The Reapers

He will now be felled with my arrow, as I am enraged at him, and gone are his lives now, and indeed the earth shall drink his blood.

– SRIMAD VALMIKI RAMAYANA (C. 500-100 B.C.)

CHAPTER ONE

THERE ARE SO MANY killings, so many victims, so many lives lost and ruined every day, that it can be hard to keep track of them all, hard to make the connections that might bring cases to a close. Some are obvious: the man who kills his girlfriend, then takes his own life, either out of remorse or because of his own inability to face the consequences of his actions; or the tit-for-tat murders of hoodlums, gangsters, drug dealers, each killing leading inexorably to another as the violence escalates. One death invites the next, extending a pale hand in greeting, grinning as the ax falls, the blade cuts. There is a chain of events that can easily be reconstructed, a clear trail for the law to follow.

But there are other killings that are harder to connect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this honeycomb world as time folds softly upon itself.

The honeycomb world does not hide secrets: it stores them. It is a repository of buried memories, of half-forgotten acts.

In the honeycomb world, everything is connected.

The St. Daniil sat on Brightwater Court, not far from the cavernous dinner clubs on Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue where couples of all ages danced to music in Russian, Spanish, and English, ate Russian food, shared vodka and wine, and watched stage shows that would not have been out of place in some of the more modest Reno hotels, or on a cruise ship, yet the St. Daniil was far enough away from them to render itself distinct in any number of ways. The building that it occupied overlooked the ocean, and the boardwalk with its principal trio of restaurants, the Volna, the Tatiana, and the Winter Garden, now screened to protect their patrons from the cool sea breeze and the stinging sands. Nearby was the Brighton playground, where, during the day, old men sat at stone tables playing cards while children cavorted nearby, the young and the not-so-young united together in the same space. New condos had sprung up to the east and west, part of the transformation that Brighton Beach had undergone in recent years.

But the St. Daniil belonged to an older dispensation, a different Brighton Beach, one occupied by the kind of businesses that made their money from those who were on nodding terms with poverty: check-cashing services that took 25 percent of every check cashed, then offered loans at a similar monthly rate to cover the shortfall; discount stores that sold cheap crockery with cracked glaze, and firetrap Christmas decorations all year round; former mom-and-pop grocery stores that were now run by the kind of men who looked like they might have the remains of mom and pop rotting in their cellars; laundromats frequented by men who smelt of the streets and who would routinely strip down to filthy shorts and sit, nearly naked, waiting for their clothes to wash before giving them a single desultory spin in the dryer (for every quarter counted) and then dress in the still-damp clothes, folding the rest into plastic garbage bags and venturing back onto the streets, their garments steaming slightly in the air; pawnshops that did a steady trade in redeemed and unredeemed items, for there was always someone willing to benefit from the misfortune of another; and storefronts with no name above the window and only a battered counter inside, the shadowy business conducted within of no interest to those who needed to be told its nature. Most of those places were gone now, relegated to side streets, to less desirable neighborhoods, pushed farther and farther back from the avenue and the sea, although those who needed their services would always know where to find them.

The St. Daniil remained, though. It endured. The St. Daniil was a club, although it was strictly private and had little in common with its glitzier counterparts on the avenue. Accessed through a steel-caged door, it occupied the basement of an old brownstone building surrounded by other brownstones of similar vintage although, while its neighbors had been cleaned up, the edifice occupied by the St. Daniil had not. It had once formed the main entrance to a larger complex, but changes to the internal structure of the buildings had isolated the St. Daniil between two significantly more attractive apartment blocks. The club’s home now squatted in the middle of them like some poor relation that had muscled in on a family photo, unashamed of its ignominy.

Above the St. Daniil was a warren of small apartments, some big enough to be occupied by entire families, others small enough to accommodate only an individual, and one, at that, for whom space mattered less than privacy and anonymity. Nobody lived in those apartments now, not willingly. Some were used for storage: booze, cigarettes, electrical goods, assorted contraband. The rest acted as temporary quarters for young-sometimes very young-prostitutes and, when required, their clients. One or two of the rooms were marginally better furnished and maintained than others, and contained video cameras and recording equipment for the making of pornographic films.

Although it was known as the St. Daniil, the club did not have an official name. A plate beside the door read “Private Members Social Club” in English and Cyrillic, but it was not the kind of place where anyone went to be sociable. There was a bar there, but few lingered at it, and those who did stuck mostly to coffee and killed time while waiting for errands to run, vig to collect, bones to break. A TV above the bar showed pirated DVDs, old hockey games, sometimes porn or, late at night, when all business had been conducted, film of Russian troops in Chechnya engaging in reprisals against their enemies, real or perceived. Worn hemispherical vinyl booths lined the walls, with scuffed tables at their center, relics of a time when this really was a social club, a place where men could talk of the old country and share the newspapers that had arrived in the mail or in the suitcases of visitors and immigrants. The decor consisted mainly of framed copies of Soviet posters from the 1940s, bought for five bucks at RBC Video on Brighton Beach Avenue.

For a time, the police had kept watch on the club, but they had been unable to access it in order to plant a bug, and a wiretap on the phones had expired without anything useful being learned. Any business of consequence was, they suspected, now conducted on throwaway cellphones, the phones replaced religiously at the end of every week. Two raids by vice on the building through the doorway above the club had scored only a couple of johns and a handful of weary whores, few of whom had English and fewer of whom had papers. No pimps were ever apprehended, and the women, the cops knew, were easily replaced.

On those nights, the door to the St. Daniil had remained firmly closed, and when the cops finally gained entry to it they had found only a bored bartender and a pair of ancient, toothless Russians playing poker for matchsticks.

It was a mid-October evening. The light outside had long faded and only a single booth in the club was occupied. The man seated there was a Ukrainian known as the Priest. He had studied in an Orthodox seminary for three years before discovering his true vocation, which lay primarily in providing the kinds of services for which priests were usually required to offer forgiveness. The club’s unofficial name was a testament to the Priest’s brief flirtation with the religious life. The St. Daniil monastery was Moscow’s oldest cloister, a stronghold of the Orthodox faith even during the worst excesses of the Communist era, when many of its priests had become martyrs and the remains of St. Daniil himself had been smuggled to America in order to save them from harm.

Unlike many of those who worked for him, the Priest spoke English with hardly a trace of an accent. He had been part of the first influx of immigrants from the Soviet Union, working hard to learn the ways of this new world, and he could still recall a time when Brighton Beach had been nothing but old people living in rent-controlled apartments surrounded by little vacant houses falling into decay, a far cry from the days when this area was a beacon for immigrants and New Yorkers alike anxious to leave the crowded neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side for space in which to live and the feel of sea air in their lungs. He prided himself on his sophistication. He read the Times, not the Post. He went to the theater. When he was in his realm, there was no porn on the TV, no poorly copied DVDs. Instead, it was tuned to BBC World, or sometimes CNN. He did not like Fox News. It looked inward, and he was a man who was always looking at the greater world outside. He drank tea during the day, and only compote, a fruit punch that tasted of plums, at night. He was an ambitious man, a prince who wished to become a king. He paid obeisance to the old men, the ones who had been imprisoned under Stalin, the ones whose fathers had created the criminal enterprise that had now reached its zenith in a land far from their own. But even as he bowed before them, the Priest looked for ways in which they might be undermined. He calculated the strength of potential rivals among his own generation and prepared his people for the inevitable bloodshed, sanctioned or unsanctioned, that would come. Recently, there had been some reversals. The mistakes might have been avoided, but he was not entirely to blame for them. Unfortunately, there were others who did not see it that way. Perhaps, he thought, the bloodshed would have to begin sooner than expected.

Today had been a bad day, another in a succession of bad days. There had been a problem with the restrooms that morning and the place still stank, even though the difficulty had apparently been solved once the drain people, from a firm trusted by the organization, got on the case. On another day, the Priest might well have left the club and gone elsewhere, but there was business to be conducted and loose ends to be tied, so he was prepared to put up with the lingering bad odor for as long as was necessary.

He flicked through some photographs on the table before him: undercover policemen, some of them probably Russian speakers. They were determined, if nothing else. He would have them identified to see if there was some way of putting pressure on them through their families. The police were drawing ever closer to him. After years of ineffectual moves against him, they had been given a break. Two of his men had died in Maine the previous winter, along with two intermediaries. Their deaths had exposed a small but lucrative part of the Priest’s Boston operation: pornography and prostitution involving minors. He had been forced to cease providing both services, and the result had affected, in turn, the smuggling of women and children into the country, which meant that the inevitable attrition of his stable of whores, and the stables of others, could not be arrested. He was hemorrhaging money, and he did not like it. Others were suffering, too, and he knew that they blamed him. Now his club stank of excrement and it would only be a matter of time before the dead men were finally connected to him.

But word had reached him that there might be a solution to at least one of his problems. All of this had started because a private detective in Maine could not mind his own business. Killing him would not get rid of the police-it might even increase the pressure upon him for a time-but it would at least serve as a warning to his persecutors and to those who might be tempted to testify against him, as well as giving the Priest a little personal satisfaction along the way.

There was a shout from the doorway in Russian: “Boss, they are here.”

One week earlier, a man had arrived at the offices of Big Earl’s Cleaning & Drain Services, Inc., on Nostrand Avenue. He had not entered through the brightly carpeted, fragrant-smelling lobby. Instead, he had walked around the side of the building to the maintenance yard and waste-treatment area.

This area did not smell at all fragrant.

He entered the garage and climbed a flight of steps to a glass booth. Inside was a desk, a range of mismatched filing cabinets, and two cork boards covered with invoices, letters, and a pair of out-of-date calendars featuring women in a state of undress. Seated behind the desk was a tall, thin man in a white shirt offset by a green and yellow polyester tie. His hair was Grecian-formula brown, and he was fiddling compulsively with his pen, the sure sign of a smoker deprived, however temporarily, of his drug. He looked up as the door opened and the visitor entered. The new arrival was of below-average height, and dressed in a navy peacoat buttoned to the neck, a pair of torn, faded jeans, and bright red sneakers. He had a three-day growth of beard, but wore it in a manner that suggested he always had a three-day growth of beard. It looked almost cultivated, in an untidy way. “Shabby” was the word that came to mind.

“You trying to quit?” asked the visitor.

“Huh?”

“You trying to give up cigarettes?”

The man looked at the pen in his right hand as if almost surprised that there wasn’t a cigarette there.

“Yeah, that’s right. Wife’s been at me to do it for years. The doc, too. Thought I’d give it a try.”

“You should use those nicotine patches.”

“Can’t get them to light. What can I do for you?”

“Earl around?”

“Earl’s dead.”

The visitor looked shocked. “No way. When did he die?”

“Two months ago. Cancer of the lung.” He coughed embarrasedly. “Kind of why I decided to give up. My name’s Jerry Marley, Earl’s brother. I came on board to help out when Earl got sick, and I’m still here. Earl a friend of yours?”

“An acquaintance.”

“Well, guess he’s gone to a better place now.”

The visitor looked around the little office. Beyond the glass, two men in masks and coveralls were cleaning pipes and tools. He wrinkled his nose as the stink reached him.

“Hard to believe,” said the visitor.

“Ain’t it though. So, what can I do for you?”

“You unclog drains?”

“That’s right.”

“So if you know how to unclog them, then you must know how to clog them as well.”

Jerry Marley looked momentarily puzzled, and then anger replaced puzzlement. He stood up. “You get the hell out of here before I call the cops. This is a business, dammit. I got no time for people trying to cause other people trouble.”

“I hear your brother wasn’t so particular about who he worked with.”

“Hey, you keep your mouth shut about my brother.”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way. It was one of the things I liked about him. It made him useful.”

“I don’t give a shit. Get out of here, you-”

“Maybe I should introduce myself,” said the visitor. “My name is Angel.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what-” Marley stopped talking as he realized that he did, in fact, give a good goddamn. He sat down again.

“I guess Earl might have mentioned me.”

Marley nodded. He looked a little paler than before. “You, and another fella.”

“Oh, he’s around somewhere. He’s-” Angel searched for the right word. “-cleaner than I am. No offense meant, but his clothes cost more than mine. The smell, y’know, it gets in the fabric.”

“I know,” said Marley. He began to babble, but couldn’t stop himself. “I don’t notice it so much no more. My wife, she makes me take my clothes off in the garage before I come in the house. Have to shower straightaway. Even then, she says she can still smell it on me.”

“Women,” said Angel. “They’re sensitive like that.”

There was a brief silence. It was almost companionable, except that Jerry Marley’s desire for a cigarette had suddenly increased beyond the capacity of any mortal man to resist.

“So,” said Angel. “About those drains…”

Marley raised a hand to stop him. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“I thought you were giving up,” said Angel.

“So did I.”

Angel shrugged. “I guess it must be a stressful job.”

“Sometimes,” said Marley.

“Well, I don’t want to add to it.”

“God forbid.”

“But I do need a favor, and I’ll do you a favor in return.”

“Right. And what would that be?”

“Well, if you do me my favor, I won’t come back again.”

Jerry Marley thought about it for less than half a second.

“That seems fair,” he said.

For a moment, Angel looked a little sad. He was hurt that everyone seemed to leap at that deal when it was offered.

Marley seemed to guess what he was thinking. “Nothing personal,” he added, apologetically.

“No,” said Angel, and Marley got the sense that the visitor was thinking of something else entirely. “It never is.”

The two men who entered the Priest’s den a week later were not what he had expected, but then the Priest had learned that nothing was ever quite as he might have expected it to be. The first was a black man dressed in a gray suit that looked as if it was being worn for the first time. His black patent leather shoes shone brightly, and a black silk tie was knotted perfectly at the collar of his spotlessly white shirt. He was clean shaven and exuded a faint scent of cloves and incense that was particularly appealing to the Priest under his current, excrementally tainted, circumstances.

Behind him was a smaller man, possibly of Hispanic origin, wearing an amiable smile that briefly distracted from the fact that his clothes had seen better days: no-name denims, last year’s sneakers, and a padded jacket that was obviously of good quality but was more suited to someone two decades younger and two sizes larger.

“They’re clean,” said Vassily, once the two men had submitted, with apparent good grace, to a frisking. Vassily was deceptively compact and his features were gentle and delicate. He moved with speed and grace, and was one of the Priest’s most trusted acolytes, another Ukrainian with brains and ambition, although not so much ambition that it might pose a threat to his employer.

The Priest gestured at a pair of chairs facing him across the table. The two men sat.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked them.

“Nothing for me,” said the black man.

“I’ll have a soda,” said the other. “Coke. Make sure the glass isn’t dirty.”

The smile never left his face. He looked over his shoulder at the bartender and winked. The bartender merely scowled.

“Now, what can I do for you?” asked the Priest.

“It’s more a matter of what we can do for you,” said the small man.

The Priest shrugged. “Cleaning, maybe? Selling door-to-door?”

There was an appreciative laugh from his soldiers. There were three of them in all, plus the bartender. Two were seated at the bar, the ubiquitous coffee cups before them. Vassily was behind the men and to their right. The Priest thought that he looked uneasy. But then, Vassily always looked uneasy. He was a pessimist, or perhaps a realist; the Priest was never entirely sure which. He supposed that it was all a matter of perspective.

The small man’s grin faded slightly.

“We’re here about the paper.”

“Paper? Are you looking for a route?”

There was more laughter.

“The paper on the detective, Parker. We hear you want him taken out. We’d prefer it if that wasn’t the case.”

The laughter stopped. The Priest had been informed that two men wanted to discuss the detective with him, so this opening gambit was not unexpected. Usually, the Priest would have left such discussions to Vassily, but this was not the usual situation, and these, he knew, were not usual men. He had been told that they merited a degree of respect, but this was the Priest’s place, and he enjoyed goading them. He respected those who respected him, and the mere fact of the men’s presence in his club irritated him. They were not pleading for the detective’s life; they were trying to tell him how to run his business.

The bartender placed a Coke in front of the small man. He sipped it and scowled.

“It’s warm,” he said.

“Give him some ice,” said the Priest.

The bartender nodded. One of the men seated at the bar leaned over and filled an empty glass with ice by scooping it through the ice bucket. He handed it to the bartender. The bartender dipped his fingers into the glass, retrieved two cubes, and dropped them into the Coke. The liquid splashed onto the small man’s jeans.

“Hey,” he said. “That’s rude, man. And seriously fucking unhygienic, even in a place that smells as bad as this one.”

“We know who you are,” said the Priest.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘We know who you are.’”

“What does that mean?”

The priest pointed at the small untidy man. “You are Angel.” The finger moved slightly to the left. “And you are named Louis. Your reputation precedes you, as I believe people say under these circumstances.”

“Should we be flattered?”

“I think so.”

Angel looked pleased. Now Louis spoke for the first time.

“You need to burn the paper,” he said.

“Why would that be?” asked the Priest.

“The detective is off-limits.”

“By whose authority?”

“Mine. Ours. Other people’s.”

“What other people?”

“If I said I didn’t know, and you didn’t want to know, would you believe me?”

“Possibly,” said the Priest. “But he’s caused me a lot of trouble. A message has to be sent.”

“We were up there, too. You going to put a paper out on us?”

The Priest wagged his finger. “Now you are off-limits. We’re all professionals. We know how these things work.”

“Do we? I don’t think we’re in the same business.”

“You flatter yourself.”

“I’m flattering somebody.”

If the Priest was offended, he didn’t show it. He was, though, surprised at the men’s willingness to antagonize him in turn when they were unarmed. He considered it both arrogant and unmannerly.

“There’s nothing to discuss. There is no paper on the detective.”

“What does that mean?”

“I cut my own lawn. I shine my own shoes. I don’t send out for strangers to do what I can take care of for myself.”

“That puts us at odds.”

“Only if you let it.” The Priest leaned forward. “Is that what you want?”

“We just want a quiet life.”

The Priest laughed. “I think it would bore you. I know it would bore me.” His fingers moved the photographs on the table, rearranging them.

“Friends of yours?” said Louis.

“Police.”

“You go after the detective, and you’re going to create more problems for yourself with them as well as us. They can be persistent. You don’t need to give them any more reasons to breathe down your neck.”

“So you want me to let the detective slide?” said the Priest. “You’re concerned for me, concerned for my business, concerned about the police.”

“That’s right,” said Louis. “We’re concerned citizens.”

“And what is the percentage for me?”

“We go away.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

The Priest’s shoulders sagged theatrically. “Okay, then. Sure. For you, I let him slide.”

Louis didn’t move. Beside him, Angel grew tense.

“Just like that,” said Louis.

“Just like that. I don’t want trouble from men of your, uh, caliber. Maybe somewhere down the road, you might do me a favor in return.”

“I don’t think so, but it’s a nice thought.”

“So, you want a drink now?”

“No,” said Louis. “I don’t want a drink.”

“Well, if that’s the case, our discussions are over.” The Priest leaned back in his seat and folded his hands over his small belly. As he did so, he raised the little finger of his left hand slightly. Behind Angel and Louis, Vassily’s hand reached behind his back for the gun tucked into his belt. The two men at the bar stood, also reaching for their weapons.

“I told you he wouldn’t agree,” said Angel to Louis. “Even if he said so, he wouldn’t agree.”

Louis shot him a look of disdain. He picked up Angel’s glass of soda, seemed about to take a sip from it, then reconsidered.

“You know what you are?” he said. “You a Monday morning quarterback.”

And as he spoke, he moved. It was done with such fluidity, such grace, that Vassily, had he lived long enough, might almost have admired it. Louis’s hand slid beneath the table as he rose, removing the gun that had been concealed beneath it earlier by the man who had accompanied the cleaning crew. In the same movement, his other hand buried the glass in Vassily’s face. By then, Vassily had his own gun drawn, but it was too late for him. The first two bullets took him in the chest, but Louis caught him before he fell, shielding himself with the body as he fired upon the men at the bar. One managed to get off a shot, but it impacted harmlessly upon the woodwork above Louis’s head. Barely seconds later, only four men remained alive in the room: the Priest, the bartender, and the two men who would soon kill them both.

The Priest had not moved. The second gun that had been concealed beneath the table was now in Angel’s hand, and it was pointing directly at the Priest. Angel had remained motionless while the killing went on behind him. He trusted his partner. He trusted him as he loved him, which was completely.

“All of this for a private detective,” said the Priest.

“He’s a friend,” said Angel. “And it’s not just about him.”

“Then what?” The Priest spoke calmly. “Whatever it is, we can reach an accommodation. You have made your point. Your friend is safe.”

“You expect us to believe that? Frankly, you don’t seem like the forgiving type.”

“You know what type I am? The type that wants to live.”

Angel considered this. “It’s good to have an ambition,” he said. “That one seems kind of narrow, though.”

“It encompasses a great deal.”

“I guess so.”

“And as for what happened here, well, if you show me mercy, then mercy will be shown to you.”

“I don’t think so,” said Angel. “I saw what was done to those children you farmed out. I know what was done to them. I don’t think you’re due mercy.”

“It was business,” said the Priest. “It was nothing personal.”

“It’s funny,” said Angel, “I hear that a lot.” He raised the gun, drawing a bead slowly upward from the Priest’s belly, passing his heart, his throat, before stopping at his face. “Well, this isn’t business. This is personal.”

He shot the Priest once in the head, then stood. Louis was staring down the barrel of his gun at the bartender, who was flat on the floor, his hands spread wide.

“Get up,” said Louis.

The bartender started to rise and Louis shot him, watching impassively as he folded in upon himself and lay still on the filthy carpet. Angel stared at his partner.

“Why?” he asked.

“No witnesses, not today.”

Louis moved swiftly to the door. Angel followed. He opened the door, glanced quickly outside, then nodded at Louis. Together, they ran for the Oldsmobile parked across the street.

“And?” asked Angel, as he got into the passenger seat and Louis climbed behind the wheel.

“You think he knew what went on there, how his boss made his money?”

“I guess.”

“Then he should have found a job someplace else.”

The car pulled away from the curb. The doors above the club opened and two men emerged with guns in their hands. They were about to fire when the Oldsmobile made a hard left and disappeared from view.

“Will it come back on us?”

“He got above himself. He attracted attention. His days were numbered. We just accelerated the inevitable.”

“You sure of that?”

“We walk on this one. We did some people a favor back there, and not just Parker. A problem was solved, and they got to keep their hands clean.”

“And they’ll go back to running kids into the country.”

“That’s a problem for another time.”

“Tell me that we’ll deal with it, that we won’t walk away.”

“I promise,” said Louis. “We’ll do what we can down the line.”

They ditched the Olds four blocks away in favor of their own Lexus. The car boasted a Sirius satellite radio and, by mutual agreement, each was allowed to choose a station on alternate evenings and the other was not allowed to complain about the selection. Tonight was Angel’s choice, so they listened to First Wave all the way back to Manhattan.

And thus the journey home passed in an almost companionable silence.

Farther south, the second link in the chain of killings was about to be forged.

There were only a handful of people in the bar when the predator entered, and he spotted his kill almost immediately: a sad, overweight little man with beaten-down shoulders, balding and sweaty, wearing a pair of brown trousers that had seen neither an iron nor a laundry in at least a week, and brown brogues that had probably cost him a lot some years before but that he could now no longer afford to replace. He was nursing a bourbon, the faintest trace of amber liquid coloring the melted ice at the bottom of the glass. At last, resignedly, he drained it. The bartender asked him if he wanted another. The fat man checked his wallet, then nodded. A generous shot was poured for him, but then the bartender could afford to be generous. It came from the cheapest bottle on the shelf.

The predator took in every detail of the fat man: his stubby fingers, the wedding band embedded in the flesh of one; the twin handles of fat at his sides; the belly that flopped over the cheap leather belt; the sweat marks beneath the arms of his shirt; the sheen of perspiration on his face, his forehead, his pate.

Because you’re always sweating, aren’t you? Even in winter, you sweat, the effort of hauling around your soft, gelatinous bulk almost too much for your heart to bear. You sweat when you wear a T-shirt and shorts in summer, and when the snow comes you sweat beneath layers of clothing. What is your wife like, I wonder? Is she fat and repugnant like you or has she tried to keep her figure in the hope that she might attract someone better while you’re out on the road, even if that someone merely uses her for a night? (For she will surely be using him in return.) Do you think about those possibilities as you hustle from town to town, barely eking out a living, always laughing harder than you should, paying for drinks that you can’t afford in order to curry favor, picking up the tab at restaurants that others choose in the hope that an order might follow? You have spent your life running, little man, always praying that the big break will come, but it never does. Well, your problems are about to come to an end. I am your salvation.

The predator ordered a beer, but it was just for show and he barely touched it. He didn’t like his faculties to be dulled when he worked, not even fractionally. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror against the wall: tall, hair graying, body lean beneath his leather jacket and dark trousers. His complexion was sallow. He liked to follow the sun, but the demands of his chosen vocation meant that such a luxury was not always possible.

After all, people sometimes had to be killed in places where the sun was not shining, and his bills had to be paid.

Yet pickings had been thin these last few months. In truth, he was mildly concerned. It had not always been thus. Once, he had enjoyed a considerable reputation. He had been a Reaper, and that name had carried a certain weight. Now he still had a reputation, but it was not entirely a good one. He was known as a man with certain appetites who had simply learned to channel them into his work, but who was sometimes overcome by them. He understood that he had overstepped the mark at least once during the past twelve months. The kill was supposed to have been simple and fast, not protracted and painful. It had caused confusion, and had angered those who had hired him. Since then, work had become less plentiful, and without work his appetites needed to find another outlet.

He had been following the kill for two days. It was practice as much as pleasure. He always thought of them as “kills.” They were never targets, and he never used the word “potential.” As far as he was concerned, once he focused upon them they were already dead. He could have chosen a more challenging individual, a more interesting kill, but there was something about the fat man that repelled him, a lingering stench of sadness and failure that suggested the world would be no poorer without him. By his actions, the fat man had drawn the predator to him, like the slowest animal in the herd attracting the attention of a cheetah.

And so they stayed that way, predator and prey sharing the same space, listening to the same music, for almost an hour, until the fat man rose to go to the men’s room, and the time came to end the dance that had begun forty-eight hours earlier, a dance in which the fat man did not even know he was a participant. The predator followed him, keeping ten paces back. He allowed the men’s room door to settle in its frame before entering. Only the fat man was inside, standing at a urinal, his face creased with effort and pain.

Bladder trouble. Kidney stones, perhaps. I will end it all.

The doors to both stalls were open as the predator approached. There was nobody inside. The knife was already in his hand, and he heard a satisfying click, the sound of a blade locking into position.

And then, a second later, the sound came again, and he realized that the first click had not come from his own blade, but the blade of another. The speed of his every motion increased, even as his throat suddenly grew dry and he heard the pounding of his heart. The fat man was also moving now, his right hand a blur of pink and silver, and then the predator felt a pressure at his chest, followed by a sharp pain that quickly spread through his body, paralyzing him as it grew, so that when he tried to walk his legs would not answer the signals from his brain and instead he collapsed on the cold, damp tiles, his knife falling from the fingers of his right hand as his left clasped the horned handle of the throwing blade now lodged in his heart. Blood pumped from the wound and began to spread upon the floor. A pair of brown brogues carefully stepped aside to avoid the growing stain.

With all of his failing strength, the predator raised his head and stared into the face of the fat man, but the fat man was not as he had once seemed. Fat was now muscle, slumped shoulders were straight, and even the perspiration had disappeared, evaporating into the cool evening air. There was only death and purpose, and for an instant the two had become one.

The predator saw scarring at the man’s neck, and knew that he had been burned at some time in the past. Even as the predator lay dying, he began to make associations, to fill in the blanks.

“You should have been more careful, William,” said the fat man. “One should never confuse business with pleasure.”

The predator made a sound in his throat, and his mouth moved. He might have been trying to form words, but no words would come. Still, the fat man knew what he was trying to say.

“Who am I?” he said. “Oh, you knew me once. The years have changed me: age, the actions of others, the surgeon’s knife. My name is Bliss.”

The predator’s eyes rolled in desperation as he began to understand, and his fingers clawed at the tiled floor in a vain effort to reach his knife. Bliss watched for a moment, then leaned down and twisted the blade in the predator’s heart before pulling it free. He wiped the blade upon the dead man’s shirt before taking a small glass bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket and holding it to the wound in the predator’s chest, using a little pressure to increase the flow. When the bottle was full, he screwed a cap on it and left the men’s room, his body changing as he walked, becoming once again the torpid, sweaty carrier of a failure’s soul. Nobody, not even the bartender, looked at him as he left, and by the time the predator’s body was found and the police summoned, Bliss was long gone.

The final killing took place on a patch of bare ground about twenty miles south of the St. Lawrence River in the northern Adirondacks. This was land shaped by fire and drought, by farming and railroads, by blowdowns and mining. For a time, iron brought in more revenue than lumber, and the railroads cut a swath through the forests, the sparks from their smokestacks sometimes starting fires that could take as many as five thousand men to bring under control.

One of those old railroads, now abandoned, curved through a forest of hemlock, maple, birch, and small beech before emerging into a patch of clear ground, a relic of the Big Blowdown of 1950 that had never been repaired. Only a single hemlock had survived the storm, and now a man knelt in its shadow upon the damp earth. Beside him was a gravestone. The kneeling man had read the name carved upon it when he was brought to this place. It had been displayed for him in a flashlight’s beam, before the beating had begun. There was a house in the distance, lights burning in one of the upper windows. He thought that he had seen a figure seated at the glass, watching as they tore him apart methodically with their fists.

They had taken him in his cabin near Lake Placid. There was a girl with him. He had asked them not to hurt her. They had bound and gagged her and left her weeping in the bathroom. It was a small mercy that they had not killed her, but no such mercy would be shown to him.

He could no longer see properly. One eye had closed itself entirely, never to reopen, not in this world. His lips had split, and he had lost teeth. There were ribs broken: he had no idea how many. The punishment had been methodical, but not sadistic. They had wanted information and, after a time, he had provided it. Then the beating had stopped. Since then, he had remained kneeling on the soft earth, his knees slowly sinking into the ground, presaging the final burial that was to come.

A van appeared from the direction of the house. It followed a well-worn track to the grave, then stopped. The back doors opened, and he heard the sound of machinery as a ramp was lowered.

The kneeling man turned his head. An elderly, hunched figure was being pushed slowly down the ramp in a wheelchair. He was swaddled in blankets like a withered infant, and his head was protected from the evening chill by a red wool hat. His face was almost totally obscured by the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, fed by a tank mounted on the back of the chair. Only the eyes, brown and milky, were visible. The chair was being pushed by a man in his early forties, who halted when the chair was feet from where the kneeling man waited.

The old man removed his mask with trembling fingers.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

The kneeling man nodded, but the other continued as though he had not given an answer. He pointed a finger at the gravestone.

“My firstborn, my son,” he said. “You had him killed. Why?”

“What does it matter?” He struggled to enunciate.

“It matters to me.”

“Go to hell.” The effort made him lips begin to bleed again. “I’ve told them all that I know.”

The old man held the mask to his face and drew a rasping breath before he spoke again.

“It took me a long time to find you,” he said. “You hid yourself well, you and the others responsible. Cowards, all of you. You thought I’d lose myself in grief, but I did not. I never forgot, never stopped searching. I swore that their blood would be spilt upon his grave.”

The kneeling man looked away and spat on the ground beneath the stone. “Finish it,” he said. “I don’t care about your grief.”

The old man raised an emaciated hand. A shadow passed over the kneeling man and two shots were fired into his back. He fell forward onto the grave, and his blood began to seep into the ground. The old man nodded contentedly to himself.

“It has begun.”

CHAPTER TWO

WILLIE BREW STOOD IN the men’s room of Nate’s Tap Joint and stared at himself in the battered mirror above the similarly battered sink. He decided that he didn’t look sixty. In the right light, he could pass for fifty-five. Okay, fifty-six. Unfortunately, he had yet to find that particular light. It certainly wasn’t in Nate’s men’s room, where the light was so bright that taking a leak felt like it was being performed under interrogation.

Willie was bald. He had lost most of his hair by the time he was thirty. After that, he’d experimented with various ways of disguising his baldness: combovers, hats, even a wig. He’d gone for an expensive one, the kind made from realistic-looking fibers. He figured he’d picked the wrong color or something, because even little kids used to laugh at him, and the guys who hung around the auto shop when they had nothing better to do, which was most of the time, had opened a book on the various shades of red his head assumed as he passed through the light and shade of the garage. Willie had enough troubles without becoming an object of amusement for the seldom gainfully employed, like some Coney Island freak: “Come see the Wig Guy: A Modern Marvel. All the Colors of the Rainbow…” He’d thrown away the wig after six months. Now he was just happy if his head didn’t shine too brightly in public.

He tugged at the skin below his cheekbones. There were deep-set wrinkles around his mouth and eyes that might have passed for laughter lines if Willie Brew was the kind of guy who did a whole lot of laughing, which he wasn’t. Willie did a brief count of the lines and wondered just how funny someone would have to find the world to build up that many wrinkles. Anyone who found the world that amusing was insane. There were broken veins on his nose, relics of his troubled middle years, and a few of his teeth felt loose. Somewhere along the path of life, he had also picked up a couple of extra chins.

Perhaps he did look sixty after all.

His eyesight remained good, although this merely enabled him to see more clearly the effects of the aging process upon him. He wondered if people with bad eyesight ever saw themselves as they truly were. Bad eyesight was the equivalent of those soft filters they used to take pictures of movie stars. You could have a third eye in the center of your forehead and, as long as it didn’t see any better than the other two, you could fool yourself into believing that you looked like Cary Grant.

He stepped back and examined his paunch, supporting it with his hands like an expectant mother showing off her bump, an image that made him quickly release his grip and wipe his hands instinctively on his pants, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He’d always had a paunch. He was just one of those guys. From the time he came out of the womb, he’d looked like his diet consisted entirely of pizza and beer, which wasn’t true. Willie actually ate pretty well for a single man. The problem was that he led what Arno, his assistant, described as a “classic indolent lifestyle,” which Willie took to mean that he didn’t run around in Spandex like a moron. Willie tried to picture himself in Spandex, and decided that he’d already had too much to drink if that was the kind of thing he was imagining alone in a men’s room on his birthday night.

He had changed out of his bib overalls for the occasion, which had been traumatic in itself. Willie was a guy born for overalls. They were loose fitting, which was important for a man of his age and girth. They gave him useful pockets in which to keep things, and a place to store his hands when he wasn’t using them without looking like a slob. Out of overalls, everything felt too tight, and he had too much stuff and too few holes in which to keep it. Tonight, he bulged in places where a man shouldn’t bulge.

Willie was wearing black Sta-Prest trousers, a white shirt veering toward yellow due to age, and a gray jacket that he liked to think of as a classic of tailoring but was, in fact, just old. He was also sporting the new tie that Arno had handed to him that morning with the words, “Happy birthday, boss. You gonna retire now and leave me the place?” It was an expensive tie: black silk embroidered with thin strands of gold. This wasn’t the kind you picked up in Chinatown or Little Italy from a guy selling do-rags and knockoff watches on the side of the street, everything wrapped in plastic and bearing a name like “Guci” or “Armoni” for rubes who couldn’t tell the difference, or who figured that nobody else could. No, the tie was pretty tasteful, given that Arno had bought it. Willie figured that maybe he’d had a little help in choosing it since, as far as Willie could recall from a funeral that they had attended together earlier in the year, Arno only had one tie in his wardrobe, and that one was maroon polyester and stained with axle grease.

The thing about it was, Willie didn’t feel sixty. He’d lived through a lot-Vietnam, a painful divorce, some heart trouble a couple of years back-and it had certainly aged him on the outside (those lines, and his few remaining gray hairs, were hard earned), but inside he felt like he always had, or at least the way he had since he was in his mid-to late twenties. That was when he had been at his peak. He’d survived two years in the Marines, and had returned home to a woman who’d loved him enough to become his wife. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t exactly been Lassie in the faithful companion stakes, but that came later. For a time, they had seemed pretty happy. He’d borrowed some money from his father-in-law, started renting premises in Queens, over by Kissena Park, and applied the mechanical skills that he had honed in the military to maintaining and repairing automobiles. It turned out that he was even better at it than he had thought, and there was always enough business to keep him occupied, so that after a few years he had hired a small Scandinavian guy with bristly hair and the attitude of a junkyard dog to help him out. Thirty years later, Arno was still with him, and still had the attitude of a junkyard dog, albeit one whose gums hurt and who could no longer scamper after female dogs with the same vigor that he once had shown.

Vietnam: Willie hadn’t come back scarred from his time in Nam, either physically or psychologically, or not so that he could tell. He’d landed in March 1965, part of the Third Marine Division assigned to create enclaves surrounding vital airstrips. Willie ended up in Chu Lai, sixty miles south of Da Nang, where the Seabees constructed a four-thousand-foot aluminum runway in twenty-three days amid cactus and shifting sands. It was still one of the finest feats of engineering under pressure that Willie had ever witnessed.

He had just turned nineteen when he signed up for service. He didn’t even wait for the draft to find him. His old man, who had come here in the twenties and had served in the military himself during World War II, told him that he owed something to his country, and Willie didn’t question his judgment. By the time he came home his father’s friends were breaking heads down on Wall Street and over at Washington Square Park, teaching the long-hairs a little something about patriotism. Willie neither condoned it nor objected to it. He’d done his time, but he could understand why other kids might not want to follow in his footsteps. It was a matter for their conscience, not his. Some of his buddies had served, too, and they had all returned home more or less intact. One of them had lost an arm to a grenade hidden in a loaf of bread, but he could have lost a lot more. Another came back minus his left foot. He’d stepped on a bear trap, and the jaws had snapped shut above his ankle. The funny thing about those bear traps-funny if you didn’t have your foot caught in one-was that they needed a key to open them, and bear trap keys weren’t the kind of thing you just happened to have in your pack. The bear trap itself would be chained to a slab of concrete buried deep in the ground, so the only way to get the wounded soldier to safety was to dig up the whole arrangement, often while under fire, and then transport it back to camp, where a doctor would be waiting, along with a couple of men armed with hacksaws and cutting torches.

Both of those guys were gone now. They’d died young. Willie had attended their funerals. They were gone, but he was still here.

Sixty years, thirty-four of them in the same business, most in the same building. Only once had the security of his postservice existence been threatened. That was during the divorce, when his wife had sought half of all that he owned, and he was faced with the possibility of being forced to sell his beloved auto shop in order to meet her demands. While he might have been kept busy with a steady stream of repairs, there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the bank and much of Queens hadn’t been like it was now. Then there was no gentrification, no single men and women driving expensive automobiles that they didn’t know how to service for themselves. People drove their cars until the wheels came off, and then came to Willie looking for a way to get another three, six, nine months out of them, just until things improved, until there was a little cash to spare. There were cops being shot on the streets, and turf wars, and protection money to be handed over, even if it was paid in kind by carrying out repairs for free, or by not asking questions when someone required a quick spray job on a car that was so hot it ticked. Elmhurst and Jackson Heights became Little Colombia, and Queens was the main entry point for cocaine shipments into the United States, the money laundered through check-cashing businesses and travel agencies. Colombians were dying every day in Willie’s neighborhood. He had even known a couple of them, including Pedro Méndez, who campaigned for the antidrug president Cesar Trujillo and took three in the head, chest, and back for his troubles. Willie had serviced Pedro’s car the week before his death. It was a different city then, almost unrecognizable from the one that existed today.

But then Queens had always been different. It wasn’t like Brooklyn, or the Bronx. It was disparate. It sprawled. People didn’t write affectionate books about it. It didn’t have a Pete Hamill to mythologize it. “Someplace in Queens”: if Willie had a buck for every time he’d heard someone use that phrase, he’d be a wealthy man. For those who lived outside the borough, everywhere within it was just “someplace in Queens.” To them, Queens was like the ocean: big and unknowable, and if you dropped something into it, it got lost and it stayed lost.

And, despite it all, Willie had loved almost every minute of his life there. Then his wife had tried to take it away from him, and even with Arno adding to the fund the money that he had saved there still wasn’t enough to pay her off. To cap it all, the landlord had put the building up for sale, so even if Willie managed to satisfy his old lady’s demands he still wasn’t sure that he would have a business once the premises were sold. He had been left with forty-eight hours to make a decision, forty-eight hours to write off nearly twenty years of effort and commitment (he was thinking of the garage, not the marriage), when a tall black man in an expensive suit and a long black overcoat arrived at the door of the little office in which Willie tried, and usually failed, to keep track of his paperwork, and offered him a way out.

The man knocked gently on the glass. Willie looked up and asked what he could do for him. The man closed the door behind him, and something in Willie’s stomach tensed. He might have been a mechanic in the military, but he’d learned how to fire a gun, and he’d had to use it more than once, although as far as he knew he’d never managed to kill anybody with it, mainly because he hadn’t really tried. Mostly, he had just done his best to avoid getting his own head shot off. He wanted to fix things, not break them, didn’t matter if they were jeeps, helicopters, or human beings.

In turn, he’d been surrounded by other men who were like him, and some who were not, the kind who were willing and able to kill if push came to shove. There were the ones who did so reluctantly, or pragmatically, and there were a couple who were just plain psychotic, who liked what they did and got off on the carnage they wreaked. And then there were those-and he could have counted them on his thumbs-who were naturals, who killed cold-bloodedly and without remorse, who derived satisfaction from the exercise of a skill with which they had been born. They had something quiet and still inside them, something that could not be touched, but Willie often suspected that the thing inside them was hollow, and it contained a raging maelstrom that they had either learned to accommodate or declined to acknowledge, like the great protective frame that houses a nuclear reactor. Willie had tried to stay away from such men, but now he sensed that, once again, he was in the presence of one of them.

It was dark outside, and Arno had just gone home. He had wanted to stay with Willie, knowing that, if things didn’t work out, tomorrow would be their final day in the shop, and he didn’t want to lose a single minute that might otherwise have been spent in its environs, but Willie had sent him on his way so that he could be alone. He understood Arno’s need to be there because he felt it himself, but this was still his business, his place. Tonight, he would sleep here, surrounded by the sights and smells that meant most to him in the world. He could not imagine a life without them. Perhaps, he thought, he could get some work in a body shop elsewhere, although he would find it difficult to toil for someone else after so many years as his own boss. In time, he might even be able to set himself up again in other premises, if he could save enough money. His bank had been sympathetic to his plight, but finally unhelpful. He was a man in the throes of a painful and potentially ruinous divorce, with a business (soon to be half a business, and that was no business at all) that was profitable but not profitable enough, and such a man was not worth the bank’s time or money.

Now his solitude had been disturbed by the visitor, and to Willie’s burdens had been added a strong helping of unease. Willie could have sworn that he had locked the door behind Arno when he left, but either he hadn’t done it properly or this was an individual who wasn’t about to let the small matter of a locked door stand in the way of whatever business he might wish to conduct.

“Sorry, we’re closed,” said Willie.

“So I see,” said the man. “My name is Louis.”

He extended a hand. Willie, who was never one to be ruder than necessary, shook it.

“Listen, I’m happy to meet you, but it doesn’t change anything,” said Willie. “We’re closed. I’d tell you to come back another day, but I got my hands full just finishing what’s out there already, and I’m not even sure if I’ll still be here once the sun sets tomorrow.”

“I understand,” said Louis. “I heard that you were in trouble. I can help you out of it.”

Willie bristled. He thought he knew what was coming. He’d seen enough jumped-up loan sharks in his time not to be dumb enough to put his head between their jaws. His wife was about to take half of all that he had. This guy was trying to take what was left.

“I don’t know what you heard,” Willie replied, “and I could give a damn. I can take care of my own problems. Now, if you don’t mind, I got things to do.”

He wanted to turn his back on the man in a gesture of dismissal, but despite his bravado he felt that the only thing worse than facing the visitor would be not facing him. You didn’t turn your back on a man like this, and not only because you might end up with a knife in it. There was a dignity about him, a stillness. If he was a loan shark, then he wasn’t a typical one. Willie might have differed on occasion with some of his customers (and, indeed, Arno) on the definition of how much rudeness was appropriate in the course of one’s daily affairs, but he wasn’t about to cross this man, not if he could help it. He’d talk his way out of it politely. It would be a strain, but Willie would manage it.

“You’re going to lose this place,” said Louis. “I don’t want that to happen.”

Willie sighed. The conversation, it seemed, was not at an end.

“What’s it to you if I do?” he asked.

“Call me a Good Samaritan. I’m worried about the neighborhood.”

“Then run for mayor. I’ll vote for you.”

The man smiled. “I prefer to keep a lower profile.”

Willie held his gaze. “I’ll bet you do.”

“I’ll invest in your business. I’ll give you exactly 50 percent of what it’s worth. In return you’ll pay me a dollar a year as interest on the loan until it’s paid off.”

Willie’s jaw went slack. This guy was either the worst loan shark in the business, or there was a catch in the deal big enough to snap Willie in two.

“A dollar a year,” he said, once he’d managed to get his mouth under control again.

“I know. I drive a hard bargain. Tell you what, I’ll leave you to think about it overnight. I hear your wife has given you forty-eight hours to reach a decision, and half of them are already gone. I guess I’m just not as reasonable as she is.”

“Nobody ever called my old lady reasonable before,” said Willie.

“She sounds like a special person,” said Louis. His expression was studiedly neutral.

“She used to be,” said Willie. “Not so much anymore.”

Louis handed Willie a card. On it was a telephone number, and the image of a snake being crushed underfoot by a winged angel, but nothing else.

“There’s no name on the card,” said Willie.

“No, there isn’t.”

“Hardly worth having a business card that doesn’t have a business on it. Must be hard to make a living.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you do, kill snakes?”

And the words were no sooner out of Willie’s mouth than he regretted them, his mind uttering a silent “Goddamn” as it realized that it had lost the race to catch up with his tongue.

“Kind of. I’m in pest control.”

“Pest control. Right.”

The man extended his hand once again in farewell. Almost in a daze, Willie shook it.

“Louis,” said Willie. “That’s it, just Louis?”

“Just Louis,” said the man. “Oh, and as of today, I’m your new landlord.”

And that was how it had begun.

Willie splashed water on his face. From outside, he heard laughter, and a voice that sounded like Arno’s giving his opinion on the Mets, an entirely negative view that seemed to involve only the word “Mets” and a seemingly infinite series of variations on a second word that Arno, who prided himself on his sophistication when he wasn’t on his fourth double vodka, liked to refer to as “the copulative.” Arno was funny like that. He might have looked like an aging rat, but he knew more words than Webster’s. Willie had been to Arno’s apartment only once, and nearly had his skull fractured when a pile of novels came toppling down on his head. Every available space seemed to be occupied by newspapers, books, and the occasional car part. On those rare occasions when Arno was late for work, Willie was tormented by images of him lying unconscious beneath an entire stack of encyclopedias from the 1950s, or smoking away like a piece of fish beneath layer upon layer of smoldering newsprint. Well, maybe “tormented” was putting it kind of strongly. “Mildly bothered” might have been closer to the mark.

Someone had written Jake is a male slut in lipstick at the bottom right-hand corner of the glass. Willie hoped that the culprit was a woman, although homosexuality didn’t bother him so much now. Love and let love, that was his motto. Anyway, that black gentleman who had saved his business (and, let’s face it, his life, because he’d always had a weakness for booze, and by the time the divorce was reaching its filthy nadir he was putting away a bottle of Four Roses a day, and say what you like about Four Roses but gentle it ain’t) had a partner named Angel, and while it wasn’t as if there were wedding bells in the offing, or an announcement in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, they were just about the closest-knit couple that Willie had ever encountered. “The couple that slays together stays together,” as Arno had once put it, and Willie had instinctively looked over his shoulder in the quiet of the garage, half expecting to see a black figure looming unhappily over him, a smaller one beside him looking equally discontented. It wasn’t that they scared him, or not much-that feeling had passed a long time ago, or so he liked to tell himself-but he hated to think that their feelings might be hurt. He had said as much to Arno, and Arno had apologized and had never issued a similar utterance since, but sometimes Willie wondered if Arno had been so far off the mark, all things considered.

The door of the men’s room opened. Arno’s head popped through the gap.

“The hell are you doing?” he asked.

“Washing my hands.”

“Well, hurry up. There’s a party waiting for you out here.” Arno paused as he saw the writing on the mirror. “Who’s Jake?” he asked. “Hey, did you write that?”

He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by a wadded paper towel, and then Willie Brew, sixty years old and sometime associate of two of the most lethal men in the city, went out to join his birthday party.

CHAPTER THREE

THE INTERIOR OF NATE’S was dimly lit. It was always that way. Even in summer, when streams of harsh sunlight struck the windows, the beams seemed to melt against the glass and then drizzle like honey through the panes, their energy dissipated as though they, like the patrons inside, had, in the transition from beyond to within, absorbed just a little too much alcohol to be truly useful for the rest of the day. Apart from an area two feet square beside the double doors, no part of Nate’s had seen unfiltered natural illumination for more than half a century.

And yet Nate’s was not a cheerless place. White fairy lights adorned the bar all year round, and each table was lit by a candle in a glass lamp seated on an iron bowl. The bowls were secured to the wood of the tables with inch-long screws (Nate was no fool) but the candles were scrupulously monitored, and as soon as they began to flicker they were replaced by a waitress or, on quiet evenings, by Nate himself, who was small, sixtyish, and jug-eared, and was said to have once bitten a man’s nose off in a bar fight down in Baja when he was in the Navy. No one had ever asked Nate if that was true because Nate would happily talk to anyone about ball scores, the idiots who ran the city of New York and the country whose space the city occupied, and the general well-being of friends and family, but as soon as someone tried to get more personal with him, Nate would wander off to clean glasses, or check the taps, or replenish the candles, and the unwise party who had inadvertently offended him would be left to wait on a refill and rue his brashness. Nate’s was not that kind of place, as Nate liked to point out, although nobody had ever managed to nail him down on just what kind of place Nate’s was, exactly. Nate liked it that way, and so did the people who frequented his bar.

Nate’s, like its owner, was a relic of another time, when this part of Queens was predominantly Irish, before the Indians and the Afghans and the Mexicans and the Colombians came along and began carving it up into their own little enclaves. Nate wasn’t Irish, and neither was his bar: even on St. Patrick’s Day, Nate wasn’t about to change his white fairy lights for green ones, or begin drawing shamrocks on the heads of his patrons’ beer. No, it was more to do with a certain state of mind, a particular attitude. Surrounded by foreign smells and strange accents, in a city that was constantly changing, Nate’s represented solidity. It was an old-world bar. You came here to drink, and to eat good, simple food that didn’t pander to dietary fads or concerns about cholesterol. You behaved yourself. If you used foul language, you kept your voice down, particularly if there were ladies present. You paid your tab at the end of the night, and you tipped appropriately. The chairs were comfortable, the restrooms, occasional graffiti apart, were clean, and Nate’s pouring hand was neither too heavy nor too light. He made good cocktails, but he didn’t do shooters. “You want shooters, go to Hooters,” as he once told some college kids who had made the mistake of asking for a tray of Dive Bombers. In fact, as Nate said later, once he had thrown their asses out, their first mistake was coming into his bar to begin with. Nate did not like college kids, which was not to say that he was not proud of the local boys who had made good by going on to further education. He knew their parents, and their grandparents. They were not “college kids.” They were his kids, and they would always be welcome in his bar, although he still wouldn’t serve them shooters, not even if a shooter was going to cure them of cancer. A man had to have standards.

The bar did not have a private room, but there were four tables at the back that were cut off from the rest of the premises by a wall of wood inset with three frosted-glass panes, and it was there that the party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Willie Brew was taking place. In truth, the party had spread out a little as the evening drew on. There was a noisy core of six or seven seated around Arno, then a second table of four or five that was quieter, mellowed by Jameson and the general good nature of those gathered there. A third was occupied by assorted wives and girlfriends, of which Willie had initially not entirely approved. Willie had been under the impression that this was to be a men-only night, but he supposed that, under the circumstances, he could afford to be tolerant, as long as nonmales kept themselves to themselves, within reason. Actually, he supposed that, deep down, he was a little flattered that they had come along. Willie was gruff, and he was by no means a looker. Since his wife left him, the only females with whom he had enjoyed actual physical contact were metal and had headlights where their boobs should have been, and he had almost forgotten how good it felt to be hugged by a woman, and smothered in perfume and kisses. He had blushed down to his ankles as a series of what might generally be termed “women of a certain age” had, either singly or in pairs, reminded him of the charms of the fairer sex by pressing said charms firmly against Willie’s body. One of the reasons he had headed for the men’s room was to remove the lipstick traces from his cheeks and mouth so that he no longer looked, as Arno had put it, like an overweight Cupid advertising a poor man’s Valentine’s Day.

Now, as he stood at the men’s room door, he took in the assorted faces as though seeing them afresh. The first thing that struck him was that he knew a lot of people with criminal pasts. There was Groucho, the hot-wire expert, who might have made a good mechanic if he could have been trusted not to boost and then sell the cars on which he was supposed to be working. Beside him was Tommy Q, who was the most indiscreet man Willie had ever met, an individual apparently born without a filter between his mouth and his brain. Tommy Q, a purveyor of illegally copied movies, music, and computer software, was such a pirate that he should have sported an eye patch and carried a parrot on his shoulder. Willie had once, in a fit of madness, bought a bootleg copy of a movie from Tommy, the soundtrack to which had consisted almost entirely of the sounds of someone munching popcorn, and a couple having sex nearby, or as close to it as they could get in a crowded movie theater. In fact, thought Willie, it had been pretty similar to the actual experience of seeing a movie in New York on a Friday night, which was precisely why Willie didn’t go to the movies in the first place. Tommy Q’s inexpertly wrapped birthday tribute to Willie sat on top of the pile of gifts in one corner. It looked, thought Willie, suspiciously like a collection of pirated DVDs.

Then there were those who should have been there but, for vastly different reasons, were not. Coffin Ed was doing two-to-five in Snake River over in Oregon for desecrating a corpse. Willie wasn’t sure what the precise wording of the charge had been and, to be honest, he didn’t want to know. Willie wasn’t the kind of man to judge another’s sexual proclivities, and one naked person being found in a position of intimacy with another naked person didn’t bother him in the slightest, but when one of the naked people was in something less than the fullest bloom of health, then that was slightly more problematic. Willie had always thought there was something kind of creepy about Coffin Ed. It was hard to feel entirely comfortable around a man who had attempted to make a living from stealing corpses and holding them for ransom. Willie had just assumed that Coffin Ed kept the corpses in a freezer somewhere until the ransom was paid, not in his bed.

Meanwhile, Jay, who used to do some part-time work for Willie, and who was the best transmission guy Willie had ever met, had died five years earlier. A heart attack had taken him in his sleep, and Willie supposed that it wasn’t such a bad way to go. Still, he missed Jay. The old man had been a rock of decency and common sense, qualities that were sadly lacking in some of the other individuals gathered in Nate’s bar that night. Old man? Willie shook his head sadly. Funny how Jay had always seemed old to him, but now Willie was only five years younger than Jay was when he died.

His gaze moved on, lingering briefly on the women (some of whom, he had to say, were looking pretty attractive now that his beer intake had softened their lines); passing over Nate at the bar, who was reluctantly making up some complicated cocktail for a pair of suits; glancing at the faces of strangers, men and women cocooned in the comforting dusk, their features glowing in the candlelight. Standing where he was, half hidden by shadows, Willie felt momentarily cut off from all that was happening, a ghost at his own banquet, and he realized that he liked the sensation.

A small side table had been set up for the buffet, but now only the scattered remains of fried chicken and beef tips and firehouse chili lay upon it, along with a half-demolished birthday cake. In a corner to the right of the table, seated apart from the rest, were three men. One of them was Louis, grayer now than he had been on the first day that they had met and a little less intimidating, but that was simply a consequence of the years that Willie had known him. Under other circumstances, Louis could still be very intimidating indeed.

To Louis’s right sat Angel, nearly a foot shorter than his partner. He had dressed up for the night, which meant only that he looked marginally less untidy than usual. Hell, he had even shaved. It made him look younger. Willie Brew knew a little of Angel’s past, and suspected more. He was a good judge of people, better than he was given credit for. Willie had met a guy once who had known Angel’s old man, and a bigger sonofabitch had rarely walked this earth, the guy said. He had hinted darkly at abuse, at the farming out of the boy for money, for booze, and sometimes just for the fun of it. Willie had kept these things to himself, but it partly explained why there was such a fierce bond between Angel and Louis. Even though he knew nothing of Louis’s upbringing, he sensed that they were both men who had endured too much in childhood, and each had found an echo of himself in the other.

But it was the third man who really troubled Willie. Angel and Louis, silent partners in his business, were, in their way, less of an enigma than their companion. They did not make Willie feel that, in their presence, the world was in danger of shifting out of kilter, that here was a thing unknowable, even alien. By contrast, that was the effect this other had upon him. He respected the third man, even liked him, but there was something about him…What was that word Arno had used? “Ethereal.” Willie had been forced to look it up later. It wasn’t quite right, but it was close. “Otherworldly,” maybe. Whenever Willie spent time with him, he was reminded of churches and incense, of sermons filled with the threat of hellfire and damnation, memories from his childhood as an altar boy. It made no sense, but there it was. He carried with him a hint of night. In some ways, he reminded Willie of men whom he had known in Vietnam, the ones who had come through the experience fundamentally altered by what they had seen and done, so that even in ordinary conversation there was a sense that a part of themselves was detached from what was going on around them, that it resided in another place where it was always dark and half-glimpsed figures chittered in the shadows.

He was also dangerous, this man, as lethal as the two men beside him, although their lethality was part of their nature, and they had accommodated themselves to it, whereas he struggled against his. He had been a cop once, but then his wife and little girl got killed, and killed bad. He found the one who had done it, though, found him and put an end to him. He’d put an end to others since then, foul, vicious men and women, judging from what Willie had learned, and Angel and Louis had helped him. In doing so, they had all suffered. There had been pain, injuries, torments. Louis had a damaged left hand, the bones smashed by a bullet. Angel had spent months in a hospital enduring grafts on his back, and the experience had drained some of the life from him. He would die sooner because of it, of that Willie was certain. The third man had lost his PI’s license not so long ago, and things still weren’t right with his girlfriend, and probably never would be, so that he didn’t see his new daughter as often as he might have liked. Last Willie heard, he was working behind a bar in Portland. That wouldn’t continue for long, not with a man like that. He was a magnet for trouble, and the ones who came to him for help brought dragons in their wake.

In his company, Willie called him Charlie, and Arno called him Mr. Parker. Once upon a time people had called him Bird, but that was a nickname from his days on the force, and Angel had told Willie that he didn’t care for it. But when he wasn’t around, Willie and Arno always referred to him as “the Detective.” They had never discussed it, never agreed between themselves that that was what he should be called. It had just emerged naturally over time. That was how Willie always thought of him: the Detective, with a capital D. It had the right ring of respect about it. Respect, and maybe just a little fear.

The Detective didn’t look too threatening, not at first glance. There he differed from Louis, who would still have looked threatening to a casual observer even if he’d been surrounded by dancing fairies and dicky birds. The Detective was slightly taller than average, maybe five-ten or so. His hair was dark, almost black, with gray seeping in around the temples. There were scars on his chin and beside his right eye. He looked to be of medium build, but there was muscle under there. His eyes were blue, shading to green depending upon how the light caught them. The pupils were always small and dark. Even when he seemed to be relaxed, as he was now at Willie’s party, there was a part of him that remained guarded and hidden, that was wound so tight his eyes wouldn’t even let the light in. They were the sort of eyes, Willie thought, that made people look away. Some folk, you caught their eyes and maybe you smiled at them instinctively, because if that stuff about the eyes being the windows of the soul was true then what was at the heart of those people was essentially good, and that somehow communicated itself to whomever they met. The Detective was different. Not that he wasn’t a good man: Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn’t like to turn away from another’s pain, the kind who couldn’t put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss. The Detective struggled against the corruption of that goodness by those darker elements, but he did not always succeed, and you could see the evidence of that struggle in his eyes.

“Hey.” It was Arno. “The hell is wrong with you tonight? You look like the IRS just called.”

Willie shrugged. “Guess it’s hitting an age with a zero at the end. Makes you thoughtful.”

“Like you’re gonna start making me coffee in the morning, and asking me how I slept?”

Willie punched him on the arm. “No, you knucklehead. Thoughtful, like when you start thinking about stuff, remembering.”

“Well, stop it. It never helped you before, and you’re too old to start getting good at it now.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” A beer was thrust into his hand, a Brooklyn Lager. He’d begun to drink it only recently. He liked the idea that there was an independent brewery over in Williamsburg once again, and he felt that he should support it. It helped that the stuff they brewed there tasted good, so it wasn’t like he had to make any allowances.

He cast a final look at the three men in the corner. Angel returned it and raised his glass in salute. Beside him, Louis did the same, and Willie lifted his bottle in acknowledgment. A feeling of warmth and gratitude washed over him, so strong that it made his cheeks glow and his eyes water. He knew what these men had done in the past, and what they were capable of doing now. Something had shifted in their world, though. Maybe it was the influence of the third man, but they were the good guys, in their way. He tried to remember something someone had said about them once, something about angels.

Ah, that was it. They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren’t entirely sure that this was a good thing.

And then he recalled who it was that had said it: it was the third man, Parker. The Detective. As if on cue, the Detective turned around, and Willie felt himself trapped in his regard. The Detective smiled, and Willie smiled back. Even as he did so, he could not shake off the sensation that the Detective knew exactly what Willie had been thinking.

Willie shivered. He’d been lying when he’d told Arno that it was his birthday that was making him act funny. That was part of it, but it wasn’t the whole story. No, for the last couple of days Willie had been getting the feeling that something was wrong. It wasn’t anything that he could put his finger on. The day before, there had been a blue Chevy Malibu parked across the street from the auto shop, two men sitting in the front seat, and it seemed to Willie like they were watching him, because when he started paying attention to them they moved off. Later, he dismissed it as paranoia, but he was certain that he had seen the car again today, this time parked farther down the street, the same two men once again occupying the front seats. He thought of mentioning the sightings to Louis, then dismissed it. It wasn’t the time or the place. Maybe he was just feeling weird because of the day, because he was now entering his seventh decade. Still, he couldn’t quite shake off the belief that something was bent out of shape slightly. It was like when his wife had filed for divorce, and the shop was about to be taken away from him, the knowledge that a crack had appeared in his existence, that his world was about to be transformed by something from outside, something hostile and dangerous.

And there was nothing that Willie could do to stop it.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS AFTER 1:00 A.M. Most of the revelers had gone home, and only Arno and Willie and a man named Happy Saul remained of the main group. Happy Saul had suffered nerve damage to his face as a child, and it had contorted his mouth into a permanently fixed grin. Nobody ever sat next to Happy Saul at a funeral. It looked bad. Unusually-for it was often the case that men with nicknames like “Happy” or “Smiley” tended to be seriously angry and depressed individuals, the kind who never saw a bell tower without experiencing visions of themselves picking off bystanders with a rifle-Happy Saul was a contented guy, and good company. At that very moment, he was telling Willie and Arno a joke so inconceivably filthy that Willie was sure he was going straight to hell just for listening to it.

Angel and Louis were now alone in the corner. The Detective had gone. He didn’t drink much anymore, and he had an early start back to Maine the next morning. Before he left, Willie opened the gift that the Detective had brought: it was a bill of acceptance for a delivery of old packing crates, signed by Henry Ford himself, framed with a picture of the great man above it.

“I thought you could hang it in the shop,” said the Detective, as Willie gazed at the photograph, his fingertips tracing the signature beneath.

“I’ll do that,” said Willie. “It’ll have pride of place in the office. Nothing else around it. Nothing.” He was touched, and a little guilty. His earlier thoughts about the Detective now seemed un-generous. Even if they were true, there was more to him than his demons. He shook the Detective’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “For this, and for coming along tonight.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it. Be seeing you, Willie.”

“Yeah, next time.”

Willie had returned to Arno and Happy Saul.

“Nice thing to get,” said Arno, holding the frame in his hands.

“Yeah,” said Willie. He was watching the Detective as he said goodnight to Nate and headed into the night. Even though Willie was at least two sheets to the wind, there was an expression on his face that Arno had never seen before, and it worried him.

“Yeah, it is…”

The two men sat close together, but not too close, Louis’s arm draped casually across the seat behind his partner’s head. Nate didn’t have a problem with their relationship. Neither did Arno, or Willie, or even Happy Saul, although if Happy Saul did have a problem there would have been no way to tell without asking him. But not everyone in Nate’s was so liberal minded, and while Angel and Louis would happily have confronted, and then quietly pummeled, anyone who had the temerity to question their sexuality or any displays of mutual affection that they might have felt inclined to show, they preferred to keep a low profile and avoid such encounters, in part so that they wouldn’t cause trouble for Nate, and in part because other aspects of their lives demanded that they remain inconspicuous whenever possible, inasmuch as a tall, immaculately attired black man who could cause sweat to break out on an iceberg on a cold day and a small, shabby person who, when he walked down the street, made it look like the garbagemen had missed some of the trash could fail to attract attention to themselves.

They had moved on to brandy, and Nate had broken out his best snifter glasses for the occasion. The glasses were big enough to house goldfish. There was music playing in the background: Sinatra-Basie from ’62, Frank singing about how love is the tender trap. Nate was polishing down the bar, humming along contentedly to the song. Usually, Nate would have started to close up by now, but he appeared in no hurry to make people leave. It was one of those nights, the kind where it felt like the clocks have been stopped and all those inside were safely insulated from the troubles and demands of the world. Nate was content to let them stay that way for a while. It was his gift to them.

“Looks like Willie had a good time,” said Louis. Willie was swaying slightly on his chair, and his eyes had the dazed look of a man who has recently been hit on the head with a frying pan.

“Yeah,” said Angel. “I think some of those women wanted to give him a special gift all of their own. He’s lucky to be wearing his clothes.”

“We’re all lucky that he’s wearing his clothes.”

“There is that. He seems kind of, I don’t know, not himself tonight?”

“It’s the occasion. Makes a man philosophical. Makes him dwell on his mortality.”

“That’s a cheerful thought. Maybe we could start a line of greeting cards, put that on them. Happy Mortality Day.”

“You been pretty quiet tonight as well.”

“You complain when I talk too much.”

“Only when you got nothing to say.”

“I always have something to say.”

“That’s your problem right there. There’s a balance. Maybe Willie could install a filter on you.” His fingers gently brushed the back of his partner’s neck. “You gonna tell me what’s up?”

Although there was nobody within earshot, Angel still glanced casually around before he spoke. It never hurt to be careful.

“I heard something. You remember William Wilson, better known as Billy Boy?”

Louis nodded. “Yeah, I know who he is.”

“Was.”

Louis was silent for a moment. “What happened to him?”

“Died in a men’s room down in Sweetwater, Texas.”

“Natural causes?”

“Heart failure. Brought on by someone sticking a blade through it.”

“That don’t sound right. He was good. He was an animal, and a freak, but he was good. Hard to get close enough to take him with a knife.”

“I hear there were rumors that he’d been overstepping the mark, adding flourishes to simple jobs.”

“I heard that, too.” There had always been something wrong with Billy Boy. Louis had seen it from the start, which was why he had decided not to work with him, once he was in a position to pick and choose. “He always did like inflicting pain.”

“Seems like someone decided that he’d done it once too often.”

“Could have been one of those things: a bar, booze, someone decides to pull a knife, gets his friends to help,” said Louis, but he didn’t sound like he believed what he was saying. He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.

“Could have been, except the place was near empty when it happened, and we’re talking about Billy Boy. I remember what you told me about him, from the old days. Whoever took him must have been a whole lot better than good.”

“Billy was getting old.”

“He was younger than you.”

“Not much, and I know I’m getting old.”

“I know it, too.”

“That you’re getting old?”

“No, that you’re getting old.”

Louis’s eyes briefly turned to slits.

“I ever tell you how funny I find you?” he asked.

“No, come to mention it, you don’t.”

“It’s cause you ain’t. At least now you know why. The blade enter from the front, or the back?”

“Front.”

“There a paper out on him?”

“Someone would have heard.”

“Could be that someone did. Where’d you get this from?”

“Saw it on the internet. I made a call or two.”

Louis rolled the glass in his hands, warming the brandy and smelling the aromas that arose. He was annoyed. He should have been told about Billy Boy, even as a courtesy. That was the way things were done. There were too many markers in his past to allow such matters to go unmentioned.

“You always keep tabs on the people I used to work with?” he said.

“It’s not a full-time job. There aren’t many of them left.”

“There aren’t any of them left now, not with Billy Boy gone.”

“That’s not true.”

Louis thought for a moment. “No, I guess not.”

“Which brings me to the next thing,” said Angel.

“Go on.”

“The cops interviewed everyone who was in the bar when they found him. Only one person had left: a little fat guy in a cheap suit, sat at the bar and drank no-name whiskey from the well, didn’t look like he could afford to change his drawers more than once every second day.”

Louis sipped his brandy, letting it rest in his mouth before releasing it to warm his throat.

“Anything else?”

“Bartender said he thought he saw some scarring just above the collar of the guy’s shirt, like he’d been in a fire once. Thought he saw some at his right wrist as well.”

“Lot of people get burned.” Louis said the words with a strangeness to his tone. It might almost have been called dispassionate, had there not been the sense that behind it a great depth of feeling lay hidden.

“But not all of them go on to take someone like Billy Boy with a knife. You think it’s him?”

“A blade,” said Louis thoughtfully. “They find it in the body?”

“No. Took it with him when he left.”

“Wouldn’t want to leave a good knife behind. He was a shooter, but he always did prefer to finish them up close.”

“If it’s him.”

“If it’s him,” echoed Louis.

“Been a long time, if it is.”

Louis’s right foot beat a slow, steady cadence upon the floor.

“He suffered. It would have taken time for him to recover, to heal. He’d have changed his appearance again, like he did before. And he wouldn’t come out of hiding for a standard job. Someone must have been real pissed at Billy Boy.”

“It’s not only about the money, though, right?”

“No, not if it’s him.”

“If he’s back, Billy Boy might just be the start. There’s the small matter of you trying to burn him alive.”

“There is that. He’ll still be hurting, even now, and he won’t be what he was.”

“He was still good enough to take Billy Boy.”

“If it’s him.” It sounded like a mantra. Perhaps it was. Louis had always known that Bliss would come back some day. If he had returned, it would be almost a relief. The waiting would be over. “It’s because he was so good to begin with. Even with a little shaved off, he’d still be better than most. Better than Billy Boy, that’s for sure.”

“Billy Boy’s no loss.”

“No, he ain’t.”

“But having Bliss back in the world isn’t so good either.”

“No.”

“I’d kinda hoped that he was dead.” Much of this had been before Angel’s time, before he and Louis had met, although he and Louis had encountered Billy Boy once, out in California. It was an accidental meeting at a service station, and Louis and Billy Boy had circled each other warily, like wolves before a fight. Angel hadn’t thought much of Billy Boy as a human being then, although he accepted that he might have been prejudiced by what Louis had told him. Of Bliss, he knew only of what he had done to Louis, and what had been done to him in return. Louis had told him of it because he knew that it was not over.

“He won’t be dead until someone makes him dead, and there’s no money in that,” said Louis. “No money, and no percentage.”

“Unless you knew he had your name on his list.”

“I don’t believe he sends out notifications.”

“No, I guess not.”

Angel tossed back half of his brandy, and began to cough.

“You sip it, man,” said Louis. “It ain’t Alka-Seltzer.”

“A beer would have been better.”

“You have no class.”

“Only by association.”

Louis considered for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “there is that…”

The apartment shared by the two men was not as those who knew the couple only casually might have imagined it to be, given their disparate dress codes, attitudes to life, and general demeanor. It occupied the top two floors of a three-story over-basement building on the farthest reaches of the Upper West Side, where the gap between rich and poor began to narrow significantly. The apartment was scrupulously tidy. Although they shared a bedroom, each had his own room in which to retire and in which to pursue his particular interests, and while Angel’s room bore the unmistakable signs of one whose skill lay in the picking of locks and the undermining of security systems-shelves of manuals, assorted tools, a workbench covered with both electrical and mechanical components-there was an order to it that would have been apparent to any craftsman. Louis’s room was starker. There was a laptop computer, a desk, and a chair. The shelves were lined with music and books, the music leaning, perhaps surprisingly, toward country, with an entire section for black artists: Dwight Quick, Vicki Vann, Carl Ray, and Cowboy Troy Coleman from the moderns, DeFord Bailey and Stoney Edwards from the earlier period, along with a little Charlie Pride, Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western, some Bobby Womack, and From Where I Stand, a boxed set detailing the black experience in country music. Louis found it hard to understand why so many others of his race failed to connect with this music: it spoke of rural poverty, of love, of despair, of faithfulness and infidelity, and these were experiences known to all men, black as well as white. Just as poor black people had more in common with poor whites than with wealthy blacks, so too this music offered a means of expression to those who had endured all of the trauma and sadness with which it dealt, regardless of color. Nevertheless, he had resigned himself to being in a minority as far as this belief was concerned, and although he had almost managed to convince his partner of the merits of some things at which he might previously have scoffed, including regular haircuts and clothing stores that did not specialize in end-of-line sales, black country music-in fact, any country music-remained one of Angel’s many enduring blind spots.

The apartment consisted of a modern kitchen, rarely used, that led into a large living room cum dining room, and Angel’s workshop, all on the lower floor. On the upper floor, there was a luxurious bathroom that Louis had appropriated for himself, leaving the en-suite shower room to his partner; Louis’s office; a smaller guest bedroom, with a small shower room, neither of which had ever been used; and the main bedroom, which was lined with closet space and, apart from the odd book, remained, by mutual effort and consent, in a state of interior design catalog neatness. There was a gun safe behind the mirror in the guest shower room. Whenever they were in the apartment, the safe remained open. At night, they each kept a weapon close at hand in the main bedroom. When the apartment was empty, the gun safe was kept locked and the mirror carefully put back in its original position using a hinge-and-lock mechanism operated by a small click switch a finger’s length behind the glass. They took care of the cleaning and maintenance of the apartment themselves. No strangers were ever admitted, nor friends or acquaintances, of which there were few in any case.

They hid in plain sight, these men. They used prepaid cell-phones, switching them regularly, but they never paid for the devices themselves: instead, homeless men and women were given money to make the purchases in stores scattered over four states, and a middleman was used to collect and pass on the phones. Even then, the cells were used only when absolutely necessary. Most of their calls were made from pay phones.

There was no internet connection in their apartment. A computer was kept in an office rented by one of Louis’s many shell companies, which they used on occasion for more delicate searches, but often a cyber café was sufficient for their needs. They avoided email, although when required they employed Hushmail to send encrypted messages, or embedded codes in seemingly innocuous communications.

Wherever possible, they used cash, not credit cards. They were part of no loyalty programs, and they bought Metrocards for the subway as they needed them, disposing of them when they were exhausted and replacing them with new ones instead of recharging the originals. Utilities were paid for through a lawyer’s office. They had learned the best routes to take on foot and by car to avoid security cameras, and the lights that illuminated the license plates on the vehicles they used all contained infrared bulbs designed to flood video cameras operating at near infrared frequency.

There were also other, more unusual, protections in place. The basement and first floor of their building were rented by an elderly lady named Mrs. Evelyn Bondarchuk, who kept Pomeranians and appeared to have cornered the market in chintz and bone china. There had once been a Mr. Bondarchuk, but he was taken from his young bride at a tragically early age, a consequence of a misunderstanding between Mr. Bondarchuk and a passing train, Mr. Bondarchuk being drunk at the time and having mistaken the track for a public urinal. Mrs. Bondarchuk had never married again, in part because no one could ever have taken the place of her much-loved, if dissolute, husband, but also because anyone who did would, by definition, have been equally or significantly more dissolute than his predecessor, and Mrs. Bondarchuk did not need such aggravation in her life. Thus a corner of her living room remained a slightly dusty shrine to the memory of her departed husband, and Mrs. Bondarchuk lavished her affection instead on generations of Pomeranians, who are not generally considered to be dissolute animals.

Mrs. Bondarchuk’s apartment was rent controlled. She paid a laughably small monthly sum to a company called Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., that appeared to be little more than a box number in Lower Manhattan. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had bought the building in the early eighties, and Mrs. Bondarchuk had feared for a time that her tenancy might be affected by the sale, but instead she was assured, by letter, that all would remain as it had been and she was welcome to see out her days, surrounded by Pomeranians, in the apartment in which she had dwelt for the best part of thirty years. In fact, she was even permitted to expand her fiefdom into the basement below as well, which had been unoccupied since its previous tenant died some years earlier. Such things were unheard of in the city, Mrs. Bondarchuk knew, and she did her best to ensure that, as far as she was concerned, they remained so. She did not tell anyone of her good fortune, apart from her good friend Mrs. Naughtie, and then only after swearing her to silence. Mrs. Bondarchuk was a clever woman. She understood that something unusual was happening in her building, but as it did not appear to be hampering her existence and was instead improving it significantly, she behaved sensibly and allowed matters to take their course.

The only significant change occurred when the couple upstairs, who were both accountants, eventually retired and moved to a house in Vermont, and their place was taken by a quiet, beautifully dressed black man and a smaller, noticeably less well-dressed individual who looked like he might have come to steal her jewelry, which, had fate not introduced him to his current partner, might well have been the case. Still, they were very polite gentlemen. Mrs. Bondarchuk suspected that they were gay. It gave her quite a frisson for, by the standards of the city, she led a very sheltered life.

If any problems arose with her apartment, Mrs. Bondarchuk left a message with a delightful young woman named Amy, who answered the phone for Leroy Frank Properties, Inc. Actually, Amy answered the phone for a great many businesses, none of which needed or wanted an actual physical presence in the city. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., owned a number of premises in New York, of which the one on the Upper West Side was the sole residential property. Amy was under explicit instructions to deal with Mrs. Bondarchuk’s problems promptly, at the very latest by close of business on the day the call was received. A premium was to be paid to the relevant plumber, electrician, carpenter, or other professional to ensure that this was the case. A list of approved individuals was kept in a file in Amy’s desk, all of whom were aware of the particular needs of Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., in relation to this building.

Mrs. Bondarchuk knew the first names of the two men who lived above her, and referred to them, respectively, as “Mr. Louis” and “Mr. Angel,” but she had never connected the black man, Louis, to Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., even though “Leroy Frank” was not a million miles removed from “Le Roi Français” and, while there had been a great many French kings, the name most commonly found among them was, of course, Louis. No, Mrs. Bondarchuk made no such connection, for it was none of Mrs. Bondarchuk’s business to think about such matters, and her life was, for her, quite idyllic, so she had no desire to go poking her nose into dark corners. She had enough money on which to live quite comfortably; she had quiet neighbors; and the soundtrack to her life was the yapping of happy Pomeranians and the soothing strings of the Mantovani Orchestra, which, she had discovered, could provide an album for every occasion. And because she valued her situation so highly, Mrs. Bondarchuk guarded every facet of it very closely indeed. When the tradesmen came to fix a leak or change a light bulb, they did so under the unflinching stare of Mrs. Bondarchuk and assorted small dogs. The mailman never got beyond the doorstep. Likewise delivery men, salesmen, small children at Halloween, large children at any time, and any adult who was not her old friend and fellow widow, Mrs. Naughtie, with whom she played an often bad-tempered series of backgammon games, fueled by cheap sherry, every Thursday night.

Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had installed an expensive and complicated alarm system when it had taken over the ownership of the building, and Mrs. Bondarchuk understood the workings of that system intimately. Mrs. Bondarchuk did not know it but, in her way, she was as essential to the security and peace of mind of the two men who lived above her as the guns that they occasionally carried in the course of their work. She was the Cerberus at the gates of their underworld.

Now, as she lay in her bed and listened to “Swedish Rhapsody” on the little CD player that Mr. Angel and Mr. Louis had given her for Christmas that year (Mrs. Bondarchuk preferred to go to bed late and wake up late: she had never been a morning person); she heard them enter, heard the soft weeping of the alarm before they silenced it with the code, and then a final single beep as the door closed and they reset the system.

“Night, night, Mrs. Bondarchuk,” called Mr. Angel from the hallway.

She did not reply, but merely smiled as she stopped the music and turned off her light. They were home, and she always slept better when they were around.

For some reason that she could not quite fathom, they made her feel very safe indeed.

That night, Louis lay awake while Angel slept. He thought about his past, and the hidden nature of the world. He thought about lives taken and lives lost, about his momma and the women who had raised him. He thought about Bliss. He followed the threads in the patterns of his life, pausing where they overlapped, where one connected with another.

And then he closed his eyes, and waited for the Burning Man to come.

It was a small town, a sundown town. That term meant something for the boy and those like him. True, there was no longer a sign advertising that fact at the town limits, which counted as progress in some small way, although there might just as well have been, since most everyone beyond the age of seven could recall where it had stood, just below the gate to Virgil Jellicote’s farm. Old Virgil had made sure that the sign wasn’t obscured by dirt or, as had once occurred during the period of unrest that followed the killing of Errol Rich, by the judicious application of some black paint, so that the sign was transformed from “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town” to “White Folks, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town.” Old Virgil had been mightily troubled by that act of vandalism; other people, too, and not all of them white. What was done to Errol Rich was wrong, but riling the cops and the town council by screwing with their beloved sign was just plain dumb, although when the police came asking who might have been responsible for the damage, they were greeted only with silence. Being dumb wasn’t a crime, not yet, and the law had plenty of other ways in which it could punish people of color without another being added to the list.

The town wasn’t even unusual in its overt exclusion of the black population. It was one of thousands of such towns across the United States, and even whole counties had turned sundown when their county seat did. Half of all the towns in Oregon, Ohio, Indiana, the Cumber-lands, and the Ozarks were, at one point, sundown towns. God help the black man who found himself in, say, Jonesboro, Illinois, after dark, or nearby Anna (which was known, to both whites and blacks, as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” and would continue to have signs to that effect on Highway 127 as late as the 1970s), or Appleton, Wisconsin, or suburbs like Levittown on Long Island; Livonia, Michigan; or Cedar Key, Florida. And, hey, that goes for your Jews, your Chinese, your Mexicans, and your Native Americans, too. Be on your way now, son. Time’s a killin’…

The thing about the boy’s hometown was that it was a pretty place. It was clean, and there wasn’t much cussing, not in public. Main Street belonged on a postcard, and the flowers growing in its pots were always appropriate to the season. It was small, though. In fact, it was so small that it barely qualified as a town by any reasonable reckoning, but no- body in those parts referred to anywhere as a village. The place in which you lived was a town or it was nothing at all. There was something substantial about a town. A town meant neighbors, and laws, and order on the streets. A town meant sidewalks, and barbershops, and church on Sundays. To call somewhere a town was to recognize a certain standard of living, of behavior. Sure, folk might go off the rails now and again, but what was important was that everyone knew where those rails were. All derailments were purely temporary. That train kept on running, and all good people made sure they were on board for the whole of the journey, allowing for some unforeseen stops along the way.

But, for the boy, it had never really been a town, not for him. True, it had all the characteristics of a town, however small a space they might have occupied. There were stores, and a movie theater, and a couple of churches, although none for the Catholics, who had to drive eight miles east to Maylersville or twelve miles south to Ludlow if they wanted to worship their own misguided version of the Lord. There were houses, too, with well-kept front lawns and white picket fences and sprinklers that hissed unthreateningly on hot summer days. There were lawyers, and doctors, and florists, and undertakers. If you looked at it the right way, the town had everything necessary to ensure a perfectly adequate degree of service for those who chose to call it home.

The problem, as the boy saw it, was that all of those people were white. The town was built for white people and run by white people. The people behind the counters of the stores were white, and the people on the other side of the counters were mostly white, too. The lawyers were white and the cops were white and the florists were white. Black people could be seen in town, but they were always moving: carrying, delivering, lifting, hauling. Only white people were allowed to stand still. Black people did what they had to do, then left. After nightfall, there were only white folk on the streets.

It wasn’t that anyone was cruel to the coloreds as a rule, or vicious, or intemperate in manner. It was simply understood by both sides that this was the way things worked. Blacks had their own stores, their own juke joints, their own places of worship, their own ways of doing things. They had their own town, in a sense, although it was one that did not trouble the planners or figure on any census. By and large, white folks didn’t interfere with them, as long as nobody caused any trouble. The blacks lived out in the woods and the swamps, and some of them had pretty nice houses, too, all things considered. No one begrudged them what they had built for themselves. Hell, it wasn’t unknown for white men to give some of these black businesses a little custom now and then, especially when those businesses facilitated the provision of exotic flesh for discerning gentlemen whose tastes ran in that direction, so it wasn’t like the two races never mingled, or the twain never met. The twain met more often than many people liked to think, and there was good money to be made from those encounters.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instintively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His momma hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.

And that was why the boy was so troubling to the policeman who watched him through the two-way mirror on the wall. The mirror was one of the few concessions to modernity in the town’s little police department. There was no a/c, even though the units had been installed. The problem with the units was that they kept blowing all of the fuses in the building on account of how the wiring was no good, or so the local electrician had explained. For the a/c to work properly, the whole building would have to be gutted and rewired, and that was going to be an expensive job in a structure this old. The town fathers were reluctant to sanction this expenditure, not if its sole purpose was to ensure that Chief Wooster didn’t break a sweat during the hot summer months. Truth was, there were those who felt that it wouldn’t do the chief the least bit of harm to break some sweat now and again, the chief being, according to the general consensus, a lard-ass with a heart that was seriously overworked, and not due to his general affection for humanity.

So the little room from which the chief was observing the boy was cooled only by a desk fan, and the desk fan wasn’t worth a gnat’s fart in the enclosed space. The chief’s uniform was pasted to his body so that even the outline of his belly button was clearly visible through the tan cotton, and the sweat was running down his face in rivulets, near blinding him sometimes if he failed to judge properly the sweep of his handkerchief across his forehead.

And yet he did not move. Instead, he stared curiously at the boy, willing him to break. Chief Wooster might have been a lard-ass, and his view of his fellow men and women was certainly colored by a cynicism bordering on misanthropy, but he was no fool. The boy interested him. The boy had managed to kill his mother’s lover, a man named Deber, without laying a finger on him, of that the chief was certain, and Deber had been nobody’s idea of an easy mark. Deber had himself done time for a murder committed when he was barely thirteen, and there had been others since then, even if no one had been able to pin them on him. One of the killings of which Deber was suspected was the murder of a pretty young black woman down in the city. The son of that pretty young black woman was now sitting on the other side of the mirror being interrogated by two detectives from the state police. They weren’t getting any further with the boy than the chief’s own men had, and the chief’s men had been far less gentle than the detectives. The bruises to the boy’s face and the swelling beneath his right eye were testament to that. Clark, one of the men in question, told the chief that the boy had pissed blood when they had taken him down to the bathroom to clean him up. The chief had told them to ease up on the boy after that. He wanted a confession, not a corpse.

It had taken the state cops a day to organize themselves sufficiently to make the journey north. During that twenty-four-hour period, the chief’s men had worked the boy pretty hard. They’d started with beatings, then threats against the boy’s family, who had provided him with an alibi. The cops had fed him soda spiked with Ex-Lax, then tied him to the chair and left him there. The chief had watched the boy fight against the urge to void himself, his mouth trembling with the effort, his nostrils flaring, his hands clasped into fists. When he was certain that the boy could take the pain no longer, he’d sent Clark in to make him an offer: confess to the Deber killing and they’d haul him straight to the bathroom. Otherwise, they’d let nature take its course and leave him to sit in what resulted. The boy simply shook his head. The chief almost admired his resilience, except it was making him look bad. He instructed Clark to accompany the boy to the men’s room before he burst, as he didn’t want him stinking up the building’s only interrogation room. Clark had acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Afterward, he had taken the boy out to the yard and hosed him off on the ground, his trousers around his ankles and the other cops jeering as the water jetted painfully against his privates.

Threats against his family hadn’t worked either. He came from a house full of women. Wooster knew them. They were good people. Wooster wasn’t a racist. There were good blacks and bad blacks, just like there were good whites and bad whites. It wouldn’t be true to say that the chief treated them all equally. Had he tried, even if he’d had the inclination, he wouldn’t have lasted a week in his current position, let alone ten years. Instead, he treated blacks and poor whites pretty much the same. Wealthy whites required more careful handling. Wealthy blacks he didn’t have to worry about, because he didn’t know any.

Wooster believed in preventive policing. People ended up in his cells only when they’d done something seriously wrong, or when every other attempt to persuade them to follow the path of righteous and decent behavior had failed. He knew the people in his charge, and he made sure that his men knew them, too. The boy and his family had not once required his attention during the first nine years that he had been chief, not until Deber appeared and wormed his way into the affections of the boy’s mother, if that was truly what he had done. There had been nothing in Deber to suggest that he was capable of arousing the affections of anyone, and the chief suspected that threats and fear had been more responsible for the gestation of the relationship than any depth of feeling on the part of either party.

Then the mother had been killed, her battered body found lying in an alleyway behind a liquor store. There had been reports that Deber had been seen in that same liquor store less than an hour before the discovery of the body, and someone told of hearing a male voice and a female voice raised in argument at about that time. Deber, though, was like the boy now seated in the interrogation room: he hadn’t broken, and the killing of the boy’s mother remained unsolved. Deber had returned to the house full of women and taken up with the boy’s aunt, or so local gossip had it. The women were frightened of him, and had good cause to be, but he should have been frightened of them, too. They were strong and clever, and nobody thought it likely that they would tolerate the presence of Deber in their house for much longer.

And then, not long after the commencement of that particular relationship, someone had taken the metal whistle that Deber used to summon his work crews, separated its two halves, and replaced the pea with a wad of homemade explosive. When Deber had blown the whistle, the charge had torn most of his face off. He’d lived for a couple of days afterward, blinded and in agony, despite the efforts of the doctors to keep him medicated, then had passed away. The chief was pretty sure that, wherever Deber now was, his agonies were continuing and were likely to do so for all eternity. Deber was no loss to the world, but that didn’t change the fact that a man had been killed, and the person responsible had to be found. It wasn’t good to have people wandering around freely creating booby traps out of household items, didn’t matter if they were targeting blacks or whites. Guns and knives were one thing. They were commonplace, just like the people who used them. There was nothing particularly unnerving, beyond the occasional brutality of the act itself, about a man who’d carve up another man because he crossed him on a bad day, or one who’d put a bullet in the head of the guy next to him in an argument over a woman, or a debt, or a pair of shoes. As chief, Wooster knew where he stood with men, and women, of that stripe. They were neither strange nor startling. On the other hand, someone who could kill a man with his own whistle represented a whole new way of thinking with regard to ending lives, and one that Chief Wooster was in no hurry to encourage or embrace.

Wooster had obtained a warrant for the boy’s arrest on the day Deber had died. The state cops had laughed down the phone at him when he’d informed them of what he’d done. Deber, they told him, had so many enemies that their suspect list resembled a phone book. He had been killed by a miniature explosive device, cunningly constructed and designed to ensure that only its intended target would be affected, and that the target would not survive. It had involved a degree of planning not usually associated with fifteen-year-old Negroes living in a shack by a swamp. Wooster had pointed out that the Negro in question was attending a high school that, thanks to a charitable donation from a southern trust fund, had a reasonably well-equipped science lab, and one that could easily have provided the iodine crystals and ammonium that an examination of the remains of the whistle had revealed as the constituent components of the explosive used to kill Deber. In fact, Wooster continued, they were precisely the components that a bright kid, not some expert assassin, might use to create an explosive, although, according to the report on the whistle, it was a miracle that it hadn’t blown up long before it reached Deber’s mouth, as nitrogen tri-iodide was a notoriously unstable compound that was supersensitive to friction. The technician who had examined the whistle suggested that the compound, even the reconstructed item itself, had probably been kept soaked in water for as long as possible by the killer, so that it had only just begun to dry out by the time the victim had raised it to his mouth for the final time. It was this information about the nature of the explosive used, and the absence of any other leads, that had convinced the state police to send, however reluctantly, two detectives to interview the boy.

Now one of those detectives stood and left the interrogation room. A moment later, the door to the chief’s little observation cell opened and the same detective entered, a cold soda in his hand.

“We’re not getting anywhere with this kid,” he said.

“You need to keep trying,” said Wooster.

“Looks like you did some trying of your own.”

“He fell over on the way to the men’s room.”

“Yeah? How many times?”

“He bounced. I didn’t keep count.”

“You sure you read him his rights?”

“Someone did. Not me.”

“He ask for a lawyer?”

“If he did, I didn’t hear him.”

The detective took a long draught of the soda. Some of it dribbled down his chin, like tobacco spit.

“He didn’t do this. It was too slick.”

Wooster wiped his brow with his sodden handkerchief.

“Too slick?” he said. “I knew Deber. I knew the people he ran with. They’re not the slick kind. If someone in his own circle, or someone he’d crossed, wanted him dead, they’d have shot him or stabbed him, maybe cut his balls off first just to send a message. They wouldn’t have wasted their time separating and then soldering a whistle so they could pack it with just enough explosive to tear his face off and turn his brain to sludge. They’re not that smart. That kid, though-” He stood and pointed at the glass. “-that kid is smart: smart enough to break into his school and smart enough to put together a little homemade blasting powder. Plus he had motive: Deber killed his mother and was fucking his aunt, and Deber wasn’t the gentle kind in the sack.”

“There’s no proof that Deber killed his mother.”

“Proof.” Wooster almost spat the word. “I don’t need proof. Some things I just know.”

“Yeah, well, the courts look at things differently. I’m friends with the men who interviewed Deber. They did everything short of hooking him up to a battery and frying him to make him talk. He didn’t break. No evidence. No witnesses. No confession. No case.”

In the interrogation room beyond, the boy’s head moved slightly, as though the men’s voices had carried to him, even through the thick walls. Wooster thought he might even have seen the ghost of a smile.

“You know what else I think?” said Wooster. His voice was softer now.

“Go on, Sherlock. I’m listening.”

Sherlock, thought Wooster. You patronizing piece of shit. I knew your daddy, and he wasn’t much better than you are. He was a nobody, couldn’t find his shoes in the morning if someone didn’t hand them to him, and you’re still less of a cop than he was.

“I think,” said Wooster, “that if that kid hadn’t killed Deber, then Deber would have killed him. I don’t think either of them had a choice. If it wasn’t the boy sitting in there, it would be Deber.”

The detective gulped down the remains of his soda. Something in the evenness of Wooster’s tone suggested to him that he had overstepped the mark seconds earlier. He tried to make amends.

“Look, Chief, you may be right. There’s something about that kid, I’ll give you that, but there’s only so much longer we can keep going with this before we have to decide whether to shit or get off the pot.”

“Just a few more hours. You talk to him about the women, about maybe using a threat against them to loosen him up some?”

“Not yet. Did you?”

“Tried. It was the only time he spoke.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me that I wasn’t the kind of man who’d hurt women.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he right?”

The chief sighed. “I guess so.”

“Shit. There are other ways, though. Informal ways.”

The two men looked at each other. Eventually, the chief shook his head.

“I don’t think you’re that kind of man either.”

“No, I don’t believe that I am.” The detective crushed the soda can and aimed it, inexpertly, at a trash basket. It bounced off the edge and landed in the corner of the room.

“I hope you shoot better than that,” said Wooster.

“Why, you figure I’m going to have to shoot somebody?”

“If only things were so easy.”

The detective patted Wooster on the shouder, then instantly regretted it as his hand was soaked with the chief’s sweat. He wiped it surreptitiously on his trouser leg.

“We’ll try again,” he said.

“Do that,” said Wooster. “He killed him. I know he killed him.”

He didn’t look at the detective as he left the room. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on the young black man in the room, and the young black man stared back at him.

Two hours later, Wooster was at his desk, drinking water and swatting at flies. The two detectives had taken a break from the questioning and the stifling heat of the interrogation room. They were sitting outside the station house in their shirtsleeves, smoking, the remains of hamburgers and fries on the steps beside them. Wooster knew that the interrogation was almost at an end. They had nothing. After almost two full days of questioning, the boy had uttered only two sentences. The second was his judgment of Wooster. The first was to tell them his name.

“My name is Louis.”

Louis, the way Wooster’s brother-in-law, who lived down in Louisiana, might have pronounced it. The French way. Not Lewis, but Lou-ee.

He watched the two detectives speaking softly to each other. One of them came back inside.

“We’re going to get a beer,” he said.

Wooster nodded. They were done. If they came back at all, it would only be to get their car, assuming they could remember where they’d left it.

In the waiting area outside, across from the main desk, a black woman was sitting, clutching her handbag. She was the boy’s grandmother, but she could have been his mother, her face was so youthful. Ever since the boy’s arrest, one or another of the women in the boy’s family had kept silent vigil on the same cold, hard chair. They all had a dignified air about them, a sense that they were almost doing the room a service by sitting in it. This one, though, the eldest of them, made Wooster uneasy. There were stories told about her. People went to her to have their fortunes read, to find out the sex of their unborn infant, or to have their minds put at rest about missing relatives or the souls of dead children. Wooster didn’t believe in any of that stuff, but he still treated the woman with respect. She didn’t demand it. She didn’t have to. Only a fool would fail to recognize that it was her due.

Seeing her there now, waiting patiently, certain in the knowledge that the boy would soon be released into her charge, Wooster could spot the similarities between the woman and her grandson. It wasn’t merely physical, although both carried themselves with the same slim grace. No, something of her own disconcerting calm had transferred itself to him. For some reason, Wooster thought of dark, still waters, of sinking into their depths, going deeper and deeper, down, down until suddenly pink jaws opened amid pale luminescence and the nature of the thing itself, the creature that hid in those unknown reaches, was finally and fatally revealed.

Wooster figured his day couldn’t get a whole lot worse, although as far as he was concerned this business wasn’t done with, no sir, not by a long shot. The boy could go home to his aunts and his grandmother and whoever else shared their little coven in the woods, but Wooster would be watching him. Wherever that boy walked, Wooster would be stepping on his shadow. He’d break that boy yet.

And there was still the fag card left to play. Wooster had his suspicions about the boy. He’d heard stories. The only women with whom Louis spent time were those in his own household, and over at the Negro school he’d had to fight his corner a couple of times. Wooster knew that kids were often wrong about these things: any sign of sensitivity, of weakness, of femininity in a man and they would be on it like flies to a cut. Most of the time they were wrong, but sometimes they got it right. There were sodomy laws in this state, and Wooster had no difficulty in enforcing them. If he could get the kid on a sodomy beef, then that could be used as leverage on the Deber killing. Spending time in the pen on a queer charge was pretty much a guarantee of pain and misery right there. Better to go in with a reputation for having taken another man’s life. At least that bought some respect. Wooster wasn’t even interested in seeing the boy go to the chair. It would be enough for him to have proven others wrong: the state cops, his own people who had laughed at him behind his back for believing that a Negro boy could have committed a crime of such sophistication. Wooster wondered if he could bait a hook for the boy. There were one or two men in the town who wouldn’t be above offering themselves up for the chance of a little dark meat. All it would take would be an agreed location, a specific time, and Wooster’s fortuitous arrival on the scene. The older man would be allowed to walk, but the boy would not. It was a possibility.

As things happened, though, Wooster’s day was about to worsen considerably, despite his own convictions to the contrary, and any plans for entrapment would soon turn to dust.

“Chief?” It was Seth Kavanagh, the youngest of his men. Irish Catholic. Mick through and through. There had been issues with some of the people in the town when Wooster hired him, and he’d even had a friendly visit from Little Tom Rudge and a couple of his fellow pillow-case-wearers, suggesting that he might want to reconsider hiring Kavanagh given that this was a Baptist town. Wooster listened to their pitch, then gave them the bum’s rush. Little Tom and his kind made Wooster’s skin crawl, but more than that, he felt incipient guilt whenever they came his way. He knew about the things that they had done. He knew about Negroes being beaten for still being within the town limits at sundown, even if those town limits seemed to change according to how much the local crackers had drunk at the time. He knew about unexplained fires in Negro cabins, and rapes that were brushed away as a little fun that had gotten out of hand.

And he knew about Errol Rich, and what had been done to him in front of a great many of the very people who praised God alongside Wooster in church every Sunday. Oh, yes, Wooster knew all about that, and he had enough self-knowledge to recognize his complicity in that act, even if he had been nowhere near the old tree from which Errol had been hanged and burned. Wooster hadn’t cemented his grip on the town, not at that point, and by the time he heard about what was happening it was too late to do anything to stop it, or so he told himself. He’d made it clear, though, in the aftermath, that such an act was never to take place again, not in this town, not if he had any say in the matter. It was murder, and Wooster wouldn’t condone it. It also got the Negroes all steamed up for no good cause. It overstepped the mark to the point where their anger threatened to overcome their fear. Furthermore-and it was this point, more than any other, that got shitbags like Little Tom thinking-it had the potential to bring the feds down on their heads, and they weren’t understanding of the way things were done in small towns like this one. They didn’t understand, and they didn’t care. They were looking to make an example of people who didn’t appreciate that the times they were a-changin’, as that folk singer fella liked to put it.

And that was another reason for making sure that the boy Louis was punished for what he had done to Deber. If he got away with murder this time, then what would follow? Maybe he might take it into his head to move on to the men who had killed Errol Rich, the ones who had driven the car out from underneath his feet so that he kicked at dead summer air; the ones who had doused him in gasoline; the ones who had lit the torch and applied it to his clothes, turning him into a beacon in the night. Because there were whispers about Errol Rich and the boy’s mother, too, and you could be certain that the boy had heard them. A man’s father dies like that, and it could be that he would take it upon himself to avenge him. Damn, Wooster knew that he would, in the same situation.

Now here was Kavanagh, another of Wooster’s little experiments in social change, bothering him with shit that he was certain he could do without. Wooster wiped his face with his handkerchief, then wrung it dry into his trash basket.

“What is it?”

He didn’t look up. Once again, his gaze was fixed upon the wall before him, as though boring through it and the observation room beyond to reach the boy who had defied him for so long.

“Company.”

Wooster turned in his chair. Through the window behind him, he watched the men emerge from their cars. One was a standard-issue Ford. He smelt government, a suspicion confirmed when Ray Vallance rolled down the passenger-side window and tossed a cigarette butt on the chief’s yard. Vallance was the ASAC of the local FBI field office. He was an okay guy, as far as the feds went. He wasn’t trying to move folks faster than they could walk on this civil rights thing, but he wouldn’t let them dawdle either. Still, Wooster would have words with him about that butt. It showed disrespect.

The second car was too good to have come from any government pool. It was tan, with matching leather upholstery, and the man who got out on the driver’s side looked more like a chauffeur than an agent, although Wooster thought that he also seemed like one mean sonofabitch, and he was pretty certain that the bulge underneath his left arm didn’t come from a tumor. He opened the right rear passenger door, and a third man joined them. He looked old, but Wooster guessed that he wasn’t much older than he himself was. He was just the kind of man who had always looked old. He reminded the chief of that old English actor, Wilfrid-Something-Something, guy was in the movie of My Fair Lady that had come out a few years back. Wooster had seen it with his wife. It had been better than he was expecting, he seemed to recall. Well, that guy, the Wilfrid guy, he had always looked old, too, even when he was young. Now here was one of his near relatives, up close and in the flesh.

Vallance seemed to sigh in his seat, then got out of the car and led two of his fellow agents to the door of the chief’s office, bypassing the cop at the desk to enter the main area.

“Chief Wooster,” he said, nodding with a pretence of amiability.

“Special Agent Vallance,” said Wooster. He didn’t stand. Vallance had never addressed him by anything but his first name before, and Wooster had returned the familiarity, even when there was business at hand. Vallance was giving him the nod, letting him know that this was serious, that both he and Wooster were being watched. Still, Wooster wasn’t about to stand down on his own turf without a fight, and there was the matter of that butt to consider.

Wooster looked past Vallance to where the other four men stood, the old-looking guy in the middle of the pack, smaller than the others but with his own, quiet authority.

“What you got here, a wedding party?” asked Wooster.

“Can we talk inside?”

“Sure.” Wooster rose and spread his hands expansively. “Everybody’s welcome here.”

Only Vallance and the older man entered, the latter closing the door behind them. Wooster could feel the eyes of his men and his secretary on him, boring through the glass. Knowing that he was on show before his own people made him step up to the plate. He straightened his shoulders and stood taller, his back to the window, not bothering to adjust the blinds, so that they had the sun in their eyes.

“What’s the deal, Agent Vallance?”

“The deal is that boy you’re sweating back there.”

“Everybody sweats here.”

“Not like him.”

“Boy is a suspect in a murder investigation.”

“So I hear. What have you got on him?”

“Got probable cause. Man he killed may have murdered his mother.”

“May have?”

“He ain’t around to ask no more.”

“From what I hear, he was asked before he left this world. He didn’t fess up to anything.”

“He did it, though. Anyone believes he didn’t is ready to meet Santa Claus.”

“So, probable cause. That all you got?”

“So far.”

“The boy bending?”

“The boy’s not the kind to bend. But he’ll break, in the end.”

“You seem real sure of that.”

“He’s a boy, not a man, and I’ve broken better men than he’ll ever be. You want to tell me what this is about? I don’t think you have jurisdiction here, Ray.” Wooster had given up being polite. “This isn’t a federal beef.”

“We think it is.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Dead man was a crew chief on the new road by the Orismachee Swamp. That’s a federal reserve.”

“Will be a federal reserve,” Wooster corrected him. “It’s still just swamp now.”

“Nope, that swamp, and the road that’s being built, have just come under federal jurisdiction. Declaration was made yesterday. Rushed through. I got the paperwork here.”

He reached into his inside jacket pocket, produced a sheaf of typed documents, and handed them to Wooster. The chief found his glasses, perched them on his nose, and read the small print.

“So”, he said, when he was done, “that don’t change a thing. Crime was committed before this declaration was made. It’s still my jurisdiction.”

“We can agree to differ on that one, Chief, but it doesn’t matter anyhow. Read closer. It’s a retrospective declaration, back to the first of the month, just before road construction began. It’s a budgetary thing, they tell me. You know how the government works.”

Wooster examined the paper again. He found the dates in question. His brow furrowed, and then blood soared to his cheeks and forehead as his anger grew.

“This is bullshit. The hell should this bother you anyway? It’s colored on colored. It’s not a rights issue.”

“This is now a federal matter, Chief. We’re not pressing charges. You’ve got to cut the boy loose.”

Wooster knew that the case was slipping away from him, and with it some of his authority and his standing with his own staff. He would never be able to recover it. Vallance had made him his bitch, and the boy in that cell was going to skate, and laugh at Wooster while he was doing it.

And Wilfrid back there, with his prematurely graying hair and his neat, if slightly threadbare, clothes, had something to do with it, of that Wooster was sure.

“And where do you fit into all this?” he asked, now directing the full force of his ire at his second visitor.

“I apologize,” said the little man. He stepped forward and stretched out a perfectly manicured hand. “My name is Gabriel.”

Wooster didn’t move to shake the hand that had been offered to him. He simply left it to hang in the air until Gabriel allowed it to fall. Screw you, he thought. Screw you, and Vallance, and good manners. Screw you all.

“You haven’t answered my question,” said Wooster.

“I’m here as a guest of Special Agent Vallance.”

“You work for the government.”

“I supply services to the government, yes.”

That wasn’t the same thing, and Wooster knew it. He was smart enough to grasp the underlying meaning of what had just been said. Suddenly, he got the sense that he was very much out of his depth, and that however angry he was, it would be unwise to ask any more questions of Gabriel. He had been trussed up like a hog ready for the spit. All that remained was for someone to shove a spike in his ass and all the way up through his mouth, and Wooster intended to avoid that fate at all costs, even if it meant giving up the boy.

He sat down in his office chair and opened a file. He didn’t notice what it was, and he didn’t read what was written on its pages.

“Take him,” he said. “He’s all yours.”

“Thank you, Chief,” said Gabriel. “Once again, my apologies for any inconvenience caused.”

Wooster didn’t look up. He heard them leave his office, and the door close softly behind them.

Chief Wooster. The big fish. Well, he’d just been shown the reality of his situation. He was a little fish in a small pond who’d somehow drifted into deep waters, and a shark had flashed its teeth at him.

He stared at the closed office door, visualizing again the wall beyond, the observation room behind it, and the boy in his cell, except now it was Gabriel watching him, not Wooster. Sharks. Deep waters. Unknown things coiling and uncoiling in their depths. Gabriel watching the boy, the boy watching Gabriel, until the two blended together to become a single organism that lost itself in a blood-dark sea.

CHAPTER FIVE

WILLIE BREW’S HEAD HURT.

Things hadn’t started out too badly. He’d woken feeling dehydrated, and aware that, despite the fact he hadn’t shifted position an inch in the night, he still hadn’t slept properly. Maybe I’ll get away with it, he thought. Maybe the gods are smiling on me, just this once. But by the time he reached the auto shop his head had started to pound. He was sweaty and nauseated by noon, and he knew things would go downhill from there. He just wanted the day to come to an end so that he could go home, go back to bed, and wake up the next morning with a clear head and a deep and abiding sense of regret.

It had been this way with him ever since he had given up hard liquor. In the good old, bad old days, he could have knocked back the guts of a bottle of even the worst rail booze and still been able to function properly the next morning. Now he rarely drank anything but beer, and then usually in moderation, because beer killed him in a way liquor never had. Except a man didn’t reach the big six-oh every day, and some form of celebration was not only in order, but expected by his friends. Now he was paying the price for seven hours of pretty consistent drinking.

Even lunch hadn’t helped. The auto shop was located in an alley just off 75th Street between 37th and Roosevelt, close by the offices of an Indian attorney who specialized in immigration and visas, an astute choice of business address on the attorney’s part as this area had more Indians than some parts of India. Thirty-seventh Avenue itself had Italian, Afghan, and Argentinian restaurants, among others, but once you hit 74th Street it was Indian all the way. The street had even been renamed Kalpana Chawla Way, after the Indian astronaut who had been killed in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, and men in Sikh turbans handed out menus throughout the day to all who passed by.

This was Willie’s patch. He had grown up here, and he hoped that he would die here. He had biked out to LaGuardia and Shea Stadium as a kid, throwing stones at the rats along the way. It had mostly been the Irish and the Jews who lived here then. Ninety-fourth Street used to be known as the Mason-Dixon line, because beyond that it was all black. Willie didn’t think he’d even seen a black face below 94th until the late sixties, although by the 1980s there were some white kids attending the mostly black school up on 98th. Funny thing was, the white kids seemed to get on pretty well with the black ones. They grew up close to them, played basketball with them, and stood alongside them when interlopers trespassed on their territory. Then, in the 1980s, things began to change, and most of the Irish left for Rockaway. The gangs came in, spreading outward from Roosevelt. Willie had stayed, and faced them down, although he’d been forced to put bars on the windows of the little apartment in which he lived not far from where the auto shop now stood. Arno, meanwhile, had always lived up on Forley Street, which was Little Mexico now, and he still didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Below 83rd it was more Colombian than Mexican, and felt like another city: guys stood on the sidewalk hawking their wares, shouting and haggling in Spanish, and the stores sold music and movies that no white person was ever going to buy. Even the movies showing at the Jackson 123 had Spanish subtitles. Through it all, Willie had survived. He’d hadn’t cut and run when times got tough, and when Louis had been forced to sell the building down by Kissena, Willie had taken the opportunity to relocate closer to home, and now he, and his business, were as much a part of the history of the place as Nate’s was. It didn’t help his hangover, though.

They’d eaten at one of the buffets, avoiding, as always, the goat curry that seemed to be a staple of the cuisine in this part of the city. “You ever even seen a goat?” Arno had once asked Willie, and he had to admit that he had not, or certainly not in Queens. He figured that any goat that found itself wandering around Seventy-fourth Street wasn’t going to live for very long anyway, given the clear demand for dishes of which it was the main ingredient. Instead they stuck to the chicken, loading up on rice and naan bread. It was Arno who had converted Willie to the joys of Indian food, goat apart, and he had found that, once you stayed away from the hot stuff and concentrated on the bread and rice, it provided pretty good soakage after a night on the tiles.

Now they were back at the auto shop, and Willie was counting down the minutes until they could close up and go home. Softly, he cursed the Brooklyn Brewery and all of its works.

“A bad workman blames his tools,” said Arno.

“What?” Willie hadn’t been in the mood for Arno all day. The little Swede or Dane or whatever the hell he was had no right to be looking so spruce. After all, they’d finished the night propping up the bar together, talking about old times and departed friends. Some of those friends were even human, although most of them had four wheels and V8 engines. Arno had no qualms about drinking liquor. His only stipulation was that it had to be clear, so it was always gin or vodka for him, and Arno had matched Willie with a double vodka tonic for every beer. Yet here he was, bright and cheerful at the end of a grim day for Willie, listening in on his private conversations with the gods of brewing. Arno never seemed to get a hangover. It had to be something to do with his metabolism. He just burned it off.

Today, Willie hated Arno.

“It’s not the brewery’s fault,” continued Arno. “Nobody made you drink all that beer.”

“You made me drink all that beer,” Willie pointed out. “I wanted to go home.”

“No, you just thought you wanted to go home. You really wanted to keep celebrating. With me,” he added, grinning like an idiot.

“I see you every day,” said Willie. “I even see you Sundays at church. You haunt me. You’re like the ghost, and I’m Mrs. Muir, except she ended up liking the ghost.”

He considered his analogy and decided there was something suspect about it, but he was too weary to withdraw it. “Why the hell did I want to celebrate with you anyway?”

“Because I’m your best friend.”

“Don’t say that. I’ll just despair.”

“You got a better friend than me?”

“No. I don’t know. Listen, you’re just supposed to work for me, and even that’s doubtful.”

“I know you don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

“Not listening.”

“Dammit, I’m serious.”

“Tra-la-la.” Arno disappeared into the little storage room to the left of the main work area, trilling at the top of his voice, a finger lodged firmly in each ear. Willie considered throwing a wheel nut at him, and then decided against it. It would require too much effort, and anyway, he didn’t trust his own aim today. He might miss Arno and hit something valuable.

He sat down on a crate, propped his elbows on his thighs, then rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. It was almost eight, and dark outside. They always worked until eight on Thursdays, but in a few minutes they could safely lock up and call it a night. He would get Arno to take in the signs advertising that you could get your brakes fixed for $49.99 and your oil changed for $14.99. Then he would watch TV for a while at home before crawling into bed.

He wondered later if he had fallen asleep for a few moments right there and then, because when he opened his eyes there were two men standing in front of him. He made them for out-of-towners immediately. He could almost smell the cow turds. Both were of medium height, the older of the two probably in his early forties, with dark hair that hung untidily past his collar, and sideburns that extended out in sharp points at the end to join a goatee, as though all of his hair, head and facial both, was part of a single arrangement that could be taken off at night and draped over a mannequin’s skull. He wore a brown, yellow, and green golf shirt under a brown corduroy jacket, and brown jeans over cheap imitation Timberlands.

Willie hated golf shirts almost as much as he hated golfers. Whenever anyone came into the shop dressed for the course, or with clubs in the back of the car, Willie would lie and tell them he was too busy to be of service. There might have been golfers who weren’t assholes, but Willie hadn’t met enough of them to be able to give the whole sorry species the benefit of the doubt. Also, in his experience, the more expensive the car a golfer drove, the bigger the asshole he was. His intense dislike of golfers extended to the entire golfing wardrobe, and that went double for phlegm-colored golf shirts and anyone sorry enough to wear one either in private or in public, and most particularly in Willie Brew’s place of business when he was nursing a hangover.

The second man was broader than the first, and, despite the moderate chill in the air, was dressed only in a faded denim jacket over a T-shirt and distressed jeans. He was chewing gum, and wore the kind of shit-eating grin that suggested here, in the flesh, was not only a jerk, but the kind of jerk who considered it a poor day indeed that didn’t involve inflicting a little pain and misery on another human being.

And this was the thing: they were both looking at Willie like he was already dead.

Willie knew who they were. He knew that, not far from the front entrance to his beloved auto shop, there would be a blue Chevy Malibu parked, ready to whisk these men back to wherever they had come from as soon as their work here was done. He should have said something the first time he saw the car. Now it was too late.

Willie stood. He still had a lug wrench in his right hand.

“We’re closed, fellas,” said Willie.

But these men were not here about a car, and anything that Willie said to the contrary was just delaying the inevitable, a pretense for which they would have no patience. They were here on business, and Willie tried to figure out if there was anyone he had bugged so much that they’d want to sic two guys like this on him. He decided that he couldn’t find a name. There was nobody who hated him this much. This wasn’t about him. A message was being sent, and it would be sent through Willie, through the breaking of his bones and the ending of his life.

Then the gum chewer produced a gun from beneath his jacket. He didn’t even point it at Willie, just let it dangle by his side like it was the most natural thing in the world to walk into a man’s premises and prepare to kill him. He kept his thumb and forefinger in position while he stretched the remaining fingers, an athlete giving his muscles a final loosening before stepping into the blocks.

“Drop the wrench,” said his goateed buddy.

Willie did. It made a loud clang as it hit the concrete floor.

“You don’t look so good,” said Goatee. Willie tried to place the accent, but couldn’t. There might have been some Canadian in there someplace. Not that it mattered, not now.

“I had a rough night.”

“Well, I hate to say it, but your day ain’t about to get much better.”

Goatee punched Willie hard. Willie didn’t have a chance to prepare for the blow. It hit him full in the center of the face and broke his nose. Willie went down on his knees, his hands already raised to catch the first flow of blood. He heard the second man snicker, then move off. The door to the storage area opened. Willie peered through his fingers, and saw the gum chewer enter the room, his gun raised now. For once in his life, Willie prayed, don’t let Arno do anything dumb.

Goatee now had his own gun in his hand.

“You know,” he continued, “you ought to be more particular about who you go into business with. I mean, I know men who keep company with faggots. I don’t respect ’em, and I can’t say that I much like what they do together, but it happens. Then, Lord knows, I’ve known men to keep company with killers. You might say that I am one of those men, and my buddy back there is as well. We’re both like that, in a way: we kill people, and we keep each other company while we do it. But you, you’re covering all the bases at once. Hanging out with fag killers: that’s quite something. Guess you ought not to be surprised at what comes next.”

He pointed the gun at Willie’s head, and Willie closed his eyes. He heard a shot, and grimaced, but the sound hadn’t come from up close. Instead, it echoed inside the storage room. The noise distracted Goatee for an instant. His head turned, and in that moment Willie was on him. He picked up the wrench as he came, raising it almost to his shoulder and then bringing it down sharply just above the man’s gun hand. He thought that he felt a bone snap, and then the gun was on the floor and Willie’s weight was forcing the other man back against the trunk of the red Olds on which Arno had been working. Even with one hand injured, Goatee was still fast. His left hand lashed out, catching Willie’s busted nose and sending fresh daggers of pain through his face, blinding him for an instant. Willie kicked with his right foot, and the steel toe cap of his work boot connected with a thigh, deadening it so that his opponent stumbled as he stretched to reach his gun. The action caused Willie to lose his own balance, and he fell. He managed to knock the gun away with the side of his foot, sending it skidding into the shadows of the garage, just as he heard a second shot and glass breaking. He tried to make himself smaller, to find some cover, and when he looked up the back window of the Olds had shattered and Goatee was moving away quickly, still limping on his dead leg. There was a third shot, and Goatee’s right shoulder was pushed forward, even as he slipped out of the garage door and disappeared into the night, his departure hastened by a final shot that struck the brickwork nearby.

Arno was standing at the entrance to the storage room, a gun in his hand. The gun wasn’t very steady, and looked too big for Arno to hold. Arno didn’t like guns and, as far as Willie knew, had never fired one before. It was a wonder that he’d managed to hit his target at all. Arno moved cautiously toward the garage door. There was the sound of a car starting up, then driving away.

Willie struggled to his feet. “What happened to the other fella?” he asked.

“I hit him with a hammer,” said Arno. He was very pale. “His gun went off when he fell. You okay?”

Willie nodded. His nose hurt like damnation, but he was alive. His hands were shaking, and now he felt sure that he was going to vomit. He reached out and gently removed the gun from Arno’s hand, putting the safety on as he did so.

“What was all that about?” asked Arno.

“I need to make a call,” said Willie. “Find some wire and tie up the guy in the storage room.”

Arno didn’t move. “I don’t think we’re gonna have to do that, boss,” he said.

Willie looked at him. “Jesus, how hard did you hit him?”

“It was a hammer. How hard do you think?”

Willie shook his head, although he wasn’t sure whether in despair or admiration.

“I’m working with fucking Rambo now,” he said. “I don’t even know how you managed to wing that other guy.”

“I was aiming for his feet,” said Willie.

“What were you trying to do, make him dance? Aiming for his feet. Jesus. Lock the doors.”

Arno did as he was told. Willie went into his office and picked up the phone. He knew by heart the number that he dialed.

The call transferred to a machine. Then he tried the service, and the woman named Amy took his number and said that she’d pass on the message. Finally, he tried the cell, using this week’s number, to be utilized only in the gravest of emergencies, but a voice told him that the phone was off.

For Louis and Angel had troubles of their own.

Mrs. Bondarchuk was in the hallway when she heard the buzzer sound. She looked through one of the frosted-glass panes of the inner door and saw a man standing on the stoop outside the main door. He was dressed in a blue uniform and had a package in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Mrs. Bondarchuk pressed the intercom switch just as the buzzer sounded again. Her Pomeranians began yapping.

“Can I help you?” she asked, in a tone that suggested any help would be a long time coming. Mrs. Bondarchuk was wary of all strangers, and especially men. She knew what men were like. There wasn’t a one that could be trusted, the two gentlemen who lived upstairs excepted.

“Delivery,” the voice came back.

“Delivery for whom?”

There was a pause.

“Mrs. Evelyn Bondarchuk.”

“Leave it inside,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk, hitting the switch that opened the outer door only.

“Are you Mrs. Bondarchuk?” said the delivery man, as he stepped into the entrance.

“Who else would I be?”

“Need you to sign for it.”

There was an inch-wide slot in the inner door for just such eventualities.

“Put it through the hole,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk.

“Lady, I can’t do that. It’s important. I need to hold on to it.”

“What am I going to do with a clipboard?” asked Mrs. Bondarchuk. “Sell it and fly to Russia? Put the clipboard through the hole.”

The front door closed behind the man. She could see him properly now. He had dark hair and bad skin.

“Come on lady, be reasonable. Open up and sign.”

Mrs. Bondarchuk didn’t like the suggestion that she was being in any way unreasonable.

“I can’t do that. You’ll have to go, and you can take your parcel with you. Leave the number and I’ll collect it myself.”

“This is stupid, Mrs. Bondarchuk. If you don’t accept it, I got to haul it all the way downtown again. You know, it could get lost,” the man said, his implication clear. “Maybe it’s perishable. What then?”

“Then it’ll start to smell,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk, “and you’ll have to throw it away. Leave now, please.”

But the man did not leave. Instead, he drew a pistol from beneath his uniform and aimed it at the glass. It had a cylinder attached to the end of it. Mrs. Bondarchuk had seen enough cop shows to know a silencer when she saw one.

“You dumb old bitch,” he said as Mrs. Bondarchuk’s finger left the intercom button, ending their conversation, while her left hand hit the silent alarm. The man glanced over his shoulder at the empty street behind him, then aimed the pistol at the glass and fired twice. The sound was like a pair of paper bags bursting, and almost simultaneously two impact marks appeared in front of Mrs. Bondarchuk’s face, but the glass did not break. Like most things about the building, Mrs. Bondarchuk included, it was more formidable than it first appeared.

The man outside seemed to realize that his efforts were in vain. He slammed his gloved hand once against the glass, as though hoping to dislodge it from its frame, then opened the main door again and ran onto the street. For a time, all was quiet. Then Mrs. Bondarchuk heard noises from the basement at the back of the house. She checked her watch. Five minutes had passed since she had hit the silent alarm. If, after ten minutes, nobody came, her instructions were to call the police. Her two gentlemen had been very specific about this when the new security system was installed, and it had been repeated in an official letter to Mrs. Bondarchuk from Mr. Leroy Frank himself. It informed her that a private security firm, a very exclusive one, was employed to monitor Mr. Frank’s properties in order to take some of the pressure from the city’s finest. In the event of trouble, someone would be with her in less than ten minutes. If, after that time, no help had arrived, only then should she call the police.

The sounds from the back of the house persisted. She hushed her Pomeranians and quietly made her way downstairs to where the back door opened onto a small paved area where the trash cans were kept. The door was reinforced steel, and there was a spy hole in the center. She looked through it and saw two men, both of them wearing courier uniforms, attaching something to the exterior of the door. One of them, the man who had fired at the front door, looked up, and guessed that she was there from the change in the light. He waved a slab of white material, like a piece of builder’s putty. Something that resembled the stub of a pencil stuck out of one end, with a wire attached.

“You ought to step back from the door,” he said, his voice muffled by the steel yet audible. “Better still, lie against it, see what happens.”

Mrs. Bondarchuk moved away, her hands pressed to her mouth.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no.”

She had to call the police. She retreated farther. She needed to get back to her apartment, needed to summon help. Mr. Leroy Frank’s security people had not come. They had let her down, just when she most needed them. She began to run, and realized that she was crying. Her ears were filled with the sound of yapping Pomeranians.

Twin shots came from outside the door. They were much louder than the earlier shots, and they were followed by the sound of something heavy falling against the metal outside. Mrs. Bondarchuk froze, then turned in the direction of the door. She raised the tips of her fingers to her mouth. They trembled, tapping lightly on her fleshy lips.

“Mrs. Bondarchuk?” someone called, and she recognized Mr. Angel’s voice. “You okay in there?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Who were those men?”

“We don’t know, Mrs. Bondarchuk.”

We. “Have they gone?”

There was a pause. “Uh, in a way,” said Mr. Angel.

Mrs. Bondarchuk went back to her apartment, closed and locked the door, and sat with a pair of Pomeranians on her lap until Mr. Angel came to see her some time later with a chocolate cake from Zabar’s. Together, they ate a slice of cake each and drank a glass of milk, and nice Mr. Angel did his best to put Mrs. Bondarchuk’s mind at rest.

CHAPTER SIX

TO WILLIE’S SURPRISE, AND to Arno’s relief, the man in the storeroom wasn’t dead. His skull was fractured, and he was bleeding from his ears, which Willie didn’t consider to be a good sign, but he was definitely still breathing. This took the decision on what to do next out of Willie’s hands. He wasn’t about to let a stranger die on his floor, so he called 911 and, while they waited for the ambulance and the inevitable cops to arrive, he and Arno got their stories straight. It was a bungled holdup, pure and simple. The men had been looking for money and a car. They were armed and, in fear of their lives, Willie and Arno had tackled them, leaving one unconscious on the floor and forcing the other to flee, wounded.

Willie took one further precaution. With Arno’s help, and using a candle that he warmed and flattened on the radiator, he took the unconscious man’s prints by pressing his fingers against the warm wax. He then placed the candle behind a pile of old documents in the office closet, and locked the door. The man wasn’t carrying a wallet or any other form of ID, which Willie thought was odd. He knew that the cops would probably print him, but he also understood that Louis might want to make some inquiries of his own. To further assist Louis in any such endeavor, Willie told Arno to take some pictures of the guy, using his cellphone. Willie’s cellphone didn’t take photos. It was so low-tech that it made a tin can on the end of a piece of string look like a viable alternative, but that was just the way Willie liked it.

Both Willie and Arno played their parts to perfection when the cops arrived: they were honest men faced with the threat of harm and, possibly, death, who had fought back against their aggressors and now stood, shocked but most definitely alive, in the center of the small business they had so determinedly defended. It wasn’t far off the mark either. The cops listened sympathetically, then advised them both to come down to the station the next morning in order to make formal statements. Arno asked if he was going to need a lawyer, but the detective in charge told him that he didn’t think so. Off the record, he said that it was unlikely any charges would be pressed even if the mook died. No DA liked prosecuting an unpopular case, and Arno was in a position to offer an ironclad self-defense plea. The next step, he said, was to identify the gentleman in question, since the only items in his pockets were gum, a roll of tens, twenties, and fifties, and a spare clip for his gun. Willie and Arno did their best to look surprised at this news.

Willie reckoned they were 99 percent done when a pair of new arrivals, one male and one female, entered the garage. They both wore dark suits, and when they showed their IDs to the patrolman at the garage door he looked over his shoulder when they had passed and mouthed the word “feds” to his colleagues inside, as if they hadn’t already guessed who the visitors were.

Willie’s face had been taped up by one of the medics. The medic had reset Willie’s nose in his office, thus saving him a trip to the hospital, and it was now throbbing balefully. Added to the nausea that he was still experiencing from his hangover and the comedown from the adrenaline rush of the fight, Willie was having trouble remembering the last time he’d felt so bad. Now, as he sat on a stool beside the busted Olds, Arno nearby, he watched the two agents approach and, with a dart of his eyes, signaled to Arno that there was trouble on its way. Willie was no expert on law enforcement, or the niceties of jurisdiction, but he had lived in Queens long enough to know that the FBI didn’t show up every time someone waved a gun in an auto shop, otherwise they’d never have time to do anything else.

The man was black and introduced himself as Special Agent Wesley Bruce. His partner, Special Agent Sidra Lewis, was a bottle blonde with piercing blue eyes and a set scowl on her face that suggested she believed everyone she met in the course of her work was guilty of something, even it was only of thinking they were better than she was. They separated Arno and Willie, the woman taking Arno into the back office while Bruce leaned against the hood of the Olds, folded his arms, and gave Willie a big, unfriendly grin that reminded him of the way the gum chewer had smiled before Arno had knocked the smile from his face with a chunk of wood and metal.

“So, how you doing?” asked Bruce.

“I been better,” said Willie, which were just about the first completely honest words he’d uttered since the cops had arrived. He got the feeling that big old Special Agent Wesley Bruce here was well aware of that fact.

“Looks like our two friends picked the wrong guys to mess with.”

“I guess so.”

“You say they were looking for a car?”

“A car, and money.”

“You got much money here?”

“Not a lot. Most people pay by check or credit card. We still get some that like to work with cash, though. Old habits die hard around here.”

“I’ll bet,” said Bruce, as though Willie was not talking about cash payments but something else entirely. Willie tried to figure out what that might be, but there were so many possibilities from which to choose, legal and illegal, that he was spoiled for choice. Finally, Willie made the connection: like everything else that night, it was about Louis and Angel. The understanding did not affect his demeanor, but it made him dislike Special Agent Bruce even more than he already did.

In the meantime, Bruce gave Willie the hard eye. “I’ll bet,” he said again. He waited. Willie could hear Arno’s voice coming from the office. He was talking a lot more than Willie was. In fact, Special Agent Lewis appeared to be having trouble just getting a word in.

Welcome to my world, thought Willie.

Eventually, Bruce seemed to realize that Willie wasn’t about to break down and confess to every unsolved crime on the books, and resumed his questioning.

“So they wouldn’t have raked in a whole lot of money for their trouble, even if they had managed to get away with it.”

“Couple of hundred maybe, including petty cash.”

“Lot of grief for a couple of hundred. There must have been easier pickings for them.”

“We don’t have a camera.”

“Excuse me?”

“Security cameras. We don’t use ’em. Most places do now, but we don’t. Maybe they figured we didn’t have them, and thought, what the hell, let’s try it.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures.”

“Something like that.”

“They strike you as desperate men?”

Willie considered the question. “Well, they weren’t friendly. I don’t know from desperate.”

“I mean, they strike you as the kind of men who needed money?”

“Everybody needs money,” replied Willie simply.

“Except our friend who got his head stoved in had four or five hundred in cash on him, not to mention a very nice gun. Doesn’t strike me that he was hurting enough to take down an auto shop for a double century.”

“I got no insights into the criminal mind. That’s your department.”

“No insights into the criminal mind, huh?” Bruce seemed to find this funny. He even laughed, although it didn’t sound natural. It was as if someone had written the words “Ha. Ha. Ha.” in front of him, then held a gun to his head and told him to read them aloud.

“What about the car?” said Bruce, when he was done laughing.

“What about it?”

“According to what you told the police, they drove here, and the other, uh, ‘alleged’ thief got away in the same vehicle. Why would they need a car if they already had one?”

“Could be they were planning a robbery and wanted something that couldn’t be linked to them.”

“Would have meant killing you and your buddy, then, just so you couldn’t identify them or the car.”

“Well, that’s why one of them ended up wearing a hammer instead of a hat. Look, Mr. Bruce-”

“I prefer ‘Special Agent Bruce.’”

Willie stared at Bruce impassively. There was a moment of strained silence between the two men, until Willie sighed theatrically and continued.

“Special Agent Bruce, I don’t understand what your problem is here. We didn’t get a chance to make these guys a cup of coffee so they could sit down and explain their motives to us. They came in, busted my nose, told me what they wanted, and you know the rest.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re heroes. There’s already a guy from the Post outside, waiting to take your picture. You’re going to be famous. Should be good for business.”

“Sure,” said Willie, a touch uneasily.

“You don’t sound too happy about it,” said Bruce.

“Who needs that kind of publicity?”

Bruce’s grin widened. “Exactly!” he said. “That’s just my point. Who needs it? Not you, and maybe not your partner in this operation.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you? Who bailed you out when you were in trouble back in the day? Your ex-wife wanted you to sell the business as part of a divorce settlement, right? Things weren’t looking good for you and then, suddenly, poof! You got the money to pay her off without having to sell. Where’d the money come from?”

Special Agent Bruce seemed to know a lot about Willie’s business. Willie wasn’t sure that he approved of his tax dollars being spent in this way.

“A Good Samaritan,” he said.

“What was his name?”

“Came through an agency. I don’t recall any names.”

“Yeah, Last Hope Investments, which was in existence for about as long as a mayfly.”

“Long enough to help me out. That’s all that matters to me.”

“You ever pay back the loan?”

“I tried but, like you say, Last Hope don’t exist no more.”

“Hardly surprising, if they go around making loans and then not seeking payment on them. Curious name, too, don’t you think?”

“Not my problem. I declared the loan. I’m all straight.”

“Who owns this building?”

“Property company.”

“Leroy Frank Properties, Incorporated.”

“That’s it.”

“You pay rent to Leroy Frank?”

“Fifteen hundred a month.”

“Not much for a big place like this.”

“It’s enough.”

“You ever meet Leroy Frank?”

“You think if I worked in a Trump building I’d meet Donald?”

“You might do, if he was a friend of yours.”

“I don’t think Donald Trump is friends with many of his tenants. He’s the Donald, not-”

“-not Leroy Frank,” Bruce finished for him.

Willie shook his head, a simple man faced with someone who seemed intent upon deliberately misinterpreting everything that was said.

“I told you: I never met no Leroy Frank. I cover my rent, I run my business, I pay my taxes, and I never even got so much as a parking ticket in my life, so I’m all square with the law.”

“Well,” said Bruce, “you must be just about the honestest man between here and Jersey.”

“Maybe even farther than that,” said Willie. “I met people from Jersey.”

Bruce scowled.

“I’m from Jersey,” he said.

“Maybe you’re the exception,” said Willie.

Bruce looked momentarily confused, then decided to let that particular conversation slide.

“He’s hard to trace, this Leroy Frank,” he resumed. “Quite the paper trail around his companies. Oh, it’s all clean and aboveboard, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a mystery. Hard for a man to stay so enigmatic these days.”

Willie said nothing.

“You know, what with this threat of terrorism and all, we’ve been spending a lot more time looking into finances that don’t add up like they should,” said Bruce. “It’s easier than it used to be. We got more powers than before. Of course, if you’re innocent then you’ve got nothing to fear-”

“I hear Joe McCarthy used to say that,” said Willie, “but I think he was lying.”

Bruce realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere for the present. He took his considerable weight off the Olds, which seemed to groan with relief. His grin faded and his scowl returned. Willie figured it was only ever going to be a short vacation for that scowl at the best of times.

“Well, I guess I’ll be going, but we’ll be seeing each other again,” said Bruce. “You happen to meet the mysterious Leroy Frank, you tell him I said hi. Unfortunate that all of this should happen in one of his properties. Be a shame if someone suggested to the press that it might be worth looking into the ownership of this place. It could threaten his anonymity, force him out into the light.”

“I just pay my money into the bank,” said Willie. “The only question I ask is, ‘Can I get a receipt?’”

Special Agent Lewis emerged from the office. If anything, her expression looked more pinched than before, and she was practically shaking with frustration. Willie suppressed a smile. Arno did that to people. Trying to get answers from him when he didn’t want to give them was like trying to straighten a snake. Bruce picked up immediately on his partner’s unhappiness, but didn’t comment upon it.

“Like I said, we’ll be back,” he told Willie.

“We’ll be here,” said Willie.

As the two agents departed, Arno appeared beside him.

“Gee, that lady was tense,” he said. “I liked her, though. We had a nice talk.”

“About what?”

“Ethics.”

“Ethics?”

“Yeah, you know. Ethics. The rights and wrongs of things.”

Willie shook his head. “Go home,” he said. “You’re making my head hurt even more.”

He called Arno’s name just as the little man was preparing to disappear into the night. “Be careful what you say on the telephone,” he told him.

Arno looked puzzled. “All I ever say on the telephone is ‘It’s not ready yet,’” he said. “That, and, ‘It’s going to cost you extra.’ You think the FBI might be interested in that?”

Willie scowled. Everybody, it seemed, was a comedian. “Who knows what they’re interested in,” he said. “Just watch what you say. Don’t speak to any of those reporters outside. And show some respect, dammit. I pay your wages.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Arno as the door closed slowly behind him. “Me, I’m gonna buy a yacht with my money this week…”

Louis made the call just as soon as the bodies had been disposed of. It was a matter of priorities. He left his name with the answering service, thinking, as he did so, that the voice on the end of the line sounded very similar to that of the woman who answered all calls for Leroy Frank. Maybe they incubated them somewhere, like chickens.

His call was returned ten minutes later. “Mister De Angelis says he will be available at twelve twenty-six tomorrow, around seven,” the neutral female voice told him.

Louis thanked her, and said that he understood perfectly. As he hung up the phone, memories of previous meetings flooded back to him, and he almost smiled. De Angelis: of the angels. Now there was a misnomer.

Shortly after seven the next evening, Louis stood on the corner of Lexington and 84th. It was already dark. The sidewalks on this odd little stretch of the city’s thoroughfares were relatively quiet, for most of its businesses, the odd bar and restaurant excepted, were already closed. A damp mist had descended over Manhattan, presaging rain and lending an air of unreality to the vista, as though a photographic image had been placed over the cityscape. To the left, the vintage sign over Lascoff’s drugstore was still illuminated, and if one squinted, it was possible to imagine this stretch of Lexington as it might have looked more than half a century earlier.

The Lexington Candy Shop and Luncheonette was a throwback to that era. In fact, its roots were older still: it had been founded by old Soterios in 1925 as a chocolate manufactury and soda fountain, then passed on to his son, Peter Philis, who had, in turn, passed it on to his son, the current owner, John Philis, who still operated the register and greeted his customers by name. Its windows were filled with special edition Coca-Cola bottles, along with a plastic train set, some photos of celebrities, and a bat signed by the Mets’ pure hitter Rusty Staub. It had been known as “Soda Candy” to generations of children, for that was what was written above its door, and its façade had remained unchanged for as long as anyone could remember. Louis could see two of its white-coated staff still moving around inside, although the front door was now locked, for the Lexington Candy Shop and Luncheonette only opened from seven until seven, Monday to Saturday. Nevertheless, the green plastic mat remained outside the door, waiting to be taken in for the night. On it was written Soda Candy’s numerical address: 1226.

Louis crossed the street and knocked on the glass. One of the men cleaning up glanced sharply to his left, then emerged from behind the counter and admitted Louis, acknowledging him only with a nod. He closed and locked the door before he and his companion abandoned their tasks and disappeared behind another door at the back marked “No Admittance. Staff Only.”

The place was just as Louis remembered it, although it had been many years since he had been inside. There was still the green counter, its surface marked by decades of hot plates and cups, and the green vinyl stools that rotated fully on their base, a source of endless amusement to children. Behind the counter stood twin gas-fired coffee urns, and a green 1942 Hamilton Beach malted machine and matching Borden’s powdered malt dispenser, along with an automatic juicer from the same period.

Soda Candy was famous for its lemonade, made to order, the lemons squeezed while you watched, then stirred with sugar syrup and poured into a glass with crushed ice. Two glasses of that same lemonade now stood before the man who occupied the corner booth. The staff members had dimmed the fluorescents before they left, so it seemed to Louis that the old man who waited for him had somehow sucked the illumination from the room, like a black hole in human form, a fissure in time and space absorbing everything around him, the good and the bad, light and not-light, fueling his own existence at the cost of all who came into his sphere of influence.

It had been some years since Louis and the man named Gabriel had met, but two men whose lives had once been so closely linked could never truly sever the bond between them. In a sense, it was Gabriel who had brought Louis into being, who had taken a boy with undeniable talents and forged him into a man who could be wielded as a weapon. It was to Gabriel that those who needed to avail themselves of Louis’s services had once come. He was the point of contact, the filter. His precise status was nebulous. He was a fixer, a facilitator. There was no blood on his hands, or none that one could see. Louis trusted him, to a degree, and distrusted him to a larger degree. There was too much about Gabriel that was unknown, and unknowable. Still, Louis was conscious of something that resembled affection for his old master.

He was smaller than Louis remembered, shrinking with age. His hair and beard were very white, and he seemed lost in his big black overcoat. His right hand trembled slightly as he gripped his glass and raised it to his lips, and some of the lemonade slopped onto the table-top.

“It’s cold for lemonade, isn’t it?” said Louis.

“Cold doesn’t trouble me,” Gabriel replied. “And one can get coffee anywhere, even if the coffee here is particularly good. I suspect it may be to do with the gas urns. But great lemonade, well, that is rarer, and one should grasp the opportunity to taste it when it arises.”

“If you say so,” said Louis as he slipped into a seat opposite, careful to keep both the staff exit and the main door in view, and placed the newspaper he had been holding in the center of the table. He didn’t touch the glass.

“You know, they filmed parts of Three Days of the Condor here? I think Redford sat just where you are sitting now.”

“You told me that before,” said Louis. “A long time ago.”

“Did I?” said Gabriel. He sounded regretful. “It seemed appropriate to mention it, given the circumstances.” He coughed. “It’s been a long time: a decade or more, ever since you discovered your conscience.”

“It was always there. I just never paid too much attention to it before.”

“I knew I was losing you long before our paths diverged.”

“Because?”

“You started asking ‘Why?’”

“It began to seem relevant.”

“Relevance is relative. In our line of work, there are those who consider the question ‘Why?’ to be a prelude to ‘How deep would you like to be buried?’ and ‘Roses or lilies?’”

“But you weren’t one of those people?”

Gabriel shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that. I just wasn’t ready to feed you to the dogs. I tried to ease your concerns, though, before I allowed you to go free.”

“‘Allowed’ me?”

“Permit an old man to indulge himself. After all, not everyone got to walk away.”

“There weren’t many left when I did.”

“And none like you.”

Louis did not acknowledge the compliment.

“And, if I may say so, my moral compass was surer than you gave me credit for,” said Gabriel.

“I’m not certain I believe that, no offense meant.”

“None taken. It is true, though. I was always careful about the work I farmed out to you. There were times when I walked a thin line, but I do not believe that I ever willingly overstepped it, at least, not where you were concerned.”

“I appreciate that. I just think the line got thinner as time went on.”

“Perhaps,” Gabriel conceded, “perhaps. So, what happened last night? I understand you received visitors?”

Louis was not surprised that Gabriel was aware of what had occurred at the apartment building. At the very least, he would have made inquiries after Louis’s call was received, although Louis suspected that Gabriel knew of what had happened before the call was even made. Someone would have told him. That was how the old systems worked, and that was why the silence over Billy Boy’s death had disturbed him so much.

“It was amateur hour,” said Louis.

“Yes. The auto shop was a surprise, though. It appeared unnecessary and crude, unless someone was trying to send out a message. If so, then why target your residence at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” said Louis. “And it made the papers. Willie won’t like the publicity. I don’t like it either. It’ll draw attention. Already has.”

Gabriel dismissed Louis’s concerns with a wave of his hand. “The papers have no interest in who owns buildings, merely who dies in them and who has sex in them, and not necessarily in that order.”

“I wasn’t talking about reporters.”

Gabriel glanced out of the window, as if expecting agents of the state to suddenly materialize from the gloom. He seemed disappointed when they did not. Louis wondered how distant Gabriel now was from his former life. He no longer had his assassins, his Reapers, to call upon, but he would not have resigned himself to a quiet retirement. He knew too much already, but he always desired to know more. Perhaps he no longer dispatched killers to do dirty work for others, but he remained a part of that world.

Discreetly, Louis tapped the newspaper. Inside it was the flattened candle holding the wounded man’s prints and copies of the photographs taken with Arno’s cellphone, as well as additional prints from the two men who had died at the apartment building.

“I brought you some items that caught my eye. I’d like you to take a look at them.”

“I’m sure the police will be looking at them, too.”

“Maybe you can do it more quickly. A favor from your friends.”

“They’re not the kind who give favors without asking something in return.”

“Then you’re going to owe them two, because I have another one to ask.”

“Name it.”

“There were two federal agents nosing around Willie’s place. They were asking questions about Leroy Frank.”

“I’ve heard nothing about an investigation. It could be that they found a thread elsewhere and something has unraveled. Then again, they’ve become so much more dogged in recent years. There was a time when terrorism used to be good for business. Now it’s all become very complicated: the slightest hint of a suspicious payment and there are all kinds of questions being asked, even of someone as blameless in such matters as Leroy Frank.”

“Well, it could be embarrassing for a lot of people if they keep tugging on threads.”

“I’m sure that something can be done,” said Gabriel. “In the meantime, the matters in hand are more pressing: who did this, and how can we ensure that it does not happen again?”

“‘We’?”

“I feel a certain responsibility for your well-being, even after all this time. Also, in a sense, your problems are my problems, especially if they relate to something that occurred on my watch, as it were. It could, of course, be the case that it’s related to your other activities. Your friend Parker has a way of making interesting enemies.”

“Willie said the guy never mentioned Parker. It was about me.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“It narrows the field. I haven’t heard anything about a price on your head and, as you say, this was amateur hour. Anyone who put a paper out on you would be sure to hire more professional staff. If I were you, I’d be rather offended that someone might think you could be dealt with in such an uncouth fashion.”

“Yeah, I’m all torn up. Speaking of which, I hope you sent flowers for Billy Boy.”

Gabriel nodded sympathetically. “It wasn’t entirely unexpected. His illness was quite advanced. Radical surgery was called for. It appears somebody took it upon himself to offer it.”

“I’m sure he would have liked a second opinion.”

“He got the best treatment available. The end, when it came, was quite swift.”

“Blissful, even.”

A spasm of unease animated Gabriel’s face.

“I should have been told,” said Louis.

“What have you heard?”

“Rumors, that’s all.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone encountered him. It had been suggested that he was dead.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Does he frighten you?” asked Gabriel slyly, calm now returning to his face.

“Do I have reason to be frightened?”

“None of which I’m aware. But in the case of the gentleman to whom you’re referring, I wouldn’t be privy to that kind of information. He’s been off the radar for a long time, but you two do have a history. If he did return, he might be in the mood to renew old acquaintances.”

“Not very reassuring for me. Maybe not very reassuring for you either.”

“I’m an old man.”

“He’s killed old men before.”

“I am different.”

Louis conceded the point.

“Still, you and your partner handled today’s upsets rather well. I imagine that you’d present quite a challenge to him, even after all these years. What did you do with the trash?”

“I had it taken away. Landfill.”

“And the old lady?”

“We bought her chocolate cake.”

“Would that everyone were so easily mollified. How are your friends from the auto shop?”

“Shaken. I told them to close up for a few days. They’re staying at a hotel.”

Gabriel finished his lemonade and stood, picking up the newspaper as he did so and sliding it into his coat pocket.

“I should have something for you in a day or two,” he said.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Well, it’s not good to have this kind of thing going on. It makes everyone look bad.”

“And we can’t have that.”

“Indeed not. Walk safely.”

And with that, Gabriel was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TWO MORNINGS LATER, GABRIEL held another meeting, this time in Central Park. The sky was clear and blue, unmarred by clouds after the gloom of the previous days, and there was a crispness to the air, a cleanliness, as though, however briefly, some of the fumes and filth of the city had been miraculously purged from it during the night. It was a day from childhood, but as he grew older Gabriel struggled to remember a time when he was young. The fragments of memory that remained to him seemed to involve another person, one unrelated to himself yet distantly familiar nonetheless. The sensation was similar to watching an old movie and recalling that, yes, one had seen this film before, and it had meant something, once upon a time.

He hated getting old. He hated being old. Seeing Louis had reminded him of all that he had once been, of the power and influence that he had wielded. There was still a little of it left, though. He no longer had Reapers at his beck and call, willing to do his bidding or the bidding of others for money, but favors were owed to him for favors done, for confidences kept, for problems buried and lives ended. Gabriel had stored his secrets away carefully, for he knew that his own life depended upon them. They were his security, and a currency to draw upon when necessary.

A younger man joined him, falling casually into step beside him. He was taller than Gabriel by a head, but Gabriel had almost three decades of often bitter experience on his companion. His code name was Mercury, after the god of spies and spooks, but Gabriel knew him as Milton. He suspected that it might be his real name, too, for, although an educated man, Milton’s knowledge did not appear to extend into the field of literature, and an allusion to Paradise Lost by Gabriel early in their relationship had been met with a blank look. Then again, one never knew with agency men, and particularly ones of Milton’s pedigree. One might have offered Milton intimate evidence of his own sexual preferences, complete with photographs, illustrations, and even former partners, to a similar end: a blank look. Blank. It was an appropriate word, in this case. Everything about Milton suggested a man who had been created in a laboratory in order to attract no attention whatsoever: average height, average looks, average hair, average clothing. There was nothing remarkable about him at all. In fact, so unremarkable was he that the eye tended to skate over him, barely registering his presence, and then instantly forgetting what it had seen. One had to be an exceptional individual to go through life so unnoticed.

Milton and Gabriel strolled by the lake, walking slowly enough to allow joggers to outpace them but fast enough that they could not be followed themselves without noticing. Milton wore a gray wool overcoat and a gray scarf, and his black shoes shone in the fall sunlight. Beside him, Gabriel, his white hair sprouting untidily from beneath a woolen cap, looked like a genial tramp. After some minutes had passed, Milton spoke.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said. His voice was as average as the rest of him, so that even Gabriel, who had known him for many years, could not tell if the words were meant or not. He decided that the sentiment might be genuine. It was not, as far as he could recall, something Milton said very often.

“And you,” Gabriel lied, and Milton smiled, any offense caused by the untruth exceeded by his happiness at catching it. Milton, thought Gabriel, was the kind of man who was only at ease when the world was disappointing him, and therefore living down to his expectations. “I didn’t expect you to come in person.”

“It’s rare that we have a chance to meet these days. Our paths no longer cross as once they did.”

“I’m an old man,” said Gabriel, and he was reminded of the context in which he had used those same words earlier in the week. He wondered if he had been correct then, if his age and his previous status might be enough to protect him from Bliss’s predation. The thought had troubled him. He bore some responsibility for what had been done to Bliss, although Bliss could hardly have been surprised when retribution was visited upon him for his own actions, but the animosity between Bliss and Louis was of a deeper, more personal nature. No, if Bliss had returned, Gabriel would not be in his sights.

“Not so old,” said Milton, and now it was his turn to lie.

“Old enough that I can see the tunnel at the end of the light,” said Gabriel. “Anyway, it’s a new world with new rules. I find it harder to recognize my place in it.”

“The rules are still the same,” said Milton. “There are just fewer of them.”

“You sound almost nostalgic.”

“Perhaps I am. I miss dealing with equals, with those who think as I do. I no longer understand our enemies. Their purpose is too vague. They don’t even know what it is themselves. They have no ideology. They have only their faith.”

“People enjoy fighting for their religion,” said Gabriel. “It’s inconsequential enough to matter deeply to them.”

Milton didn’t say anything in response. Gabriel suspected that Milton was a worshipper. Not a Jew. Catholic maybe, although he lacked the imagination to be a good one. No, Milton was probably a Protestant of indistinct color, a member of some particularly joyless congregation that thrived on hard benches and long sermons. The image of Milton in church led Gabriel to imagine what Mrs. Milton might look like, if there was such a person. Milton did not wear a wedding band, but that meant nothing. It was in the nature of such men to give as little as possible away. From something as simple as a wedding band, a whole existence might be imagined. Gabriel pictured Milton’s wife as a pinched woman, as stern and unyielding as her religion, the kind who would spit the word “love.”

“So, you’ve had contact with our lost sheep,” said Milton, changing the subject.

“He seemed well.”

“Apart from the fact that somebody appears to be trying to kill him.”

“Apart from that.”

“The police drew a blank on the first set of prints,” said Milton. “So did we. A candle: that was quite ingenious. The gun found at the garage was clean, too, according to the police reports. No previous use.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“They were amateurs. Amateurs tend to make small mistakes before they make large ones.”

“Sometimes. Perhaps these gentlemen dived in headfirst, and went straight from zero to minus one.”

Gabriel shook his head. It didn’t fit. He pushed it to the back of his mind, leaving it to simmer like a pot on a stove.

“We did, however, have more luck with one of the second sets. Curious that the owners of those prints have yet to surface.”

“Landfill,” said Gabriel. “It’s difficult to surface when you’re under thirty feet of earth.”

“Indeed. The prints came from a man named Mark Van Der Saar. Unusual name. Dutch. There aren’t many Van Der Saars in this part of the world. This particular Van Der Saar did three years upstate at the Gouverneur Correctional Facility for firearms offenses.”

“Is that where he was from?”

“Massena. Close enough.”

“Employers?”

“We’re looking into it. One of his known accomplices is, or was, given Mr. Van Der Saar’s recently acquired status as a decedent, a man named Kyle Benton. Benton did four years at the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility, also, incidentally, for firearms offenses. Ogdensburg, too, is located upstate, in case you didn’t know.”

“Thank you for the geography lesson. Please, go on.”

“Benton works for Arthur Leehagen.”

The rhythm of Gabriel’s footsteps faltered for a moment, then recovered itself.

“A name from the past,” he said. “That’s all you have?”

“So far. I thought you’d be impressed: it’s more than you had before you met me.”

They walked on in silence while Gabriel considered what he had been told. He shifted pieces of the puzzle around in his mind. Louis. Arthur Leehagen. Billy Boy. It was all so long ago, and he felt a soft surge of satisfaction as he fitted the pieces together, establishing the connection.

“Do you know of two FBI agents named Bruce and Lewis?” he asked, once he was content with his conclusions. Milton had glanced at his watch, a clear sign that their meeting was about to come to an end.

“Should I?”

“They were looking into our mutual friend’s affairs.”

“I’m not sure that ‘friend’ is a word I’d use in this case.”

“He has been friendly enough to keep his mouth shut for many years. I should think that is more amicable behavior than you’re used to.”

Milton didn’t contradict him, and Gabriel knew that he had scored a point.

“What kind of interest are they showing?”

“They seem to be delving into his property investments.”

Milton withdrew a gloved hand from his pocket and waved it disdainfully in the air.

“It’s all of this post-9/11 bullshit,” he said. Gabriel was shocked to hear him swear. Milton rarely showed such depth of feeling. “They’re under instruction to follow paper trails: unusual business investments, financial dealings that seem suspicious, property and transport holdings that don’t add up. They are the bane of our lives.”

“He’s not a terrorist.”

“Most of them aren’t, but along the way useful information is sometimes unearthed and followed up. It probably got passed on to these agents, and now they’re curious.”

“They’re more than curious. They seem to know something of his background.”

“It’s hardly a state secret.”

“Oh, but some of it is,” said Gabriel.

The two men stopped, squinting against the sunlight, their breaths mingling in the dry air.

“He has a reputation,” said Milton. “He’s been keeping bad company, if such a thing were humanly possible given his own nature.”

“I assume you’re referring to the private investigator.”

“Parker. And I believe he’s a former investigator. His license has been revoked.”

“Perhaps he’s found some more peaceful ways of occupying his time.”

“I doubt it. From what little I know of him, he feeds on trouble.”

“Yet, if I did not know better, I might have said that Louis was almost fond of him.”

“Fond enough to kill for him. If he has attracted attention, then he has brought it on himself. The only wonder is that it has taken the FBI so long to come knocking on his door.”

“That’s all very well,” said Gabriel, “but there is as much that is unknown about him as known, and I’m certain you would prefer matters to remain this way.”

“I hope that’s not a threat.”

Gabriel placed a hand on the younger man’s arm, patting lightly the sleeve of his overcoat.

“You know me better than that,” he said. “What I mean is that any investigation will eventually come up against a brick wall, a brick wall constructed by you and your colleagues. But such barriers are not impregnable, and the right questions asked in the right places could produce information that would be inconvenient to both parties.”

“We could always get rid of him,” said Milton. He said it with a smile on his face, but the remark still drew a wary look from Gabriel.

“If you were going to do that, you would have done it long ago,” said Gabriel. “And would you have disposed of me, too?”

Milton began to walk again, Gabriel falling into step alongside him.

“With regret,” said Milton.

“Somehow, I find that almost consoling,” said Gabriel.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Milton.

“Call off the dogs.”

“You think it’s that easy? The FBI doesn’t care much for other agencies interfering in its affairs.”

“I thought you were all on the same side.”

“We are: our own. Nevertheless, I’ll talk to some people and see what I can do.”

“I would be most grateful. After all, you’d be protecting a valuable asset.”

“A once-valuable asset,” Milton corrected, “unless, of course, he’s in the market for some work.”

“Unfortunately, he appears to have chosen another path.”

“It’s a shame. He was good. One of the best.”

“Which reminds me,” said Gabriel, as though it were a mere afterthought and not something that had been preying on his mind since he had learned of the death of Billy Boy. “What do you know of Bliss?”

“I know Laphroaig and a good cigar,” said Milton. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”

“Not quite.”

“We lost contact with him many years ago. He was never on our Christmas card list to begin with. I found him distasteful. I shed no tears when he fell from grace.”

“But you used him.”

“Once or twice, and always through you. I learned to hold my breath, and I washed my hands afterward. As I understand it, you and your ‘friend’ contrived to put an end to his career.”

“We were moderately successful,” said Gabriel.

“Moderately. You should have used more explosive.”

“We only wanted him dead, not half the people who might have been standing nearby when it happened.”

“In some circles, such humanity might be taken as a sign of weakness.”

“Which is why I have devoted such time and energy to reducing the size of those circles. As, I think, have you.”

Milton inclined his head in modest agreement.

“Nevertheless, there are indications that Bliss may be back on the radar.”

“Really?” For the first time, Milton looked directly at Gabriel. “I wonder why.”

Gabriel had learned to read faces and tones of voice, to balance words spoken against gestures made, to pick up on the slightest of inflections that might give the lie to what was being said. As he listened to Milton speak, he felt certain that he had not been told all that the other man knew of what was taking place.

“Perhaps if you heard anything more, you might be inclined to give me a call.”

“Perhaps,” said Milton.

Gabriel reached out his hand. Milton took it and, as they shook, Gabriel neatly slid a piece of paper beneath the cuff of Milton’s shirt.

“A small token of gratitude,” said Gabriel. “A container that you might be ill-advised to allow to leave the yard in question.”

Milton nodded his thanks. “When you see the lost sheep, pass on my regards.”

“I’ll be sure to do that. I know he thinks fondly of you.”

Milton grimaced. “You know,” he said, “I don’t find that very comforting at all.”

Gabriel contacted Louis later that evening, again through their respective answering services. They spoke for only a few minutes in a cab taking Gabriel to the Performance Space on Broadway. The driver was absorbed in a lengthy and animated telephone conversation being conducted entirely in Urdu. Gabriel had amused himself earlier in the journey by attempting to follow what was being said.

“I had a call,” said Gabriel. “It came from a gentleman who works for Nicholas Hoyle.”

“Hoyle? The millionaire?”

“Millionaire, recluse, whatever.”

“And what did he say?”

“It appears that Mr. Hoyle would like to meet you. He says he has information that could be useful to you, information concerning the events of recent days.”

“Neutral territory?”

Gabriel shifted in his seat. “No. Hoyle never leaves his penthouse. He is, by all accounts, a most peculiar man. You’ll have to go to him.”

“That’s not the way things are done,” said Louis.

“He approached you through me. That is the way things are done. He would be aware of any consequences that might arise should he fail to observe the usual niceties.”

“He could have sent those men to draw me out.”

“If he was intent upon that, he could simply have hired better help and finished the job there and then. Anyway, he has no reason to move against you, or none of which I am aware, unless you have angered him in the course of some of your recent activities.”

He arched a questioning eyebrow at Louis.

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” said Louis.

“Then again,” said Gabriel, “I can’t imagine that you and your friend from Maine leave many loose ends. Cancer offers a better survival rate than crossing you. Given that, I imagine Hoyle has some mutually beneficial arrangement in mind. The choice is yours, though. I am merely passing on the message.”

“In my position, what would you do?”

“I would speak to him. So far, we’re no closer to finding out anything about the men involved or who was behind them.”

Gabriel darted a look at Louis. The lie had passed him by. That was good. Gabriel would wait to hear from Louis what Hoyle had to say. In the meantime, he had begun to make inquiries about Arthur Leehagen. He was not yet ready to share with Louis what Milton had told him. In everything that he did, Gabriel protected himself first and foremost. Despite any affection he might have retained for Louis, he would feed him to wild dogs before he put himself at risk.

“So they were amateurs, but their boss isn’t? Still makes no sense, unless we’re back to the possibility that someone wants to draw me into the open.”

“You’re not as hard to find as you might like to believe, as recent events have proved. We’re missing something here, and Hoyle may be the one to enlighten us. He doesn’t issue invitations to his abode every day. Under other circumstances, it might be considered quite an honor.”

Louis watched the city flash by the window. Everything-the cab, the people, the lights-seemed to be moving too fast. Louis was a man who liked to be in control, but that control was being ceded to others: Gabriel, his unseen contacts, and now Nicholas Hoyle.

“All right, make the arrangements.”

“I will. You’ll have to go unarmed. Hoyle doesn’t allow weapons inside the penthouse.”

“Gets better and better.”

“I’m sure that you can handle anything that may arise. Incidentally, I raised the federal matter with some potentially interested parties. I believe it will be dealt with to your satisfaction.”

“And who might those interested parties be?”

“Oh, you know better than to ask that. Now, if you’d just let me out here, I’ll be on my way. And please pay the cab driver. It’s the least that you can do for me after all that I’ve done for you.”

Bliss drove north, an anonymous figure on an anonymous highway, just another pair of headlights burning whitely in the dark. Soon he would leave the road and find a place to rest for the night. Rest, not sleep. He had not slept properly in many years, and he lived in constant pain. He desired peaceful oblivion more than almost anything else on earth, but he had learned to survive on a few hours of slumber brought on by the exhaustion that eventually overcame his residual agonies. The treatment of his injuries, and his efforts to stay ahead of his pursuers, had depleted him not only physically, but financially, too. He had been forced to resurface, but he had chosen his paymaster carefully. In Leehagen, he had found someone who could satisfy both his financial and his personal needs.

The bottle containing Billy Boy’s blood lay in a padded box at the bottom of Bliss’s small suitcase. Leehagen had wanted him killed on his land, but Bliss had refused. It was too dangerous. But as the knife left his hand, and he saw the look of understanding on Billy Boy’s face before he died, Bliss knew that his gifts were still intact. It gave him confidence for what was to come.

That night, as he lay on his bed in a modest, clean motel room, humming softly to himself, he thought of Louis with the ardor of a lover journeying to meet his betrothed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HEADQUARTERS OF HOYLE Enterprises stood a few blocks from the UN, so the surrounding streets were a Babel of diplomatic plates, creating uneasy relationships between bitter international enemies now forced to share valuable parking space. Hoyle’s building was unremarkable: it was older and smaller than most of the adjacent towers and stood at the eastern extreme of a public area that extended partially into the vicinity of the neighboring blocks to the north, south, and west, creating a natural boundary between Hoyle and the edifices around him.

In the twenty-four hours since the meeting with Gabriel, Louis and Angel had sourced the blueprints for Hoyle’s building, and Angel, aided by a bored Willie Brew and a slightly less bored Arno, had watched it for an entire day. It was a precaution, an effort to establish some sense of the rhythms of the building, of how deliveries were dealt with, of shift changes and lunch breaks among the security guards. It wasn’t long enough to form any accurate determination of the risks involved in entering, but it was better than nothing.

Actually, to Willie it was worse than doing nothing. He could have been doing nothing in the relative comfort of his own apartment, instead of doing something that he wasn’t enjoying far from any comfort at all. Arno had spent most of their watch reading, which seemed to Willie to defeat the purpose of keeping an eye on the building to begin with, but then Willie supposed that Arno was just killing time, too. Louis was reluctant to have them return to the auto shop just yet, which meant that Willie could either sit in his apartment and watch TV that didn’t interest him, or sit in a car and watch a building that didn’t interest him either. One good thing had resulted from their efforts: Willie had decided that, Louis or no Louis, he and Arno were going back to work soon. Even after only a couple of days of lounging around, Willie felt as though something was dying inside him.

Hoyle’s penthouse occupied the top three floors of the building. The remainder was given over to his offices. While Hoyle-owned companies were involved in mining, property, insurance, and pharmaceutical research, among other interests, the beating heart of his operation lay behind the modest façade of the Manhattan office. This was the parent company, and it was in this building that all power ultimately resided. A small but steady stream of people moved in and out of the lobby throughout the day, the flow increasing between twelve and two, and becoming almost entirely one-way traffic after five. Angel had spotted nothing untoward during his period of surveillance, and neither had Willie or Arno. There were no men carrying RPGs stationed behind the pillars, and he could see no heavy artillery hidden among the potted plants.

Then again, as Gabriel had noted, Hoyle had approached Louis through the proper channels, a peculiarly old-world notion in this modern age, and one that depended for its force upon Gabriel’s reputation and the favors owed to him by others. If there were any breach of protocol, Hoyle would be aware of the possible repercussions. As far as Gabriel was concerned, therefore, Louis had no cause to be any warier than usual, which meant that Louis and Angel were very wary indeed as they entered the building shortly after eight that evening.

There was one security guard behind the desk, and he merely nodded them through. Only one elevator was open in the lobby, and it had no buttons inside or out. The interior was mirrored. There was no visible camera. Angel figured that meant there were probably at least three: one behind each mirrored wall, and maybe a pinhole fourth behind the small video screen displaying the numbers of the passing floors. The elevator was also likely to be miked, so neither man spoke. They merely watched their reflections in the gleaming brass of the doors, one apparently contentedly, the other critically. Angel didn’t like mirrors. As Louis had once pointed out, mirrors didn’t like him either, remarking that “even your reflection probably leaves a stain.”

When the display read “PH,” the elevator stopped and the doors opened silently. There were two men waiting for them in an otherwise empty foyer, with more mirrors on the walls and a vase of freshly cut flowers standing on a small marble plinth. Both men wore black suits and matching funeral ties, and both carried metal detector wands. They swept them over Angel and Louis, pausing to check belts, coins, and watches, then indicated that they should proceed. A pair of carved wood doors, Oriental in origin, and clearly old, opened to reveal a third man. He was dressed more casually than the others: black trousers and a black wool jacket over an open-collared white shirt. His hair was neither too long nor too short and was pushed casually over his ears at the sides, as though he cared just enough to keep it tidy, and nothing more. His eyes were brown, and Angel detected in his features a mixture of amusement, frustration, and professional jealousy. He had the build of a swimmer: broad across the shoulders, but slender and muscular overall. The jacket hung loose enough to hide a gun, and was unbuttoned.

Angel felt Louis relax slightly, but the response was the opposite of what it appeared to be. When Louis relaxed, it was an indication that a threat was at hand and he was preparing to act, as when an archer releases a breath simultaneously with the flight of the arrow, channeling all of the tension into the flighted missile itself. The two men regarded each other silently for a few moments, then the waiting man spoke.

“My name is Simeon,” he said. “I’m Mr. Hoyle’s personal assistant. Thank you for joining us. Mr. Hoyle will be with you presently.”

Angel wasn’t sure what Simeon’s duties as an assistant entailed, but he was pretty certain that they didn’t involve typing or answering the phone. Neither was he simply a bodyguard, unlike the men who had searched them. No, Angel had met Simeon’s type before, and so had Louis. Here was a specialist, and Angel wondered why a businessman, albeit a wealthy, reclusive one like Nicholas Hoyle, might require someone with the abilities that Simeon undoubtedly possessed.

Simeon’s gaze moved briefly to Angel, decided that there was nothing there worth lingering upon, then returned to Louis. He retreated into the room behind him, extending his right hand in a gesture of welcome. He did not turn his back on Louis. It came across as a sign of respect as well as of caution.

They entered a large, open-plan living area, dimly lit, with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, occupied by a combination of books, sculptures, and ancient weaponry: blades and axes and daggers, all mounted on transparent glass supports. The room was so cold that Angel felt goose bumps rise. The floorboards were made of reclaimed wood, and the couches and chairs were dark and comfortable, giving the impression that here was the habitation of a man of arms and letters, a throwback to another era. The room itself might even have been from another century, were it not for a glass wall that looked down upon an enclosed swimming pool, the water rippling slightly and casting its patterns on the interior walls. Although the contrast was initially disconcerting, Angel decided that it complemented, rather than undermined, the decor. Unless one was close to the glass, the sunken pool was invisible, so all that remained were the ghosts of the ripples upon the walls. It was like being in the cabin of a great ship at sea.

“Boy, it’s blue,” said Angel, as he stared down at the water, and it was: unnaturally so, as though a dye had been added to it. Angel decided that, even if he was the swimming kind, he wouldn’t have taken a dip in that pool. It looked like a chemical vat.

“The pool is professionally treated every week,” said Simeon. “Mr. Hoyle likes his cleanliness.”

There was an edge to his voice when he spoke, a mild under-tone of sarcasm. It made Louis wonder just how committed Simeon was to his boss. Louis had previously met men who were more than bodyguards to their employers, but less than friends. They were like guard dogs who grow to love the men who feed them scraps, doting on moments of affection and viewing any anger directed toward them as evidence of a failure on their part. Simeon didn’t seem like that kind of guy. This was a financial arrangement, pure and simple, and as long as Hoyle continued to put money into Simeon’s account, Simeon would continue to guard Hoyle’s life. Both parties knew exactly where they stood, and Louis guessed that both Hoyle and Simeon liked it that way.

“Hey, is Simeon your first name or your last name?” asked Angel. “Does it matter?”

“Just trying to make conversation.”

“You’re not very good at it,” said Simeon.

Angel looked downcast. “I get that a lot.”

Louis was examining a lance point on one of the shelves. He didn’t touch it, merely moved its glass base carefully in order to view it point-on, as though it were aimed at his face.

“It’s from a Hyksos lance,” said Simeon. “They invaded Egypt seventeen hundred years before Christ and formed the Fifteenth Dynasty.”

“You read that somewhere?” asked Louis.

“No, Mr. Hoyle read it somewhere. He was kind enough to share the knowledge with me, and now I’m passing it on to you.”

“Interesting. You should run tours.” Louis turned to Simeon. “You work for him long?”

“Long enough.”

“That could be taken two ways.”

“Guess so.”

“Where did you serve?”

“What makes you think I’m ex-military?”

“I have good eyes.”

Simeon considered his reply. “Marines.”

“Let me guess: Recon.”

“No. Antiterrorist, out of Norfolk.”

Antiterrorist: that meant FAST, the Marines’ Fleet Antiterrorist Security Team, formed at the end of the 1980s to provide additional short-term protection when the threat was beyond the capabilities of the usual security forces. Simeon would have been trained in threat assessment, the preparation of security plans, guarding VIPs protection. Despite himself, Louis was impressed.

“This must make a pleasant change for you,” said Angel, joining them. “Now you don’t have to lift anything heavier than a wand.” He smiled guilelessly. “It’s like being a fairy godfather.”

Louis had moved on to what appeared to be a dagger and ax combined, with a vicious triangular blade.

“That’s a ko dagger-ax.” Another man had entered the room from a door to the right. He had a full head of silver hair, neatly trimmed, and wore a long-sleeved red polo shirt and tan chinos. His shoes were brown penny loafers, scuffed and comfortable. He was lightly tanned. When he smiled, he revealed teeth that were slightly uneven, and not excessively white. His blue eyes were magnified behind the lenses of his glasses. Whatever else he was, he did not appear to be vain, or had ceased to make the more obvious concessions to vanity. The only peculiar aspect of his appearance was the pair of white gloves that covered his hands. “I’m Nicholas Hoyle. Welcome, gentlemen, welcome.”

He joined Louis at the shelf, clearly enjoying the opportunity to show off his collection. “Eleventh or tenth century B.C.,” he continued, lifting the weapon so Louis could examine it more closely. “They were all the rage in Pa-Shu during the Eastern Chou, but that one originated in Shansi.”

He replaced the ax and moved on. “This item is interesting.” He carefully moved a curved dagger from its plinth. “It’s late Shang, thirteenth to twelfth century B.C. See, there’s a rattle at the end of its hilt.” He shook the blade gently. “Not for silent killing, I imagine.”

Finally, he moved on to a crude-looking ax that stood on a shelf of its own. “This is one of the oldest weapons I own,” he said. “Hungshan, from the Liao river region of northeast China. Neolithic. Three thousand years old, at least, perhaps even four thousand or more. Here, take it.”

He handed the ax to Louis. Behind him, Angel saw Simeon stiffen slightly. Even after all these years, the ax was clearly capable of inflicting damage. It looked much more recent than it was, a testament to the skill that had gone into its construction. Louis saw that the top of the ax head had been carved to resemble an eagle. He ran the tip of his index finger along the carving.

“It’s religious in nature,” said Hoyle. “The first messenger from the Celestial Ruler was believed to have been a bird. Eagles were believed to transmit human wishes to the gods; in this case, one presumes, the death of an enemy.”

“It’s an impressive collection,” said Louis, returning the ax to him.

“I began collecting when I was a boy,” said Hoyle. “I started with minié balls gathered from the Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield. My father was a Civil War aficionado and liked to take us on battlefield vacations. My mother, I seem to recall, was generally unimpressed. I even created my own mix of tallow and beeswax to lubricate them, just like the soldiers did to prevent bore fouling from black powder residue. Otherwise-”

“They’d stick in the barrel,” Louis finished. “I know. I used to collect them myself.”

“And where was that?” asked Hoyle.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Louis. “It was a long time ago.”

“Well,” said Hoyle. He seemed embarrassed that he had overstepped some mark with Louis by asking about his past. It wasn’t a situation with which he appeared to be familiar. To hide his discomfort, he indicated a pair of armchairs and twin couches surrounding a low redwood table. Louis took one of the chairs, Hoyle another, while Angel sat on a couch. Alcohol was offered, but Angel and Louis declined. Instead, green tea was served, and some Japanese candies that stuck to Angel’s teeth and filled his mouth with a taste of lemon and horseradish that was not unpleasant, merely peculiar.

“You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands,” said Hoyle. He managed the neat trick of making it sound like a request, a favor granted by another even if the decision had been entirely his own. “Even with my gloves on, I tend to be cautious about such matters. The human hand is home to both resident and transient bacteria, a veritable cesspool of germs, but it is the transients of whom we must be most acutely aware. My immune system is not what it once was-a congenital weakness-and now I no longer venture beyond these walls. Nevertheless, I remain in good health, but precautions must be taken, particularly where visitors are concerned. I hope you’re not offended.”

Neither Angel nor Louis looked offended. Louis remained impassive. Angel appeared bewildered. He glanced discreetly at his hands. They looked clean, but he knew what a cesspool was. He sipped some green tea. It didn’t taste of very much at all. He considered using it to wash his hands.

“I hear you’ve been having difficulties,” said Hoyle. He addressed his comments to Louis alone. Angel was used to such behavior. It didn’t trouble him. It meant that, in the event of a problem, he usually had an advantage over those, like Simeon and his master, who had underestimated him.

“You seem to be well informed,” said Louis.

“I make it my business to be,” replied Hoyle. “In this case, your interests and mine appear to have coincided. I know who sent those men to your home and the business premises in Queens. I know why they were sent. I also know that the situation is likely to deteriorate further unless you act promptly.”

Louis waited.

“In 1983,” Hoyle continued, “you killed a man named Luther Berger. He was shot in the back of the head at close range as he left a business meeting in San Antonio. You were paid fifty thousand dollars for the hit. It was good money, in those days, even split with the driver of your getaway vehicle. In keeping with protocol, you didn’t ask why Berger had been targeted.

“Unfortunately, though, his name wasn’t really Luther Berger. He was Jon Leehagen, or ‘Jonny Lee’ as he was sometimes called. His father is a man named Arthur Leehagen. Arthur Leehagen did not take kindly to the killing of his older son. He has spent a very long time trying to find out who was behind his murder. In the last twelve months, he has made considerable progress. The man who hired you through Gabriel-his name was Ballantine, incidentally, although you never met him-died a week ago. He was taken to Leehagen’s property, killed, and his remains fed to hogs. Leehagen has also been able to establish your identity, and the identity of the driver of the vehicle that removed you from the scene. I believe he was known to you as Billy Boy. He, like Ballantine, has since been killed: stabbed in a restroom, as I understand it, although you may know more about the circumstances than I do.

“The men who attacked your home and the auto shop in Queens were sent by Leehagen. More will follow. I don’t doubt that you’re capable of handling most of them, but, rather like terrorists, they only have to get lucky once, while you will have to be both lucky, and proficient, all of the time. I also imagine that you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to yourself or your business operations than is absolutely necessary. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to act sooner rather than later.”

“And how would you know all of this?”

“Because I am at war with Arthur Leehagen,” said Hoyle. “I make it a point to know as much as possible about his actions.”

“And assuming any of this is true, why are you so eager to share it with us?” asked Louis.

“There is bad blood between Leehagen and me. It goes back a very long way. We grew up not far from each other, but our lives have taken somewhat divergent paths. Despite that, fate has seen fit to bring us into conflict on occasion. I would like to outlive him, and I would like that process to begin as soon as possible.”

“Must be real bad blood,” said Louis.

Hoyle nodded at Simeon. A portable DVD player was placed upon the table. Simeon hit the “Play” button. After a second or two, a grainy film commenced.

“This arrived two months ago,” said Hoyle. He did not look at the screen. Instead, he watched the reflection of the ripples upon the wall behind them.

The film showed a pretty blond woman, perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties. The woman appeared to be dead, and her face and hair were smeared with mud. She was naked, but most of her body was obscured by the massive heads of the hogs that were feeding on her. Angel looked away. Simeon hit “Pause,” freezing the image.

“Who is she?”

“My daughter, Loretta,” said Hoyle. “She was seeing Leehagen’s surviving son, Michael. She was doing so out of spite. She blamed me for all that was wrong with her life. Sleeping with the son of a man whom I despised seemed, to her, fitting revenge, but she underestimated the Leehagen family’s capacity for violence, and vengeance.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Louis quietly.

Hoyle looked away, unable to meet Louis’s eye. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, the clear implication being that whatever had provoked such a response had been similarly vile.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Because there was no proof that Leehagen did this. I know the recording came from him-I can feel it-but even if I managed to convince the police that Leehagen was responsible, I guarantee that there would be nothing of my daughter left for them to find, assuming they could even locate the hog farm in question. There is also the matter of my own dealings with Leehagen. Neither of us is entirely innocent, but it has gone too far for us to stop now.”

He gestured at Simeon, who picked up the DVD player and removed it to a darkened alcove, then disappeared into one of the back rooms.

“I should add that you were not my first port of call in this matter,” said Hoyle. “I first hired a man named Kandic, a Serb, to kill Leehagen’s remaining son, and, if possible, Leehagen himself. I was informed that Kandic was the best in the business.”

“And how did that work out?” asked Louis.

Simeon returned. In his hands was a glass jar, and in the jar lay a human head. The corneas had been drained of color by the embalming fluid, and the skin had been bleached to the color of bone. The flesh at the base of the neck was ragged and torn.

“Not very well,” said Hoyle drily. “This arrived one week ago. Either I was misled when I was told that Kandic was the best, or it’s bad news for anyone who might consider following in his footsteps.”

“And now you want Leehagen to pay for what happened to your daughter.”

“I want this to end. It will do so only when one of us is dead. Naturally, as I said, I would prefer it if Leehagen predeceased me.”

Louis stood. The movement caused the two men by the door to reach for their weapons, but Simeon stilled them with a wave of his hand.

“Well,” said Louis, “this has all been very interesting. I don’t know where you get your information from, but you should talk to your source, because he’s feeding you some poor product. I don’t know about any Luther Berger, and I’ve never handled a gun in my life. I’m a businessman, that’s all. I’d also be careful about saying some of those things out loud again. It could get you into trouble with the law.”

Louis walked to the door, Angel behind him. Nobody tried to stop them, and no one said anything until they had passed into the lobby and were waiting on the elevator.

“Thank you for your time, gentlemen,” said Hoyle. “I’m sure I’ll be hearing from you soon.”

The elevator doors opened, Louis and Angel stepped inside, and rode in silence to the ground before disappearing into the streets.

Louis was silent as they drove from Hoyle’s building. Around them, the city moved to its own hidden heartbeat, a rhythm that varied from hour to hour, tied to the movements of the individuals that inhabited it so that sometimes he found it hard to tell if the city dictated the lifestyles of its people, or the people influenced the life of the city.

“I thought the gloves were a nice touch,” said Angel. “If his tan had been a little darker, he could have done Al Jolson.”

There was no reply. A signal changed ahead of them, but Louis floored the gas and sped through the lights. Louis knew better than to risk attracting the attention of the cops, but now he seemed reluctant to stop for any reason. Angel could also see that he was driving with his mirrors, keeping a close watch on cars behind them, or passing on the left and right.

Angel looked out of his window, watching storefronts flash by.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. His tone, though soft and neutral, indicated to his partner that a response of some kind would be wise.

“I make some calls. I find out how much of what Hoyle told us is true.”

“You don’t trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone with that much money.”

“The head in the jar was pretty convincing. You really never hear of the guy he hired?”

“No, I never did.”

“Can’t have been too good at his job, if you never heard of him.”

“The fact that his head currently resides in a jar would tend to support that,” said Louis.

“So?”

“If Hoyle is telling even some of the truth, then we’re going to have to move against this Leehagen,” said Louis. “We’ll need to do it fast. He’ll know that we’re looking for whoever is trying to light us up. He needs to get to us before we figure it out. So, like I told you, I’ll make some calls, and we’ll take it from there.”

Angel sighed. “And I was starting to enjoy the quiet life.”

“Yeah, but you need the noise to appreciate the silence.”

Angel looked at him. “What are you: Buddha?”

“I must have read it someplace.”

“Yeah, in a fortune cookie.”

“You got a soul like a raisin, you know that?”

“Just drive. My raisin-like soul needs peace.”

Angel went back to staring out of the window, but his eyes took in nothing of what they saw.

CHAPTER NINE

ANGEL SAT ALONE AT his workbench. Before him were scattered the components of an assortment of keyless entry systems: pushbutton handsets, hard-wired keypads, wireless remote deadbolts, and even a proximity card reader and a fingerprint reader, the latter alone representing about two thousand dollars worth of butchered electronics. Angel liked to keep up with developments in his area of expertise. Most of the equipment he was examining was capable of being used for both commercial and domestic purposes, but homeowners and contractors had, in his experience, yet to embrace the new technology. Equally, most locksmiths were not adept at dealing with keyless locks. Many were suspicious of the new systems, regarding them as being more open to corruption or breakdown. The reality was that electronic systems had fewer moving parts and, once they were installed, were potentially much harder to access than traditional mechanical systems. Angel could pick a five-pin tumbler lock with a screwdriver and a pin. A biometric reader was another matter entirely.

Usually, he would be fascinated by the equipment he had disassembled, like an anatomist given an opportunity to examine the internal organs of a particularly fine specimen, but on this occasion his mind was elsewhere. The attack on the apartment building had unnerved him, and the evening’s developments at Hoyle’s apartment had done nothing to set his mind at ease. In the aftermath of the attacks, he and Louis had discussed the possibility of lying low for a time, but had quickly discounted it. To begin with, there was Mrs. Bondarchuk, who refused to move, arguing that it would disturb her Pomeranians. She also pointed out that her grandfather had refused to flee from the Communists in Russia, fighting on with the Whites, and that her father had fought the Nazis at Stalingrad. They had not run, and neither would she. The fact that both her grandfather and father had died in the course of their respective stands against the enemy did not affect her argument in any way.

Louis, in turn, did not believe that their enemies would attack them again at the apartment. Between that incident, and the encounter at the auto shop, three men had been lost. At the very least, they would be licking their wounds. A little time had been bought, and it could best be used at their home, not at some makeshift safe house, or in a vulnerable hotel. Angel had acquiesced, but there was something in the way Louis spoke that had disturbed him.

He wants them to come, he thought. He wants this to continue. He likes it.

Angel had never told a soul that Louis sometimes frightened him. He had not even told Louis, although he wondered if Louis might not have guessed that fact for himself. It was not that he feared Louis might turn on him. While his partner could charitably be described as “acid-tongued” on occasion, none of the violence of which he was capable had ever been directed at Angel. No, what frightened Angel was Louis’s need for that violence. There was a hunger inside him that could only be fed by it, and Angel did not fully understand the source of that hunger. Oh, he knew a great deal about Louis’s past. Not everything, though: there were parts of it that remained hidden, even from him, but then it was also true that Angel had not told Louis everything about himself either. After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.

But the details of Louis’s past were not enough to explain the man that he had become, not for Angel. When faced with a threat to his own safety and that of the women with whom he lived, the young Louis had acted immediately to remove that threat. He had set out, quite cold-bloodedly, to kill the man named Deber whom he suspected of murdering his mother, and who had now returned to the house that she had occupied with her own mother, her sisters, and her young son, to replace her with another. Louis had smelt his mother’s blood upon him, and Deber in turn, his senses attuned to potential threats, had seen the desire for vengeance bubbling beneath the placid surface of the boy. Their small world could not contain both of them, and Deber had felt certain that, when the time came for the boy to act, he would do so in the way of a hot-headed young man. It would be direct: a blade, or a cheap gun acquired for the purpose. Deber would see him coming. The boy would want to look into Deber’s eyes as he died, for that was the kind of revenge that a child sought. There could be no gratification at a distance, Deber believed.

But the boy was not like that. From his earliest years, there was something inside him that could not be touched, an old soul living in a young body. Deber was cunning and cruel, but the boy was clever and dispassionate. Deber did not die from a bullet wound, or a knife to the chest or belly. He did not see death coming for him, for death arrived camouflaged. It came in the guise of a cheap metal whistle, an item of which Deber was inordinately fond. He used it to summon the boy for meals, to get the attention of his woman, to organize the gangs of men whose work he oversaw. When he raised it to his mouth on that fateful morning, he might just have had enough time to wonder why it did not emit its usual shrill call before the small ball of homemade explosive blew his face and part of his skull away. The boy’s last memory of Deber was of a small, dapper man leaving the house to drive to work, the whistle hanging on a chain around his neck. He did not need to see the whistle being raised, to witness the burst of red and black that came with the explosion, to stare down upon the ruined human being dying in a pauper’s bed, in order to achieve satisfaction.

Deber’s murder had come naturally to Louis, so it would not be true to say that his first fatal act of violence had set him on the path to becoming what he now was. He had always had that capacity within him, and the catalyst for its eruption into the world had been largely unimportant. But once it was unleashed, it flowed through his veins as naturally as blood.

Angel, too, had killed, but the reasons behind the killings had been less complicated than those that motivated Louis. Angel had killed, variously, because he had to; because had he not done so he himself would have died; and because, most of all, it had seemed like the thing to do at the time. He was not haunted or tormented by those whom he had killed. He wondered, on occasion, if that meant there was something wrong with him. He suspected that it did. But Angel had no urge to kill. He did not seek out violent men in order to confront them, or to test himself against them. Had someone informed him that, from this day forth, he would never have to hold a gun again and would live out his days doing nothing more challenging than breaking locks and eating fried food, he would have been content to do so, as long as Louis was by his side. But therein lay the problem: a life like that was beyond Louis, and to embrace such an existence would have meant sacrificing his partner. Angel’s violence was born out of circumstance; Louis’s was elemental.

That was, in part, why they had remained close to Charlie Parker over the years. Angel owed a debt to the private detective, who had done his best, as a cop, to protect Angel from those who would have harmed him while he was in prison. Angel had never fully understood why Parker had chosen to do that. Angel had helped him with information from time to time, as long as it didn’t involve naming too many names, and he was sure, although they had never spoken of it, that Parker knew something of Angel’s past, of the abuse that he had endured as a child. But there were a lot of criminals out there who could point to troubled childhoods, some of them even worse than Angel’s; pity or empathy were not enough to explain why Parker had chosen to help and, ultimately, befriend him. It was almost, thought Angel, as though Parker had known what was to come. No, not known. That wasn’t it. There were things about Parker that were unusual, even downright spooky, but he wasn’t a seer. Perhaps it was just something as simple as meeting another human being and understanding, immediately and deeply, that this was an individual who belonged in one’s life, for reasons readily apparent or yet to be revealed.

Louis had found difficulty in understanding that, at least at the start. Louis did not want cops or ex-cops in his life. Yet he knew what Parker had done for Angel, knew that Angel would not be alive were it not for the strange, troubled private detective who seemed about to break under the weight of his grief and loss, yet somehow refused to do so. In time, Louis had seen something of himself in the other man. They began by respecting each other, and that had developed into a kind of friendship, albeit one that had been tested on more than one occasion.

But what Louis and Parker had in common more than anything else, Angel believed, was a kind of darkness. A version of Louis’s fire burned in Parker; a stranger yet more refined form of Louis’s hunger gnawed at him. In a way, they used each other, but each did so with the knowledge, and consent, of his peer.

Things had changed, though, in recent months. Parker was no longer a licensed PI. He felt that he was being watched by those who had taken his license away, that a wrong move could put him in jail, or draw attention to his friends, to Louis and Angel. Angel wasn’t certain how they had managed to avoid that attention until now. They had been careful and professional, and luck had played a part at times, but those factors in themselves should not have been enough, could not have been enough. It was an enigma.

But with Parker out of commission, Louis had been denied one of the outlets for his urges. He had begun to speak of taking on jobs again. The move against the Russians had been inspired less by the immediate threat to Parker than by Louis’s desire to flex his muscles. Now it seemed that he and Angel were under attack from forces they had not yet fully identified. And what most disturbed Angel was the suspicion that Louis was secretly pleased at this development.

Then there was Gabriel, who bore some responsibility for their current situation, since, if what Hoyle had told them was true, it was he who had dispatched Louis to kill Leehagen’s son to begin with. Angel had never met the old man, but he knew all about him. The relationship that existed between Gabriel and Louis was ineffably complex. Louis seemed to feel that he owed some debt to Gabriel, even though Angel believed that Gabriel had manipulated and, possibly, corrupted Louis for his own ends. Now Gabriel was, however peripherally, back in Louis’s life, like a hibernating spider spurred into motion by the warmth of the sun and the vibrations of insects close to its dusty web. It suggested to Angel that aspects of Louis’s past, his old life, were now leaching into the present, and poisoning them as they came.

If Louis sometimes frightened Angel, then Angel remained frustratingly unknowable to his partner. Despite all that had happened to him, there was a gentleness at the heart of Angel that might almost have been construed as a weakness. Angel felt things: compassion, empathy, sorrow. He felt them for those who were most like him, troubled children in particular, for Louis knew that every adult who was abused as a child holds that child forever in his heart. That did not make his emotions any less admirable, and Louis recognized that he himself had been colored and changed by the years he had spent in the company of this odd, disheveled man. He had been humanized by him, yet what was a virtue in Angel had become a chink in Louis’s armor. But then the moment he began to have feelings for Angel he had sacrificed a crucial element of his defenses. His forces, in a sense, had been divided. Where once he had only to worry about himself-and that concern was tied up with the nature of his profession-he now had to contend with his fears for another. When Angel had almost been taken from him, held to ransom and mutilated by a family that had no intention of ever releasing him alive, Louis had seen, for an instant, what he would become without his partner: a creature of pure rage who would be consumed by his own fire.

What he did not tell Angel was that part of him devoutly wished for such a consummation.

Parker, too, had altered him, for in the detective Louis saw elements of both Angel and himself combined: he had Angel’s compassion, his desire not to let the weak be ground down by the strong and the ruthless, but also something of Louis’s willingness, even need, to strike out, to judge and to inflict punishment. There was a delicate balance between Parker and Louis, the latter knew: Parker held the worst of Louis back, but Louis allowed the worst of Parker to find an outlet. And Angel? Well, Angel was the pivot around whom the other two moved, a confidant of both, containing within himself echoes of both Louis and Parker. Yet wasn’t that true of all of them? It was what bound them together, that and an emerging sense that Parker was moving toward a confrontation of which they, too, were destined to be a part.

He had never imagined that he would end up tied to such a man as Angel. In fact, for many years he had chosen not to acknowledge his sexuality to himself. It was a shameful thing when he was young, and he had suppressed it so well that any expression of it had proved difficult for him as he grew older.

And then this strange person had tried to burgle his apartment. He hadn’t even done it particularly well, the proof being that he had ended up under Louis’s gun while attempting to get his television out of a window. Who, Louis often wondered, enters an apartment that is clearly tastefully decorated, with some small, easily transportable objets d’art, and then tries to steal a heavy TV set? It was no wonder that Angel had ended up in jail. As a thief, he was a spectacular failure, but as a lockpicker, well, that was where his true genius lay. In that, he was gifted. It was, Louis suspected, God’s little joke on Angel: he would give him the skills required to gain access to any locked room, but would then deprive him of the guile required to make practical use of those skills, short, of course, of actually becoming a locksmith and earning an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, a concept that Angel found repugnant.

Almost as repugnant to Louis was his partner’s distinctive fashion sense. At first, Louis thought it was an affectation; that, or pure cheapness. Angel would scour the bargain racks at Filene’s, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, anywhere that primary colors were gathered together in unlikely combinations. He didn’t care much for outlet malls, unless their stores, too, had a rail that had been discounted so much that the stores were pretty much paying customers to take stuff away. No, outlet malls were too easy. Angel liked the hunt, the thrill of the chase, that moment of pleasure that came from unexpectedly finding a lime-green Armani shirt reduced to one tenth of its original price, and a pair of designer jeans to match, assuming by “matching” one meant “clashing unbearably.” The thing about it was, Angel would be immensely, genuinely proud of his purchases, and it had taken years for Louis to realize that, every time he commented unfavorably on his partner’s choice of attire, something inside Angel cringed, like a child that has tried to please a parent by cooking a meal, only to get all of the ingredients wrong and find himself chastised instead of praised for his efforts. It didn’t matter that, when it came to clothing, Angel seemed to be colorblind. This was designer clothing. It had cost him next to nothing, but it was good quality and had a label that people would know. As a child, Angel had probably dreamed of wearing nice clothes, of owning expensive things, but as an adult he could not justify to himself the expense of such items. They were meant for others, not for him. He did not consider himself worthy of them. But he could cheat by buying them for next to nothing, since no justification would be required if they were cheap.

Louis had once bought Angel a beautiful Brioni jacket as a gift, and the garment had languished in a closet for years. When Louis had eventually confronted Angel about it, Angel had explained that it was too expensive to wear, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who wore expensive clothes. Louis hadn’t understood the response then, and he wasn’t sure that he understood it a whole lot better now, but he had since learned to bite his tongue when Angel presented his latest purchases for approval, unless faced with provocation beyond the tolerance of mortal man to endure. For his part, Angel had started to learn that a bargain wasn’t a bargain if no one could look at it without shades or antinausea medication. An accommodation of sorts had therefore been reached.

Now, while Angel sat in his workroom and stared vacantly at the electronic components arrayed before him, Louis was in an anonymous office ten blocks away, a computer screen glowing before him, wondering if it might not be better to deal with Leehagen himself, to leave Angel behind. The thought lasted about as long as a bug in an oven. Angel would not stay. It was not in him to do so. Yet, unlike Angel, this was Louis’s purpose: to hunt, to provide the ultimate solution to any problem. He enjoyed it. Ever since the emergence of the Leehagen threat, he had felt more alive than he had at any other point in the last year. Old muscles were returning to life, old instincts coming to the fore. He, and the things and people that mattered to him, were in danger, but he felt himself capable of meeting and neutralizing the threat. Angel would stand alongside him, but he would not share Louis’s pleasure in what was to come, and Louis would try to hide his own as best he could. It was not a pleasure in killing, he told himself, but the pleasure that a craftsman takes in exercising his skills. Without that opportunity, well, he was just a man, and Louis did not care for being “just” anything.

He switched on the computer, and began tracking Arthur Leehagen.

Gabriel sat in Wooster’s observation room. The boy was tall, although a little too slim, but that would change. He was handsome now, and would be handsome yet. There was a stillness to him that boded well. Despite his hours of interrogation, he held his head high. His eyes were bright and watchful. He did not blink often.

After a couple of minutes had passed, the boy’s posture changed slightly. He tensed, and his head tilted, like an animal that has sensed the approach of another but has not yet decided if it represents a threat. He knew that he was being watched and that it was no longer Wooster who was observing him.

Gabriel leaned forward in his seat and touched the glass, running his fingers over the boy’s head, his cheekbones, his chin, like a breeder checking the quality of a thoroughbred horse. Yes, he thought, you have the potential to become what I need.

There is a Reaper in you.

Gabriel knew that the vast majority of men were not born killers. True, there were many who believed themselves to be capable of killing, and it was possible to condition men to become killers, but few were born with that innate ability to take the life of another. In fact, throughout history it had been known that men in combat demonstrated a marked reluctance to kill, and would not do so even to save their own lives, or the lives of their comrades. During World War II, it was estimated that as few as 15 percent of all American riflemen in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. Some would fire wide or high, if they fired at all. Others would take on ancillary tasks such as carrying messages, transporting ammunition, even rescuing under fire fellow soldiers who had been injured, sometimes at far greater risk to themselves than might have been the case had they stayed in position and used their weapons. In other words, this was not a matter of cowardice, but a consequence of an innate resistance among humans to the killing of their own species.

All of that would change, of course, with improvements in the conditioning of soldiers to kill. Yet conditioning was one thing, while finding a man for whom that conditioning was not required was quite another. At times of fear or anger, human beings stop thinking with their forebrain, which is, in effect, the first, intellectual filter against killing, and start thinking with their midbrain, their animal side, which acts as a second filter. While there were those who suggested that, at this stage, the “fight or flight” mechanism came into play, the range of responses was actually more complex than that. In fact, to fight or to flee was the final choice, once posturing or submission had been eliminated.

Overcoming that second filter was one of the aims of conditioning, but there were those in whom that midbrain filter was absent. They were sociopaths, and in a sense, the purpose of conditioning was to create a pseudosociopath, one who could be controlled, one who would obey orders to fight and kill. A sociopath obeyed no orders, and therefore could not be controlled. A properly trained and conditioned soldier was a weapon in himself. In that process, of course, something good was lost, perhaps even the best part of the human being involved: it was the understanding that we do not exist merely as independent entities, but are part of a collective whole and that each death lessens that whole and, by extension, ourselves. Military training required that understanding to be nullified, that realization to be cauterized. The problem was that, like the early surgical procedures of ancients, this process of cauterization was based upon an inadequate understanding of the workings of human beings.

Fears of death or injury were not the main causes of mental breakdowns in combat; in fact, they were found to be among the least important factors. Nor was exhaustion, although it could be a contributor. Rather, it was the burden of killing, and of killing up close and knowing that it was your bullet or your bayonet that had brought a life to an end. Sailors did not suffer psychiatric casualties to any similar degree. Neither did bomber pilots dropping their loads high above cities that might have been, from their distant vantage point, entirely empty of citizens. The difference was one of proximity, of, for want of a better term, intimacy. This was death heard and smelled and tasted and felt. This was to face the aggression and hostility of another directed entirely at oneself, and to be forced to acknowledge one’s own aggression and hatred in turn. It was to recognize that one had become, potentially, both victim and executioner. This was a denial of one’s own humanity, and the humanity of others.

The boy named Louis was unusual. Here was an individual who had responded to a hostile stimulus in a forebrained way, approaching the threat as a problem to be solved. It wasn’t simply that the second, midbrain filter had been overcome; instead, Gabriel wondered if the issue had ever even reached that stage. This was a cold-blooded, premeditated killing. It indicated significant potential. The difficulty, from Gabriel’s point of view, lay in the physical distance from the killing itself that the boy had maintained. Gabriel understood the relationship between physical proximity and the trauma of killing. It was harder to kill someone up close with a knife than it was to shoot him at long range with a sniper’s rifle. Similarly, the sense of elation that frequently came with a kill was increasingly short-lived the closer the killer was to the victim, because in that situation guilt was as close as the body. Gabriel had even known soldiers to comfort the man whose life they had taken as he lay dying, whispering apologies for what had been done.

In real terms, the apparent ease with which the boy had killed suggested a possible dissociation, a reluctance or inability to recognize the consequences of his actions; that, or an intellectual understanding that he had murdered someone combined with an emotional denial of the act, and with that any real responsibility for it. He would have to be tested further so that his true nature might be revealed. The boy did not appear to be showing signs of undue stress. He had, it seemed, handled himself calmly when faced with sometimes violent interrogation. He had not broken. He was not seeking an opportunity to confess, to expiate his sin. True, stress might reveal itself later, but for the moment he appeared relatively untroubled by what he had done. It was only a small percentage of men, that elusive 2 percent, who, under the right circumstances, could kill without remorse. Those circumstances did not necessarily involve personal risk, or even a risk to the lives of others. It was, at one level, a matter of conditioning and situation. At some point, the boy would have to be placed in the right environment in order to see how he might respond. If he did not react correctly, that would be the end of the matter. It might also, Gabriel knew, mean the boy’s death.

There was also the matter of how he would respond to authority. It was one thing to kill for oneself, and quite another to kill because someone told you to do so. Soldiers were more likely to fire their weapons when their leaders were present, and were more effective when they were bound to that leader by their respect for him. Gabriel was in a different position: his charges had to be willing to do what he told them even while he himself was far away. He was like a general, but without subordinates in the field who could ensure that his orders were carried out to the letter. In turn, leaders in combat had a degree of legitimacy that came from their status in the hierarchy of their nations, but Gabriel’s position was far more ambiguous.

For all of these reasons, Gabriel picked those whom he used with great care. True sociopaths were of no use to him, because they did not respect authority. The younger his charges were, the better, because the young were more open to manipulation. He tried to look for weaknesses to exploit, ways to fill the gaps in their lives. The boy Louis lacked a father figure, but he had not been so desperate to find one that he was prepared to acquiesce to Deber’s authority, or to flee from him in order to seek another when it became apparent that Deber considered him a threat. Gabriel would have to tread lightly. Louis’s trust would be hard-earned.

But from what Gabriel had learned, Louis was also a natural loner. He had no close friends, and he lived as the only male in a household of women. He was not the kind who would form relationships within larger groups, which meant that, if his natural instincts were channeled, he would not seek absolution for his actions from others. Absolution was one thing Gabriel could not offer, and that, in turn, was why he preferred those who were not unduly troubled by guilt. Neither did he want those who might identify excessively with their victims. To do what he required of them necessitated emotional distance, and on occasion Gabriel was prepared to alter his approach in order to exploit social, moral, or cultural differences between his Reapers and their victims. Nevertheless, he did not seek to eradicate empathy entirely, for the absence of empathy was another indicator of sociopathy. Some empathy was a necessary restraint upon hostile or sadistic behavior. A delicate balance had to be maintained. It was the difference between being prepared to hurt someone when required, and hurting someone when one desired.

According to what Gabriel had learned before his arrival at the little police department, the boy was a fighter, one who would stand his ground when provoked. That was good. It indicated an important predisposition to aggression, even a longing for an opportunity to display it. Louis’s experiences with Deber had been the trigger for what followed but, to complete the analogy, the weapon had already been loaded long before then. There were also rumors that the boy was a homosexual; if not a practicing one, for he was still very young, then he had at least exhibited sufficient tendencies to allow rumors about his sexuality to circulate locally. Gabriel, as in so many other areas, was enlightened about matters of individual sexuality. He distinguished between those aspects that were aberrant-a predilection toward violence, for example, or the impulse to abuse children-and those that were not. Aberrant sexual behavior indicated a degree of unreliability that tended to exhibit itself in other areas as well, and rendered its practitioners unsuitable for Gabriel’s purposes. Gabriel was not a homosexual, but he understood the nature of sexual desire, just as he understood the nature of aggression and hostility, for the two were not as distant as some liked to believe. While there were some aspects of human behavior that could be controlled and altered, there were some that could not, and one’s sexual orientation was among them. Louis’s sexuality interested Gabriel only in the sense that it might make him vulnerable or conflicted. Such weaknesses could be exploited.

And so Gabriel watched Louis through the glass, and the boy stared back. Five minutes passed in this way, and at the end Gabriel nodded once to himself in apparent satisfaction, then stood and left the room to face the fifteen-year-old killer.

Like any good leader, Gabriel loved his people, in his fashion, even though he was prepared, at all times, to sacrifice them if the need arose. Over the years that followed, Louis fulfilled, and even exceeded, Gabriel’s expectations, except in one regard: he refused to kill women on Gabriel’s orders. It was, Gabriel supposed, a legacy of his upbringing, and Gabriel made allowances for it, for he did indeed love Louis. He became like a son to him and Gabriel, in turn, became the father of the man.

Gabriel stepped into the interrogation room and took a seat across the table from Louis. The room smelled of perspiration and other less pleasant things, but Gabriel did not give any indication that he noticed. The boy’s face was shiny with sweat.

Gabriel unplugged the tape recorder from the wall, then sat across from Louis and placed his hands upon the table. “My name is Gabriel,” he said. “And you, I believe, are Louis.”

The boy did not answer, but simply regarded the older man silently, waiting to see what might be revealed.

“You’re free to go, by the way,” said Gabriel. “You will not be charged with the commission of any crime.”

This time, the boy reacted. His mouth opened slightly, and his eyebrows lifted an inch. He looked at the door.

“Yes, you can walk out of here right now, if you choose,” Gabriel continued. “Nobody will try to stop you. Your grandmother is waiting outside for you. She will take you back to your little cabin. You can sleep in your own bed, be among familiar things. All will be as it once was.”

He smiled. The boy had not moved.

“Or don’t you believe that?”

“What do you want?” said Louis.

“Want? I want to help you. I think you are a very unusual young man. I might even go so far as to say that you’re gifted, although your gift is one that might not be appreciated in circles such as these.”

He waved his right hand gently, taking in the interrogation room, the station house, Wooster, the law…

“I can help you to find your place in the world. In return, your skills can be put to better use than they would be here. You see, if you stay in this town you’ll overstep the mark. You’ll be challenged, threatened. That threat may come from the police, or from others. You’ll respond to it, but you’re known now. You won’t get away a second time with what you did, and you’ll die for it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gabriel wagged a finger, but it was not a disapproving gesture.

“Very good, very good,” he said. He chuckled, then allowed sound to drift into silence before he spoke again.

“Let me tell you what will happen next. Deber had friends, or perhaps ‘acquaintances’ would be a better word for them. They are men like him, and worse. They cannot allow his death to go unremarked. It would damage their own reputations, and suggest a degree of weakness that might leave them open to attack by others. Already, they will know that you have been questioned about what happened to him, and they will not be as skeptical as the state police. If you return to your home, they will find you and they will kill you. Perhaps, along the way, they will hurt the women who share that home with you. Even if you run, they will come after you.”

“Why should you care?”

“Care? I don’t care. I can walk away from here, and leave you and your family to your fate, and it will cause me not a moment’s regret. Or you can hear my offer, and perhaps something mutually beneficial may result. Your problem is that you do not know me, and therefore cannot trust me. I fully understand your predicament. I realize that you will need time to consider what I am suggesting-”

“I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” said Louis. “You haven’t said.”

He is almost droll, thought Gabriel. He is old beyond his years.

“I offer discipline, training. I offer a way for you to channel your anger, to use your talents.”

“Protection?”

“I can help you to protect yourself.”

“And my family?”

“They’re at risk only as long as you remain here, and only if they know where you are.”

“So I can go with you, or I can walk out of here?”

“That’s right.”

Louis pursed his lips in thought.

“Thank you for your time, sir,” he said, after some moments had passed. “I’m going to leave now.”

Gabriel nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope. He handed it to the boy. After a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it and opened it. He tried to hide his reaction to what was inside, but the widening of his eyes betrayed him.

“There’s a thousand dollars in that envelope,” said Gabriel. “There’s also a card with a telephone number on it. Through that number I can be reached at any time, day or night. You think about my offer, but remember what I said: you can’t go home again. You need to get far away from here-far, far away-and then you need to figure out what you’re going to do when those men come calling on you. Because they will.”

Louis closed the envelope and left the room. Gabriel did not follow him. He did not have to. He knew the boy would leave this town. If he did not, then Gabriel had misjudged him and he was of no use to him anyway. The money did not matter. Gabriel had faith in his own judgment. The money would come back to him many times over.

After he was released, Louis walked back with his grandmother to the cabin in the woods. They did not speak, even though it was a two-mile walk. When they reached home, Louis packed a bag with his clothes and some mementos of his mother-photos, one or two items of jewelry that had been passed on to him-then took two hundred dollars from the envelope and secreted the cash in various pockets, in a slash in the waist-band of his trousers, and in one of his shoes. The remainder he divided into two piles, slipping the smaller into the right front pocket of his jeans and the rest back into the envelope. Then he kissed good-bye to the women who had raised him, handed the envelope and the five hundred dollars it contained to his grandmother, and got a ride on Mr. Otis’s truck to the bus station. He asked to make only one stop along the way. Mr. Otis was reluctant to oblige him, but he saw what Wooster had seen in the boy, and what Gabriel had seen, too, and he understood that he was not to be crossed, not in this thing or in any other. So Mr. Otis pulled up just past Little Tom’s bar, his truck hidden by the bushes that lined the road and watched the boy walk into the dirt lot, then disappear from view.

Mr. Otis began to sweat.

Little Tom looked up from the newspaper that lay open on the bar. There were no customers to distract him, not yet, and the radio was tuned to a football game. He liked these quiet moments. For the rest of the night he would serve drinks and make small talk with his customers. He would discuss sports, the weather, men’s relationships with their womenfolk (for women did not trouble Little Tom’s bar, any more than the coloreds did, and thus the bar was a refuge for a certain type of man). Little Tom understood the role his bar performed: no decisions of great import were made here, and no conversations of any consequence took place. There was no trouble, for Little Tom would not tolerate it, and no drunkenness, for Little Tom did not approve of that either. When a man had consumed what Little Tom adjudged to be “enough,” he would be sent on his way with some words of advice about driving carefully and not getting into any arguments once he was home. The police were rarely called to Little Tom’s premises. He was in good standing with the town fathers.

None of this distracted from the fact that, like many men who practiced a public and superficial version of what they considered to be a reasonable way of life, Little Tom was an animal, a creature of violent and abusive appetites, sexually incontinent and filled with loathing for all those who were different from himself: women, especially those who would not touch him unless money was involved; Jews, although he did not know any; churchgoers of any liberal stripe or persuasion; Polish, Irish, Germans, and any others who spoke American with an accent or who had names that Little Tom could not pronounce with ease; and all coloreds, without exception.

Now, a young black man was standing on the threshold of Little Tom’s bar, watching him as he read his newspaper. Little Tom didn’t know how long the colored had been standing there, but however long it had been, it was too long.

“Be on your way, boy,” said Little Tom. “This ain’t a place for you.”

The boy did not move. Little Tom shifted position and began to walk toward the raised hatch in the bar. Along the way, he picked up the bat that lay beneath the bar. There was a shotgun there, too, but Little Tom figured that the sight of the bat would be enough.

“You hear what I said? Be about your business.”

The boy spoke. “I know what you did,” he said.

Little Tom stopped. They boy’s composure unnerved him. His tone was even, and he had not blinked since Little Tom had first noticed him, not once. His gaze seemed to penetrate Little Tom’s skull and crawl like a spider over the surface of his brain.

“The hell are you talking about?”

“I know what you did to Errol Rich.”

Little Tom grinned. The grin grew slowly, spreading like oil. So that was what this was about: a colored, a nigger, letting his anger get the better of his senses. Well, Little Tom knew all about dealing with coloreds who couldn’t keep a civil tongue in their mouths in front of a white man.

“He got what was coming to him,” said Little Tom. “You’re about to get what’s coming to you, too.”

He moved swiftly, swinging the bat as he came, striking up instead of down, aiming for the boy’s ribs, but the boy stepped nimbly forward, into the stroke instead of away from it, so that the bat struck the wood of the door frame at the same time as fingers gripped Little Tom’s throat and spun him against the wall. The impact of the bat on the wood sent a painful vibration up Little Tom’s arm, so that it was still weak when the edge of the boy’s left hand hit it, causing the bat to fall to the floor.

Little Tom was too surprised to react. No colored had ever touched him before, not even a black woman, for Little Tom did not consort with other races, either forcibly or with their consent. He smelled the boy’s breath as he leaned closer. The fingers tightened on his throat, and then he heard the back door of the bar open and a man shouted something. The grip upon him eased a little, and then he was flung to one side, tripping over a stool and landing heavily.

“Hey,” said the voice, and Little Tom recognized Willard Hoag’s gravelly tones. “The fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?”

The boy picked up the bat and turned to face the new threat. Hoag, unarmed, stopped. The boy looked at Little Tom.

“Another time,” he said.

He backed out of the bar, taking the bat with him. Seconds after he left, the bat came crashing through Little Tom’s window, showering the floor with glass. Little Tom heard a truck pull away, but when he got to the road it was no longer in sight, and he never did find out who had driven the colored to his place. It troubled him for a long time, even after he discovered the boy’s identity and found a way to pass it on to those who had their own reasons for dealing with him. As he grew older, the memory of the offense grew dim. Lots of memories faded, for by the time that he died, Little Tom was succumbing to dementia, even if he managed to hide its effects from those who frequented his increasingly ailing little bar, as the business went into decline along with its owner. Thus it was that when the boy eventually returned as a man, and made Little Tom pay the price for what he had done to Errol Rich, Little Tom was unable to connect him to the only colored who had ever laid a hand upon him.

And as for why Louis took so long to avenge Errol Rich’s death, well, as he liked to tell Angel, Little Tom was worth killing, but he wasn’t worth traveling very far to kill, so Louis just waited until he happened to be in the neighborhood. It was, he said, a matter of convenience.

That came later, though. For now, he headed west, and he did not stop until he could see and smell the ocean. He found a place in which to live and work, and there he waited for the men to come.

CHAPTER TEN

LOUIS WAS EARLY FOR the meeting with Gabriel at Nate’s. He didn’t like being early for encounters of this kind. He preferred to keep people waiting for him, aware always of the potential psychological advantages to be gained in even the most apparently innocuous of encounters. It might have seemed that such precautions would be unnecessary in any meeting between Gabriel and himself, as they had known each other for many years, but both men were acutely aware of how difficult their relationship was. They were not equals, and although Gabriel had been more of a father figure to Louis than any other man in his life, taking the boy under his wing when he was still a teenager, teaching him how to survive in the world by honing his own natural skills, both men understood why he had done so. If one were to regard Louis’s instincts as a form of corruption, his willingness to use violence, even to the point of murder, as moral weakness rather than strength of character, then Gabriel had exploited that corruption, deepening and enhancing it in order to turn Louis into a weapon that could be used effectively against others. Louis was not so naive as to believe that, had he not met Gabriel, he might otherwise have been saved from himself. He knew that, had Gabriel not entered his life, he would probably be dead by now, but he had paid a price for the salvation of sorts offered by the older man. When Louis, the last of the Reapers, had walked away from Gabriel, he had done so with no regrets and without turning his back, and for many years after he had been wary, conscious that there were those who might prefer it if he were silenced forever, and that Gabriel might well be among them.

The old man had been part of Louis’s life for longer than almost anyone else he had known, the few surviving female members of his own family apart, and he kept even them at a distance, salving his conscience by ensuring that they never wanted for money, even as he acknowledged to himself that they had little need of what he sent them and that his gifts were more for his own peace of mind than theirs. But Gabriel had been there from the crucial later years of his adolescence, then all through his adulthood until Louis had severed their ties. Now they were together again, one in his middle age, the other in his declining years. They had seen each other grow older, and it was strange to think that, when they had first met, Gabriel had been younger than Louis himself was now.

Louis glanced at his watch. He was particularly unhappy about being early on this occasion, for he was in no mood to wait. He felt the tension building within himself, but he did not try to dissipate it. He recognized it as anticipation. Louis knew that there was conflict and violence on its way, and his body and mind were preparing for it. The tension was part of that, and it was good. The months of normality, of indolence, of ordinary life, had come to an end. Even when he and Angel had traveled to Maine earlier that year to help Parker deal with the revenger, Merrick, there had been little call for his specialized services, and he had returned to New York frustrated and disappointed. They had been glorified bodyguards, nothing more. Now he and Angel were under threat, and he was preparing to respond. What troubled him was that he did not yet have a clear picture of what form that threat had taken. That was why he was here, waiting in the old bar not far from Willie Brew’s auto shop. Gabriel had promised him clarification and confirmation of the information offered by Hoyle, and Gabriel, whatever his faults, was not one to renege on his promises.

The delivery door at the back of the bar opened with a soft creak, and Gabriel entered. The door had been kept unlocked for him at Louis’s request, Nate leaving them to their own devices in the otherwise empty bar. Nate knew better than to bother them. The bar was another of Louis’s silent investments, a place in which to meet and in which to store some essentials should he ever need to go to ground: cash, a small quantity of diamonds and Krugerrands, a gun and ammunition. They were kept in a locked box in a safe behind shelves in Nate’s office, and only Louis held the combination. He had nests like this in five different locations throughout New York and New England, two of which, this one included, were unknown even to Angel.

Gabriel took a seat and signaled to Nate for a coffee. Nothing was said until the cup arrived and they were alone again. Gabriel sipped at his coffee, his little finger held carefully away from the handle. The old man, thought Louis, had always observed the niceties of civilized behavior, even when he was arranging for men and women to be wiped from the face of the earth.

“Tell me,” said Louis.

Gabriel shifted uneasily.

“Ballantine disappeared on the twelfth. He was under investigation by the SEC. His assets were about to be frozen. Someone, it seems, sent the authorities details of insider trading by companies of which Ballantine was a director. He was facing a series of indictments. It was assumed that he was in hiding, or had fled the jurisdiction.”

“Is there any evidence to suggest otherwise?”

“He has a wife and three children. They have been interviewed, and they seemed genuinely at a loss to explain his absence. He hasn’t been in contact with them. His passport was found in his desk at home. There was a floor safe in one of his closets. His wife didn’t have the combination, or said she didn’t. A court order was obtained to open it. There was nearly one hundred thousand dollars in cash inside, along with almost twice that amount in negotiable bonds.”

“Not the kind of baubles a man on the run would leave behind.”

“Hardly. Especially not so conscientious a family man as Mr. Ballantine.”

Sarcasm dripped like snake venom from Gabriel’s words.

“Too clean to be clean?”

“He owned a house in the Adirondacks through one of his companies. A place in which to entertain clients, one assumes. And to be entertained in turn.”

“Did you find the entertainer?”

“A prostitute. Quite upmarket. She had been advised to keep quiet, even though she knew little enough. Men came. They took Ballantine. They left her.”

“Did you know that he had disappeared before I asked you to look into this?”

Gabriel met Louis’s gaze, but it was a calculated effort.

“I don’t keep up with the activities of all my former clients.”

“That’s a lie.”

Gabriel shrugged. “Not entirely. Some remain on the radar for good reasons, but others I let slide. Ballantine I did not concern myself with. He was an intermediary, nothing more. He used me. On occasion I used him, too, but so did many others. You, of all people, should know how these things work.”

“That’s right. It’s why I’m trying to figure out how much you’ve been hiding from me.”

For the first time since he had arrived, Gabriel smiled. “We all need secrets. Even you.”

“Was Kandic one of yours?”

“No. After you left me, my interest in such matters ceased. There is a new breed of independent contractor out there now, some of them veterans of the conflicts in Chechnya and Bosnia. They’re war criminals. Half of them are on the run from the UN, the other half from their own people. Kandic was running from both. He was a former member of the Scorpions, a Serbian police unit linked to atrocities in the Balkans, but it seems that he had a history to hide long before he began killing old men in Kosovo. When the tide began to turn, he sold out his own comrades to the Muslims and made his way over here. I haven’t yet managed to trace the means by which he was hired by Hoyle.”

“Was he any good?”

“I’m sure that he came highly recommended.”

“Yeah, I’d like to see the reference. It probably didn’t mention that he was prone to decapitation. Is that all you have for me?”

“Nearly.” Hoyle had confirmed what Milton had told Gabriel: there was a link to Leehagen. Now Gabriel explained what he knew of the man named Kyle Benton, and his connection to both Leehagen and one of the men who had died outside Louis’s building, although he did not tell Louis how long he had known about Benton.

“I’m looking into the rest,” he concluded. “These things take time.”

“How long?”

“A few days. No more than that. Did you believe all that Hoyle told you?”

“I saw a head in a jar, and a girl being eaten by hogs. They both looked real enough. Did you know that Luther Berger was really Jon Leehagen?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“Not then,” Louis conceded. “Did you know who his father was?”

“I was aware of him. He was a creature of contradictions. A hoodlum from the sticks, and an astute businessman. An ignorant man, but with low cunning. A cattle breeder and a pimp, but with mines to his name. An abuser and trafficker of women, who loved his sons. Not a threat, not in the circles in which you and I moved. Now he has cancer of the lungs, liver, and pancreas. He cannot breathe unaided. He is virtually housebound, apart from occasional excursions around his property in his wheelchair to feel fresh air upon his face. Therein lies the problem. I suspect that Hoyle may be right: if Leehagen is behind this, then he will keep coming at you, because he has nothing to lose. He will want you to die before he does.”

“And the enmity with Hoyle?”

“True, from what I can find out. They have long been rivals in business affairs, and were once rivals in love. She chose Leehagen, and gave him his two sons. She died of cancer, perhaps the same form of the disease that is now killing Leehagen himself. Their mutual antagonism is well known, although its precise roots appear to be lost in the past.”

“Did his son deserve to die?”

“You know,” said Gabriel, “I think I preferred you when you weren’t so scrupulous.”

“That’s not answering the question.”

Gabriel raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. “What does ‘deserving’ mean? The son was not so different from the father. His sins were fewer, but that was a consequence of age, not effort. A believer in God would say that one sin was enough to damn him. If that is true, then he was damned a hundred times over.”

For a moment, Louis’s features, usually so impassive, altered. He looked weary. Gabriel saw the change, but did not comment upon it. Nevertheless, in that instant Gabriel’s opinion of his protégé altered. He had, he supposed, entertained hopes that Louis might yet prove useful once again. He had been good at what he did, good at killing, but to maintain that edge required sacrifice. Call it what you would-conscience, compassion, humanity-but it had to be left bloody and lifeless upon the altar of one’s craft. Somehow, a little of the decency had been left in Louis’s soul, and over the last decade it had prospered and grown. Yet perhaps Gabriel, too, had failed to smother all of his natural feelings toward the younger man beneath a blanket of pragmatism. He would assist him in this one last matter, and then their relationship would have to come to an unconditional end. There was too much weakness in Louis now for Gabriel to be able to risk keeping the lines of communication open. Weakness was like a virus: it transferred itself from host to host, from system to system. Gabriel had survived in his various incarnations through a combination of luck, ruthlessness, and an ability to spot the flaws in human beings. He planned to live for a great many more years. His work had kept him young inside. Without such amusements, he would have withered and died, or so it sometimes seemed to him. Gabriel, despite all of his many talents and his instinct for survival, lacked the self-knowledge to understand that he had withered inside a long time before.

“And Bliss?” asked Louis.

“I have heard nothing.”

“Billy Boy was driving the car on the day that we took out Leehagen’s son.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Now he’s dead, and Ballantine’s gone-dead, according to Hoyle. If those killings are linked to Leehagen, then only you and I are left.”

“Well, then, the sooner we clear this whole affair up, the happier we will both be.” Gabriel stood. “I’ll be in touch when I have more to offer,” he said. “You can make your final decision then.”

He left the same way that he had entered. Louis remained seated, considering all that he had been told. It was more than he had before he arrived, yet it was still not enough.

From his perch on a garage roof, Angel followed Gabriel’s progress, watching as the sinister old man walked slowly up the alley, watching as he reached the street and looked left and right, as though undecided about which path beckoned him, watching as an old Bronco with out-of-state plates passed slowly, watching as flames leapt in the darkness of its interior, watching as the old man bucked and clouds of blood shot from his back as the bullets exited, watching as he folded to the ground, the redness pooling around him, the life seeping from him with every failing beat of his heart…

Watching, feeling shock, but no regret.

“He’ll live. For now.”

Louis and Angel were back in their apartment. It was late afternoon. The call had come through to Louis. Angel did not know from whom, and he did not ask. He only listened as his lover repeated what he had been told.

“He’s a tough old bastard,” said Angel.

There was no warmth to his tone. Louis recognized its absence.

“He would have let you die, if it suited him. It wouldn’t have cost him a moment’s thought.”

“No, that’s not true,” said Louis. “He would have spared a moment for me.” He stood at the window, his face reflected in the glass. Angel, damaged himself, wondered how much more damaged in turn this man whom he loved could be to retain such affection for a creature like Gabriel. Perhaps it was true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence. After all, Angel had wept when the news of his own father’s death had reached him, and Angel’s father had sold him to pedophiles and sexual predators for drinking money. Angel sometimes thought that he had wept all the harder because of it, wept for all that his father had not been as much as for what he was.

“If Hoyle is right, then Leehagen found Ballantine,” said Louis. “Maybe Ballantine gave him Gabriel.”

“I thought he always insulated himself,” said Angel.

“He did, but they knew each other, and there was probably only one layer, one buffer, between Ballantine and Gabriel, if that. It looks like Leehagen found it, and from there made the final connection.”

“What now?” asked Angel.

“We go back to Hoyle, then I kill Leehagen. This won’t stop otherwise.”

“Are you doing it for your sake, or for Gabriel’s?”

“Does it matter?” Louis replied.

And in that moment, had he been there to witness it, Gabriel might have seen something of the old Louis, the one he had nurtured and coaxed into being, shining darkly.

Benton called from a phone box on Roosevelt Avenue.

“It’s done,” he said. Benton’s wrist and shoulder ached, and he was sure that the latter had begun to bleed again. He could feel dampness and warmth there. He should not have taken it upon himself to fire the shots at the old man, not with the wounds that he had received at the auto shop, but he was angry, and anxious to make up for his failure on that occasion.

“Good,” said Michael Leehagen. “You can come home now.” He hung up the phone and walked down the hall to the bedroom in which his father lay sleeping. Michael watched over him for a couple of minutes, but did not wake him. He would tell him of what had transpired when he awoke.

Michael had no idea who the old man really was. Ballantine had spoken of him only in the most general of terms. It was enough that he had been involved in his brother’s slaying, and was meeting Louis, the man directly responsible for his brother’s death. The attack would be one more incentive for Louis to strike back, one more reason for him to travel north. At last Michael had begun to understand his father’s reasoning: blood called for blood, and it should be spilled where his brother lay at uneasy rest. He still believed that his father was overestimating the potential threat posed by Louis and his partner once they were lured north, and there had been no need to involve the third party, the hunter, the one named Bliss, but his father was not to be dissuaded, and Michael had given up the argument almost as soon as it had begun. It didn’t matter. It was his father’s money and, ultimately, his father’s revenge. Michael would acquiesce to the old man’s wishes, for he loved his father very much, and when he was dead, all that was once his would become his son’s.

Michael Leehagen might have been a king in waiting, but he was loyal to the old ruler.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEY DIDN’T GIVE HOYLE notice of their arrival. They simply turned up in the lobby after hours and told one of the security staff to inform Simeon that Mr. Hoyle had visitors. The guard didn’t seem unusually troubled by the request. Angel guessed that, given the fact of Hoyle’s residency in the building, and his reluctance to face the world on its own terms, the guards had grown used to human traffic at odd hours.

“What name should I give?” asked the guard.

Louis did not answer. He merely stood beneath the lens of the nearest camera, his face clearly visible.

“I think he’ll know who it is,” said Angel.

The call was made. Three minutes went by, during which an attractive woman in a tight-fitting black skirt and white blouse passed through the lobby and eyed Louis appreciatively. Almost imperceptibly, except to Angel, Louis’s posture changed.

“You just preened,” said Angel.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, you did. You stood straighter. You became straight. You de-gayed.”

The doors of the private elevator opened in the lobby, and the guard gestured at them to enter. They walked toward it.

Louis shrugged. “A man likes to be appreciated.”

“I think you’re confused about your sexuality.”

“I got an eye for beauty,” said Louis. He paused. “So does she.”

“Yeah,” said Angel, “but she’ll never love you as much as you do.”

“It is a burden,” said Louis, as the doors closed.

“You’re telling me.”

Only Simeon was waiting for them in the lobby when they arrived at Hoyle’s penthouse. He was dressed in black pants and a long-sleeved black shirt. This time, the gun that he wore was clearly visible: a Smith & Wesson 5906, housed in a Horseshoe holster.

“Customized?” asked Louis.

“Maryland,” said Simeon. “Had it dehorned.” He drew the gun smoothly and rapidly and held it so that they could see where the sharp edges had been removed from the front and rear sights, the magazine release, the trigger guard extension, and the hammer. The display functioned both as a surprising act of vanity on Simeon’s part that Angel would not have associated with a man like him, and also as a warning: they had arrived unscheduled, and at a late hour. Simeon was wary of them.

He put the gun back in its holster and wanded them almost casually, then showed them once again into the room overlooking the pool. This time, the pattern created by the ripples on the wall was distorted and irregular, and Angel could hear the sound of someone swimming. He wandered over to the glass and watched Hoyle performing butterfly strokes through the water.

“He swim a lot?” he asked Simeon.

“Morning and evening,” said Simeon.

“He ever let anyone else use that pool?”

“No.”

“I guess he’s not the sharing kind.”

“He shares information,” said Simeon. “He’s sharing it with you.”

“Yeah, he’s a regular fountain of knowledge.”

Angel turned away and joined Louis at the same table at which they had sat with Hoyle earlier in the week. Simeon stood nearby, allowing them to see him, and him to see them.

“How come you work for this guy?” asked Louis at last. The sounds of swimming had ceased. “Can’t be too much call for your talents, stuck all the way up here with someone who don’t get out much.”

“He pays well.”

“That all?”

“You serve?”

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t know. Paying well covers a lot of sins.”

“He got a lot of sins to cover?”

“Maybe. It comes to that, we’re all sinners.”

“Guess so. Still, those Marine skills of yours, they’ll get rusty, sins or no sins.”

“I practice.”

“Not the same.”

Angel saw Simeon twitch slightly.

“You implying that I might need to use them soon?”

“No. Just saying that it’s easy to take these things for granted. You don’t stay sharp and they may not be there for you when you need them.”

“We won’t know until that day comes.”

“No, we won’t.”

Angel closed his eyes and sighed. There was enough testosterone in the room to make a wig bald. They were one step away from arm wrestling. At that moment, Hoyle entered. He was wearing a white robe and slippers, and was drying his hair with a towel, although he did so while wearing the ubiquitous white gloves.

“I’m glad that you came back,” he said. “I just wish it could have been under better circumstances. How is your-” He searched for the right word to describe Gabriel, then fixed on “‘friend’?”

“Shot,” said Louis simply.

“So I gathered,” said Hoyle. “I appreciate the confirmation, though.”

He took a seat across from them and handed the damp towel to Simeon, who did his best not to bristle at being reduced to the status of pool boy in front of Louis. “I presume that the attack on Gabriel is the reason you’ve returned. Leehagen is taunting you, as well as attempting to punish another of those whom he blames for his son’s death.”

“You seem sure that it was Leehagen who targeted him,” said Louis.

“Who else could it be? No one else would be foolish enough to attack a man of Gabriel’s standing. I’m aware of his connections. To move against him would be unwise, unless one had nothing to lose by doing so.”

Louis was forced to agree. In the circles in which Gabriel moved, there was a tacit understanding that the provider of the manpower was not responsible for what occurred once that manpower was put to use. Louis was reminded of Gabriel’s description of Leehagen: a dying man, desperate for revenge before the life left him entirely.

“So,” said Hoyle. “Let us be clear. Perhaps you’re wondering if this apartment is wired, or if anything that you say here might find its way to some branch of the law enforcement community. I can assure you that the apartment is clean, and that I have no interest in involving the law in this matter. I want you to kill Arthur Leehagen. I will provide you with whatever information I can to facilitate his demise, and I will pay you handsomely for the job.”

Hoyle nodded to Simeon. A file was produced from a drawer and passed to Hoyle. He placed it on the table before them.

“This is everything that I have on Leehagen,” said Hoyle, “or everything that I believe might prove useful to you.”

Louis opened the file. As he flipped through its contents, he saw that some of the material replicated what he had uncovered himself, but much was new. There were sheafs of closely typed pages detailing the Leehagen family history, business interests, and other enterprises, some of them, judging by photocopies of police reports and letters from the attorney general’s office, criminal in nature. They were followed by photographs of an impressive house, satellite images of forests and roads, local maps, and, last of all, a picture of a balding, corpulent man with a series of flabby chins folding into a barrel chest. He was wearing a black suit and a collarless shirt. What was left of his hair was long and unkempt. Dark pig eyes were lost in the flesh of his face.

“That’s Leehagen,” said Hoyle. “The photograph was taken five years ago. I understand that his cancer has taken its toll upon him since then.”

Hoyle reached for one of the satellite images, and pointed to a white block at its center. “This is the main house. Leehagen lives there with his son. He has a nurse who lives in her own small apartment adjoining it. About a quarter of a mile to the west, perhaps a little farther”-he grabbed another photograph, and placed it beside the first-“are cattle pens. Leehagen used to keep a herd of Ayrshire cattle.”

“That’s not cattle land,” said Louis.

“It didn’t matter to Leehagen. He liked them. Fancied himself as a breeder. He felled forest so they could graze, and utilized areas that had been cleared by storm damage. I think they made him feel like a gentleman farmer.”

“What happened to them?” asked Angel.

“He sent them for slaughter a month ago. They were his cattle. They weren’t going to outlive him.”

“What’s this?” asked Louis. He pointed to a series of photographs of a small industrial structure with what appeared to be a town nearby. A thin straight line ran along the bottom of a number of the photographs: a railway line.

“That’s Winslow,” said Hoyle. He placed two standard maps side by side in front of Louis and Angel. “Look at them. See any difference between them?”

Angel looked. In one, the town of Winslow was clearly marked. In another, there was no sign of the town at all.

“The first map is from the 1970s. The second is only a year or two old. Winslow doesn’t exist anymore. Nobody lives there. There used to be a talc mine near the town-that’s what you can see to the east in some of the pictures-owned by the Leehagen family, but it gave out in the 1980s. People started to leave, and Leehagen began buying up the vacant properties. Those who didn’t want to go were forced out. Oh, he paid them, so it was all aboveboard, but it was made clear what would happen if they didn’t leave. It’s all private land now, lying to the northeast of Leehagen’s house. You know anything about talc mining, sir?”

“No,” said Louis.

“It’s a nasty business. The miners were exposed to tremolite asbestos dust in the mines. A lot of the companies involved knew that the talc contained asbestos, the Leehagens included, but chose not to inform their workers about either its presence or the prevalence of asbestos-related diseases in their mines. We’re talking mainly about scarring of the lungs, silicosis, and incidents of mesothelioma, which is a rare asbestos-related cancer. Even those who weren’t directly involved in mining began developing lung problems. The Leehagens defended themselves by denying that industrial talc contains asbestos or poses a cancer risk, which I believe is a lie. This stuff ended up in kids’ crayons, and you know what kids do with crayons, right? They put them in their mouths.”

“With due respect, what does this have to do with the matter in hand?” asked Louis.

“Well, it was how Leehagen managed to empty Winslow. He offered financial settlements to the families, most of whom had relatives who had worked in the mines. The settlements indemnified Leehagen and his descendants against any future action. He screwed those people to the wall. The amounts they received were far less than they might have been awarded had they been prepared to take their cases to court, but then this was the 1980s. I don’t think they even knew what was making them sick, and most of them were already dead when the first cases from elsewhere began coming before the courts a decade or more later. That’s the kind of man Leehagen is. It is ironic, though, that his own cancers may well have been caused by the mines that made him wealthy. They killed his wife”-when Hoyle said the word “wife,” he winced slightly-“and now they’re killing him.”

Hoyle found another map, this one depicting the course of a river. “After he’d emptied the town, he got permission to redirect a local stream, the Roubaud, on some spurious environmental grounds. Effectively, the redirection allowed him to cut himself off. It functions as a moat. There are only two roads that cross it into his land. Behind Leehagen’s house is Fallen Elk Lake, so he has water at his back as well. He’s sown the lake bed with rocks and wire to prevent anyone from gaining access to the house from that direction, so the only way onto his land is over one of the two bridges spanning the stream.”

Hoyle pointed them out on the map, then traced the roads that led from them with his finger. They formed the shape of an inverted funnel, cut at four points by two inner roads that ran through the property parallel to the eastern shore of the lake.

“Are they watched?” asked Angel.

“Not consistently, but there are still homes nearby. Some of them are rented by Leehagen to the families of the men who used to tend his cattle, or who work his property. There are a couple of others that belong to people who’ve reached an arrangement with him. They stay out of his affairs, and he lets them live where they’ve always lived. They’re mainly on the northern road. The southern road is quieter. It would be possible for a vehicle going down either of those roads to get pretty close to Leehagen’s house, although the southern road would be the safer bet, but if the alarm was raised then both those bridges could be closed before any trespassers had a chance to escape.”

“How many men does he have?”

“A dozen or so close to him, I’d guess. They stay in touch on the land through a dedicated, secure high-frequency network. Some have served time, but the rest are little more than local thugs.”

“You guess?” said Angel.

“Leehagen is a recluse, just as I am. His disease has made him one. The little that I do know about his current circumstances was dearly bought.” He moved on. “Then there’s his son and heir, Michael.” Hoyle found another photograph, this time of a man in his forties with something of Leehagen Senior in his eyes, but who weighed considerably less. He was wearing jeans and a checked shirt and cradled a hunting rifle in his arms. An eight-point buck lay at his feet, the animal’s head resting on a log so that it faced the camera. Louis recalled the man whom he had killed in San Antonio, Jonny Lee. He had looked more like his father, from what Louis could remember of him.

“This one is quite recent,” said Hoyle. “Michael looks after most of his father’s business affairs, legal and otherwise. He’s the family’s link to the outside world. Compared to his father, he’s quite the bon viveur, but by any normal standards he is almost as reclusive. He ventures out a couple of times a year, but usually people come to him.”

“Including your daughter,” said Louis.

“Yes,” said Hoyle. “I want Michael killed as well. I’ll pay extra for him.”

Louis sat back. Beside him, Angel was silent.

“I never pretended that this was going to be easy,” said Hoyle. “If I could have dealt with this matter without the involvement of those outside my own circle, then I would have. But it seemed to me that we had a shared interest in putting an end to Leehagen, and that you might succeed where others had failed.”

“And this is all you have?” asked Louis.

“All that might prove useful, yes.”

“You still haven’t told us how your beef with Leehagen began,” said Angel.

“He stole my wife,” said Hoyle. “Or the woman who might have been my wife. He stole her, and she died because of it. She worked at the mine, helping with paperwork. Leehagen believed that it would be good for her to earn her keep.”

“This is over a woman?” said Angel.

“We’re rivals in many matters, Leehagen and I. I bested him repeatedly. In the process, I alienated the woman I loved. She went to Leehagen as a means of getting back at me. He was, I should add, not always so repellent in appearance. He has been ill for many years, even before the cancer took hold. His medication affected his weight.”

“So your woman went to Leehagen-”

“And she died,” finished Hoyle. “In retaliation, I stepped up my efforts to ruin him. I fed information about him to business rivals, to criminals. He came back at me. I retaliated again. Now we are where we are, each of us sealed away in our respective fortresses, each nursing a deep hatred of the other. I want this thing ended. Even weak and ill, I begrudge him his existence. So here is my offer: if you kill him, I will pay you $500,000, with a $250,000 bonus if his son dies alongside him. As a gesture of good faith, I will pay you $250,000 of the bounty on the father in advance, and $100,000 on that of the son. The balance will be placed in escrow, to be paid over on completion of the job.”

He replaced the photographs and maps in the file, closed it, and eased it gently toward Louis. After only a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it.

The call woke Michael Leehagen from a stupor. He staggered to the phone in his dressing gown, his eyes bleary and his voice hoarse.

“Yes?”

“What have you done?”

Michael recognized the voice instantly. It dispelled the last vestiges of sleep from him as surely as if he had stood in the face of a raging, icy gale.

“What do you mean?”

“The old man. Who gave you the authority to target him?” There was a calmness to Bliss’s voice that made Michael’s bladder tighten.

“Authority? I gave myself the authority. We got his name from Ballantine. He set my brother up, and he was meeting with Louis. He’ll make the connection. It will bring him here for sure.”

“Yes,” said Bliss. “Yes, it will. But it’s not how these things are done.” He sounded distracted, as though this was not a development that he had anticipated or desired. It made no sense to Michael. “You should have spoken to me first.”

“With respect, you’re not the most contactable of men.”

“Then you should have waited until I called you!” This time, the anger in Bliss’s voice was clear.

“I’m sorry,” said Michael. “I didn’t think there would be a problem.”

“No.” Michael heard him breathe in deeply, calming himself. “You couldn’t have known. You may have to prepare for reprisals if the attack is connected to you. Some people won’t like it.”

Michael had no idea what Bliss was talking about. His father wanted everyone involved in Jonny Lee’s death wiped from the face of the earth. How things were done elsewhere was of no consequence to him. He was interested only in the end result. He waited for Bliss to continue.

“Call your men back from the city,” said Bliss, and now he sounded weary. “All of them. Do you understand?”

“They’re already on their way.”

“Good. Who fired the shots?”

“I don’t think that-”

“I asked you a question.”

“Benton. Benton fired the shots.”

“Benton,” said Bliss, seemingly committing the name to memory, and Michael wondered if he had somehow condemned Benton by naming him.

“When are you coming up here?”

“Soon,” said Bliss, “soon…”

CHAPTER TWELVE

LOUIS STARED DOWN AT the man on the bed. Gabriel looked even smaller and more ancient than before, so old that he was nearly unrecognizable to Louis. Even in the space of a day, he seemed to have lost too much weight. His skin was gray, marked with a deep yellow in places where a salve had been applied to it. His eyes were sunken in blue-black pools, so that they seemed bruised, like those of a fighter who has spent too long trapped against the ropes, pummeled into unconsciousness by his opponent. His breathing was shallow, hardly there at all. The gunshot wounds, covered by a layer of dressings, had allowed some of his critical, and already dwindling, life force to dissipate, as though, had he been a witness to the shooting, Louis might have perceived it emerging from the exit holes, a pale cloud amid the blood. It would never return. It was lost, and an elemental part of Gabriel had been lost with it. If he survived, he would not be the same. Like all men, he had always been fighting death, the pace of the struggle increasing as the years drew on, but now death had the upper hand and would not relinquish it.

He had expected a police presence near the old man, but there was none. It troubled him, until he realized that others would be keeping vigil over Gabriel now. There was a small camera fixed to the upper-right-hand corner of the room, but he could not tell if it was a recent addition to the decor. He assumed that they were watching him. He waited for them to show themselves, but they did not come. Still, the fact that he had been allowed to get so close to Gabriel meant they knew who he was. It did not concern him. They had always known where to find him, if they chose.

He touched Gabriel’s hand, black on white. There was a tenderness to the gesture, and a sense of regret, but something else played across Louis’s face: a kind of hatred.

You created me, thought Louis. Without you, what would I have become?

The door behind him opened. He had seen the nurse approaching, her shape reflected in the polished wall behind Gabriel’s bed.

“Sir, you’ll have to leave now,” she said.

He acknowledged her with a slight inclination of his head, then leaned down and kissed Gabriel gently on the cheek, like Judas consigning his Savior to death. He was both a man without a father, and a man with many fathers. Gabriel was one of them, and Louis had yet to find a way to forgive him for all that he had done.

Milton stood in a small office steps away from Gabriel’s room. The door was marked “Private,” and behind it sat a desk, two chairs, and an array of monitoring equipment, including both video and audio recording facilities. It was known in the law enforcement community as the Auxiliary Nurses’ Station, or ANSTAT, and was a shared resource, which meant that, in theory, all agencies had an equal call on its use. In reality, there was a pecking order that had to be observed, and Milton was king rooster. He hovered over the two armed agents, watching as Louis left Gabriel’s room and the nurse closed the door softly behind him.

“Action, sir?”

“None,” said Milton, after only a moment’s hesitation. “Let him go.”

They stood in Louis’s office, Hoyle’s papers and maps spread across Louis’s desk. Louis had added his own notes and observations with a red pen. This would be the last time that all of the information they had would be presented in this way. Once this discussion was over, it would be destroyed: shredded, and then burned. On a chair nearby lay fresh maps, and copies of the photographs and satellite images that they would show to the others.

“How many?” asked Angel.

“To do the job, or to do the job right?”

“To do it right.”

“Sixteen, at least. Two to hold each of the bridges, maybe more. Four in the town for backup. Two teams of four approaching the property cross-country. And, if we lived in an ideal world, a big-ass chopper to take them all out once they were done. Even then, there would be problems with communication. There’s no cellphone coverage that deep into the mountains. The trees and the gradient of the land mean that there’s no line of sight, so walkie-talkies are out of the question for us.”

“Satellite phones?”

“Yeah, and maybe we could send the cops a letter of confession as well.”

Angel shrugged. At least he’d asked.

“So how many do we have?”

“Ten, ourselves included.”

“We could bring in Parker. That would give us eleven.”

Louis shook his head. “This is our game. Let’s play it, see what numbers we roll.”

He picked up four images, photographs of Leehagen’s house taken with increasing degrees of magnification, and set them alongside one another, comparing angles, revealed points of access, weaknesses, strengths.

And Angel walked away, leaving him to his plans.

They both understood that this was not the way such things were done. There should have been background checks carried out, weeks-even months-of preparation, alternative entry and exit strategies examined, yet they did none of these things. In part, they recognized the urgency of the situation. Their friends, their home, had been targeted. Gabriel had been grievously wounded. Even without the information provided by Hoyle, they knew that it was in the nature of a man who would act in such a reckless way not to retreat after initial reverses. He would come at them again and again until he succeeded, and everyone close to them was at risk as a consequence.

As in most matters that concerned them both, it was Angel who was the more perceptive, the one who recognized underlying motives, the one who instinctively homed in on the feelings of others. Despite all that remained hidden about his partner, he was attuned to the other man’s rhythms, his modes of thought and methods of reasoning, in a way that he believed was alien to Louis in their relationship. For a man who had lived so long in a gray world, drained of morality and conscience, Louis was always most comfortable with what was black and white. He was not prone to self-examination, and when he did analyze himself he did so entirely at one remove, as though he were a detached observer of his own follies and failings. Angel sometimes wondered if that was a consequence of the lifestyle he had chosen, but he suspected that it was probably an integral aspect of Louis’s makeup, as much a part of him as his color and his sexuality, a thing stamped upon his consciousness before he even left his mother’s womb, waiting to be called into being as the boy grew older. Gabriel had recognized that singlemindedness, and had harnessed it.

Now circumstances had intervened and, in a way, Louis was once again serving Gabriel, although this time as his avenger. The problem was that his desire to act, to strike, to release some of that pent-up energy had made him incautious. They were moving too quickly against Leehagen. There were too many gaps in their knowledge, too many sides upon which they were exposed.

So Angel broke a cardinal rule. He confided in another. Not everything, but enough that, if things began to fall apart, someone would know where to look for them, and whom to punish.

That evening, they ate together at River on Amsterdam. It was a quiet meal, even by their standards. Afterward, they had a beer in Pete’s, once the office crowd had departed along with the free munchies, and half watched the Celtics make dull work of the Knicks. To amuse himself, Angel counted the number of people who were using hand sanitizer, and stopped once it threatened to move into double figures. Hand sanitizer: what was the city coming to, he wondered. I mean, he could understand the logic of it. Not everyone who used the subway was exactly spotlessly clean, and he’d taken cab rides that had required him to send his clothes to the laundry the following day just to get the stink out, but seriously, he wasn’t sure that a little bottle of mild hand sanitizer was the answer. There was stuff breeding in the city that could survive a nuclear attack, and not just cockroaches. Angel had read somewhere that they’d found the gonorrhea virus in the Gowanus Canal. On one level, it was hardly surprising: the only thing that you couldn’t find in the Gowanus Canal was fish, or at least any fish that you could eat and live for longer than a day or two once you’d consumed it, but how dirty did a stretch of water have to be to contract a social disease?

Usually, he would have shared these thoughts with his partner, but Louis was elsewhere, his eyes on the flow of the game but his mind intent upon very different strategies. Angel finished his beer. Louis still had half a glass left, but there was more life in the Gowanus.

“We done?” said Angel.

“Sure,” said Louis.

“We can watch the end of the game, if you want.”

Louis’s eyes drifted lazily toward him. “There’s a game?” he said.

“I guess there is, somewhere.”

“Yeah, somewhere.”

They walked through the brightly lit streets, side by side, together but apart. Outside a bar at the corner of 75th, Navy boys were shouting come-ons to the young women strolling by, drawing smiles and daggered glances in equal measure. One of the sailors had an unlit cigarette in his mouth as he stood at the door of the bar. He patted his pockets for a lighter or a book of matches, then looked up to see Angel and Louis approaching.

“Buddy, you got a light?” he asked.

Louis reached into his pocket and withdrew a brass Zippo. A man, he believed, should never be without a lighter or a gun. He flipped and flicked, and the sailor shielded the flame instinctively with his left hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” said Louis.

“Where you from?” asked Angel.

“Iowa.”

“The hell is someone from Iowa doing in the Navy?”

The sailor shrugged. “Thought it might be good to see some ocean.”

“Yeah, not a lot of ocean in Iowa,” said Angel. “So, you seen enough yet?”

The sailor looked downcast. “Buddy, I seen enough ocean to last me a lifetime.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and tapped the heel of a shiny black shoe upon the ground.

“Terror firmer,” said Angel.

“Amen to that. Thanks for the light.”

“Our pleasure,” said Louis.

He and Angel walked on.

“Why would anyone join the Navy?” asked Angel.

“Damned if I know. Iowa. There’s a guy only ever saw pictures of the sea, and decided it was for him. Dreamers, man. They forget they have to wake up sometime.”

And in that moment their silence became more companionable than it had previously been, and Angel resigned himself to what was being done, because he was a dreamer, too.