him, or to me. Maybe you feel like you do, but we don’t see it that way. You have a family now. You have a woman who loves you, and a daughter who depends on you. Don’t screw it up.”

“I don’t intend to. I know what I have.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

What could I tell him? That I wanted to do this, that I needed to do this? It was part of the reason, I knew. Maybe also, in some low, hidden part of myself, I wanted to force them away, to hasten what I saw as an inevitable end.

But there was one more element, one that I could not explain to Angel, or to Rachel, or even to myself. I felt it as soon as I saw the cab moving along the road, drawing slowly closer and closer to the house. I felt it as I watched the woman step onto the gravel in our drive. I felt it as she told her story, trying to hold back the tears but desperate not to show weakness in front of strangers.

She was gone. Alice was gone, and wherever she now was she would never walk through this world as she once did. I couldn’t say how I knew it, any more than Martha could explain her sense that her daughter was at risk to begin with. This woman, filled with courage and love, was brought here for a reason. There was a connection, and it would not be denied. I had learned this from bitter experience. The troubles of others that found their way to my door were meant for my intervention and could not be ignored.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know that it has to be done.”

Gradually, most of the guests slipped away. They seemed to take with them whatever gaiety they had brought, leaving none behind in our house. Rachel’s parents, as well as her sister, were staying the night with us. Walter and Lee were due to spend a couple of days with us too, but Martha’s visit had caused the abandonment of that plan, and they were already on their way home so that Walter could talk to cops in person if necessary.

I was clearing up outside when Frank Wolfe cornered me. He was taller than I, and bulkier. He’d played football in high school, and there were colleges sufficiently impressed by him to consider offering him a scholarship, but Vietnam intervened. Frank didn’t even wait for the draft. He was a man who believed in duty and responsibility. Joan was already pregnant when he left, although neither of them knew it at the time. His son, Curtis, was born while he was “in country,” and a daughter followed two years later. Frank won some medals, but he never spoke about how he came by them. When Curtis, who had become a deputy with the county sheriff ’s office, was killed during a bank raid, he didn’t disintegrate or descend into self-pity the way some men might have done but instead held his family close to him, binding them to him so that they would have him to lean upon, so that they would not fall. There was much that was admirable about Frank Wolfe, but we were too dissimilar ever to manage more than a few civil words to each other.

Frank had a beer in his hand, but he wasn’t drunk. I had heard him talking to his wife earlier, and they had witnessed Martha’s arrival and the conclave that resulted. I figured Frank had subsequently slowed down on the booze, either of his own volition or at his wife’s instigation.

I picked up some paper plates and threw them into the garbage bag, still amazed that the weather was mild enough to allow guests to find their way outside, and relieved that I had cleared the lawn of snow a day earlier. Frank watched me but didn’t move to lend a hand.

“Everything okay, Frank?” I said.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

There was no point in brushing him off. He hadn’t become a good lawyer by lacking persistence. I finished clearing the plates from the garden table, tied up the garbage bag, and went to work on the empty bottles with a new bag. They made a satisfying clink as they hit the bottom.

“I’m doing my best, Frank,” I said softly. I didn’t want to have this discussion with him, not now and not ever, but it was upon us.

“With respect, I don’t think you are. You got duties now, responsibilities.”

I smiled, despite myself. There were those two words again. They defined Frank Wolfe. He would probably have them inscribed on his gravestone.

“I know that.”

“So you got to live up to them.”

He tried to emphasize his point by waggling the beer bottle at me. It diminished him, somehow, making him appear less like a concerned father and more like a garrulous drunk.

“Listen, this thing you do, it’s got Rachel worried. It’s always got her worried, and it’s put her at risk. You don’t put the people you love at risk. A man just doesn’t do that.”

Frank was trying his best to be reasonable with me, but he was already getting under my skin, maybe because all that he was saying was true.

“Look, there are other ways that you can use the skills you have,” he said. “I’m not saying give up on it entirely. I got contacts. I do a lot of work with insurance companies, and they’re always looking for good investigators. It pays well: better than what you earn now, that’s for sure. I can ask around, make some calls.”

I found myself hurling the bottles into the bag with more force. I took a deep breath to rein myself in, and tried to drop the next one as gently as I could.

“I appreciate the offer, Frank, but I don’t want to work as an insurance investigator.”

Frank had run out of “reasonable,” so he was forced to uncork something a little more potent. His voice rose.

“Well, you sure as hell can’t keep doing what you do now. What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s happening? You want the same thing to happen a-”

He stopped abruptly, but it was too late. It was out now. It lay, black and bloody, on the grass between us. I was suddenly very, very tired. The energy drained from my body, and I dropped the sack of bottles on the ground. I leaned against the table and lowered my head. There was a shard of sharp wood against the palm of my right hand. I pressed down steadily upon it, and felt skin and flesh give way beneath the pressure.

Frank shook his head. His mouth opened, then closed again without uttering a word. He was not a man given to apologies. Anyway, why should a man apologize for telling the truth? He was right. Everything that he had said was right.

And the terrible thing was that Frank and I were closer in spirit than he realized: we had both buried children, and both of us feared more than anything else a repetition of that act. Had I chosen to do so, I could have spoken at that moment. I could have told him about Jennifer, about the sight of the small white coffin disappearing beneath the first clods of earth, about organizing her clothes and her shoes so that they could be passed on to children still living, about the appalling sense of absence that followed, of the gaping holes in my being that could never be filled, of how I could not walk down a street without being reminded of her by every passing child. And Frank would have understood, because in every young man fulfilling his duty he saw his absent son, and in that brief truce some of the tension between us might have been erased forever.

But I did not speak. I was retreating from them all, and the old resentments were coming to the fore. A guilty man, confronted by the self-righteousness of others, will plead bitter innocence or find a way to turn his guilt upon his accusers.

“Go to your family, Frank,” I told him. “We’re done here.”

And I gathered up the garbage and left him in the evening darkness.

Rachel was in the kitchen when I returned, making coffee for her parents and trying to clean up some of the mess left on the table. I started to help her. It was the first time we had been alone since we had returned from the church. Rachel’s mother came in to offer help, but Rachel told her that we could take care of it. Her mother tried to insist.

“Mom, we’re fine,” said Rachel, and there was an edge to her voice that caused Joan to beat a hasty retreat, pausing only to give me a look that was equal parts sympathy and blame.

Rachel used the blade of a knife to begin scraping the food from a plate into the trash can. The plate had a dark blue pattern upon its rim, although it wouldn’t have it for much longer if Rachel continued to scratch at it.

“So, what’s going on?” she asked. She didn’t look at me as she spoke.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“You were kind of hard on Angel and Louis today, weren’t you? You hardly spoke a word to them while they were here. In fact, you’ve hardly spoken a word to me.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t spent the afternoon cloistered in your office, we might have found time to speak.”

It was a fair criticism, although we had been in the office for less than an hour.

“I’m sorry. Something came up.”

Rachel slammed the plate down on the edge of the sink. A small blue chip flew from the rim and was lost on the floor.

“What do you mean, ‘something came up’? It’s your daughter’s fucking christening!”

The voices in the living room went quiet. When the conversation picked up again, it sounded muted and strained.

I moved toward her.

“Rach-” I began.

She raised her hands and backed away.

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

I couldn’t move. My hands felt awkward and useless. I didn’t know what to do with them. I settled for putting them behind my back and leaning against the wall. It was as close as I could come to a gesture of surrender without raising them above my head or exposing my neck to the blade. I didn’t want to fight with Rachel. It was all too fragile. The slightest misstep, and we would be surrounded by the fragments and shards of our relationship. I felt my right hand stick to the wall. When I looked down there was blood upon it, left by the splinter cut.

“What did that woman want?” said Rachel. Her head was down, loose strands of hair falling over her cheeks and eyes. I wanted to see her face clearly. I wanted to push back her hair and touch her warm skin. Like this, her features hidden, she reminded me too much of another.

“She’s Louis’s aunt. Her daughter has gone missing in New York. I think she came to Louis as a last resort.”

“Did he ask you for help?”

“No, I offered to help.”

“What does she do, her daughter?”

“She was a street prostitute, and an addict. Her disappearance won’t be a priority for the cops, so someone else will have to look for her.”

Rachel ran her hands through her hair in frustration. This time, she did not try to stop me as I moved to hold her. Instead, she allowed me to press her head gently to my chest.

“It will just take a couple of days,” I said. “Walter has made some calls. We have a lead on her pimp. It may be that she’s safe somewhere, or in hiding. Sometimes women in the life drop out for a time. You know that.”

Slowly, her arms reached around my back and held me.

“Was,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You said ‘was.’ She was a prostitute.”

“It’s just the way that I phrased it.”

Her head moved against me in denial of the lie.

“No, it’s not. You know, don’t you? I don’t understand how you can tell, but I think you just know when there’s no hope. How can you carry that with you? How can you take the strain of that knowledge?”

I said nothing.

“I’m frightened,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t talk to Angel and Louis after the christening. I’m frightened of what they represent. When we spoke about them being godfathers to Sam, before she was born, it was like, well, it was like it was a joke. Not that I didn’t want them to do it, or that I didn’t mean it when I agreed, but it seemed like no harm could come of it. But today, when I saw them there, I didn’t want them to have anything to do with her, not in that way, and at the same time I know that each of them, without a second thought, would lay down his life to save Sam. They’d do the same for you, or for me. It’s just…I feel that they bring…”

“Trouble?” I said.

“Yes,” she whispered. “They don’t mean to, but they do. It follows them.”

Then I asked the question that I had been afraid to ask.

“And do you think that it follows me too?”

I loved her for her answer, even as another fissure appeared in all that we had.

“Yes,” she said. “I think those in need find you, but with them come those who cause misery and hurt.”

Her arms gripped me tighter, and her nails dug sharply into my back.

“And I love you for the fact that it pains you to turn away. I love you for wanting to help them, and I’ve seen the way you’ve been these last weeks. I’ve seen you after you walked away from someone you thought you could help.”

She was talking about Ellis Chambers from Camden, who had approached me a week earlier about his son. Neil Chambers was involved with some men in Kansas City, and they had their hooks pretty deep in him. Ellis couldn’t afford to buy him out of his trouble, so somebody was going to have to intervene on Neil’s behalf. It was a muscle job, but taking it would have separated me from Sam and Rachel, and would also have involved a degree of risk. Neil Chambers’s creditors were not the kind of individuals who took kindly to being told how to run their affairs, and they were not sophisticated in their methods of intimidation and punishment. In addition, Kansas City was way off my turf, and I told Ellis that he might find the men involved were more amenable to some local intervention than the involvement of a stranger. I made some inquiries, and passed on some names to him, but I could see that he was disappointed. For better or worse, I’d gained a reputation as a “go-to” guy. Ellis had expected more than a referral. Somewhere inside, I also believed that he deserved more.

“You did it for me, and for Sam,” said Rachel, “but I could tell the effort that it caused you. You see, that’s the thing of it: whichever way you turn, there will be pain for you. I just didn’t know how much longer you could keep turning away from those who reached out to you. I guess now I know. It ended today.”

“Rachel, she’s family to Louis. What else could I do?”

She smiled sadly.

“If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. You know that.”

I kissed the top of her head. She smelled of our child.

“Your dad tried to talk to me outside.”

“I bet you both enjoyed that.”

“It was great. We’re considering going on vacation together.”

I kissed her again.

“What about us?” I asked. “Are we okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I love you, but I don’t know.”

With that she released me, and left me alone in the kitchen. I heard her climb the stairs, and there came the creak of the door to the bedroom where Sam lay sleeping. I knew that she was looking down upon her, listening to her breathe, watching over her so that no harm would come to her.

That night, I heard the voice of the Other calling from beneath our window, but I did not go to the glass. And behind her words I discerned a chorus of voices, whispering and weeping. I covered my ears against them and squeezed my eyes tightly closed. In time, sleep came, and I dreamed of a leafless gray tree, its sharp branches curving inward, thick with thorns, and within the prison that they formed brown mourning doves fluttered and cried, a low whistling rising from their wings as they struggled, and blood upon their feathers where the thorns had pierced their flesh. And I slept as a new name was carved upon my heart.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Spyhole Motel was an unlikely oasis, a resting place for travelers who had almost entirely despaired of ever finding respite before the Mexican border. Perhaps they had skirted Yuma, tired of lights and people, longing to see the desert stars in all their glory, and had instead found themselves facing mile upon mile of stone and sand and cactus, bordered by high mountains they could not name. Even to stop briefly by the roadside was to invite thirst and discomfort, and maybe the attentions of the Border Patrol, for the coyotes ran their illegals along these routes, and the migras were always on the lookout for those who might be colluding with them in the hope of making some easy money. No, it was better not to stop here, wiser to keep moving in the hope of finding comfort elsewhere, and that was what the Spyhole promised.

A sign on the highway pointed south, advising the weary of the proximity of a soft bed, cold sodas, and functioning air-conditioning. The motel was simple and unadorned, apart from a vintage illuminated sign that buzzed in the night like a great neon bug. The Spyhole consisted of fifteen rooms set in a wide N shape, with the office at the end of the left arm. The walls were a light yellow, although without closer examination it was difficult to say whether this was their original color or if constant exposure to the sands had resulted in their transformation to that hue, as though the desert would tolerate the motel’s presence only if it could lay some claim to it by absorbing it into the landscape. It lay in a natural alcove, a gap between mountains known as the Devil’s Spyhole. The mountains gave the motel a little shade, although barely steps from its office the heat of the desert winds blew through the Devil’s Spyhole itself like the blast from the open door of an incinerator. A sign outside the office warned visitors not to wander from the motel’s property. It was illustrated with snakes and spiders and scorpions, and a drawing of a cloud puffing superheated air toward the black stick figure of a man. The drawing might almost have been comical, were it not for the fact that blackened figures were regularly found on the sands not far from the motel: illegals, mostly, tempted by the deceptive promise of great wealth.

The motel derived as much of its custom from referrals as from those who saw its sign in passing on the highway. There was a truck stop ten miles west, Harry’s Best Rest, with an all-night diner, a convenience store, showers and bathrooms, and space for up to fifty rigs. There was also a noisy cantina, frequented by specimens of human life that were barely one step up from the predatory desert creatures outside. The truck stop, with its lights and noise and promise of food and company, sometimes attracted those who had no business being there, travelers who were merely tired and lost and seeking a place to rest. Harry’s Best Rest was not meant for them, and its staff had learned that it was prudent to send them on their way with a suggestion that they seek some comfort at the Spyhole. Harry’s Best Rest was owned by a man named Harry Dean, who occupied a role that would have been familiar to his predecessors on the border a century before. Harry walked a thin line, doing just enough to satisfy the law and keep the migras and Smokies from his door, which in turn usually enabled him to stay on the right side of those individuals, mired in criminality, who frequented the shadier corners of his establishment. Harry paid some people off, and was in turn paid off. He turned a blind eye to the whores who serviced the truckers in their rigs or in the little cabanas to the rear, and to the dealers who supplied the drivers with uppers and other narcotics to keep them awake or bring them down as the need arose, as long as they kept their supply off the premises and safely stored amid the tangles of junk in the back of their assorted pickups and automobiles, the smaller vehicles interspersed among the huge rigs like bottom-feeders following the big predators.

It was 2 A.M. on Monday, and the Best Rest had quietened down some as Harry helped Miguel, his bar manager, to clean up behind the counter and restock the beer and liquor. Technically the cantina was no longer open for business, although anyone who wanted a drink at that time of night could still be served at the diner next door. Nevertheless, men continued to sit in the shadows, nursing their shots, some talking together, some alone. They were not the kind of men who could be told to leave. They would fade into the night in their own time, and of their own accord. Until then, Harry would not trouble them.

A connecting doorway led from the cantina into the diner. A sign on the diner side announced that the bar was now closed, but the main door to the cantina remained unlocked for the present. Harry heard it open and looked up to see a pair of men enter. Both were white. One was tall and in his early forties, with graying hair and some scarring to his right eye. He wore a blue shirt, a blue jacket, and jeans that were a little long at the ends, but was otherwise largely unremarkable in appearance.

The other man was almost as tall as his companion, but obscenely fat, his enormous belly hanging pendulously between his thighs like a great tongue lolling from an open mouth. His body appeared out of proportion to his legs, which were short and slightly bowed, as though they had struggled for many years to support the load they were required to bear and were at last buckling under the strain. The fat man’s face was perfectly round and quite pale, but his features were very delicate: green eyes enclosed by long, dark lashes; a thin, unbroken nose; and a long mouth with full, dark lips that were almost feminine. But any passing resemblance to traditional notions of facial beauty were undone by his chin, and the tumorous, distended neck in which it lost itself. It rolled over his shirt collar, purple and red, like an intimation of the gut that lay farther down. Harry was reminded of an old walrus that he had once seen in a zoo, a great beast of blubber and distended flesh on the verge of collapse. This man, by contrast, was far from the grave. Despite his bulk, he walked with a strange lightness, seemingly gliding across the sticky, shell-strewn floor of the cantina. Harry’s shirt was streaked with sweat even though the AC was blasting, yet the fat man’s face was entirely dry, and his white shirt and gray jacket appeared untouched by perspiration. He was balding, but his remaining hair was very black and cut short against his skull. Harry found himself mesmerized by the man’s appearance, the mix of terrible ugliness and near beauty, of obscene bulk and irreconcilable grace. Then the spell was broken, and Harry spoke.

“Hey,” said Harry. “We’re closed.”

The fat man paused, the sole of his right foot poised just above the floor. Harry could see an unbroken peanut just beneath his shoe leather.

The foot began to complete its descent. The shell started to flatten beneath the weight.

And Harry was suddenly confronted by the face of the fat man, inches from his own, staring straight at him. Then, before he could even begin to take in his presence, the fat man was to his left, then to his right, all the time whispering in a language Harry couldn’t understand, the words an unintelligible mass of sibilance and occasional harsh consonants, their precise meaning lost to him but their intimation clear.

Stay out of my way. Stay out of my way or you’ll be sorry.

The fat man’s face was a blur, his body zipping from side to side, his voice an insistent throbbing inside Harry’s head. Harry felt nauseous. He wanted it to stop. Why wasn’t anyone intervening on his behalf? Where was Miguel?

Harry reached out a hand in an effort to support himself against the bar.

And the movement around him suddenly ceased.

Harry heard the peanut shell crack. The fat man was where he had previously been, fifteen or twenty feet from the bar, his colleague behind him. Both were looking at Harry, and the fat man was smiling slightly, privy to a secret that only he and Harry now shared.

Stay out of my way.

In a far corner, Harry saw a hand raised: Octavio, who took care of the whores, absorbing a cut of their income in return for protection, and passing on a little of it to Harry in turn.

This was none of Harry’s business. He nodded once, and returned to cleaning off the overspill from the beer taps. He managed to complete his task, then slipped quietly into the little bathroom behind the bar, where he sat on the toilet seat for a time, his hands trembling, before he vomited violently into the sink. When he returned to the cantina, the fat man and his partner were gone. Only Octavio was waiting for him. He didn’t look much better than Harry felt.

“You okay?” he asked.

Harry swallowed. He could still taste bile in his mouth.

“Better we forget, you understand?” said Octavio.

“Yeah, I get you.”

Octavio gestured to the bar, pointing out the bottle of brandy on the top shelf. Harry took the bottle and poured the alcohol into a highball glass. He figured that Octavio didn’t need a snifter, not this time. The Mexican put a twenty on the bar.

“You need one too,” he said.

Harry poured himself a glass, keeping his hand heavy.

“There was a girl,” said Octavio. “Not local. Black Mexican.”

“I remember,” said Harry. “She was here tonight. She’s new. Figured her for one of yours.”

“She won’t be back,” said Octavio.

Harry lifted the glass to his lips, but found that he couldn’t drink. The taste of bile was returning. Vera, that was the girl’s name, or the name she had given when Harry had asked. Few of these women used their real name for business. He’d spoken to her once or twice, just in passing. He’d seen her maybe three times in all, but no more than that. She’d seemed pretty nice, for a whore.

“Okay,” said Harry.

“Okay,” said Octavio.

And, like that, the girl was gone.

There were only three rooms occupied at the Spyhole Motel. In the first room, a young couple on a road trip to Mexico were bickering, still argumentative after a long, uncomfortable journey. Soon they would descend into uneasy, prickly silence, until the boy made the first move toward reconciliation, heading out into the desert night and returning with sodas from the machine by the office. He would place one of the cans against the small of the girl’s back, and she would react with a shiver. He would kiss her, and tell her that he was sorry. She would kiss him back. They would drink, and soon the heat and the arguments would appear to be forgotten.

In the next room, a man sat in his vest upon a bed, watching a Mexican game show. He had paid for his room in cash. He could have stayed in Yuma, for he had business there in the morning, but his face was known, and he disliked staying in the city for longer than he had to. Instead, he sat in the remote motel and watched couples hug each other as they won prizes worth less than the money in his wallet.

The last room on this block of the motel was taken by another solo traveler. She was young, barely into her twenties, and she was running. They called her Vera in Harry’s Best Rest, but those who were seeking her knew her as Sereta. Neither name was real, but it no longer mattered to her what she was called. She had no family now, or none that cared. In the beginning, she had sent money home to her mother in Ciudad Juarez, supplementing the meager income she gleaned from her work in one of the big maquiladoras on Avenida Tecnologico. Sereta and her older sister Josefina had worked there too, until that November day when everything changed for them.

When she called home Sereta would tell Lilia, her mother, that she was working as a waitress in New York. Lilia did not question her, even though she knew that her daughter, before she left for the north, had frequently been seen leaving the gated communities of the Campestre Juarez, where the wealthy Americans lived, and the only local women admitted to such places were servants and whores. Then, in November 2001, the body of Sereta’s sister Josefina was one of eight found in an overgrown cotton field near the Sitio Colosio Valle mall. The bodies were badly mutilated, and the protests of the poor increased in volume, for these were not the first young women to die in this place, and there were stories told of wealthy men behind barred gates who had now added killing for pleasure to their list of recreations. Sereta’s mother told her to leave and not to come back. She never mentioned the Campestre Juarez to her daughter, and the rich men in their black cars, but she knew.

One year later, Lilia too was dead, taken by a cancer that her daughter believed was a physical manifestation of pain and grief, and now Sereta was alone. In New York, she had found a kindred spirit in Alice, but that friendship too had been sundered. Alice should have stayed with her, but the grip of the sickness was tight upon her, and she had made her own choice to remain in the big city. Sereta, instead, had headed south. She knew these desert places and how they worked. She wanted those who were pursuing her to think that she had crossed into Mexico. Instead, she planned to skirt the border, making for the West Coast, where she hoped to disappear for a time until she could figure out her next move. She knew that what she had was valuable. After all, she had listened to a man die for it.

Sereta too was watching television, but the volume was down low. She found the glow comforting but did not wish the babble to disturb her thoughts. Money was the problem. Money was always the problem. She had been forced to run so suddenly that there was no time to plan, no time to assemble what few funds she had to her name. She had a friend bring her car to her, then drove away, putting as much space between herself and the city as possible.

She’d heard about the Best Rest in the past. It was a place where nobody asked too many questions and where a girl could make some money quickly, then move on without any further obligation, as long as she paid her cut to the right people. She took a room at the Spyhole, negotiating a pretty good deal, and had nearly two thousand dollars put away after just a few days, thanks in part to a particularly generous tip from a truck driver whose sexual tastes, messy but harmless, she had indulged the night before. Soon she would move along. Maybe just one more night, though, she thought, even as, unbeknownst to her, her existence had already bound itself to the lives of those who had taken her sister.

For far to the north, the Mexican named Garcia might have smiled familiarly at the mention of Josefina’s name, recalling her final moments as he busied himself with the remains of another young woman…

There was only one other person on the motel property. He was a slim young man of Mexican descent, and he was seated behind the reception desk in the office, reading a book. The book was entitled The Devil’s Highway, and it told of the deaths of fourteen Mexicans who had attempted to cross the border illegally not many miles from where the motel lay. The book made the young man angry, even as he felt a sense of relief that his parents had made a good life here and that such a death was not destined to be his.

It was almost 3 A.M., and he was about to lock the door and retire to the back room for some sleep, when he saw the two white men approach the office. He had not heard their car pull up and supposed that they must have deliberately parked some way off. Already he was on his guard, for that made no sense to him. There was a gun beneath the counter, but he had never had cause even to show it. Now that most people paid by credit card, motels provided poor pickings for thieves.

One of the men was tall and dressed in blue. The heels of his cowboy boots clicked upon the tiles as he entered the office. His companion was absurdly corpulent. The clerk, whose name was Ruiz, believed that he had never before seen a man who looked quite so unhealthy, and he had seen many fat Americans in his young life. The fat man’s belly hung so far between his thighs that Ruiz guessed that he must have been obliged to lift it up each time he made water. He carried in his hand a tan straw hat with a white band, and wore a light jacket over a white shirt, and tan pants. His shoes were brown, and polished to a high sheen.

“How you doing tonight?” asked Ruiz.

The thin man answered.

“We’re doing well. You full up?”

“Nah, when we’re full we turn on the NO VACANCIES sign out on the road to save folks a trip.”

“You can do that from here?” asked the thin man. He sounded genuinely interested.

“Sure,” said Ruiz. He pointed to a box upon the wall, lined with switches. Each was carefully labeled with a handwritten sticker. “I just flick a switch.”

“Amazing,” said the thin man.

“Fascinating,” said his colleague, speaking for the first time. Unlike the other man, he did not sound interested. His voice was soft, and slightly higher in pitch than a man’s voice should have been.

“So, would you like a room?” asked Ruiz. He was tired and wanted to get the two men booked in and their cards processed so that he could catch up on his sleep. He also, he realized, wanted to get them out of the office. The fat man smelled peculiar. He hadn’t noticed any stench from the one in blue, but the tubby guy had an unusual body odor. He smelled earthy, and Ruiz involuntarily found himself picturing pale worms breaking through damp clods of dirt and black beetles scurrying for the shelter of stones.

“We may need more than one,” replied Blue.

“Two?”

“How many rooms do you have?”

“Fifteen altogether, but three are occupied.”

“Three guests.”

“Four.”

Ruiz stopped talking. There was something wrong here. Blue was no longer even listening. Instead, he had picked up Ruiz’s book and was looking at the cover.

“Luis Urrea,” he read. “The Devil’s Highway.”

He turned to his companion.

“Look,” he said, displaying the book to him. “Maybe we should buy a copy.”

The fat man glanced at the cover.

“I know the route,” he said drily. “If you want it, just take that one and save some money.”

Ruiz was about to say something when the fat man struck him in the throat, slamming him back against the wall. Ruiz experienced a sense of pain and constriction as small, delicate parts of himself were crushed by the blow. He was having trouble breathing. He tried to form words, but they would not come. He fell against the wall and a second blow came. He slid slowly to the floor. His face was turning dark as he suffocated, his windpipe entirely ruined. Ruiz began to claw at his mouth and throat. He could hear a clicking noise, like the ticking of a clock counting down his final moments. The two men did not appear particularly interested in his sufferings. The fat man walked around the desk, stepping carefully over Ruiz. The dying man again caught the smell of him as he switched on the NO VACANCIES sign out on the highway. His companion, meanwhile, flicked through that night’s guest registration cards.

“One couple in two,” he told the fat man. “One male in three. The name sounds Mexican. One woman in twelve, registered under the name Vera Gooding.”

The fat man didn’t acknowledge him. He was now standing over Ruiz, watching blood and spittle trail from the corners of his mouth.

“I’ll take the couple,” he said. “You take the Mexican.”

He squatted down beside Ruiz. It was a surprisingly graceful movement, like the dipping of a swan’s head. He extended his right hand and brushed the hair from the young man’s brow. There was a mark on the underside of the fat man’s forearm. It looked like a twin-pronged fork, recently burned into the flesh. The fat man turned Ruiz’s head from left to right.

“Do you think we should bring it back for our Mexican friend?” asked Blue. “He works well with bone.”

“Too much trouble,” said the fat man.

His tone was dismissive. The fat man gripped Ruiz’s hair, turning his head slightly, then leaned in close to him. His mouth opened slightly, and Ruiz saw a pink tongue and teeth that tapered to blunt ends. Ruiz’s eyes were bulging, and his face was purple. He spit red fluid, and as he did so the fat man’s lips touched his, his mouth closing entirely upon Ruiz’s, his hand clasping the young man’s face and chin, keeping his jaws apart. The Mexican tried to struggle, but he could not fight both the fat man and the end that was coming. A word flashed in his head, and he thought: Brightwell. What is Brightwell?

His grip upon the fat man’s shoulder loosened, his legs relaxed, and the fat man drew away from him and stood.

“You have blood on your shirt,” Blue told Brightwell.

He sounded bored.

Danny Quinn watched his girlfriend as she carefully applied the small brush to her toenails. The polish was a mix of purple and red. It made her look as though her toes were bruised, but Danny decided to keep this opinion to himself. He was content to bask for a time in the afterglow of their lovemaking, taking in her concentration and her poise. At times like these, Danny loved Melanie deeply. He had cheated on her, and would probably cheat on her again, although he prayed each night for the strength to remain faithful. He wondered sometimes at what would happen if she found out about his other life. Danny liked women, but he distinguished between sex and lovemaking. Sex meant little to him, apart from the satiation of an urge. It was like scratching an itch: if his right hand was broken and his back was itchy, then he’d use his left to deal with it. All things being equal, he would prefer to use his right hand, but an itch was an itch, right? If Melanie wasn’t around-and her work with the bank sometimes required her to be away from home for two or three days-then Danny would go elsewhere for his pleasure. Mostly, he told the women involved that he was single. Some of them didn’t even ask. One or two had fallen for him a little, and that had created problems, but he had worked them out. Danny had even used hookers on occasion. The sex was different with them, but he did not consider sex with hookers as cheating on Melanie. There was no emotion involved at all, and Danny reasoned that without emotion there was no real betrayal of his feelings for Melanie. It was clinical, and he always practiced safe sex, even with the ones who offered a little extra.

Deep down, Danny wanted to be the person that Melanie thought he was. He tried to tell himself, each time he strayed, that this would be the last. Sometimes he could go for weeks, even months, without being with another woman, but eventually he would find himself alone for a time, or in a strange city, and the urge to trawl would take him.

But he did love Melanie, and if he could have turned back the clock of his life and made his choices again-his first hooker, and the shame he felt afterward; the first time he cheated on someone, and the guilt that came with it-he believed that he would live his life differently, and that he would be a better, happier man as a result.

I will start again, he lied to himself. It was like alcoholism, or any other addiction. You had to take things one day at a time, and when you fell off the wagon, well, you just got right back up again and started counting from one.

He reached out to stroke Melanie’s back, and heard a knock at the door.

Melanie Gardner was afraid that Danny was cheating on her. She didn’t know why she thought it, for none of her friends had ever seen him with another woman, and she had never found any telltale signs on his clothes or in his pockets. Once, while he was sleeping, she had tried to read his e-mails, but he was scrupulous about deleting both sent and received mail, apart from those that had to do with his business. There were a lot of women in his address book, but she did not recognize any of the names. Anyway, Danny was regarded as one of the best electricians in town, and in her experience it was women who tended to make most of the business calls to Danny, probably because their husbands were too ashamed to admit that there was something around the house that they could not repair themselves.

Now, as she sat on the bed, the warmth of him gradually fading, she felt the urge to confront him. She wanted to ask him if he was seeing someone else, if he had ever been with another woman in the time that they had been together. She wanted to look in his eyes as he answered, because she believed that she would be able to tell if he was lying. She loved him. She loved him so much that she was afraid to ask, for if he lied, she would know, and it would break her heart, and if he told her what she feared was the truth, then that would also break her heart. The tension she had been feeling had broken through at last in a dumb argument about music earlier in the evening, and then they had made love even though Melanie did not really want to. It had allowed her to delay the confrontation, nothing more, just as painting her toenails had suddenly seemed a matter of great urgency.

Melanie painstakingly filled in the last patch of clear nail upon her little toe, then placed the brush back in the polish, turning slightly as she did so. She saw Danny reaching out for her.

She opened her mouth to speak at last, and heard a knock at the door.

Edgar Certaz thumbed idly at the remote control, flashing through the channels. There were so many that by the time he had finished flicking through them all he had forgotten if there were any of the earlier ones that merited his attention. He settled at last upon a Western. He thought it very slow. Three men were waiting for a train. The train came. A man with a harmonica got off. He killed the three men. An Italian played an Irishman, and an American actor whose face was familiar to him appeared as the villain, which threw Certaz a little as he had only ever seen the American play good guys. There were few Mexicans that he could see, which was good. Certaz was tired of seeing peasants in white clutching sombreros as they appealed for help against bandits from gunmen in black, as though all Mexicans were either victims or cannibals who fed on their own.

Certaz was a middleman, an intermediary. Like the woman in the next room he had connections with Juarez, and he and his fellow narcotraficantes had been responsible for many deaths in the city. His was a dangerous business, but he was paid well for his troubles. Tomorrow, he would meet two men and arrange for the delivery of $2 million worth of cocaine, for which he and his associates would receive a 40 percent commission. If the delivery proceeded without a hitch, the next consignment would be considerably larger, and his reward commensurately greater. Certaz would make all of the arrangements, but at no point would either drugs or money be in his possession. Edgar Certaz had learned to insulate himself from risk.

The Colombians still controlled the manufacture of cocaine, but it was the Mexicans who were now the biggest traffickers of the drug in the world. The Colombians had given them their start in the trade, albeit unintentionally, by paying Mexican smugglers in cocaine instead of cash. Sometimes, up to half of every shipment into the United States went to the Mexicans. Certaz was one of the original mules, and had quickly worked his way up to a position of prominence in the Juarez cartel controlled by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “Lord of the Skies” after he pioneered the use of jumbo jets to transport huge shipments of drugs between territories.

In November 1999, a joint raid by Mexican and U.S. law enforcement unearthed a mass grave at a desert ranch named La Campana, near Juarez. The grave contained two hundred bodies, maybe more. La Campana was once the property of Fuentes and his lieutenant, Alfonso Corral Olaguez. Carrillo had died in the summer of 1997, following an overdose of anesthesia administered in the course of plastic surgery intended to change his appearance. It was rumored that his Colombian suppliers, envious of his influence, had paid off the medics. Two months later Corral was shot and killed at the Maxfim restaurant in Juarez, leading to a bloody turf war headed by Carrillo’s brother Vicente. The bodies at La Campana, stored in the narco-bunkers that riddled the land, included the remains of those who had crossed Carrillo, among them members of the rival Tijuana cartel as well as unfortunate peasants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certaz knew this, because he had helped to put some of them there. The discovery of the bodies had increased the pressure on the Mexican dealers, forcing them to be ever more careful in their operations, and so the need for men with Certaz’s expertise had grown considerably. He had survived the investigations and the recriminations, and had emerged stronger and more secure than ever before.

In the movie, a woman arrived on a train. She was expecting someone to meet her, but there was nobody waiting. She took a ride out to a homestead, where the Irishman lay dead on a picnic table alongside his children.

Certaz was bored. He pressed his thumb against the remote to kill the picture, and heard a knock at the door.

Danny Quinn draped a towel around his waist and went to the door.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Police.”

It was a mistake, but Brightwell was distracted. It had been a long trip, and he was tired. The heat of the day had made him weary, and now the comparative cool of the desert night had taken him by surprise.

Danny looked at Melanie. She took her purse and headed for the bathroom, closing the door behind her. They had a little weed in a Ziploc bag, but Melanie would just flush it down the john. It was a shame to lose it, but Danny could always get more.

“You got some ID?” said Danny.

He still had not opened the door. He looked through the spy hole and saw a fat man with a round face and a weird neck holding up a badge and a laminated identification card.

“Come on,” said the man. “Open up. This is just routine. We’re searching for illegals. I just need to take a look inside, ask you some questions, then I’ll be gone.”

Danny swore, but relaxed a little. He wondered if Melanie had already flushed their stash. He hoped not. He opened the door, and smelled something unpleasant. He tried to hide his shock at the man’s appearance, but failed. Already, he knew that he had made a mistake. This was no cop.

“You alone?” asks the fat man.

“My girlfriend is in the bathroom.”

“Tell her to come out.”

This is all wrong, thought Danny, all wrong.

“Hey,” he said. “Let me have another look at that badge.”

The fat man reached into his jacket pocket. When his hand reemerged, it was not holding a wallet. Danny Quinn saw a flash of silver, and then felt the blade enter his chest. The fat man grabbed Danny’s hair and pushed the blade up and to the left. He heard the girl’s voice calling from the bathroom.

“Danny?” said Melanie. “Is everything okay?”

Brightwell released his grip on Danny’s hair and yanked the blade free. The boy collapsed onto the floor. His body spasmed, and the fat man placed his foot upon his stomach to still him. Had he more time, Brightwell might have kissed him as he had Ruiz, but there were more pressing matters to which to attend.

From the bathroom came the flushing of a toilet, but it was being used to mask another sound. There was the creak of a window sliding open, and a screen being forced. Brightwell walked to the bathroom and raised his right foot, then shattered the lock with the impact.

Edgar Certaz heard the knock on the adjoining room seconds after someone commenced knocking on his own door. He then discerned a male voice identify himself as a cop claiming to be hunting illegals.

Certaz was not dumb. He knew that when the cops came hunting, they didn’t do it so politely. They came hard and fast, and in force. He also knew that this motel was not on their shit list, because it was relatively expensive and well run. The sheets were clean and the towels in the bathroom were changed every day. It was also far from the main routes used by the illegals. Any Mexican who got this far was not going to check into the Spyhole Motel for a bath and a porno movie. He was going to be sitting in the back of a van headed north or west, congratulating himself and his buddies on making it across the desert.

Certaz did not reply to the knock on his door. The knock came again.

“Open up,” said a voice. “This is the police.”

Certaz carried a lightweight Smith amp; Wesson mountain gun, with a short, four-inch barrel. He did not possess a license for it. While he did not have a criminal record, he knew that if he was taken in and fingerprinted, his prints would set off alarm bells in local and federal agencies and that he would be a very old man by the time he was released, assuming that they did not find an excuse to execute him first. So two thoughts crossed Edgar’s mind. The first was that if this really was a police raid, then he was in trouble. The second thought was that, if these men were not police, then they were still trouble, but trouble that could be dealt with. He heard a muffled scream from the room next door as Brightwell dealt with Danny Quinn’s girlfriend.

You want me to open up, decided Edgar, then I’ll open up.

He drew the Smith amp; Wesson, walked to the wooden door, and began firing.

Blue bucked as the first of the shots hit him in the chest, its force diminished slightly by its passage through the door. The second took him in the right shoulder as he spun, and he grunted loudly as he hit the sand. There was no use for silence now. He drew his own Double Eagle and fired from the ground as the door to the motel room opened.

There was nobody in the gap. Then Certaz’s gun appeared, low down from the left, where the Mexican was hunched beneath the window. Blue saw the dark finger tense upon the trigger and prepared for the end.

Shots came, but not from the Mexican. Brightwell was at the window, firing down at an angle through the glass. He shot Edgar Certaz in the top of the head and the Mexican tumbled forward, even as two more bullets entered his back.

Blue rose to his feet. There was now blood on his shirt too. He swayed a little.

From the back of the motel, they heard the sound of someone running. The door to the last motel room remained closed, but they knew that their quarry was no longer inside.

“Go,” said Blue.

Brightwell moved quickly. He ran less gracefully than he walked, rocking from side to side on his stubby legs, but he was still fast. He heard a car starting, then the engine being gunned. Seconds later, a yellow Buick shot around the corner of the motel. There was a young woman behind the wheel. Brightwell fired, aiming to the right of the driver’s head. The windshield was hit, but the car kept coming, forcing him to throw himself to one side to avoid being struck. His next shots took out the tires and blew out the rear window. He watched with satisfaction as the Buick hit the late Edgar Certaz’s truck and came to a sudden halt.

Brightwell got to his feet and approached the ruined car. The young woman inside lay dazed in the driver’s seat. There was blood on her face, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.

Good, thought Brightwell.

He opened the door and pulled her from the car.

“No,” Sereta whispered. “Please.”

“Where is it, Sereta?”

“I don’t know what-”

Brightwell punched her in the nose. It broke under the impact.

“I said, where is it?”

Sereta fell to her knees, her hands against her face. He could barely understand her when she told him that it was in her purse.

The fat man reached into the car and retrieved the purse. He began tossing the contents onto the ground until he found the small silver box. Carefully, he opened it and examined the piece of yellowed vellum within. He looked at it and, seemingly content, replaced it in the box.

“Why did you take it?” he asked. He was genuinely curious.

Sereta was crying. She said something, but it was muffled by her tears and the hands that she had cupped over her ruined nose. Brightwell leaned down.

“I can’t hear you,” he said.

“It was pretty,” said Sereta, “and I didn’t have any pretty things.”

Brightwell stroked her hair almost tenderly.

Blue was approaching. He staggered a little, but remained on his feet. Sereta crawled back against the car, trying to stem the bleeding from her nose. She looked at Blue, and he seemed to shimmer. For a moment she saw a black, emaciated body, tattered wings hanging from nodes upon its back, and long, taloned fingers that clutched feebly at the air. The figure’s eyes were yellow, shining in a face that was almost without features, apart from a mouth filled with small, sharp teeth. Then the shape before her was, once again, a man dying upon his feet.

“Jesus, help me,” she said. “Jesus, Lord God, help me.”

Brightwell kicked her hard in the side of the head, and her words ceased. He dragged her limp body to the trunk of her car, opened it, then dumped her inside before walking to his own Mercedes and returning with two plastic cans of gas.

Blue leaned against the Buick as his colleague approached. His eyes lingered for a moment on the gasoline, then shifted away.

“Don’t you want her?” he said.

“I would taste her words in my mouth,” said Brightwell. “Strange, though.”

“What is?” asked Blue.

“That she should believe in God and not in us.”

“Perhaps it is easier to believe in God,” says Blue. “God promises so much…”

“…but delivers so little,” finished Brightwell. “We make fewer promises, but we keep them all.”

Had Sereta been able to see him, then Blue would have shimmered again before her eyes. His companion did not notice. He saw Blue as he had always seen Blue.

“I am fading,” said Blue.

“I know. We were careless. I was careless.”

“It does not matter. Perhaps I will wander for a time.”

“Perhaps,” said Brightwell. “In time, we will find you again.”

He sprayed gasoline upon his companion, dousing his clothes, his hair, his skin, then poured the remainder upon the interior of the Buick. He tossed the empty containers onto the backseat, then stood before Blue.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye,” said Blue. He was almost blinded by the gasoline, but he found the open door of the Buick and eased himself into the driver’s seat. Brightwell regarded him for a moment, then took a Zippo from his pocket and watched the flame take life. He tossed the lighter into the car and walked away. He did not look back, not even when the gas tank exploded and the darkness behind him was lit by a new fire as Blue passed from this world, and was transformed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Each of us lives two lives: our real life and our secret life.

In our real life, we are what we appear to be. We love our husbands or our wives. We care for our children. Each morning we pick up a bag or a briefcase and we do what we must to oil the wheels of our existence. We sell bonds, we clean hotel rooms, we serve beer to the kind of men with whom we would not share our air if we had a choice in the matter. We eat our lunch in a diner, or on a bench in a park where people walk their dogs and children play in the sunlight. We feel a sentimental urge to smile at the animals because of the joy they take in the simplicity of a stroll through green grass, or at the children paddling in pools and racing through sprinklers; but still we return to our desks or our mops or our bars feeling less happy than we formerly were, unable to shake off the creeping sense that we are missing something, that there is supposed to be more than this to our lives.

Our real life-anchored by those twin weights (and here they come again, our careworn friends) duty and responsibility, their edges considerately curved, the better to fit upon our shoulders-permits us our small pleasures, for which we are inordinately grateful. Come, take a walk in the countryside, the earth spongy and warm beneath your feet, but be aware always of the ticking clock, summoning you back to the cares of the city. Look, your husband has made dinner for you, lighting the candle that his mother gave you for a Christmas gift, the one that now makes the dining room smell of mull and spices although it is already mid-July. See, your wife has been reading Cosmo again, and in an effort to add a little spice to your waning sex life has for once gone farther than JCPenney for her lingerie, and has learned a new trick from the pages of her magazine. She had to read it twice just to understand some of the terminology, and had to rely on ancient memory to summon up a picture of the sad, semitumescent organ that she now proposes to service in this manner, so long has it been since any such matters passed between the two of you without the cover of blankets and smothered lights, the easier to fantasize about J. Lo or Brad, perhaps the girl who takes your order at the sandwich bar, or Liza’s kid from two doors down, the one who is just back from college and is now transformed from a geeky little kid with railroad braces into a veritable Adonis with white, even teeth and tanned, muscular legs.

And in the darkness, one upon the other, the real life blurs at its margins, and the secret life intrudes with a rush and a moan and the flicking tongue of desire.

For in our secret life, we are truly ourselves. We look at the pretty woman in marketing, the new arrival, the one with the dress that falls open when she crosses her legs, revealing a pristine expanse of pale thigh, and in our secret life we do not see the veins about to break beneath her skin, or the birthmark shaped like an old bruise that muddies the beauty of her whiteness. She is flawless, unlike the one we have left behind that morning, thoughts of her new bedroom trick already forgotten for it will be put away as surely as will be the Christmas candle, and neither trick nor light will see use for many months to come. And so we take instead the hand of the new fantasy, unsullied by reality, and we lead her away, and she sees us as we truly are as she takes us inside her and, for an instant, we live and die within her, for she needs no magazine to teach her arcane things.

In our secret life, we are brave and strong, and know no loneliness, for others take the place of once-loved (and once-desired) partners. In our secret life, we take the other path, the one that was offered to us once but from which we shied away. We live the existence we were meant to lead, the one denied us by husbands and wives, by the demands of children, by the requirements of petty office tyrants. We become all that we were meant to be.

In our secret life, we dream of striking back. We point a gun and we pull the trigger, and it costs us nothing. There is no regret at the wound inflicted, the body slumping backward, already crumpling as the spirit leaves it. (And perhaps there is another waiting at that moment, the one who tempted us, the one who promised us that this is as it was meant to be, that this is our destiny, and he asks only this one small indulgence: that he may place his lips against those of the dying man, the fading woman, and taste the sweetness of what passes from them so that it flutters briefly like a butterfly in his mouth before he swallows, trapping it deep inside him. This is all that he asks, and who are we to deny him?)

In our secret life our fists pummel, and the face that blurs with blood beneath them is the face of everyone who has ever crossed us, every individual who has prevented us from becoming all that we might have been. And he is beside us as we punish the flesh, his ugliness forgiven in return for the great gift that he has given us, the freedom that he has offered. He is so convincing, this blighted man with his distended neck, his great, sagging stomach, his too-short legs and his too-long arms, his delicate features almost lost in his pale, puckered skin, that to gaze on him from afar is like looking at a full, clear moon as a child and believing that one can almost see the face of the man who dwells within it.

He is Brightwell, and with sugared words he has fed us the story of our past, of how he has wandered for so long, searching for those who were lost. We did not believe him at first, but he has a way of convincing us, oh yes. Those words dissolve inside us, their essence coursing through our system, their constituent elements in turn becoming part of us. We begin to remember. We look deep into those green eyes, and the truth is at last revealed.

In our secret life, we once were angels. We adored, and we were adored. And when we fell, the last great punishment was to mark us forever with all that we had lost, and to torment us with the memory of all that once was ours. For we are not like the others. All has been revealed to us, and in that revelation lies freedom.

Now we live our secret life.

I awoke to find myself alone in our bed. Sam’s cradle was empty and silent, and the mattress was cold to the touch, as though no child had ever been laid upon it. I walked to the door and heard noises coming from the kitchen below. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs.

There were shadows moving in the kitchen, visible through the half-ajar door, and I could hear closets being opened and closed. A woman’s voice spoke. Rachel, I thought: she has taken Sam downstairs to feed her, and she is talking to her as she always talks to her, sharing her thoughts and hopes with her as she does whatever she must do. I saw my hand stretch out and push the door, and the kitchen was revealed to me.

A little girl sat at the end of the kitchen table, her head slightly bowed and her long blond hair brushing the wood and the empty plate that sat before her, its blue pattern now slightly chipped. She was not moving. Something dripped from her face and fell to the plate, expanding redly upon it.

Who are you looking for?

The voice did not emerge from the girl. It seemed to be coming to me both from some distant, shadowy place and also from close by, whispering coldly in my ear.

They are back. I want them to go. I want them to let me be.

Answer me.

Not you. I loved you, and I will always love you, but you are gone.

No. We are here. Wherever you are, so will we be too.

Please, I need to put you to rest at last. Everything is coming to pieces. You are tearing me apart.

She will not stay. She will leave you.

I love her. I love her as I once loved you.

No! Don’t say that. Soon she will be gone, and when she leaves we will still be here. We will stay with you, and we will lie by you in the darkness.

A crack appeared in the wall to my right, and a fissure opened in the floor. The window shattered and fragments of glass exploded inward, each shard reflecting trees and stars and moonlight, as though the whole world were disintegrating around me.

I heard my daughter upstairs, and I ran, taking the stairs two at a time. I opened the bedroom door and Rachel was standing by the crib, Sam in her arms.

“Where were you?” I asked. “I woke up, and you weren’t there.”

She looked at me. She was tired, and there were stains on her nightshirt.

“I had to change her. I took her into the bathroom so she wouldn’t wake you.”

Rachel laid Sam in her cot. Once she was happy that our daughter was comfortable and settled, she prepared to return to bed. I stood over Sam, then leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

A small drop of blood fell upon her face. I dabbed it away with my thumb, then walked to the mirror in the corner. There was a small cut below my left eye. When I touched it, it stung me sharply. I stretched the abrasion with my fingers, and explored it until I had removed the tiny fragment of glass from within. A single tear of blood wept down my cheek.

“Are you okay?” asked Rachel.

“I cut myself.”

“Is it bad?”

I wiped my arm across my face, smearing the blood.

“No,” I lied. “No, it’s not bad at all.”

I left for New York early the next morning. Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, in the seat where the night before a young girl had sat, blood slowly pooling on the plate before her. Sam had been awake for two hours, and was now crying furiously. Usually, once she was awake and fed, she was content simply to watch the world go by. Walter was a source of particular fascination for her, his presence causing Sam’s face to light up whenever he appeared. In his turn, the dog always remained close to the child. I knew that dogs sometimes became disconcerted by the arrival of a new child in a house, confused by how this might affect the pecking order. Some became actively hostile as a result, but not Walter. Although he was a young dog, he seemed to recognize some duty of protection toward the little being that had entered his territory. Even the day before, during the fuss following the christening, it had taken him time to separate himself from Sam. It was only when he was assured of the presence of Rachel’s mother close by that he appeared to relax and attached himself instead to Angel and Louis.

Rachel’s mother was not yet awake. While Frank had returned to work that morning, managing to avoid me entirely before leaving, Joan had offered to stay with Rachel while I was gone. Rachel had accepted the offer without question, and I was grateful to her for that. The house was well protected: prompted by events in the recent past, we had installed a system of motion sensors that alerted us to the presence of anything larger than a fox on our property, and cameras kept vigil both on the main gate and the yard, and on the marshland behind, feeding images to twin monitors in my office. The investment was considerable, but it was worth it for peace of mind.

I kissed Rachel good-bye.

“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said.

“I know. I understand.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

She was holding Sam against her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she would not be comforted. I kissed Sam too, and I felt Rachel’s warmth, her breast pressed against my arm. I recalled that we had not made love since Sam was born, and the distance between us seemed even greater as a result.

Then I left them and drove away in silence.

The pimp named G-Mack sat in the darkened apartment on Coney Island Avenue that he shared with some of his women. He had a place in the Bronx, closer to the Point, but he had been using it less and less frequently of late, ever since the men came looking for his two whores. The arrival of the old black woman had spooked him even more, and so he had retreated to his private crib, venturing out to the Point only at night and keeping a distance from the main streets whenever possible.

G-Mack wasn’t too sure about the wisdom of living on Coney Island Avenue. It was once a dangerous stretch of road, even back in the nineteenth century, when gang members preyed on the tourists returning from the beaches. In the 1980s, hookers and pushers colonized the area around Foster Avenue, their presence made clearer by the bright lights of the nearby gas station. Now there were still whores and dealers, but they were a little less obvious, and they fought for sidewalk space alongside Jews and Pakistanis and Russians and people from countries of which G-Mack had never even heard. The Pakistanis had been having a hard time of it in the aftermath of 9/11, and G-Mack had heard that a lot of them were arrested by the Feds, while others had left for Canada or gone back home entirely. Some of them had even changed their names, so it sometimes seemed like there had been a sudden influx of Pakistanis named Eddie and Steve into G-Mack’s world, like the plumber he’d been forced to call a week or two back after one of the bitches managed to clog up the bowl by flushing something down there about which G-Mack didn’t even want to know. The plumber used to be called Amir. That was what it said on his old card, the one G-Mack had pinned to the refrigerator door with a Sinbad magnet, but on his new card he was now Frank. Frank Shah, like that was going to fool anyone. Even the three numerals, the 786 that Amir once told him stood for “In the name of Allah,” were now gone from beside his address. G-Mack didn’t much care either way. Amir was a good plumber, as far as he could tell, and he wasn’t about to hold a grudge against a man who could do his job, especially since he might need his services again sometime. But G-Mack didn’t like the smell of the Pakistani stores, or the food that they sold in their restaurants, or the way that they dressed, either too neat or too casual. He distrusted their ambition, and their manic insistence that their kids better themselves. G-Mack suspected that good old Frank-Who-Was-Really-Amir bored the ass off his kids with his sermons on the American dream, maybe pointing to black people like G-Mack as a negative example, even if G-Mack was a better businessman than Amir would ever be and even if G-Mack’s people weren’t the ones who steered two jets into New York’s tallest buildings. G-Mack had no personal beef with the Pakistanis who lived around him, food and clothing aside, but shit like 9/11 was everybody’s business, and Frankie-Amir and his people needed to make it clear just whose side they were on.

G-Mack’s place was on the top floor of a three-story brownstone with brightly painted cornices, between Avenues R and S, close to the Thayba Islamic Center. The Thayba was separated from the Keshet Jewish day-care center by a kids’ play group, which some people might have called progress but which bothered the hell out of G-Mack, these two opposing sides being so close to each other, although maybe not as much as the fucking Hasidim farther down the avenue in their threadbare black coats, their kids all pale with their fag curls. It didn’t surprise G-Mack that they always hung around in groups, because there wasn’t one of them strange Jews could handle himself if it came to a fight.

He listened to two of his whores babbling in the bathroom. There were nine in his stable now, and three of them slept here in cots that he rented to them as part of their “arrangement.” A couple of the others still lived with their mommas, because they had children and needed someone to take care of the kids while they were on the streets, and he had rented floor space to the rest in the place over by the Point.

G-Mack rolled a joint and watched as the youngest of the three women, the little white bitch who called herself Ellen, strolled through the kitchen in her bare feet, eating toast with peanut butter smeared untidily across it. Said she was nineteen, but he didn’t believe that. Didn’t care none, either. There were a lot of men liked them younger, and she was taking top dollar on the streets. G-Mack had even considered setting her up somewhere private, maybe placing an ad in the Voice or the Press and charging four or five hundred an hour for her. He’d been about to do it, too, when all the shit had broken around him, and he’d been forced to watch his back. Still, he liked to take a little of her honey for himself sometimes, so it was good to have her near.

G-Mack was twenty-three, younger than most of his own women. He had started out selling weed to schoolkids, but he was ambitious and saw himself expanding his business to take in stockbrokers and lawyers and the hungry young white guys who frequented the bars and clubs on weekends, looking for something to give them a kick for the long nights to come. G-Mack saw himself in slick threads, driving a hooked-up car. For a long time he dreamed of owning a ’71 Cutlass Supreme, with cream leather interior and chrome spokes, although the Cutlass carried bullshit eighteen-inch wheels as standard and G-Mack knew that a ride was nothing unless it was sitting on twenty-twos at the least, Lexani alloys, maybe even Jordans if he wanted to rub the other brothers’ noses in it. But a man who was planning on driving a ’71 Cutlass Supreme with twenty-two-inch wheels was going to have to do more than push weed on pimple-faced fifteen-year-olds. So G-Mack invested in some E, along with a little coke, and slowly the dough started coming in swift and sweet.

The problem for G-Mack was that he didn’t have the backbone to enter the big time. G-Mack didn’t want to go back to jail. He had served six months in Otisville on an assault beef when he was barely nineteen, and he still woke up at night screaming at the memory. G-Mack was a good-looking young brother, and they’d had a time with him those first days until he tied himself up with the Nation of Islam, who had some big sonsofbitches on their side and who didn’t take kindly to those who would try to punk out one of their potential converts. G-Mack spent the rest of his six clinging to the Nation like it was driftwood after a shipwreck, but when he left he dropped that shit like it was damaged goods. They came looking for him, asking him questions and shit, but G-Mack was all done with them. Sure, there were threats, but G-Mack was braver on the outside, and eventually the Nation cut him loose as a bad deal. He still occasionally paid lip service to the Nation if the need arose, when he was around folks who didn’t know no better, but mostly he just liked the fact that Minister Farrakhan didn’t take shit from whites and that the presence of his followers in their sharp suits and shades scared the hell out of all those middle-class doughboys.

But if G-Mack was to raise the money to finance the lifestyle he wanted so badly, then it meant trying to score big, and he didn’t like the idea of holding that much supply. If he was caught in possession, he was looking at a class A felony, and that was fifteen to life right there. Even if he got lucky, and the prosecutor wasn’t having troubles at home or suffering from prostate problems, and allowed him to plead down to a class B, then G-Mack would spend the rest of his twenties behind bars, and fuck anyone who said that you were still a young man when you got out, because six months inside had aged G-Mack more than he liked to think about, and he didn’t believe that he could survive five to ten years inside, didn’t matter whether it was no class B, class C, or even class fucking Z.

What finally confirmed him in the belief that the pusher’s life was not for him was a raid on his crib by a couple of real bad-ass narcs. Seemed like they’d turned someone who was even more scared of prison than G-Mack, and G-Mack’s name had come up in the course of the conversation. The cops hadn’t found nothing, though. G-Mack always took the same shortcut onto the streets, slipping through the burned-out shell of another three-story behind his own that in turn backed onto a vacant lot. There was an old fireplace in there, and G-Mack hid his stash inside it, behind a loose brick. The cops took him in, even though they’d got fresh air in return for their warrant. G-Mack knew they didn’t have nothing on him, so he kept quiet and waited for them to let him walk. It took him three days to work up the courage to go back to his stash, and he off-loaded it five minutes later for half of what it was worth on the street. Since then, he’d kept his distance from drugs and instead found another potential source of income, because if G-Mack didn’t know shit about the drug trade, he did know about pussy. He’d had his share, and he’d never paid for it, at least not up front and in cash, but he knew there were men out there who would. Hell, he even knew a couple of bitches who were selling it already, but they didn’t have nobody to look out for them, and women like that were in a vulnerable position. They needed a man to take care of them, and it didn’t take long for G-Mack to convince them that he was just the man to do it. He only had to hit one every so often, and even then he didn’t have to hit her hard, and the others just fell in line behind her. Then that old pimp Free Billy had died, and some of his women had come G-Mack’s way, expanding his stable still further.

Looking back, he couldn’t remember why he’d taken on the junkie whore, Alice. Most of Free Billy’s other girls just used grass, maybe a little coke if a john offered it or they struck lucky and managed to hold something back from G-Mack, not that he didn’t search them regularly to keep that kind of theft to a minimum. Junkies were unpredictable, and just the look of them could put the johns off. But this one, she had something, ain’t nobody could deny that. She was just on the verge. The drugs had taken some of the fat off her, leaving her with a body that was just about perfect and a face that gave her the look of one of those Ethiopian bitches, the ones that the modeling agencies liked on account of their features didn’t look so Negro, what with their slim noses and their coffee complexions. Plus she was close to Sereta, the Mexican with the touch of black to her, and that was one fine-looking woman there. Sereta and Alice were Free Billy’s girls, and they made it clear to him that they came as a pair, so G-Mack had been content to live with the arrangement.

At least Alice, or LaShan as she called herself on the streets, was smart enough to realize that johns didn’t like track marks. She kept a stash of liquid vitamin E capsules among her possessions, and squeezed the contents onto her arm after she shot up to hide the evidence. He guessed she shot up in other parts of her body too, secret parts, but that was her business. All G-Mack cared about was that the marks didn’t show and that she kept herself together while she was hooking. That was one good thing about heroin users: they got the nod for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes once the drug kicked in, but thirty minutes later they were ready to go. They could almost pass for normal then, until the drug started wearing off, and they got sick again, all itchy and antsy. Mostly, Alice seemed to have her habit under that kind of control, but G-Mack still figured when he took her on that the junkie didn’t have more than a couple of months in her. He could see it in her eyes, the way the hunger was biting more deeply now, the way her hair was slowly turning white, but with her looks he could still get good money on her for a time.

And that was how it was, for a couple of weeks, but then she started holding back on him, and her looks began fading more rapidly than even he had expected as her addiction deepened. People sometimes forgot that the shit sold in New York was stronger than just about anywhere else: even heroin was about 10 percent pure, as against three to five in places like Chicago, and G-Mack had heard of at least one junkie who arrived in the city from the sticks, scored within an hour of getting there, and was dead of an OD one hour after that again. Alice still had that great bone structure, but it had become just a little too obvious without a decent cushion of flesh over it, and her skin was growing increasingly sallow in complexion as the junk took its toll. She was willing to do just about anything for her supply, so he sent her out with the worst kinds, and she went to them smiling, didn’t even ask most of them if they’d put a rubber on before she went down. She ran out of vitamin E, as it cost her money that she needed for junk, so she started injecting between her toes and fingers. Soon, G-Mack realized, he would have to cut her loose, and she’d end up living on the streets, toothless and killing herself for ten-dollar Baggies down by the Hunts Point market.

Then the old guy had come cruising in his car, his big-ass driver calling the women over as he slowed. He’d spotted Sereta, she’d offered him Alice as well, and the two whores had climbed in the back with the withered old freak and headed off, once G-Mack had taken note of his plate. Didn’t make no sense to be taking chances. He’d talked to the driver too, just so that they were all clear on how much this was going to cost, and so the whores couldn’t lie to him about the take. The driver brought them back three hours later, and G-Mack got his money. He searched the girls’ bags and found another hundred in each. He let them keep fifty of it, told them he’d look after the rest. Seemed like the old guy liked what they’d shown him, too, because he came back again a week later: same girls, same arrangement. Sereta and Alice enjoyed it because it got them off the streets and the old man treated them nice. He fed them booze and chocolates in his place in Queens, let them fool around in his big old tub, gave them a little extra (which G-Mack very occasionally let slide; after all, he wasn’t no monster…).

It was all nice and easy, until the girls disappeared. They didn’t return from the old man’s like they were supposed to. G-Mack didn’t worry about them until he got back to his place, then an hour or two later he took a call from Sereta. She was crying, and he had trouble calming her down enough to understand what had happened, but gradually she managed to tell him that some men had come to the house and started arguing with the old guy. The girls were in the upstairs bathroom, fixing their hair and reapplying their makeup before heading back to the Point. The new arrivals started shouting, asking him about a silver box. They told him they weren’t leaving without it, then Luke, the old man’s driver, came in, and there was more shouting, followed by what sounded like a bag bursting, except Alice and Sereta had spent enough time on the streets to know a gunshot when they heard one.

After that, the men downstairs went to work on the old man, and in the course of their efforts he died. They started tearing the house apart, downstairs first. The women heard drawers being opened, pottery breaking, glass shattering. Soon they would make their way upstairs; and then there would be no hope, but suddenly they heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Sereta risked a glance out of the window and saw lights flashing.

“Private security,” she whispered to Alice. “They must have set off an alarm somehow.”

It was one man, alone. He shined a flashlight on the front of the house, then tried the doorbell. He returned to his vehicle and spoke into the radio. Somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. It was the only sound in the house. The men downstairs were now silent. After a couple of seconds, Alice and Sereta heard the noise of the back door in the kitchen opening as the men left. When they were certain that all was okay, the women followed, but not before they had erased all traces of themselves from the upper rooms, wiping wood and faucets, even retrieving the rubbers and tissues from the trash. Alice ripped her stockings climbing a wall, and Sereta cut her side, but they got away.

Now they were scared, afraid that someone might come after them, but G-Mack told them to be cool. Neither of them had ever been printed by the cops, so even if any prints were found, there was no way to link them to anything unless they got into big trouble with the law. They just needed to stay calm. He told them to come back to him, but Sereta refused. G-Mack started shouting, and the bitch hung up on him. That was the last he heard of her, but he figured she’d head south, back to her own people, if she was scared. She was always threatening to do that anyhow, once she had enough money saved, even if G-Mack figured it was just the empty posturing and pipe-dreaming that most of these whores went in for at some time or another.

The death of the old man-his name was Winston-and his driver made the news, big-time. He wasn’t real wealthy, not like Trump or one of those guys, but he was a pretty well-known collector and dealer in antiques. The cops figured it for a robbery gone wrong until they found some cosmetics in the bathroom, left by the women in their panic to flee the house, and they announced that they were looking for one, maybe two women, to help them with their inquiries. The cops came trawling the Point, after it emerged that old man Winston liked to take a ride around its streets looking for women. They asked G-Mack what he knew, once they tracked him down, but G-Mack told them he knew nothing about it. When the cops said that someone had seen G-Mack talking to Winston’s driver, and maybe it was his women who were with him that night, G-Mack told them that he talked to a lot of people, and sometimes their drivers, but that didn’t mean he made no deals with them. He didn’t even bother denying that he was a playa. Better to give them a little truth to hide the taste of the lie. He had already warned the other whores to keep quiet about what they knew, and they did as they were told, both out of fear of him and out of concern for their friends, because G-Mack had made it clear to them that Alice and Sereta were safe only as long as the men who did the killings didn’t know a thing about them.

But this wasn’t any botched robbery, and the men involved tracked down G-Mack just as the police had done before them, except they weren’t about to be fooled by any show of innocence. G-Mack didn’t like to think about them, the fat man with the swollen neck and the smell of freshly turned earth from him, and his quiet, bored friend in blue. He didn’t like to remember how they had forced him against a wall, how the fat man had placed his fingers in G-Mack’s mouth, gripping his tongue when he uttered the first of the lies. G-Mack had almost puked then on the taste of him, but there was worse to come: the voices that G-Mack heard in his head, the nausea that came with them, the sense that the longer he allowed this man to touch him, the more corrupted and polluted he would become, until his insides began to rot from the contact. He admitted that they were his girls, but he hadn’t heard from them since that night. They were gone, he said, but they’d seen nothing. They had been upstairs the whole time. They didn’t know anything that could help the cops.

Then it had come out, and G-Mack cursed the moment he had agreed to take Sereta and her junkie bitch friend into his stable. The fat man told him that it wasn’t what they knew that concerned him.

It was what they had taken.

Winston had shown Sereta the box on the second night, happy and sated from his hours of mild pleasure, while Alice was cleaning herself up. He liked displaying his collection to the lovely dark-haired girl, smarter and more alert than her friend as she was, explaining the origins of some of the objects and pointing out little details about them. Sereta guessed that apart from the sex, he just wanted someone to talk to. She didn’t mind. He was a nice old man, generous and harmless. Maybe it wasn’t very smart of him to be trusting a pair of women he barely knew with the secrets of his treasures, but Sereta at least could be relied upon, and she was careful to watch Alice just in case her friend might be tempted to take something in the hope of fencing it later.

The box he was holding was less interesting to her than some of the other items in his possession: the jewelry, the paintings, the tiny ivory statuettes. It was a dull silver, and very plain in appearance. Winston told her that it was very old, and very valuable to those who understood what it represented. He opened it carefully. Inside, she saw a folded piece of what looked like paper.

“Not paper,” Winston corrected. “Vellum.”

Taking a clean handkerchief, he removed it and unfolded it for her. She saw words, symbols, letters, the shapes of buildings, and right in the center, the edge of what looked like a wing.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a map,” he said, “or part of one.”

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Winston shrugged. “Who knows? Lost, perhaps. This is one of a number of pieces. The rest have been scattered for a very long time. I once hoped that I might find them all, but now I doubt that I ever will. I have lately begun to consider selling it. I have already made some inquiries. We shall see…”

He replaced the fragment, then closed the box and restored it to its place on a small shelf by his dressing table.

“Shouldn’t it be in a vault or something?” she asked.

“Why?” said Winston. “If you were a thief, would you steal it?”

Sereta looked at the shelf. The box was lost amid the curios and little ornaments that seemed to fill every corner of Winston’s house.

“I was a thief, I wouldn’t even be able to find it,” she said.

Winston nodded happily, then shrugged off his robe.

“Time for one more, I think,” he said.

Viagra, thought Sereta. Sometimes that damn blue pill was a curse.

When the men offered him money for any information that might lead to the whereabouts of the whores, it didn’t take G-Mack more than a couple of moments to think about it and accept. He figured he didn’t have much choice, since the fat man had made it clear that if he tried to screw them over, he would suffer for it, and someone else would be running his whores as a result. He put out some feelers, but nobody had heard from either Sereta or Alice. Sereta was the smart one, he knew. If Alice stayed close by her and did as she was told, maybe cut down on her habit and tried to get straight, they might be able to stay hidden for a long time.

And then Alice had come back. She rang the doorbell on the Coney Island crib and asked to come up. It was late at night, and only Letitia was there, because she’d come down with some kind of puking bug. Letitia was Puerto Rican, and new, but she had been warned about what to do if either Sereta or Alice made an appearance. She allowed Alice to come up, told her to lie down on one of the cots, then called G-Mack on his cell. G-Mack told her to keep Alice there, not to let her go. But when Letitia went back to the bedroom, Alice was gone, and so was Letitia’s bag, with two hundred dollars in cash. When she ran down to the street, there was no sign of the thin black girl.

G-Mack went ape-shit when he got back. He hit Letitia, called her every damn name he could think of, then got in his car and trawled the streets of Brooklyn, hoping to catch sight of Alice. He guessed that she’d try to score using Letitia’s money, so he cruised the dealers, some of them known to him by name. He was almost at Kings Highway when at last he saw her. Her hands were cuffed, and she was being placed in the back of a cop car.

He followed the car to the precinct house. He could bail her out himself, but if anyone connected her to what had happened to Winston, then G-Mack would be in a world of trouble, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he called the number that the fat man had given him, and told the man who answered where Alice was. The man said they’d take care of it. A day later, Boy Blue came back and paid G-Mack some money: not as much as he’d been promised but, combined with the implicit threat of harm if he complained, enough to keep him from objecting and more than sufficient to make a considerable down payment on a ride. They told him to keep his mouth shut, and he did. He assured them that she had nobody, that no one would come asking after her. He said that he knew this for sure, swore upon it, told them he knew her from way back, that her momma was dead from the virus and her poppa was a hound who got himself killed in an argument over another woman a couple of years after his daughter was born, a daughter he’d never cared to see; one of many, if the truth be told. He’d made it all up-accidentally touching on the truth about her father along the way-but it didn’t matter. He put what they gave him for her toward the Cutlass Supreme, and it now sat on chrome Jordans, Number 23, in a secure garage. G-Mack was in the life now, and he had to look the part if he was going to build up his stable, although he had driven the Cutlass only on a handful of occasions, preferring to keep it carefully garaged and visiting it occasionally like he would a favorite woman. True, the cops might come asking about Alice again once they found out that she’d skipped bail, but then again they had other things to occupy them in this big, bad city without worrying about some junkie hooker who took a skip to get away from the life.

Then the black woman had come around asking questions, and G-Mack hadn’t liked the look on her face one little bit. He had grown up around women like that, and if you didn’t show them you meant business right from the start, then they’d be on you like dogs. So G-Mack had hit her, because that was how he always dealt with women who got out of line with him.

Maybe she’d go away, he thought. Maybe she’d just forget about it.

He hoped so, because if she started asking questions, and convinced some other people to ask questions too, then the men who paid him might hear about it, and G-Mack didn’t doubt for one minute that to safeguard themselves they would bind him, shoot him, and bury him in the trunk of his car, all twenty-three inches off the ground.

It was a strange situation in which Louis and I found ourselves. I wasn’t working for him, but I was working with him. For once, I wasn’t the one calling the shots, and this time what was occurring was personal to him, not to me. To salve his conscience a little-assuming, as Angel remarked, that he had a conscience to begin with-Louis was picking up the tab for whatever expenses arose. He was putting me up in the Parker Meridien, which was a lot nicer than the places in which I usually stayed. The elevators played vintage cartoons on little screens, and the TV in my room was bigger than some New York hotel beds I’d known. The room was a little minimalist, but I didn’t mention that to Louis. I didn’t want to seem to be carping. The hotel had a great gym, and a good Thai restaurant a couple of doors up from it. There was also a rooftop pool, with a dizzying view over Central Park.

I met Walter Cole at a coffee shop down on Second Avenue. Police cadets passed back and forth by our window, hauling black knapsacks and looking more like soldiers than cops. I tried to remember when I was like them and found that I couldn’t. It was as though some parts of my past had been closed off to me while others continued to leach into the present, like toxic runoff poisoning what might once have been fertile soil. The city had changed so much since the attacks, and the cadets, with their military appearance, now seemed more suited to its streets than I did. New Yorkers had been reminded of their own mortality, their susceptibility to harm from outside agencies, with the consequence that they, and the streets that they loved, had been altered irrevocably. I was reminded of women I had seen in the course of my work, women whose husbands had lashed out at them once and would lash out at them again. They seemed always to be braced for another blow, even as they hoped that it would not come, that something might have altered in the demeanor of the one who had hurt them before.

My father once hit my mother. I was young, no more than seven or eight, and she had started a small fire in the kitchen while she was frying some pork chops for his dinner. There was a phone call for her, and she left the kitchen to take it. A friend’s son had won a scholarship to some big university, a particular cause for celebration as her husband had died suddenly some years before, and she had struggled to bring up their three children in the years that followed. My mother stayed on the phone just a little too long. The oil in the pan began to hiss and smoke, and the flames from the gas ring rose higher. A dish towel began to smolder, and suddenly there was smoke pouring from the kitchen. My father got there just in time to stop the curtains from igniting, and used a damp cloth to smother the oil in the pan, burning his hand slightly in the process. By that point my mother had abandoned her call, and I followed her into the kitchen, where my father was running cold water over his hand.

“Oh no,” she said. “I was just-”

And my father hit her. He was frightened and angry. He didn’t hit her hard. It was an open-handed slap, and he tried to pull the blow as he realized what he was doing, but it was too late. He struck her on the cheek, and she staggered slightly, then touched her hand gently to her skin, as though to confirm to herself that she had been hit. I looked at my father, and the blood was already leaving his face. I thought he was about to fall over, for he seemed to teeter on his feet.

“Lord, I’m sorry,” he said.

He tried to go to her, but she pushed him away. She couldn’t look at him. In all their years together, he had never once laid a hand upon her in anger. He rarely even raised his voice to her. Now the man she knew as her husband was suddenly gone, and a stranger revealed in his place. At that moment, the world was no longer the place that she had once thought it to be. It was alien, and dangerous, and her vulnerability was exposed to her.

Looking back, I don’t know if she ever truly forgave him. I don’t believe that she did, for I don’t think that any woman can ever really forgive a man who raises his hand to her, especially not one whom she loves and trusts. The love suffers a little, but the trust suffers more, and somewhere, deep inside herself, she will always be wary of another strike. The next time, she tells herself, I will leave him. I will never let myself be hit again. Mostly, though, they stay. In my father’s case, there would never be a next time, but my mother was not to know that, and nothing he could ever do in the years that followed would ever convince her otherwise.

And as strangers passed by, dwarfed by the immensity of the buildings around them, I thought: What have they done to this city?

Walter tapped the tabletop with his finger.

“You still with us?” he asked.

“I was just reminiscing.”

“Getting nostalgic?”

“Only for our order. By the time it arrives, inflation will have kicked in.”

Somewhere in the distance I could see our waitress idly spinning a mint on the counter.

“We should have made her commit to a price before she left,” said Walter. “Heads up, they’re here.”

Two men weaved through the tables, making their way toward us. Both wore casual jackets, one with a tie, one without. The taller of the two men was probably nudging six-two, while the smaller was about my height. Short of having blue lights strapped to their heads and Crown Vic-shaped shoes, they couldn’t have screamed “Cops!” any louder. Not that it mattered in this place: a few years back, two guys fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico-literally, as they hadn’t been in the city more than a day or two-tried to take down the diner, home to cops since time immemorial, at around midnight, armed with a hammer and a carving knife. They got as far as “This is a-” before they were looking down the barrels of about thirty assorted weapons. A framed front page from the Post now hung on the wall behind the register. It showed a photograph of the two geniuses, below the block headline DUMB AND DUMBER.

Walter rose to shake hands with the two detectives, and I did the same as he introduced me. The tall one was named Mackey, the short one was Dunne. Anybody hoping to use them as proof that the Irish still dominated the NYPD was likely to be confused by the fact that Dunne was black and Mackey looked Asian, although they pretty much made the case that the Celts could charm the pants off just about any race.

“How you doin?” Dunne said to me as he sat down. I could see that he was sizing me up. I hadn’t met him before, but like most of his kind who had been around for longer than a few years he knew my history. He’d probably heard the stories as well. I didn’t care if he believed them or not, as long as it didn’t get in the way of what we were trying to do.

Mackey seemed more interested in the waitress than he was in me. I wished him luck. If she treated her suitors like she treated her customers, then Mackey would be a very old and very frustrated man by the time he got anywhere with this woman.

“Nice pins,” he said admiringly. “What’s she like from the front?”

“Can’t remember,” said Walter. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her face.”

Mackey and Dunne were part of the NYPD’s Vice Division, and had been for the past five years. The city spent $23 million each year on prostitution control, but “control” was the operative term. Prostitution wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much money the city threw at the problem, and so it was a matter of prioritizing. Mackey and Dunne worked with the Sexual Exploitation of Children Squad, which worked all five boroughs, tackling child porn, prostitution, and child sex rings. They had their work cut out: 325,000 children were subjected to sexual exploitation every year, of whom over half were runaways or kids who had been thrown out of their homes by their parents or guardians. New York acted like a magnet for them. There were over five thousand children working as prostitutes in the city at any time, and no shortage of men willing to pay for them. The squad used young-looking female cops, some, incredibly, capable of passing for thirteen or fourteen, to lure “chickenhawks,” as pedophile johns liked to term themselves. Most, if caught patronizing, would avoid jail time if they had no previous history, but at least they would be mandated to register as sex offenders and could then be monitored for the rest of their lives.

The pimps were harder to catch, and their methods were becoming more sophisticated. Some of the pimps had gang affiliations, which made them even more dangerous to both the girls and the cops. Then there were those who were actively engaged in trafficking young girls across state lines. In January 2000, a sixteen-year-old Vermont girl named Christal Jones was found smothered in an apartment on Zerega Avenue in Hunts Point, one of a number of Vermont girls lured to New York in an apparently well-organized Burlington-to-the-Bronx sex ring. With deaths like Christal’s, suddenly $23 million didn’t seem like nearly enough.

Mackey and Dunne were over on the East Side to talk to the cadets about their work, but it appeared to have done little for their confidence in the future of the force.

“All these kids want to do is catch terrorists,” said Dunne. “They had their way, this city would be bought and sold ten times over while they were interrogating Muslims about their diet.”

Our waitress returned from far-off places, bearing coffee and bagels.

“Sorry, boys,” she said. “I got distracted.”

Mackey saw an opening and rushed to take advantage of it.

“What happened, gorgeous, you catch sight of yourself in a mirror?”

The waitress, whose name was Mylene, whatever kind of name that was, favored him with the same look she might have given a mosquito that had the temerity to land on her during the height of the West Nile virus scare.

“Nope, caught sight of you and had to wait for my beating heart to be still,” she said. “Thought I was gonna die, you’re so good-looking. Menus are on the table. I’ll be back with coffee.”

“Don’t count on it,” said Walter, as she vanished.

“Think you got some sarcasm on you there,” Dunne remarked to his partner.

“Yeah, it burns. Still, that lady looks like a million dollars.”

Walter and I exchanged glances. If that waitress looked like a million dollars, then it was all in used bills.

The pleasantries over, Walter brought us down to business.

“You got anything for us?” he asked.

“G-Mack: real name Tyrone Baylee,” said Dunne. He pretty much expectorated the name. “This guy was made to be a pimp, you catch my drift.”

I knew what he meant. Men who pimp women tend to be smarter than the average criminal. Their social skills are relatively good, which enables them to handle the prostitutes in their charge. They try to shy away from extreme violence, although most consider it their duty and their right to keep their women in place with a well-placed slap when circumstances require it. In short, they’re cowards, but cowards gifted with a degree of cunning, a capacity for emotional and psychological manipulation, and sometimes a self-deluding belief that theirs is a victimless crime since they are merely providing a service to both the whores and the men who patronize them.

“He’s got a prior for assault. He only served six months, but he did them in Otisville, and it wasn’t a happy time for him. His name came up during a narcotics investigation a year or two back, but he was pretty low down on the food chain, and a search of his place turned up nothing. Seems that experience encouraged him to find an alternative outlet for his talents. He got himself a small stable of women, but he’s been trying to build it up over the last couple of months. A pimp called Free Billy died awhile back-they called him Free Billy on account of the fact that he claimed his rates were so low he was practically giving his whores away for nothing-and his girls were divided up by the rest of the sharks out on the Point. G-Mack had to wait his turn, and by all accounts there wasn’t much left for him once the others had taken their pick.”

“The girl you’re asking after-Alice Temple, street name LaShan-she was one of Free Billy’s,” said Mackey, taking up the baton. “According to the cops who work the Point she was a good-looking woman once, but she was using, and using hard. She didn’t look like she was going to last much longer, even on the Point. G-Mack’s been telling people that he let her go cause she wasn’t worth anything to him. Said nobody was going to pay good money for a woman looked like she might be dying of the virus. Seems she was friendly with a whore named Sereta. Black Mexican. They came as a twofer. Looks like she dropped off the map about the same time as your girl, but unlike her friend, she didn’t appear again.”

I leaned forward.

“What do you mean by that?”

“This Alice was picked up close by Kings Highway about a week or so ago. Possession of a controlled substance. Looked like she’d just come out to score. Beat cops found her with the needle in her arm. She didn’t even have time to inject.”

“She was arrested?”

“It was a quiet night, so her bail was set before the sun came up. She made it within the hour.”

“Who paid it?”

“Bail bondsman named Eddie Tager. Her court date was set for the nineteenth, so she still has a couple of days left.”

“Is Eddie Tager G-Mack’s bondsman?”

Dunne shrugged. “He’s pretty low-end, so it’s possible, but most pimps tend to pay bail for their whores themselves. It’s mostly set low, and it allows them to get their hooks deeper into the girl. In Manhattan, first-timers usually just get compulsory health and safe-sex education, maybe community service if the judge is having a bad day, but the other boroughs don’t have court-based programs to meet the needs of prostitutes, so it goes harder on them over there. The cops who spoke to G-Mack say he denied just about everything except his birth.”

“Why were they talking to him?”

“He was questioned in connection with the murder of an antiques dealer named Winston Allen, along with most of the pimps over there. Allen had a taste for whores from the Point, and there was a rumor that maybe two of G-Mack’s girls might have been among them. G-Mack claimed that they had it all wrong, but the date would tie in with the disappearance of Alice and her friend from the streets. We didn’t know that when she was picked up, though, and her prints didn’t match the partials we got from Allen’s house when she was processed. Everything since has been a dead end.”

“Anyone talk with Tager?”

“He’s proving hard to find, and nobody has the time it takes to go looking under rocks for him. Let’s be straight here: if you and Walter hadn’t come along asking questions, Alice Temple would be struggling for attention, even with the death of Winston Allen. Women disappear from the Point. It happens.”

Something passed between Dunne and Mackey. Neither was about to put it into words, though, not without some pushing.

“Lately more than usual?” I asked.

It was a blind throw, but it hit home.

“Maybe. It’s just rumors, and talk from programs like GEMS and ECPAT, but there’s no pattern, which presents a problem, and the ones who are going missing are mostly homeless, or don’t have anyone to report them, and it’s not just women either. Basically, what we got is a spike in the Bronx figures over the past six months. It might be meaningless, or it might not, but unless we start turning up bodies, it’s going to stay a blip.”

It didn’t help us much, but it was good to know.

“So back to business,” said Mackey. “We figure that maybe if we feed you this information, you’ll help us by taking some of the pressure off and maybe find out something we can use on G-Mack along the way.”

“Such as?”

“He’s got a young girl working for him. He keeps her pretty close, but her name is Ellen. We’ve tried talking to her, but we’ve got nothing on her to justify pulling her in, and G-Mack has his women schooled halfway to Christmas on entrapment. Juvenile Crime hasn’t had any luck with her either. If you find out anything about her, maybe you’ll tell us.”

“We hear G-Mack called your girl a skank, a junkie skank,” said Mackey. “Thought you might like to know that, just in case you were planning on talking with him.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “What’s his territory?”

“His girls tend to work the lower end of Lafayette. He likes to keep an eye on them, so he usually parks on the street close by. I hear he’s driving a Cutlass Supreme on big-ass tires now, ’71, ’72, maybe, like he’s some kind of millionaire rapper.”

“How long has he been driving the Cutlass?”

“Not long.”

“Must be doing okay if he can afford a car like that.”

“I guess. We didn’t see no tax return, so I can’t say for sure, but he seems to have come into money recently.”

Mackey kept his eyes fixed on me as I spoke. I nodded once, letting him know that I understood what he was intimating: someone had paid him to keep quiet about the women.

“Does he have a place?”

“He lives over on Quimby. Couple of his women live with him. Seems he has a crib over in Brooklyn as well, down on Coney Island Avenue. He moves between them.”

“Weapons?”

“None of these guys are dumb enough to carry. The more established ones, they maybe keep one or two knuckle grazers that they can call on in case of trouble, but G-Mack ain’t in that league yet.”

The waitress returned. She looked a whole lot less happy to be coming back than she did when she came over the first time, and she hadn’t exactly been ecstatic then.

Dunne and Mackey ordered a tuna on rye and a turkey club. Dunne asked for a “side of sunshine” with his tuna. You had to admire his perseverance.

“Salad or fries,” said the waitress. “Sunshine is extra, and you’ll have to eat it outside.”

“How about fries and a smile?” said Dunne.

“How about you have an accident, then I’ll smile?”

She left. The world breathed easier.

“You got a death wish, man,” said Mackey.

“I could die in her arms,” said Dunne.

“You dying on your sorry ass right now, and you ain’t even near her arms.”

He sighed, and poured so much sugar into his coffee his spoon pretty much stood up straight in it.

“So, you think G-Mack knows where this woman is at?” asked Mackey.

I shrugged. “We’re going to ask him that.”

“You think he’s going to tell you?”

I thought of Louis, and what he would do to G-Mack for hitting Martha.

“Eventually,” I said.

CHAPTER SIX

Jackie O was one of the old-time macks, the kind who believed that a man should dress the part. He typically wore a canary yellow suit for business, set off by a white shirt with a pink tie, and yellow-and-white patent leather shoes. A full-length white leather coat with yellow trim was draped across his shoulders in cold weather, and the ensemble was completed by a white fedora with a pink feather. He carried an antique black cane, topped with a silver horse’s head. The head could be removed with a twist, freeing the eighteen-inch blade that was concealed inside. The cops knew that Jackie O carried a sword stick, but Jackie O was never questioned or searched. He was occasionally a good source of information, and as one of the senior figures at the Point he was accorded a modicum of respect. He kept a close eye on the women who worked for him, and tried to treat them right. He paid for their rubbers, which was more than most pimps did, and made sure each was equipped with a pen loaded with pepper spray before she hit the streets. Jackie O was was also smart enough to know that wearing fine clothes and driving a nice car didn’t mean that what he did had any class, but it was all that he knew how to do. He used his earnings to buy modern art, but he sometimes thought that even the most beautiful of his paintings and sculptures were sullied by the manner in which he had funded their purchase. For that reason he liked to trade up, in the hope that by doing so he might slowly erase the stain upon his collection.

Jackie O didn’t entertain many visitors in his Tribeca apartment, purchased on the advice of his accountant many years before and now the most valuable possession that he had. After all, he spent most of his time surrounded by hookers and pimps, and they weren’t the kind of people to appreciate the art upon his walls. Real connoisseurs of art tended not to socialize with pimps. They might avail themselves of the services offered by them, but they sure weren’t going to be stopping by for wine and cheese. For that reason, Jackie O enjoyed a fleeting moment of pleasure when he looked through the spy hole in his steel door and saw Louis standing outside. Here was somebody who might appreciate his collection, he thought, until he quickly realized the probable reason for the visit. He knew that he had two choices: he could refuse to let Louis in, in which case he was likely to make the situation worse, or he could simply admit him and hope that the situation wasn’t already so bad that it couldn’t possibly get much worse. Neither option was particularly appealing to him, but the longer Jackie O procrastinated, the more likely he was to try the patience of his visitor.

Before opening the door, he put the safety back on the H amp;K that he held in his right hand, then returned it to the holster that lay taped beneath a small table near the door. He composed his features into an expression as close to joy and surprise as his fear would allow, unlocked and opened the door, and got as far as the words “My man! Welcome!” before Louis’s hand closed around his throat. The barrel of a Glock was pressed hard into the hollow below Jackie O’s left cheekbone, a hollow whose size was increased by Jackie O’s gaping mouth. Louis kicked the door shut with his heel, then forced the pimp back into the living room of the apartment before sending him sprawling across his couch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, so Jackie O was still wearing his red Japanese silk robe and a pair of lilac pajamas. He found it hard to muster his dignity dressed as he was, but he gave it a good try.

“Hey, man, what is this?” he protested. “I invite you into my home, and this is how you treat me. Look”-he fingered the collar of his gown, revealing a six-inch rip in the material-“you done tore my gown, and this shit’s silk.”

“Shut up,” said Louis. “You know why I’m here.”

“How would I know that?”

“It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. You know.”

Jackie O gave up the act. This man was not someone to play the fool with. Jackie O could recall the first time he ever set eyes on him, almost a decade before. Even then he had heard stories, but he had not encountered the one about whom they were told. Louis was different in those days: there was a fire burning coldly inside him, clear for all to see, although the ferocity of it was slowly diminishing even then, the flames flickering confusedly in a series of crosswinds. Jackie O figured that a man couldn’t just go on killing and hurting without paying a high price for it over time. The worst of them-the sociopaths and the psychos-they just didn’t realize it was happening, or maybe some were just so damaged to start with that there wasn’t much room for further deterioration. Louis wasn’t like that, though, and when Jackie O first knew him the consequences of his actions were gradually beginning to take their toll upon him.

A honey trap was being set for a man who preyed on young women, after a girl was killed by him in a country far from this one. Some very powerful people had decreed that this man was to die, and he was drowned in a bathtub in his hotel room, lured there with the promise of a girl and a guarantee that no questions would be asked if she suffered a little, for he was a man with the money to indulge his tastes. It wasn’t an expensive hotel room, and the man had no possessions with him when he died, other than his wallet and his watch. He was still wearing the watch when he died. In fact, he was fully clothed when he was found, because the people who had ordered his death didn’t want there to be even the slightest possibility that it might be mistaken for suicide or natural causes. His killing would serve as a warning to others of his kind.

It was Jackie O’s bad luck to be coming out of a hotel room on the same floor when the killer emerged, after Jackie had set up one of his marginally more expensive women for a day’s work. He didn’t know the man was a killer, not then, or certainly not for sure, although he sensed something circling beneath the seemingly placid surface, like the pale ghost of a shark glimpsed moving through the deep blue depths. Their eyes locked, but Jackie kept walking, making for the security of crowds and people. He didn’t know where the man was going or what he had been doing in that hotel room, and he didn’t want to know. He didn’t even look back until he was at the corner of the hallway, the stairs in view, and by then the man was gone. But Jackie O read the papers, and he didn’t need to be a mathematician to put two and two together. At that moment he cursed his high profile among his kind and his love of fine clothes. He knew he would be easy to find, and he was right.

So this was not the first time that the killer Louis had invaded his space; nor was it the first time that his gun had pressed itself to Jackie’s flesh. On that first occasion, Jackie had been sure that he was going to die, but there had been a steadiness to his voice when he said: “You got nothing to fear from me, son. I was younger, and I had the nerve, I might have done the same myself.”

The gun had slowly disengaged itself from his face, and Louis had left him without another word, but Jackie knew that he owed him a debt for his life. In time Jackie learned more about him, and the stories he had heard started to make sense. After some years Louis returned to him, now changed somehow, and gave Jackie O his name, and asked him to look out for a young woman with a soft Southern accent and a growing love for the needle.

And Jackie had done his best for her. He tried to encourage her to seek another path as she drifted from pimp to pimp. He helped Louis to trace her on those repeated occasions when he was determined to force her to seek help. He intervened with others where necessary, reminding those who had her in their charge that she was different, that questions would be asked if she was harmed. Yet it was an unsatisfactory arrangement, and he had seen the pain in the younger man’s face as this woman who was blood to him was passed from man to man, and died a little in every hand. Slowly, Jackie began to care less about her, as she started to care less about herself. Now she was gone, and her failed guardian was seeking a reckoning with those responsible.

“She was G-Mack’s girl,” said Jackie O. “I tried talking to him, but he don’t listen to no old men. I got girls of my own to look out for. I couldn’t be watching her all the time.”

Louis sat down on a chair opposite the couch. The gun remained pointing at Jackie O. It made Jackie O nervous. Louis was calm. The anger had disappeared as suddenly as it had manifested itself, and that made Jackie more afraid than ever. At least anger and rage were human emotions. What he was witnessing now was a man disengaging from all such feelings as he prepared to visit harm on another.

“Now, I got a problem with what you just told me,” said Louis. “First of all, you said ‘was,’ as in she ‘was’ G-Mack’s girl. That’s the past tense, and it has a ring of permanence about it that I don’t like. Second, last I heard she was with Free Billy. You were supposed to tell me if that situation changed.”

“Free Billy died,” said Jackie O. “You weren’t around. His girls were divided up.”

“Did you take any of them?”

“One, yeah. She was Asian. I knew she’d bring in good money.”

“But not Alice.”

Jackie O realized his mistake.

“I had too many girls already.”

“But not so many that you couldn’t find room for the Asian.”

“She was special, man.”

Louis leaned forward slightly.

“Alice was special too. To me.”

“Don’t you think I know that? But I told you, a long time ago, that I wouldn’t take her. I wasn’t going to have you look in my eyes and see the man who was handing her over to others. I made that clear to you.”

Louis’s eyes flickered.

“You did.”

“I thought she’d be okay with G-Mack, honest, man,” said Jackie O. “He’s starting out. He wants to make his rep. I heard nothing bad about him, so I had no reason to be concerned for her. He didn’t want to hear anything from me, but that don’t make him no different from any of the other young bloods.”

Slowly, Jackie O was beginning to recover his courage. This wasn’t right. This was his place, and he was being disrespected, and over something that wasn’t his concern. Jackie O had been in the game too long to take this kind of shit, even from a man like Louis.

“Anyway, the fuck you blaming me for? She wasn’t my concern. She was yours. You wanted someone to look out for her all the time, then that someone should have been you.”

The words came out in such a rush that, once he had started speaking, Jackie O found himself unable to stop. The accusation now lay between the two men, and Jackie O didn’t know if it was going to just disappear or explode in his face. In the end, it did neither. Louis flinched, and Jackie O saw the guilt wash like rain across his face.

“I tried,” he said softly.

Jackie O nodded and looked to the floor. He had seen the woman return to the streets after each intervention by the man before him. She had checked out of public hospitals and virtually escaped from private clinics. Once, on the last occasion when Louis had tried to take her back, she pulled a blade on him. After that Louis had asked Jackie O to continue doing what he could for her, except there wasn’t much that Jackie O could do, because this woman was sliding, and sliding fast. Maybe there were better men than Free Billy for her to be with, but Free Billy wasn’t the kind of man who gave up his property easily. He’d received a warning through Jackie O about what would happen to him if he didn’t do right by Alice, but it wasn’t like they were man and wife and Louis was the father of the bride. This was a pimp and one of his whores we were talking about. Even with the best will in the world-and Free Billy was a long way from having any kind of goodwill-there was a limit to the amount that a pimp could, or would, do for a woman who was forced to make her money from whoring. Then Free Billy died, and Alice ended up with G-Mack. Jackie O knew that he should have taken her into his stable, but he just didn’t want her, even aside from anything else he had told Louis. She was trouble, and in daylight she was soon going to look like the walking dead because of all the shit she was pouring into her system. Jackie O didn’t hold with junkies in his stable. They were unpredictable, and they spread disease. Jackie O always tried to make sure that his girls practiced safe sex, didn’t matter how much the john offered for something extra. A woman like Alice, well, hell, there was no predicting what she might do if the need was on her. Other pimps weren’t as particular as Jackie O. They didn’t have any social conscience. Like he said, he’d figured she’d be okay with G-Mack, except it turned out that G-Mack wasn’t smart enough to do the right thing.

Jackie O had survived for a long time in his chosen profession. He grew up on these streets, and he was a wild young man in those days. He stole, sold weed, boosted cars. There wasn’t much that Jackie O wouldn’t do to turn a buck, although he always drew the line at inflicting harm on his victims. He carried a gun then, but he never had call to use it. Most of the time, those he stole from never even saw his face, because he kept contact to a minimum. Now junkies busted into people’s cribs while they were asleep, and when those folks woke up they usually weren’t best pleased to see some wired-up brother trying to steal their DVD player, and a confrontation ensued more often than not. People got hurt when there was no necessity for it, and Jackie O didn’t hold with that kind of behavior.

Jackie O had entered into pimping kind of accidentally. Turned out he was a pimp without even knowing it, on account of the first woman that he fell for in a serious way. He was down on his luck when he met her, due to some no-account Negroes who had ripped him off on a supply buy that would have kept him in weed for the rest of the year. This left him with some serious cash flow problems, and he found himself out on the street once he’d used up all the favors he could call in. In the end, there was barely a couch in the neighborhood that he hadn’t called his bed at some point. Then he met a woman in a basement bar, and one thing led to another, the way it sometimes will between a man and a woman. She was older than he by five years, and she gave him a bed for one night, then a second, then a third. She told him she had a job that kept her out late, but it wasn’t until the fourth night that he saw her getting ready for the streets, and he figured out what that job might be. But he stayed with her while he waited for his situation to improve, and some nights he would accompany her as she made her way to the little warren of streets upon which she plied her trade, discreetly following her and the johns to vacant lots just to make sure that no harm came to her, in return for which she would give him ten bucks. Once, on a rainy Thursday night, he heard her cry out from the cab of a delivery truck, and he came running to find the guy had slapped her over some imagined slight. Jackie O took care of him, catching him by surprise and hitting him over the back of the head with a blackjack that he kept in his coat pocket for just such an eventuality. After that, he became her shadow, and pretty soon he became the shadow for a bunch of other women too.

Jackie O never looked back.

He tried not to think too deeply about what he did. Jackie O was a God-fearing man, and gave generously to his local church, seeing it as an investment in his future, if nothing else. He knew that what he was doing was wrong in the eyes of the Lord, but if he didn’t do it, then someone else would, and that someone might not care about the women the way Jackie did. That would be his argument, if it came down to it and the good Lord was looking dubious about admitting Jackie to his eternal reward.

So Jackie O watched his women and his streets, and encouraged his peers to do likewise. It made good business sense: they weren’t looking out only for their whores, but for the cops too. Jackie didn’t like to see his women, half-naked and dressed in high heels, trying to run from Vice in the event of a descent on the Point. If they fell in those heels, then, likely as not, they’d do themselves an injury. Given enough notice, they could just slink away into the shadows and wait for the heat to disperse.

That was how the rumors came back to Jackie, shortly after Alice and her friend had disappeared from the streets. The women started to tell of a black van, its plates beaten and obscured. It was a given on the streets that vans and SUVs were to be avoided anyway, because they were tailor-made for abduction and rape. It didn’t help that his women were already a little paranoid because stories were circulating about people who had gone missing in recent months: girls and younger men, in the main, most of them homeless or junkies. Jackie O had seriously considered putting some of his women on temporary medication to calm them down, so at first he was skeptical about the mythical van. No approaches were ever made to them from the men inside, they said, and Jackie suggested that it might simply be the cops in another guise, but then Lula, one of his best girls, came to him just as she was about to take to the streets.

“You need to watch out for that black Transit,” she told him. “I hear they been asking after some girls used to service some old guy out in Queens.”

Jackie O always listened to Lula. She was the oldest of his whores, and she knew the streets and the other women. She was the den mother, and Jackie had learned to trust her instincts.

“You think they’re cops?”

“They ain’t no cops. Plates are all torn up, and they feel bad, the men inside.”

“What do they look like?”

“They’re white. One of them’s fat, real fat. I didn’t get a good look at the other.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you just tell the girls to walk away if they see that van. Tell them to come to me, y’hear?”

Lula nodded and went to take up her place at the nearest corner. Jackie O did some walking that night, talking to the other pimps, but it was hard with some as they were men of low breeding, and lower intelligence.

“Yo bitch spookin you, Jackie,” said one, a porcine man who liked to be called Havana Slim on account of the cigars that he smoked, didn’t matter that the cigars were cheap Dominicans. “You gettin old, man. Street’s no place for you now.”

Jackie ignored the taunt. He had been here long before Havana, and he would be here long after Havana was gone. Eventually he found G-Mack, but G-Mack just blew Jackie O right off. Jackie O could see that he was rattled, though, and the older man began filling in the blanks for himself.

One night later, Jackie O glimpsed the black van for the first time. He had slipped down an alleyway to take a leak when he saw something gleaming behind a big Dumpster. He zipped himself up as, gradually, the lines of the van were revealed to him. The rear plate was no longer battered or obscured, and Jackie O figured there and then that they were changing the plates on a regular basis. The tires were new, and although some damage had been done to the side panels, it looked purely cosmetic, an attempt to divert attention from the van and its occupants by making it appear older and less well maintained than it really was.

Jackie reached the driver’s door. The windows were smoked glass, but Jackie thought that he could see one figure, maybe two, moving inside. He knocked on the glass, but there was no response.

“Hey,” said Jackie. “Open up. Maybe I can help you with somethin. You lookin for a woman?”

There was only silence.

Then Jackie O did something dumb. He tried to open the door.

Looking back, Jackie O couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. At best, he was going to make whoever was inside the van seriously pissed, and at worst, he could end up with a gun in his face. At least, Jackie O thought that a gun in the face was the worst that could happen.

He grasped the handle and pulled. The door opened. A stench assailed Jackie O, as if someone had taken the bloated carcass of a dead animal buried in shallow ground and suddenly pierced its hide, releasing all the pent-up gas from within. The smell must have made Jackie nauseous, because there was no other way of explaining what he thought he saw inside the cab of the van before the door was yanked closed and the van pulled away. Even now, in the comfort of his own apartment, and with the benefit of hindsight, Jackie could only recall fragmented images.

“It was like it was filled with meat,” he told Louis. “Not hanging meat, but like the inside of a body, all purple and red. It was on the panels and on the floor, and I could see blood dripping from it and pooling in places. There was a bench seat in the front, and two figures sitting on it, but they were all black, except for their faces. One was huge and fat. He was closest to me, and the smell came mostly from him. They must have been wearing masks, because their faces looked ruined.”

“Ruined?” asked Louis.

“I didn’t get a good look at the passenger. Hell, I didn’t get much of a look at anything, but the fat one, his face was like a skull. The skin was all wrinkled and black, and the nose looked like it had been broken off, with only a piece left near his forehead. His eyes were kind of green and black, with no whites to them. I saw his teeth too, because he said something when the door opened. His teeth were long, and yellow. It must have been a mask, right? I mean, what else could it be?”

He was almost talking to himself, carrying on an argument in his head that had been going on since the night he had opened the door of the van.

“What else could it be?”

Walter and I separated after our lunch with Mackey and Dunne. They offered to meet up with us again if we needed any more help.

“No witnesses,” said Mackey, and there was a sly look in his eye that I didn’t like. I didn’t care about what they might have heard, but I wasn’t going to let someone like Mackey throw my past back in my face.

“If you have something you want to say, then say it now,” I said.

Dunne stepped between us.

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, quietly. “You handle G-Mack how you want to, but he better be breathing and walking when you’re done, and if he expires, then you be sure to have a good alibi. Are we clear on that? Otherwise, we’ll have to come after you.”

He didn’t look at Walter when he spoke. His eyes remained fixed on me. Only as he turned away did he speak directly to Walter. He said: “You better be careful too, Walter.”

Walter didn’t reply, and I did not react. After all, Dunne had a point.

“You don’t have to come along tonight,” I said, once the two cops were out of sight.

“Bullshit. I’m there. But you heard what Dunne said: they’ll fall on you if something happens to this G-Mack.”

“I’m not going to touch the pimp. If he had anything to do with Alice’s disappearance, then we’ll get it out of him, and later I’ll try to bring him in so he can tell the cops what he knows. But I can only speak for myself. I can’t speak for anyone else.”

I saw a cab on the horizon. I flagged it and watched with satisfaction as it weaved through two lanes of traffic to get to me.

“Those guys are going to bring you down with them someday,” said Walter. He wasn’t smiling.

“Maybe I’m dragging them down with me,” I replied. “Thanks for this, Walter. I’ll be in touch.”

I climbed in the cab and left him.

Far away, the Black Angel stirred.

“You made a mistake,” it said. “You were supposed to check her background. You assured me that no one would come after her.”

“She was just a common whore,” said Brightwell. He had returned from Arizona with the weight of Blue’s loss heavy upon him. He would be found again, but time was pressing, and they needed all of the bodies they could muster. Now, with the death of the girls still fresh in his memory, he was being criticized for his carelessness, and he did not like it. He had been alone for so long, without having to answer to anyone, and the exercise of authority chafed upon him in a way that it had not previously done. He also found the atmosphere in the sparsely furnished office oppressive. There was the great desk, ornately carved and topped with green leather, and the expensive antique lamps that shed a dim light on the walls, the wooden floor, and the worn rug upon which he now stood, but there were too many empty spaces waiting to be filled. In a way, it was a metaphor for the existence of the one before whom he now stood.

“No,” said the Black Angel. “She was a most uncommon whore. There are questions being asked about her. A report has been filed.”

Two great blue veins pulsed at each of Brightwell’s temples, extending their reach across either side of his skull, their ambit clearly visible beneath the man’s corona of dark hair. He resented the reprimand, and felt his impatience growing.

“If those you had sent to kill Winston had done their job properly and discreetly, then we would not be having this conversation,” he said. “You should have consulted me.”

“You were not to be found. I have no idea where you go when you disappear into the shadows.”

“That’s none of your concern.”

The Black Angel stood, leaning its hands upon the burnished desk.

“You forget yourself, Mr. Brightwell,” it said.

Brightwell’s eyes glittered with new anger.

“No,” he said. “I have never forgotten myself. I remained true. I searched, and I found. I discovered you, and I reminded you of all that you once were. It was you who forgot. I remembered. I remembered it all.”

Brightwell was right. The Black Angel recalled their first encounter, the revulsion it had felt, then, slowly, the dawning understanding and the final acceptance. The Black Angel retreated from the confrontation and turned instead to the window. Beneath its gaze, people enjoyed the sunshine, and traffic moved slowly along the congested streets.

“Kill the pimp,” said the Black Angel. “Discover all that you can about those who are asking questions.”

“And then?”

The Black Angel cast Brightwell a bone.

“Use your judgment,” it said. There was no point in reminding him of the necessity of attracting no further attention to themselves. They were growing closer to their goal, and furthermore, it realized that Brightwell was moving increasingly beyond its control.

If he had ever truly been under its control.

Brightwell left, but the Black Angel remained lost in remembrance. Strange the forms that we take, it thought. It walked to the gilt mirror upon the wall. Gently, it touched its right hand to its face, examining its reflection as though it were another version of itself. Then, slowly, it removed the contact lens from its right eye. It had been forced to wear the lens for hours that day as there were people to be met and papers to be signed, and now its eye felt as though it were burning. The mark did not react well to concealment.

The Black Angel leaned closer, tugging at the skin beneath its eye. A white sheen lay across the blue of the iris, like the ruined sail of a ship at sea, or a face briefly glimpsed through parting clouds.

That night, G-Mack took to the streets with a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. It was a Hi-Point nine-millimeter, alloy-framed and loaded up with CorBon+P ammunition for maximum stopping power. The gun had cost G-Mack very little-hell, even new the Hi-Point retailed for about 10 percent of what a similar Walther P5 would go for-and he figured that if the cops came around and he had to let it go, then he wouldn’t be out of pocket by too much. He had fired the gun only a couple of times, out in the New Jersey woods, and he knew that the Hi-Point didn’t respond well to the CorBon ammo. It affected the accuracy, and the recoil was just plain nasty, but G-Mack knew that if it came down to it, he’d be using the Hi-Point right up close, and anyone who took one from the gun at that range was going to stay down.

He left the Cutlass Supreme in the garage, and instead drove over to the Point in the Dodge that he used for backup. G-Mack didn’t care if one of the other brothers saw him driving the old-lady car. The ones that mattered knew he had the Cutlass, could take it out anytime he damn well pleased if they needed some reminding, but the Dodge was less likely to attract attention, and it had enough under the hood to get him out of trouble quickly if the need arose. He parked up in an alleyway-the same alleyway in which Jackie O had seen fit to try to confront the occupants of the black van, although G-Mack didn’t know that-then slipped out onto the streets of the Point. He kept his head down, doing the rounds of his whores from the shadows, then retreated back to the Dodge. He had instructed the young bitch, Ellen, to act as an intermediary, bringing the money from the others to him instead of forcing him to return to the streets again.

He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He reached beneath the driver’s seat and removed a Glock 23 from its slot. The Hi-Point under his arm would do if he ran into trouble on the street, but the 23 was his baby. He’d been put onto it by a guy who got drummed out of the South Carolina State Police for corruption and now did a thriving business in firearms for the more discerning customer. The Staties down in SC had adopted the 23 sight unseen, and had never had cause to complain. Loaded up with.40 caliber S amp;W cartridges, it was one mean killing machine. G-Mack removed the Hi-Point from his holster and balanced both weapons in his hands. Next to the Glock, it was clear what a piece of shit the Hi-Point really was, but G-Mack wasn’t too concerned. This wasn’t a fashion show. This was life or death, and anyway, two guns were always better than one.

We descended on Hunts Point shortly before midnight.

In the nineteenth century, Hunts Point was home to wealthy landowning families, their numbers gradually swelled by city dwellers envious of the luxurious lifestyles available to the Point’s residents. After World War I, a train line was built along Southern Boulevard, and the mansions gave way to apartments. City businesses began to relocate, attracted by the space available for development and ease of access to the tristate region. The poor and working-class families (nearly sixty thousand residents, or two-thirds of the population in the 1970s alone) were forced out as Hunts Point’s reputation grew in business circles, leading to the opening of the produce market in 1967 and the meat market in 1974. There were recycling stores, warehouses, commercial waste depots, auto glass sellers, scrap dealers-and, of course, the big markets, to and from which the trucks trundled, sometimes providing the hookers with a little business along the way. Nearly ten thousand people still lived in the district, and to their credit they had campaigned for traffic signals, modified truck routes, new trees, and a waterfront park, slowly improving this sliver of the South Bronx to create a better home for themselves and for future generations; but they were living in an area that was a crossroads for all the garbage the city of New York could provide. There were two dozen waste transfer stations on this little peninsula alone, and half of all its putrescible garbage and most of its sewage sludge ended up there. The whole area stank in summer, and asthma was rife. Garbage clung to fences and filled the gutters, and the noise of two million trucks a year provided a sound track of squealing brakes, tooting horns, and beeping reverse signals. Hunts Point was a miniature city of industry, and among the most visible of those industries was prostitution.

The streets were already crammed with cars as I arrived, and women tottered between them on absurdly high heels, most of them wearing little more than lingerie. There were all shapes, all ages, all colors. In its way, the Point was the most egalitarian of places. Some of the women shuffled like they were in the final stages of Parkinson’s, jerking and shifting from one foot to the other while trying to keep their spines straight in what was known locally as the “crack dance,” their pipes tucked into their bras or the waistbands of their skirts. Two girls on Lafayette were eating sandwiches provided by the Nightworks outreach initiative, which tried to provide the working girls with health care, condoms, clean needles, even food when necessary. The women’s heads moved constantly, watching for pimps, johns, cops. The cops liked to swoop occasionally, backing up the paddy wagons to street corners and simply sweeping any hookers within reach into the back, or pink-slipping them for disorderly conduct or obstructing traffic, even loitering, anything to break up their business. A $250 fine was a lot for these women to pay if they didn’t have a pimp to back them up, and many routinely spent thirty to sixty days in the can for nonpayment rather than hand over to the courts money that they could ill afford to lose, if the poorer ones had $250 to begin with.

I went into the Green Mill to wait for the others. The Green Mill was a legendary Hunts Point diner. It had been around for decades, and was now the main resting place for cold pimps and tired whores. It was relatively quiet when I got there, since business was good on the streets. A couple of pimps wearing Philadelphia Phillies shirts sat at one of the windows, flicking through a copy of Rides magazine and arguing the relative merits of assorted hookups. I took a seat near the door and waited. There was a young girl seated at one of the booths. Her hair was dark, and she was dressed in a short black dress that was little more than a slip. Three times I saw older women enter the diner, give her money, then leave again. After the third had departed, the girl closed the little purse containing the money and left the diner. She was back again maybe five minutes later, and the cycle resumed again.

Angel joined me shortly after the girl had returned. He had dressed down for the occasion, if such a thing were actually possible. His jeans were even more worn than usual, and his denim jacket looked like it had been stolen from the corpse of a particularly unhygienic biker.

“We have him,” he said.

“Where?”

“An alley, two blocks away. He’s sitting in a Dodge, listening to the radio.”

“He alone?”

“Looks like it. The girl over at the window seems to be bringing him his money a couple of times an hour, but she’s the only one who’s been near him since ten.”

“You figure he’s armed?”

“I would be if I was him.”

“He doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“He knows somebody’s coming. Louis talked to Jackie O.”

“The old-timer?”

“Right. He just gave us the lead. He figures G-Mack made a big mistake, and he’s known it since the night Martha confronted him. He’s edgy.”

“I’m surprised he’s stayed around this long.”

“Jackie O thinks he’d run if he could. He’s low on funds, seeing as how he spent all his money on a fancy ride, and he has no friends.”

“That’s heartbreaking.”

“I thought you might see it that way. Pay at the register. You leave it on the table, and someone will steal it.”

I paid for my coffee and followed Angel from the diner.

We intercepted the girl just as she entered the alley. The pimp’s Dodge was parked around a corner in a lot behind a big brown-stone, with an exit behind him onto the street and one before him that connected perpendicularly with an alley. For the moment, we were out of his sight.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m not interested tonight,” she replied.

She tried to walk around me. I gripped her arm. My hand entirely enclosed it, with so much room to spare that I had to tighten my fist considerably just to hold on to her. She opened her mouth to scream, and Louis’s hand closed around it as we moved her into the shadows.

“Take it easy,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

I showed her my license, but didn’t give her enough time to take in the details.

“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Understand? I just need a few words.”

I nodded to Louis, and he carefully removed his hand from her mouth. She didn’t try to scream again, but he kept his hand close just in case.

“What’s your name?”

“Ellen.”

“You’re one of G-Mack’s girls.”

“So?”

“Where are you from?”

“Aberdeen.”

“You and a million other Kurt Cobain fans. Seriously, where are you from?”

“Detroit,” she said, her shoulders sagging. She was probably still lying.

“How old are you?”

“I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

“I know you don’t. I’m just asking. You don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Bullshit,” said Louis. “That’s how old you’ll be in 2007.”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay, listen to me, Ellen. G-Mack is in a lot of trouble. After tonight, he’s not going to be in business anymore. I want you to take whatever money is in that purse and walk away. Go back to the Green Mill first. Our friend will stay with you to make sure you don’t talk to anyone.”

Ellen looked torn. I saw her tense, but Louis immediately brought his hand closer to her mouth.

“Ellen, just do it.”

Walter Cole appeared beside us.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk back with you, buy you a cup of coffee, whatever you want.”

Ellen had no choice. Walter wrapped an arm around her shoulder. It looked almost protective, but he kept a tight grip on her in case she tried to run. She looked back at us.

“Don’t hurt him,” she said. “I got nobody else.”

Walter walked her across the road. She took her old seat, and he sat beside her, so that he could hear all that she said to the other women, and could stop her if she made a break for the door.

“She’s just a child,” I said to Louis.

“Yeah,” he said. “Save her later.”

G-Mack had promised to slip Ellen 10 percent of whatever the other women made if she acted as his go-between for the night, a deal to which Ellen was happy to agree because it meant that she got to spend a few hours drinking coffee and reading magazines instead of freezing her ass off in her underwear while she tried to entice sleazebags into vacant lots. But it didn’t do for G-Mack to be away from his women for too long. The bitches were already ripping him off. Without his physical presence to keep them in line, he’d be lucky to come out with nickels and dimes by close of business. He knew that Ellen would also take a little extra before she handed over the cash to him, so all things considered, this wasn’t going to be a profitable night for him. He didn’t know how much longer he could stay in the shadows, trying to avoid a confrontation that must inevitably come unless he got together enough cash to run. He had considered selling the Cutlass, but only for about five seconds. He loved that car. Buying it had been his dream, and disposing of it would be like admitting that he was a failure.

A figure moved in his rearview mirror. The Hi-Point was back in the waistband of his jeans, but the Glock was warm in his right hand, held low, down by his thigh. He tightened his grip on it. It felt slick upon the sweat of his palm. A man stood, wavering, close to the wall. G-Mack could see that he was a no-count, dressed in tattered denims and anonymous sneakers that looked like they came from a thrift store. The man fumbled in his pants, then turned to one side and leaned his forehead against the wall, waiting for the flow to start. G-Mack relaxed his grip on the Glock.

The driver’s side window of the Dodge exploded inward, showering him with glass. He tried to raise his gun as the passenger window also disintegrated, but he received a blow to the side of the head that stunned him, then a strong hand was upon his right arm and the muzzle of a gun much bigger than his own was pressed painfully into his temple. He caught a glimpse of a black man with close-cropped graying hair and a vaguely satanic beard. The man did not look happy to see him. G-Mack’s left hand began to drift casually toward the Hi-Point concealed beneath his jacket, but the passenger door opened, and another voice said: “I wouldn’t.”

G-Mack didn’t, and the Hi-Point was slipped from his jeans.

“Let the Glock go,” said Louis.

G-Mack allowed the gun to drop to the floor of the car.

Slowly, Louis eased the gun away from G-Mack’s temple and opened the car door.

“Get out,” said Louis. “Keep your hands raised.”

G-Mack glanced to his left, where I knelt outside the passenger door. The Hi-Point in my left hand was dwarfed by my Colt. It was Big Gun Night, but nobody had told G-Mack. He stepped carefully from the car, falling glass tinkling to the ground as he did so. Louis turned him, pushing him against the side of the car and forcing his legs apart. G-Mack felt hands upon him and saw the little man in denim who had previously seemed on the verge of taking a drunken leak. He couldn’t believe that he had been fooled so easily.

Louis tapped him with the barrel of his own H amp;K.

“You see how dumb you are?” he said. “Now, we going to give you a chance to show how smart you are instead. Turn around, slowly.”

G-Mack did as he was told. He was now facing Louis and Angel. Angel was holding G-Mack’s Glock. G-Mack wasn’t going to be getting it back. In fact, although G-Mack probably didn’t know it, he was now as close as he had ever come to being killed.

“What do you want?” asked G-Mack.

“Information. We want to know about a woman named Alice. She’s one of your girls.”

“She’s gone. I don’t where she’s at.”

Louis raked his gun across G-Mack’s face. The younger man curled up, his hands cupped around his ruined nose, blood flowing freely between his fingers.

“You remember a woman?” said Louis. “Came to you a couple of nights back, asked you the same question that I just asked? You remember what you did to her?”

After a moment’s pause, G-Mack nodded, his head still down and drops of blood sprinkling the pitted ground beneath his feet, falling on the weeds that had sprouted between the cracks.

“Well, I ain’t even started hurting you enough for what happened to her, so if you don’t answer my questions right, then you won’t be walking out of this alley, do you understand?”

Louis’s voice dropped until it was barely a whisper.

“The worst thing about what will happen to you is that I won’t kill you,” he said. “I’ll leave you a cripple, with hands that won’t grip, ears that won’t hear, and eyes that won’t see. Are we clear?”

Again, G-Mack nodded. He had no doubt that this man would carry out his threats to the letter.

“Look at me,” said Louis.

G-Mack lowered his hands and raised his head. His lower jaw hung open in shock, and his teeth were red.

“What happened to the girl?”

“A guy came to me,” said G-Mack. His voice was distorted by the damage to his nose. “He told me that he’d give me good money if I could trace her.”

“Why did he want her?”

“She was in a house with a john, a guy named Winston, and a raid went down. The guy got killed, his driver too. Alice and another girl, Sereta, were there. They ran, but Sereta took something from the house before she left. The guys who did the killing, they wanted it back.”

G-Mack tried to sniff back some of the blood that had now slowed to an ooze over his lips and chin. The pain made him wince.

“She was a junkie, man,” he said. He was pleading, but his voice remained monotonic, as though he himself did not believe what he was telling Louis. “She was on the long slide. She wasn’t earning no more than a hundred dollars out there, and that was on a good night. I was gonna cut her loose anyway. He said nothing bad would happen to her, once she told them what they wanted to know.”

“And you’re telling me that you believed him?”

G-Mack stared Louis straight in the face.

“What did it matter?” he said.

For the first time in all the years that I had known him, Louis seemed about to lose control. I saw the gun rising and his finger tightening on the trigger. I reached out my hand and stopped it before it could point at G-Mack.

“If you kill him, we learn nothing more,” I said.

The gun continued its upward pressure against my hand for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

“Tell me his name,” said Louis.

“He didn’t give me a name,” said G-Mack. “He was fat and ugly, and he smelled bad. I didn’t see him but once.”

“He give you a number, a place to contact him?”

“The guy with him did. Slim, dressed in blue. He came to me, after I told him where she was at. He brought me my money, told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“How much?” asked Louis. “How much did you sell her out for?”

G-Mack swallowed.

“Ten Gs. They promised ten more if she gave them Sereta.”

I stepped away from them. If Louis wanted to kill him, then let it be done.

“She was blood to me,” said Louis.

“I didn’t know,” said G-Mack. “I didn’t know! She was a junkie. I didn’t think it would matter.”

Louis gripped him by the throat and forced the gun against G-Mack’s chest. Louis’s face contorted, and a wail forced itself from somewhere deep within him, issuing forth from the place where all of his love and loyalty existed, walled off from any of the evil that he had done.

“Don’t,” said the pimp, and now he was crying. “Please don’t. I know more. I can give you more.”

Louis’s face was close to him now, so close that blood from G-Mack’s mouth had spattered his features.

“Tell me.”

“I followed the guy, after he paid me off. I wanted to know where I could find him, if I had to.”

“You mean in case the cops came along, and you had to sell him out to save your skin.”

“Whatever, man, whatever!”

“And?”

“Let me go,” said G-Mack. “I tell you, you let me walk away.”

“You got to be fuckin with me.”

“Listen, man, I did wrong, but I didn’t hurt her. You need to talk to someone else about what happened to her. I’ll tell you where you can find them, but you got to let me walk. I’ll leave town, and you’ll never see me again, I swear.”

“You tryin to bargain with a man got a gun pushed into your chest?”

It was Angel who intervened.

“We don’t know that she’s dead,” he said. “There may still be a chance of finding her alive.”

Louis looked to me. If Angel was playing good cop and Louis bad cop, then my role was somewhere in between. But if Louis killed G-Mack, it would go bad for me. I didn’t doubt that Mackey and Dunne would come looking for me, and I would have no alibi. At the very least, it would involve some awkward questions, and might even reopen old wounds that would be better off left unexplored.

“I say listen to him,” I said. “We go looking for this guy. If it turns out that our friend here is lying, then you can do what you want with him.”

Louis took his time deciding, and all the while G-Mack’s life hung from a thread, and he knew it. At last Louis took a step back and lowered the gun.

“Where is he?”

“I followed him to a place off Bedford.”

Louis nodded.

“Looks like you bought yourself a few more hours of life,” he said.

Garcia watched the four men from his hiding place behind the Dumpster. Garcia believed all that Brightwell had told him, and was certain of the rewards that he had been promised. He now bore the brand upon his wrist, so that he might be recognized by others like him, but unlike Brightwell, he was merely a foot soldier, a conscript in the great war being waged. Brightwell also bore a brand upon his wrist, but although it was far older than Garcia’s, it appeared never to have properly healed. In fact, when Garcia stood close to Brightwell, he could sometimes detect the smell of scorched flesh from him, if a diminution of the fat man’s own stench permitted it.

Garcia did not know if the fat man’s name was really Brightwell. In truth, Garcia did not care. He trusted Brightwell’s judgment, and was grateful to him for finding him, for bringing him to this great city once Garcia had honed his abilities to Brightwell’s satisfaction, and for giving him a place in which to work and to pursue his obsessions. Brightwell, in turn, had found in Garcia a willing convert to his convictions. Garcia had merely absorbed them into his own belief system, relegating other deities where necessary, or dispensing with them entirely if they conflicted utterly with the new, compelling vision of the world-both this world, and the world below-presented to him by Brightwell.

Garcia was concerned at the wisdom of not intervening once they saw the three men approach the pimp G-Mack, but he would make no move unless Brightwell moved first. They had just been a little too late. Minutes earlier, and the pimp would have been dead by the time these strangers had found him.

As Garcia watched, two of the men took G-Mack by the arms and led him from his car. The third man seemed about to follow, then stopped. He scanned the alleyway, his gaze resting for a moment on the shadows that obscured Garcia, then moved on, his head tilting back as he took in the buildings that surrounded him, with their filthy windows and their battered fire escapes. After a minute had elapsed, he followed his companions from the alley, but he kept his back to them, retreating from the lot, his eyes scanning the dirty windows as though aware of the hostile presence concealed behind them.

Brightwell had decided to kill them. He would follow the four men, then he and Garcia would slaughter them and dispose of them. He did not fear them, even the black man who moved so quickly and had an air of lethality about him. If it were done swiftly and cleanly, then the consequences would be limited.

Brightwell was standing in the grimy hallway of an apartment block, close by the entrance to the fire escape, where a single yellowed window looked down upon the alley below. He had taken the precaution of removing the starter from the fluorescent light behind him, so that he might not be seen if for any reason the lights were switched on. He was about to turn away from the window when the white man in the dark jacket, whose back had been to Brightwell for the duration of their confrontation with G-Mack, turned and scanned the windows. As his gaze fell upon Brightwell’s hiding place, Brightwell felt something constrict in his throat. He took a step closer to the window, his right hand instinctively reaching out and touching the glass, his fingertips resting against the figure of the man below. Memories surged through his brain: memories of falling, fire, despair, wrath.

Memories of betrayal.

Now the man in the alley was backing away, as though he too sensed something hostile, a presence that was both unknown yet familiar to him. His eyes continued to search the windows above, seeking any sign of movement, any indication of the source of what he sensed within himself. Then he disappeared at last from Brightwell’s sight, but the fat man did not move. Instead, he closed his eyes and released a trembling breath, all thoughts of killing banished from his mind. What had so long evaded him was now unexpectedly, joyously revealed.

We have found you at last, he thought.

You are discovered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

As I retreated down the alleyway, I tried to put a name on what I had felt as I stared at the window. The sense of being watched was strong from the moment that we confronted G-Mack, but I was unable to detect any obvious signs of surveillance. We were surrounded by brownstones and warehouses, and any one of them could have concealed a watcher, maybe just a curious neighbor or even a whore and her john on their way to a slightly pricier assignation in a rundown apartment, pausing briefly to take in the men in the alleyway before proceeding on their way, conscious always that time was money and the demands of the flesh were pressing.

It was only when Angel and Louis began moving G-Mack, and I had a moment to scan the windows one last time, that the prickling began at the base of my neck. I was conscious of a disturbance in the night, as though a silent explosion had occurred somewhere in the distance and the shock waves were approaching the place in which I stood. A great force seemed to rush toward me, and I half expected to see a shimmering in the air as the circle widened, churning garbage and scattering discarded newspapers as it came. My attention focused on one particular window on the fourth floor of an old brownstone, a fire door close by leading to a rusted fire escape. The window was dark, but I thought for a moment that I saw a shifting against the glass, black momentarily giving way to gray at the center. Buried memories, both alien to me yet almost familiar, tried to emerge from my unconscious. I sensed them there, moving like worms beneath frozen earth or like parasites under the skin, desperately seeking to break through and expose themselves to the light. I heard a terrible howling, and it was as if voices were raised in rage and despair, descending from some great height, twisting and tumbling through the air, their cries distorting and fading as they fell. I was among them, jostled by the flailing of my brothers, hands striking me, nails tearing in a desperate attempt to arrest the descent. There was fear in me, and regret, but more than anything else I was filled with a dreadful sense of loss. Something indescribably precious had been taken from me, and I would never see it again.

And we were burning. We were all burning.

Then this half-remembered, half-created past, this phantasm from my mind, found itself bound up with real loss, for the pain brought back the deaths of my wife and my daughter and the emptiness that their passing had left inside. And yet the torment that I had endured on the night that they were taken from me, and the awful, debilitating pain that followed, seemed somehow less than what I now felt in the alleyway, the footsteps of my friends slowly growing distant, the protestations of the doomed man between them fading away. There was only the howling, and the emptiness, and the figure lost behind yellowed glass, reaching out to me. Something cold touched my cheek, like the unwanted caress of a lover once cherished and now rejected. I drew back from it, and thought that my response had somehow generated a reaction in the hidden figure at the window. I sensed its surprise at my presence mutate into manifest hostility, and I thought that I had never before been in proximity to such rage. Any impulse I had to ascend to the upper floor of the building immediately disappeared. I wanted to flee, to run and hide and reinvent myself somewhere far away, to cloak myself in a new identity and lie low in the hope that they would not track me down.

They.

He.

It.

How did I know this?

And as I moved slowly away, following Angel and Louis to the busy streets beyond, a voice that was once like mine spoke words that I did not understand. It said:

You are discovered.

We have found you again.

Louis was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Lexus when I reached them. Angel was in the back beside G-Mack, who sat sullen and hunched, sniffing gently through his ruined nose. Before I got in beside Louis, I took a pair of cuffs from my jacket pocket and told G-Mack to attach one cuff to his right wrist and the other to the armrest of the door. When he had done so, and his right arm was crossed awkwardly over his body, I got in the car and we drove toward Brooklyn. Louis stole a glance at me.

“Everything okay back there?”

I looked over my shoulder at G-Mack, but he appeared lost in his own misery and hurt.

“I felt like we were being watched,” I said quietly. “There was someone in one of the upper stories.”

“If that’s true, then there was someone on the ground as well. You think they were coming for this piece of shit in the back?”

“Maybe, but we got to him first.”

“They know about us now.”

“I think they knew about us already. Otherwise, why start tidying up the loose ends?”

Louis checked the rearview mirror, but the nature of the night traffic made it hard to tell if we were being followed. It didn’t matter. We would have to assume that we were and wait to see what developed.

“I think you have more to tell us,” I said to G-Mack.

“My man in blue came to me, paid me, then told me not to ask no questions. That’s all I know about him.”

“How were they going to get to her?”

“He said it wasn’t none of my business.”

“You use a bail bondsman named Eddie Tager for your girls?”

“Hell, no. Most of the time, they just get pink-slipped anyways. They get themselves in some serious shit, I’m gonna have me a talk with them, see if we can work something out. I ain’t no charity, givin it away to no bondsman.”

“I bet you’re real understanding about how they pay it back too.”

“This is a business. Nobody gets nothing for free.”

“So when Alice was arrested, what did you do?”

He didn’t reply. I slapped him once, hard, on his wounded face.

“Answer me.”

“I called the number they gave me.”

“Cell phone?”

“Yeah.”

“You still have the number?”

“I remember it, bitch.”

Blood had dripped onto his lips. He spit it onto the floor of the car, then recited the number by heart. I took out my cell and entered the number, then, just to be safe, wrote it in my notebook. I guessed that it wouldn’t lead to much. If they were smart, they’d have disposed of the phone as soon as they had the girl.

“Where did Alice keep her personal things?” I said.

“I let her leave some stuff at my place, makeup and shit, but she stayed with Sereta most of the time. Sereta had her a room up on Westchester. I wasn’t gonna have no junkie whore in my crib.” When he said the word “whore” he looked at Louis. We had learned all that we would from G-Mack. As for Louis, he did not respond to the pimp’s goads. Instead, he pulled over to drop me at my car, and I followed them to Brooklyn.

Williamsburg, like the Point, was once home to some of the wealthiest men in the country. There were mansions here, and beer gardens, and private clubs. The Whitneys rubbed shoulders with the Vanderbilts, and lavish buildings were erected, all close enough to the sugar refineries and distilleries, the shipyards and the foundries, for the smell to reach the rich if the wind was blowing the right way.

Williamsburg’s status as the playground of the wealthy changed at the beginning of the last century, with the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge. European immigrants-Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Italians-fled the crowded slums of the Lower East Side, taking up occupancy of the tenements and the brownstones. They were followed by the Jews, in the thirties and forties, who settled mainly in Southside, among them Satmar Hasidim from Hungary and Romania, who still congregated in the section northeast of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Northside was a little different. It was now trendy and bohemian, and the fact that Bedford Avenue was the first stop made by the L train from Manhattan meant that it was an easy commute, so property prices were going up. Nevertheless, the area had some way to go before it achieved true desirability for those with money in their pockets, and it was not about to abandon its old identity without a fight. The Northside Pharmacy on Bedford still took care to call itself additionally a farmacia and an apteka; Edwin’s Fruit and Veg store sold Zywiec beer from Poland, advertised with a small neon sign in the window; and the meat market remained the Polska-Masarna. There were delis and beauty salons, and Mike’s Northstar Hardware continued in business, but there was also a little coffee shop called Reads that sold used books and alternative magazines, and the lampposts were dotted with flyers hawking loft spaces for artists’ studios.

I hung a right on Tenth at Raymund’s Diner, with its wooden Bierkeller sign illustrated by a beer and a joint of meat. One block down, at Berry, stood a warehouse building that still bore the faint traces of its previous existence as a brewery, for this area was once the heart of New York’s brewing industry. The warehouse was five stories tall and badly scarred by graffiti. A fire escape ran down the center of its eastern façade, and a banner had been strung across the top floor. It read: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW!” Someone had crossed out the word “Home” and spray painted the word “Polish” in its place. Underneath was a telephone number. No lights burned in any of the windows. I watched Louis drive around the block once, then park on Eleventh. I pulled up behind him and walked to his car. He was leaning back in his seat, talking to G-Mack.

“You sure this is the place?” Louis asked him.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“If you’re lying, I’ll hurt you again.”

G-Mack tried to hold Louis’s gaze, but failed.

“I know that.”

Louis turned his attention to Angel and me.

“Get out, keep an eye on the place. I’m gonna dump my boy here.”

There was nothing that I could say. G-Mack looked worried. He had every reason to.

“Hey, I done told you everythin I know,” he protested. His voice broke slightly.

Louis ignored him.

“I’m not gonna kill him,” he said to me.

I nodded.

Angel got out of the car, and we faded into the shadows as Louis drove G-Mack away.

The present is very fragile, and the ground beneath our feet is thin and treacherous. Beneath it lies the maze of the past, a honeycomb network created by the strata of days and years where memories lie buried, waiting for the moment when the thin crust above cracks and what was and what is can become one again. There is life down there in the honeycomb world, and Brightwell was now alerting it to his discovery. Everything had changed for him, and new plans would have to be made. He called the most private of numbers, and saw, as the sleepy voice answered, that white mote flickering in the darkness.

“They were too quick for us,” he said. “They have him, and they’re moving. But something interesting has emerged…”

Louis parked the car in the delivery bay of a Chinese food store, close by the Woodhull Medical Center, on Broadway. He tossed G-Mack the key to the cuffs, watched silently as he freed his hand, then stood back to let him step from the car.

“Lie down on your belly.”

“Please, man-”

“Lie down.”

G-Mack sank to his knees, then stretched flat on the ground.

“Spread your arms and your legs.”

“I’m sorry,” said G-Mack. His face was contorted with fear. “You got to believe me.”

His head was turned to one side so that he could see Louis. He began to cry as the suppressor was mounted on the muzzle of the little.22 that Louis always carried as backup.

“I do believe you’re sorry now. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Please,” said G-Mack. Blood and snot mixed on his lips. “Please.”

“This is your last chance. Have you told us everything?”

“Yeah! I got nothing else. I swear to you, man.”

“You right-handed?”

“What?”

“I said, are you right-handed?”

“Yeah.”

“So I figure you hit the woman with that hand?”

“I don’t-”

Louis took one look around to make sure nobody was near, then fired a single shot into the back of G-Mack’s right hand. G-Mack screamed. Louis took two steps back and fired a second shot into the pimp’s right ankle.

G-Mack gritted his teeth and pressed his forehead against the ground, but the pain was too much. He raised his damaged right hand and used his left to push himself up and look at his wounded foot.

“Now you can’t go far if I need to find you again,” said Louis. He raised the gun and leveled it at G-Mack’s face. “You’re a lucky man. Don’t forget that. But you better pray that I find Alice alive.”

He lowered the gun and walked back to the car.

“Hospital’s across the street,” he said, then drove away.

Apart from the fire escape, there appeared to be only one way into or out of the building, and that was a single steel door on Berry. There were no bells or buzzers, and no names of residents.

“You think he was lying?” asked Angel.

Louis had rejoined us. I didn’t ask him about G-Mack.

“No,” said Louis. “He wasn’t lying. Open it.”

Louis and I took up positions at opposite corners of the building, watching the streets while Angel worked on the lock. It took him five minutes, which was a long time for him. “Old locks are good locks,” he said, by way of explanation.

We slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind us. The first floor was an entirely open space that had once been used to house the vats, with storage space for barrels and sliding doors to admit trucks. The doors were long gone, and the entrances bricked up. To the right, beside what had once been a small office, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor. There was no elevator. The next three floors were similar to the first: largely open-plan, with no signs of habitation.

The top story was different. Someone had commenced a halfhearted division of the space into apartments, although it looked like the work had been done sometime before, then abandoned. Walls had been erected, but most had no doors added, so that it was possible to see the empty areas within. There appeared to be five or six apartments planned in total, but only one seemed to be finished. The green entrance door was unmarked and closed. I took the left side, while Angel and Louis moved to the right. I knocked twice, then drew back quickly. There was no reply. I tried again, but with the same result. We now had a couple of options, neither of which appealed to me. Either we could try to break down the door, or Angel could pick the two locks and risk getting his head blown off if someone was inside and listening.

Angel made the choice. He got down on one knee, spread his little set of tools on the floor, then handed one to Louis. Simultaneously, they worked the locks, both of them trying to shield themselves as best they could by keeping as much of their bodies as possible against the wall. It seemed to take a long time, but was probably less than a minute. Eventually, both locks turned, and they pushed the door open.

To the left was a galley-style kitchen, with the remains of some fast food on the counter. There was cream in the refrigerator, with three days remaining before it expired, and a paper bag filled with pita bread, also apparently fresh. Apart from some cans of beans and franks and a couple of containers of macaroni and cheese, this was the sum total of food in the apartment. The entrance hall then led into a lounge area, consisting only of a couch, an easy chair, and a TV and VCR. Again to the left was the smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms, the single bed casually made, and with a pair of boots and one or two items of clothing visible on a chair by the window. With Angel covering me, I checked the closet, but it contained only cheap trousers and shirts.

We heard a low whistle, and followed it to where Louis stood in the doorway of a second bedroom to the right, his body blocking our view. He stepped to one side, and we saw what lay within.

It was a shrine, and its inspiration lay in a place far distant from this one, and in a past far stranger than any we could imagine.