The Whisperers

War smells. It smells of open sewers and excrement. It smells of garbage and rotting food and standing water. It smells of dog carcasses and human corpses. It smells of the homeless, and the dying, and the dead.

They were flown from McCord AFB to Rhein-Main AFB, then on to Kuwait. They traveled in full kit with their weapons, the bolts removed and kept in their pockets. In Kuwait, they filled sandbags to line the bottoms of their vehicles and absorb shrapnel. It was only a couple of days later that they were told they were heading into the box. The officers cheered: they wanted to earn their combat patches. The chill was intense as they moved north through the desert night. He had never been in the desert before, not unless you counted the Desert of Maine, and that was just a field with some sand in it. He hadn’t expected the desert to be so cold, but then he knew about as much about deserts as he knew about Iraq. Before he was sent there, he couldn’t even have found it on a map. He’d never had any intention of visiting, so why bother trying to look for it? But now he knew…

What did these people do? How did they live? There was nothing growing that he could see. The kids were barefoot, and lived in houses made of mud and brick. They were told not to trust anybody, but he still handed out candy and water to kids when he could. Most of the guys did, at the start, until the insurgency kicked in, and the rivers began filling up with bodies, and the haji started using children as lookouts, or human shields, or soldiers. After that, they stopped treating kids as kids. By then, he was scared most of the time, but he’d entered a place where the concept of fear had ceased to have any concrete meaning because fear was always present, either as a whisper or a scream.

Then there was the dust: it got everywhere. He tried to keep his M4 clean and well-lubricated, but it didn’t always help, and the gun sometimes jammed, There were those who said that the standard army cleaner wasn’t worth a shit, and guys asked for commercial lubricants as part of their care packages from home. Later he read that there was something about the Iraqi dust that was different from the dust used in the weapons tests stateside. It was smaller, and contained more salts and carbonates, which tended to corrode. It also reacted with some of the gun lubricants, creating bigger particles that blocked the chambers. It was as though the land itself was conspiring against the invaders.

This place was old. They didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand it either, not then. It was only after, when he began tracing its history, that he realized this was the cradle of civilization: the ancestors of these people peering at him fearfully from out of mud houses had created writing, philosophy, religion. This army of tanks and rockets and airplanes was following in the path of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Mongols, of Alexander, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. This was once the greatest empire in the world. He struggled to grasp just how old it was, even as he read of Gilgamesh, and Mesopotamia, and the kings of Agade, and the Sumerians.

That was when he came across the names, of Enlil and his wife Ninlil and the story of how Enlil took three forms, and impregnated his wife three times, and from those three unions sprang Nergal, and Ninazu, and one other, one whose name was lost, rendered illegible by the damage to the old stones on which the story had been written. Three unions, three entities: things of the netherworld.

Demons.

And that was when he began to understand.

11

Jackie Garner was all apologies when he called the next morning. He’d managed to stay with Joel Tobias as far as Blainville, Quebec, and had watched the loading of the animal feed. He hadn’t noticed anything untoward, and then had stayed with Tobias until the border, where something about the way Jackie looked or, possibly, smelled had aroused suspicion. A chemical test had been run on his bag, and traces of explosives had been found. Given that this was Jackie Garner, the munitions king, it would have been a miracle if traces of explosives hadn’t been found, but it meant that Jackie’s car was searched, and he’d been forced to answer a lot of awkward questions about his hobbies before he was allowed to leave, by which time Joel Tobias had vanished.

‘Don’t worry about it, Jackie,’ I told him. ‘We’ll find another way.’

‘You want me to go back to his house and wait for him?’

‘Yeah, why not.’ It would make Jackie feel that he wasn’t in trouble, if nothing else.

‘Any word from New York?’

‘They’ll be here tonight.’

‘You won’t tell them how I screwed up?’

‘You didn’t screw up, Jackie. You were just unlucky.’

‘I should be more careful,’ said Jackie, with regret. ‘But I do love explosives…’

Soon after, Bennett Patchett emailed me some names of former soldiers who had attended his son’s funeral. The first two were Vernon and Pritchard. Both had a note beside them indicating that he wasn’t sure of the spelling. He admitted that he couldn’t remember the names of all those who had been there, because not everyone had signed the book of condolences, and not everyone had been introduced to him, but he thought that at least a dozen ex-soldiers had been present. He did recall a woman named Carrie Saunders, who had something to do with counseling veterans, but as far as he knew she’d had no formal contact with Damien before he died. There was also Bobby Jandreau, who was now in a wheelchair due to the injuries that he had suffered in Iraq. He was on my list of those to whom I wanted to talk, once the help from New York had arrived.

‘Were any of those at the funeral black?’

‘ Vernon ’s a colored fella,’ he said. ‘Is that important?’

‘Just curious.’

I made a note to call Carrie Saunders, and to find out more about Bobby Jandreau, but first I took a trip out to Scarborough Downs, where Ronald Straydeer lived in a cabin within shouting distance of the racecourse. Ronald had served in the K9 corps during the Vietnam war, and was haunted as much by the loss of his dog, which he’d had to abandon as ‘surplus to requirements’ during the fall of Saigon, as by the deaths of his comrades. Now his house was a kind of rest stop for veterans who happened to be passing through town and needed a place to sleep, somewhere they could have a beer and a toke without being bothered by foolish questions. I wasn’t certain what Ronald did for a living, but it probably wasn’t unconnected to the ready supply of weed that he always appeared to have close at hand.

Ronald had also recently begun to involve himself in the issue of rights for veterans. After all, he’d had firsthand experience of the problems that they faced upon his own return from Vietnam and, especially after 9/11, he probably believed that he’d seen the last of such ugliness. Instead, a whole new bag of ugly had been opened on veterans, worse even than that faced by their Vietnam predecessors. Then it had been about returning soldiers being blamed for an unpopular war, their critics inflamed by images of kids dying on college campuses, or with burning napalm on their skin as they ran across a Vietnamese bridge. Now that anger had been replaced by ignorance of the consequences of combat, both physical and psychological, for ex-soldiers, and the reluctance of those who had been happy to send them to war to look after the injured and battle-scarred, whether those injuries were visible or not, once they came home. I’d seen Ronald on local television a couple of times, and he was often approached for comment by newspapers in the state when the subject of disabled veterans was raised in any form. He’d set up an informal organization called Concerned Veterans of Maine, and for the first time since I’d known him he seemed to have a real sense of purpose, a new battle to fight instead of old ones to relive.

I saw a drape twitch when I arrived at his place. I knew that Ronald had a sensor fitted at the end of the private drive that led up to his house, and anything larger than a small mammal broke the beam. He was smart enough not to keep too significant a stash at his home, so that any raid would net possession, but not possession with intent to supply. Then again, Ronald’s activities were kind of an open secret among certain branches of the local law enforcement community, but they were content to let them slide because Ronald didn’t sell to kids, he didn’t use violence, and he was helpful to the cops when the need arose. It wasn’t as if Ronald was operating a drug empire anyway. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been living in a small cabin out by Scarborough Downs.

He’d have been living in a big cabin out by Scarborough Downs.

Ronald came to the door as I stepped from the car. He was a large man, his black hair cut short and heavily streaked with silver. He wore tight-fitting jeans, and a checked shirt hung loosely over his belt. Around his neck hung a leather pouch.

‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Big medicine?’

‘Nope, I keep my small change in there.’

His hand, tanned and corded with muscle and veins, gripped mine and swallowed it, like a gnarly old catfish consuming a minnow.

‘You’re the only Native American I know,’ I said, ‘and you don’t do any of that proper Native American stuff.’

‘You disappointed?’

‘Some. It just feels like you’re not making the effort.’

‘I don’t even want to be called a Native American. Indian does just fine.’

‘See? I bet I could have arrived here dressed as a cowboy and you wouldn’t even have blinked an eye.’

‘Nope. I might’ve shot you, but I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.’

We sat at a table in his yard, and Ronald pulled a couple of sodas from a cooler. Music played softly from a boombox in the kitchen, a mix of Native American blues, folk, and Americana: Slidin’ Clyde Roulette, Keith Secola, Butch Mudbone.

‘Social call?’ he asked.

‘Sociable,’ I replied. ‘You remember a kid named Damien Patchett: local boy, served in Iraq with the infantry?’

Ronald nodded. ‘I went to his funeral.’

I should have known. Whenever he could, Ronald attended the local funerals of veterans. His argument was that, in honoring one, he honored all. It was part of his ongoing personal duty to the fallen.

‘Did you know him?’

‘No, never met him.’

‘I hear that he may have taken his own life.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘His father.’

Ronald touched a small silver cross that hung from a leather strap around his wrist, a small gesture toward Bennett Patchett’s grief. ‘It’s happening again,’ he said. ‘You hope the brass and the politicians will learn, but they never do. War changes men and women, and some of them change so much that they don’t know themselves anymore, and they hate what they’ve become. You ask me, we’re just getting better at collating suicide figures, that’s all. More Vietnam veterans have died by their own hands since the war than were killed in country, and more Iraq veterans will die by their own hands this year than will be killed in Iraq, judging by the way the figures are heading. The same dictum applies to both wars: poor treatment over there, poor treatment back home.’

‘What was the talk about Damien?’

‘That he’d become isolated, that he was having trouble sleeping. A lot of guys have trouble sleeping when they get back. They have trouble doing a lot of stuff, but when you can’t sleep, you know, your head gets messed up, and you start getting moody and depressed. Maybe you drink more than you should, or you take something to bring you down and then you start needing a little more of it every time. He’d been on Trazodone, but then he stopped.’

‘Why?’

‘You’d have to ask someone who knew him better than I did. Some guys don’t like taking sleep meds: they find they get a drug hangover from it when they wake up, and it screws up their REM sleep, but all I got was secondhand news about Damien. Did his father hire you to look into his death?’

‘In a way.’

‘I didn’t think that there was any doubt about how he died.’

‘There isn’t, at least not about his final moments. It’s what led him to do it that his father is curious to understand.’

‘So you’re looking into post-traumatic stress disorder now?’

‘In a way.’

‘I see that you’re still having trouble answering straight questions.’

‘I like to think of it as circling.’

‘Yeah, like before a raid. Maybe you should have worn that cowboy hat after all.’

He sipped his soda and looked away. It wasn’t quite a huff, just the dignified Native American equivalent of one.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I surrender. I’ll give you a name: Joel Tobias.’

Ronald had a good poker face. There was only the slightest flicker of his eyelids at the mention of Tobias’s name, but it was enough to indicate that Ronald didn’t care much for him.

‘He was at the funeral too,’ he said. ‘A bunch of guys who served with Damien came to pay their respects, some from away. There was trouble at the cemetery, although they managed to keep the Patchetts from seeing any of it.’

‘Trouble?’

‘A photographer was hanging around from a small newspaper, the Sentinel-Eagle. He was taking some shots, part of a photo essay he was putting together and hoping to sell to The New York Times: you know, the funeral of a fallen warrior, the grief, the release. Someone in the family – must have been Bennett – had told him that it would be okay. Well, it wasn’t, not with everyone. A couple of Damien’s old buddies had a word with him, and he went away. One of them was Tobias. He was introduced to me later, at a bar. By that time, we were down to the stragglers.’

‘Has Tobias come up on your radar?’

‘Why would he?’

‘There might be people who suspect he’s smuggling.’

‘If he is, it’s not pot. I’d know. You talk to Jimmy Jewel?’

‘He doesn’t know either.’

‘If Jimmy doesn’t know, then I got no chance. You spend a dollar, that man hears the change hit the counter.’

‘But you’re aware of Tobias?’

Ronald shifted in his seat. ‘Whispers, that’s all.’

‘What kind?’

‘That Tobias is working an angle. He’s that kind of guy.’

‘Was he one of those who didn’t want his picture taken?’

‘There were four or five of them that spoke to the photographer, as far as I can remember. Tobias was among them. One of the others made the papers himself, a week or so later.’

‘How come?’

‘His name was Brett Harlan, from Caratunk.’

That name meant something. Harlan. Brett Harlan.

‘Murder-suicide,’ I said. ‘Killed his wife, then himself.’

‘With an M9 bayonet. Those were hard deaths. Specialist Brett Harlan, Stryker C, Second Saber Brigade, Third Infantry. His wife was on leave from the One Hundred and Seventy-second Military Intelligence Battalion.’

‘Damien Patchett served with the Second Saber Brigade.’

‘And so did Bernie Kramer.’

‘Who’s Bernie Kramer?’

‘Corporal Bernie Kramer. Hanged himself in a hotel room in Quebec three months ago.’

I thought of what Karen Emory had said to me: ‘They’re all dying.’

‘It’s a cluster,’ I said. ‘A cluster of suicides.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Any reason why that might be?’

‘I can give you general, but not specific. There’s a woman out of Togus, ex-military. Her name is Carrie Saunders, and I think she’d met both Harlan and Kramer. You should talk to her. She’s conducting research, and she came to me looking for some information: names of people who might be willing to be interviewed, both from my era and later. I gave her what I could.’

‘Bennett said that Carrie Saunders attended Damien’s funeral.’

‘She might have been at the church. I didn’t see her myself.’

‘What is she researching?’

Ronald finished his soda, crushed the can, and tossed it into a recycling bin.

‘Post-traumatic stress disorder,’ he said. ‘Her specialty is suicides.’

The sun rose higher. It had turned into a beautiful summer’s day, with clear blue skies and just the faintest of breezes, but Ronald and I were no longer outside. He had taken me into his small office, from which he was running Concerned Veterans of Maine. The walls were covered with clippings from newspapers, and tables of fatalities, and photographs. One, directly above Ronald’s computer, depicted a woman helping her injured son from his bed. The picture had been taken from behind, so that only the mother’s face was visible. It took me a moment to spot what was wrong with the photograph: almost half of the young man’s head was missing, and what was left was a network of scars and crevasses, like the surface of the moon. His mother’s face displayed a mixture of emotions too complex to interpret.

‘Grenade,’ said Ronald. ‘He lost forty percent of his brain. He’ll need constant care for the rest of his life. His mother, she doesn’t look young, does she?’ He said it as if noticing her for the first time, even though he must have stared at her every single day.

‘No, she doesn’t.’

And I wondered what would be better: for him to die before his mother, so that his pain could come to an end, and hers could take another, perhaps less wrenching, form; or for him to outlive her, so that she could have her time with him, and be a mother to him as she was when he was an infant, when the possibility of a life like this could only have come to her in a nightmare. The former would be best, I thought, for if he lived too long then she would be gone, and eventually he would become a shadow in the corner of a room, a name without a past, forgotten by others and with no memories of his own.

Surrounded by all of this, Ronald spoke to me of suicides and homelessness; of addiction and waking nightmares; of men left without limbs who were struggling to receive full disability from the military; of the backlog of claims, 400,000 and counting; and of those whose scars were not visible, who were damaged psychologically but not physically, and whose sacrifice was therefore not recognized as yet by their government, for they were denied a Purple Heart. And as he talked, his anger grew. He never raised his voice, never even clenched a fist, but I could feel it coming off him, like heat from a radiator.

‘It’s the hidden cost,’ he said at last. ‘Body armor protects the torso, and a helmet is better than no helmet. The medical responses are getting better, and faster. But one of those IEDs goes off beside you, or underneath your Hummer, and you can lose an arm or a leg, or take a piece of shrapnel in the back of your neck that leaves you paralyzed for life. Now you can survive with catastrophic injuries, but it might be that you’ll wish you hadn’t. You look at The New York Times, and you look at USA Today, and you see the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan rising in that little box that they use for the bad news, but not as fast as it once did, not in Iraq anyway, and you think that maybe things are getting better. They are, if you’re only counting the dead, but you need to multiply that figure by ten to count the injured, and even then there’s no way to tell how many are seriously wounded. One in four of those who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan needs medical or mental health treatment. Sometimes, it’s not available to them like it should be, and even if they’re fortunate enough to get a little of what they need, the government tries to shortchange them at every turn. You got no idea how hard it is to get full disability, and then the same men who sent those soldiers over to fight tried to close Walter Reed to save a dollar. Walter Reed. They’re fighting two wars, and they want to close the army’s flagship medical center because they think it’s costing too much money. This has got nothing to do with being for or against the wars. It’s got nothing to do with liberalism, or conservatism, or any other label that you choose to throw at it. It’s about doing what’s right by those who fight, and they’re not doing right by them. They never have. They never, ever have…’

His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, he sounded different.

‘When the government won’t do what it should, and the military can’t take care of its own injured, then maybe it falls to others to try and do something about it. Joel Tobias is an angry man, and it could be that he’s gathered others like him to his cause.’

‘His cause?’

‘Whatever Tobias is doing, it grew out of good intentions. He knew men and women who were struggling. We all do. Promises were made. They would be helped.’

‘You’re saying that the money from whatever they’re moving across the border was meant for injured soldiers?’

‘Some of it. Most of it. At first.’

‘What changed?’

‘It’s a lot of money. That’s what I hear. The bigger the sum, the greater the greed.’

Ronald stood. Our conversation was drawing to a close.

‘You need to talk to someone else,’ he said.

‘Give me a name.’

‘There was a fight at Sully’s.’ Sully’s was a notorious Portland dive bar. ‘It was after we buried the Patchett boy. A couple of us were in a corner, and Tobias and some others were at the bar. One of them was in a wheelchair, his trouser legs pinned up halfway to his groin. He’d had a lot to drink when he turned on Tobias. He accused him of reneging. He mentioned Damien, and the other guy, Kramer. There was a third name too, one that I didn’t catch. It began with R: Rockham, something like that. Boy in the wheelchair said that Tobias was a liar, that he was stealing from the dead.’

‘What did Tobias do?’

Ronald’s face creased with disgust.

‘He pushed him toward the door. The guy in the wheelchair, there was nothing that he could do to stop it except put the brake on his chair. He almost fell to the floor, but Tobias held on to him. When he wouldn’t lift the brake on his chair – and he struck out at them when they tried to force him – they just picked him up, chair and all, and put him out on the street. They stripped him of his dignity, just like that. They reminded him of how powerless he was. They didn’t laugh after they did it, and one or two of them looked sickened, but it doesn’t change what happened. That was a low thing that they did to that boy.’

‘Was his name Bobby Jandreau?’

‘That’s right. Seems that he served alongside Damien Patchett. He owed Damien his life, from what I hear. I went outside to make sure that he was okay, but he didn’t want any help. He’d been humiliated enough. He needs help, though. I could see it in him. He was on the way down. So, now you know more than you did when you came here, right?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He nodded. ‘Part of me, it wanted them to succeed,’ he said. ‘Tobias, whoever else is helping him, I wanted them to make the score, whatever it is.’

‘And now?’

‘It’s gone bad. You should be careful, Charlie. They won’t like you sticking your nose in their business.’

‘They already tried to warn me off by drowning me in an oil barrel.’

‘Yeah? So how’s that working out for them?’

‘Not so good. The one who did all the talking was soft-spoken, maybe with a hint of something southern in there. You get any ideas about who that might be, I’d like to hear them.’

I tried to reach Carrie Saunders at the VA facility in Togus later that day, but the call went straight to her answering service. Then I called the Sentinel-Eagle, which was a weekly local paper in Orono, and from its news editor got a cell phone number for a photographer named George Eberly. He wasn’t a staffer, but he did some freelance work for the paper. Eberly answered on the second ring, and when I told him what I wanted he seemed happy to talk.

‘It was agreed with Bennett Patchett,’ he said. ‘He spoke to the rest of the family about what I wanted to do. It would be a memorial to his son, I told him, but also a way of connecting with other families who had lost sons and daughters, or fathers and mothers, to the war, and he understood that. I promised to be unobtrusive, and I was. I stayed in the background. Most people didn’t even notice me, and then suddenly I was confronted by a bunch of goons.’

‘Did they tell you what their problem was?’

‘They said it was a private ceremony. When I pointed that I had the family’s permission to take pictures, one of them tried to take my camera from me while the rest shielded him. I backed away, and a guy, a big guy with fingers missing, grabbed my arm and told me to delete any photographs that weren’t of the family. He said that if I didn’t, he’d break the camera, and then, later, he and his buddies would find me and break something else of mine, something that didn’t have a lens and couldn’t be replaced.’

‘So you deleted the photos?’

‘Like hell I did. I own a new Nikon. It’s a complicated piece of machinery if you don’t know what you’re doing. I pressed a couple of buttons, locked the screen, and told him that I’d done what he asked. The big guy let me go, and that was it.’

‘Any chance that I could take a look at those photos?’

‘Sure, I don’t see why not.’ I gave him my e-mail address, and he promised to send the photos as soon as he got back to his computer.

‘You know,’ added Eberly, ‘there was a connection between Damien Patchett and a corporal named Bernie Kramer, who killed himself up in Canada.’

‘I know. They served together.’

‘Well, Kramer’s family came from Orono. After he died we printed a piece that he’d written. His sister asked us to publish it. She still lives here in town. That’s how I came to be interested in this whole photo project, to be honest. The article was a big deal around here, and it got the editor in trouble with the military.’

‘What did Kramer write about?’

‘That PTSD thing. Post-traumatic stress. I’ll forward the piece to you with the photos.’

Eberly’s material came in about two hours later, while I was cooking myself a steak for dinner. I took the pan from the heat and set it aside to cool.

Bernie Kramer’s article was short, but intense. It spoke of his struggle with what he believed to be PTSD – his paranoia, his inability to trust, his moments of crippling fear and dread – and in particular his anger at the military’s refusal to recognize PTSD as a combat injury instead of an ailment. Clearly, it had been written as an extended letter to the paper’s editor, a letter never sent, but the editor had seen the potential in it and moved it to the op-ed page. Most affecting of all was a description of his time at the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Bragg. Kramer implied that Fort Bragg was being used as a dumping ground for soldiers who were suffering from problems related to drug abuse, and that constant staff changes meant that awards, record recovery, and retirement ceremonies were being ignored. ‘By the time we came home,’ he concluded, ‘we were already being forgotten.’

It wasn’t hard to see how the army might have been unhappy with one of its ex-soldiers going on the record in this way, although worse had been written in soldiers’ blogs and elsewhere. Nevertheless, a small local paper would have been easy meat for a military press officer with a point to prove to his superiors.

I printed out the article, and added it to those I had earlier collected regarding the deaths of Brett Harlan, and Margaret, his wife. I had also made notes for myself regarding PTSD and military suicides. Then I looked at the photos that Eberly had taken after Damien’s funeral. Helpfully, he had circled the faces of the men who had confronted him, Joel Tobias’s among them. I regarded the others carefully. Only one of them was black, so I figured that was Vernon. I checked the photographic printer to make sure that it had paper in it, then printed duplicate copies of each of the best pictures. I wanted to know the names of the rest of these men. Ronald Straydeer might be able to help me. I had his email address, so I forwarded some of the images to him. Eberly had also given me the name and phone number for Bernie Kramer’s sister, Lauren Fannan. I called her, and we spoke for a while. She told me that Bernie had come back ‘sick’ from Iraq, and his condition had worsened in the months that followed. She was under the impression that pressure had been put on him not to talk about his problems, but she couldn’t tell if that pressure had come from the military, or from his own buddies.

‘Why would you say that?’ I asked.

‘There was a friend of his, Joel Tobias. He was Bernie’s sergeant in Iraq. Tobias was the reason why Bernie was up in Quebec to begin with. Bernie spoke fluent French, and he was doing some work for Tobias up there, something to do with shipping and trucks. Bernie was taking medication to help him sleep, and Tobias told him to stop, because it was screwing with Bernie’s ability to work.’

If Joel Tobias had told Bernie Kramer to stop taking his medication because it was interfering with his assigned tasks, might he also have been responsible for Damien Patchett setting aside his Trazodone?

‘Did Bernie seek professional help?’

‘I got the impression that he was receiving some kind of help, because of the way he started talking about his condition, but he never said from whom. After Bernie died, I called Tobias and told him that he wouldn’t be welcome at the funeral, so he stayed away. I haven’t seen him since. I found the letter that Bernie had written about his post-traumatic stress among his private papers, and decided that it should be printed in the newspaper, because people should know how these men and women have been treated by their own government. Bernie was a lovely man, a gentle man. He didn’t deserve to end his life that way.’

‘You mentioned Bernie’s private papers, Mrs. Fannan. Do you still have them?’

‘Some of them,’ she replied. ‘The rest I burned.’

There was something here. ‘Why did you burn them?’

She had started to cry, and I had trouble understanding some of what she said next. ‘He’d written page after page of just… madness, about how he was hearing voices, and seeing things. I thought it was all part of his illness, but it was so disturbing, and so insane. I didn’t want anyone else to read it, because if it got out I thought it would detract from the letter. He was talking about demons, and being haunted. None of it made any sense. None of it.’

I thanked her and let her go. A message had appeared in my mailbox. Ronald Straydeer had come through for me: he’d printed one of the photographs, marked it, then scanned the image again and returned it. There was a short note above it:

After you left, I remembered something else about the funeral that struck me as odd. There was a veteran of the first Iraq war hanging around with Tobias and the others at Sully’s. His name is Harold Proctor. As far as I can tell, he never gave a damn about anyone or anything, and there’s no reason why he should be close to Tobias unless he’s part of what’s happening. He owns a rundown motel near Langdon, north-west of Rangeley. You don’t need me to tell you how close that is to the Canadian border.

Proctor wasn’t in any of the photographs. I knew that there was a system in place whereby veterans of former wars met returning soldiers, but I had no idea how to find out if Proctor had participated, or if he might have been among those who had met Damien Patchett when he got back home. But if Ronald was right in his assessment of Proctor, and I had no reason to doubt him, then the older man seemed an unlikely candidate for a meet-and-greet.

Ronald had given me two more names: Mallak and Bacci. Beside Mallak’s name he’d written: ‘Unionville – but raised in Atlanta.’ He’d also formally identified the black man as Vernon, and a short, bearded man next to him as Pritchard. He’d put an X over the face of a tall man wearing glasses, and had written ‘Harlan deceased’: next to it. Finally, barely visible in the distance to the left of the image, there was a muscular man in a wheelchair: Bobby Jandreau. Kyle Quinn’s words returned to me, spoken as I looked at the photograph of Foster Jandreau in the newspaper.

A bad business.

I picked up my pen, and formally added Foster Jandreau’s name to the list of the dead.

12

Tobias made the run to Harold Proctor’s motel early the next morning. He supposed that it was fate: he’d been on his way to Proctor’s place when the Mexicans had taken him, so it didn’t exactly throw him to be told to proceed there anyway, even without a cargo to deposit. The reason for the trip was more unexpected, although when he had time to think about it he believed that he had foreseen just such an eventuality.

‘Proctor’s flaking on us,’ said the voice that morning on the other end of the line. ‘He wants out. Take whatever is left there, and pay him off. It’s mostly small stuff that’s left anyway.’

‘You sure he’s not going to talk out of school?’ said Tobias.

‘He knows better than to do that.’

Tobias wasn’t so sure. He planned to have a few words with Proctor when he saw him, just to make certain that he understood where his obligations lay.

His face and hands were hurting. The ibuprofen that he’d taken had dulled the pain somewhat, but not enough to help him sleep properly. Lack of sleep was nothing new to him, though, not lately. In Iraq, he’d slept through mortar fire, he’d been so tired all the time, but ever since he’d returned home he’d been having trouble getting a good night’s rest, and when he did sleep he dreamed. They were bad dreams, and recently they had begun to get worse. He thought that he could even trace the start of his recent problems to one of the runs that he’d made to Proctor’s place a month or so ago. Ever since then, he hadn’t been right.

Tobias wasn’t much for hard liquor, but he could have used a serious drink right about now. Proctor would give him one, if he asked, but Tobias didn’t intend to impose on Proctor’s hospitality for that long. Anyway, the last thing Tobias wanted was to be stopped by the cops with booze on his breath while driving a rig: a rig, what’s more, that would probably contain more potential wealth per square foot than any other that had ever previously been driven through the state.

As if to remind him of the wisdom of his decision to wait until he got back to Portland before slaking his thirst, a border patrol vehicle passed him on the road, heading east. Tobias raised a hand casually in greeting, and the gesture was returned. He watched the border cop in his mirrors until he was gone from sight, then breathed more easily. It would be just his luck to cross the cops after what had happened the night before. Proctor was simply the shitty icing on that particular turd cake.

Tobias didn’t care much for the older man. Proctor was a lush, and he believed that the fact they had both served in the military meant that they were brothers deep inside, but Tobias didn’t view the world in that way. They hadn’t even served in the same war: their conflicts were separated by more than a decade. He and Proctor were on different paths. Proctor was drinking himself to death, while Tobias was looking forward to making some money and improving his life. He thought that he might ask Karen to marry him, and once they were hitched they’d head south, get away from the damn Maine cold. The summers were better up here, not so humid as Florida or Louisiana, some August days excepted, but they weren’t good enough to make up for the winters, not by a long shot.

He thought again about a drink. He’d settle for a couple of beers when he returned to Portland. He hated himself when he got messy, and hated seeing others get messy too. He flashed to Bobby Jandreau in Sully’s, Bobby shooting his mouth off and attracting attention, even in a place like Sully’s where most people were too busy getting drunk to pay any mind to whatever might be going on around them. He pitied Bobby. Joel wasn’t sure that he could have gone on living if he’d been wounded as badly as Bobby had. His own injuries were enough for him: he limped with every step, and he still experienced phantom pain where the tips of his missing fingers should have been. But Bobby’s injuries didn’t excuse him from getting loud and saying the things that he’d said. They’d promised him a cut, and Joel had been willing to keep to the deal, even after what was said at Sully’s, but now Bobby didn’t want it. He didn’t want anything to do with them, and that worried Joel. It troubled the others too. They’d tried reasoning with Bobby, but it had done no good. Joel figured that his pride had been hurt by what they’d done with him at Sully’s, but they’d had no choice.

Nobody gets hurt: that was the essence of the arrangement that they had. Do no harm. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always possible in the real world, and the principle had been subtly altered to ‘Do no harm to our own.’ The detective, Parker, had asked for what had happened to him, and Foster Jandreau had too. Tobias might not have pulled the trigger on him, but he’d agreed on the necessity of it.

Tobias was already anticipating the sign for Proctor’s Motel, giving him time to prepare for the turn. He was nervous. A rig turning into a disused motel was just the kind of action that attracted attention this close to the border. Tobias preferred those occasions when small items were being moved, and the exchange could be made at a gas station, or a diner. The movement of larger pieces requiring him to come to the motel always made him sweat, but there were only one or two more of those shipments to go, and now he’d find some place near Portland to store them. After Kramer’s death, a decision had been made that most of the larger items weren’t worth the risk, presenting, as they did, all kinds of logistical difficulties. An alternative means of disposing of them would be found, even if it meant a smaller profit. After all, they’d gone to the trouble of transporting them as far as Canada, and damned if they were just going to dump them in a quarry somewhere, or bury them in a hole. Still, buyers had already been found for a number of statues, and it had fallen to Tobias to get them across the border. He’d driven the first shipment, certified as cheap stone garden ornaments for those with more money than taste, straight to a warehouse in Pennsylvania without a hitch. The second shipment had to be stored for a couple of weeks with Proctor, and moving it had taken four men, and five hours. All the time, Tobias had been waiting for the state police, or US Customs, to come blazing in, and he could still recall his sense of relief when the work was completed and he was back on the road, heading for home, and Karen. He just needed to finish with Proctor this last time, then he would be done. If it was true that Proctor wanted out, so much the better. Tobias wouldn’t miss him. He wouldn’t miss him, or the stink of his cabin, or the sight of his lousy motel slowly sinking into the ground.

A man who couldn’t hold his booze wasn’t to be trusted. It was a sign of a deeper weakness. Tobias would bet a dollar to a dime that Proctor had come out of Iraq One a prime candidate for PTSD counseling, or whatever passed for it then. Instead, he’d retreated to a rundown motel at the edge of the woods and tried to fight his demons alone, aided only by the bottle and any food that came wrapped in plastic with a microwave time written on the side.

Tobias had never believed that he himself suffered from post-traumatic stress. Oh sure, he had trouble relaxing, and he still had to fight the urge to flinch at the sound of fireworks launching or a car backfiring. There were days when he didn’t want to get out of bed, and nights when he didn’t want to get into bed, didn’t want to close his eyes for fear of what might come, and that was even before the new nightmares. But post-traumatic stress? No, not him. Well, not the severe kind, not the kind where, just to get through the day, you had to be so doped up that it popped out of your pores like discolored sweat, not the kind where you wept for no reason, or you lashed out at your woman because she burned the bacon or spilled your beer.

No, not that kind.

Not yet, but it’s started. You did lash out, didn’t you?

He looked around the cab, certain that someone had spoken, the voice strangely familiar. The wheel twisted slightly so that he felt his heart skip a beat before he readjusted, fearful of sending the rig off the road and onto the slope, fearful of tumbling, of ending up trapped in his cab, trapped almost within sight of the old motel.

Not yet.

Where had that voice come from? And then he remembered: a warehouse, its walls cracked, its roof leaking, a consequence of the earlier bombing and the poor workmanship that had gone into its construction; a man, little more than a pile of bloodied cloth now, the life already leaving his eyes. Tobias was standing over him, the muzzle of his M4 carbine, the gun that had torn the man apart, pointing unwaveringly at the fighter’s head, as though this bloodied rag doll could pose any threat to him now.

‘Take it, take it all. It’s yours.’ The fingers, stained red, indicated the crates and boxes, the shrouded statues, that filled the warehouse. Tobias was amazed that he could even speak. He must have taken four, five shots to the body. Now there he was, waving a hand in the flashlight’s beam, as though any of this was his to give or to retain.

‘Thanks,’ said Tobias, and he felt himself sneer as he spoke the word, and heard the sarcasm in his voice, and he was ashamed. He had belittled himself in front of the dying man. Tobias hated him, hated him as he hated all of his kind. They were terrorists, haji: Sunni or Shia, foreign or Iraqi, they were all the same in the end. It didn’t matter what they called themselves: al-Qaeda, or one of the bullshit names of convenience that they made up from their stock jumble of phrases, like those collections of magnetic words that you stuck to your fridge and used to create bad poetry: Victorious Martyrs of the Brigade of Jihad, Assassination Front of the Imam Resistance, all interchangeable, all alike. Haji. Terrorist.

Yet there was an intimacy to death in moments like this, in giving it and in receiving it, and he had just breached the protocol, answering like a surly teenager, not a man.

The haji smiled, and some white was still visible through the blood that had filled his mouth and stained his teeth.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘Not yet…’

Not yet. That was the voice he heard, the voice of a man with the promised virgins waiting for him in the next world, the voice of a man who had fought to protect what was in that warehouse.

Fought, but not hard enough. That was what Damien had said to him: they fought, but not as hard as they should have.

Why?

The motel came into view. To his left, he saw the line of boarded-up rooms and shivered. The place always gave him the creeps. No wonder Proctor had become what he was, holed up here with only the trunks of trees behind him and his bequest, this dump, before him. It was hard to look at those rooms and not imagine unseen guests, unwanted guests, moving behind the walls: guests who liked damp, and mold, and ivy curling around their beds; guests who were themselves in the process of decaying, malevolent shadows entwined on leaf-strewn beds, old ruined bodies moving rhythmically, dryly, passionlessly, the horns on their heads-

Tobias blinked hard. The images had been so vivid, so strong. They reminded him of some of the dreams he’d been having, except in those there had only been shadows moving, hidden things. Now they had shape, form.

Jesus, they had horns.

It was the shock, he decided, a delayed reaction to all that he had endured the evening before. He pulled up within sight of Proctor’s cabin and waited for him to emerge, but there was no sign. Proctor’s truck was parked over to the right. Under ordinary circumstances, Tobias would have hit the horn and rousted the old bastard, but it wouldn’t have done to blast the woods, particularly not since Proctor had a neighbor who might be tempted to come and take a look at what all the noise was about.

Tobias killed the engine and climbed down from the cab. His burned hand felt damp beneath the bandages, and he knew that the wounds were seeping. The only consolation for the pain and humiliation was the knowledge that payback would not be long in coming. The wetbacks had crossed the wrong people.

He walked up to the cabin and called Proctor’s name, but there was still no response from inside. He knocked on the door.

‘Hey, Harold, wake up,’ he called. ‘It’s Joel.’

Only then did he try the door. Even so, he was careful, and slow. Proctor slept with a gun close by, and Tobias didn’t want him coming out of a drunk’s sleep and loosing a couple of shots at a suspected intruder.

It was empty. Even in the gloom created by the mismatched drapes, he could see that. He hit the lightswitch and took in the unmade bed, the wrecked television and the demolished phone, the laundry spilling from a basket in the corner, and the smell of neglect, of a man who had let himself go. To his right was the kitchen-cum-living room. Tobias saw what it contained, and swore. Proctor had lost it, the asshole.

The remaining crates and boxes, the ones that were supposed to stay hidden in rooms 11, 12, 14 and 15, were stacked almost to the ceiling, visible to anyone who might just happen to stick a nose into Proctor’s place to see what was going on. The crazy old bastard had hauled them up here by himself instead of waiting for Tobias to come and take them off his hands. He hadn’t even bothered closing most of them. The stone face of a woman stared out of one; another contained more of the seals, their gemstones glittering as Tobias approached.

Worst of all, on the kitchen table, entirely unconcealed, stood a gold box, about two feet long, two feet wide, and a foot deep, its lid comparatively plain apart from a series of concentric circles radiating from a small spike. There was Arabic lettering along the margins, and its sides were decorated with intertwined bodies: twisted, distended figures with horns protruding from their heads.

Just like the figures I imagined in the motel rooms, thought Tobias. He had helped to move the box on that first night, recalling how they had opened the lead casket in which it was contained, revealing it to the flashlights. The gold had gleamed dully; later, Bernie Kramer, who came from a family of jewelers, would tell him that the box had recently been cleaned. There were traces of paint still visible, as though it had once been disguised to hide its true value. He had barely glanced at it then, for there were so many other artifacts to take in, and adrenalin was still coursing through his body in the aftermath of the fight. He hadn’t even seen the sides until now, just the top. There was no way that he could have known about the creatures carved into it, no way that he could have pictured them so clearly in his mind.

Warily, he approached the box. Three of its sides were sealed with twin locking devices shaped like spiders, with a single large spider lock on the front: seven locks in all. He heard that Kramer had tried to open it, but hadn’t been able to figure out how the mechanisms worked. They had discussed the possibility of breaking the box open to see what it contained, but wiser counsel had prevailed. A bribe was paid, and the box was x-rayed. It was found to be not one box but a series of interconnected boxes, each of the interior boxes having only three sides, the fourth in every case being one of the walls of the larger box surrounding it, but every box still appeared to have seven locks, only the arrangement of them differing slightly, the locks themselves growing smaller and smaller. Seven boxes, seven locks on each, forty-nine locks in total. It was a puzzle contraption, and it was empty apart from what the radiographer identified as fragments of bone, wrapped in what appeared to be wire, each wire connected in turn to the locks on the boxes. It might have looked like a bomb on the x-ray, but the box, Kramer had suggested, was a reliquary of some kind. He had also translated the Arabic writing on the lid. Ashrab min Damhum: ‘I will drink their blood.’ It was decided that the box should remain intact, the locks unbroken.

Now they were so close, and Proctor had almost blown it for them. Well, Proctor could stay out here and drink himself to death as far as Tobias was concerned. He’d said that he didn’t care about his cut of the final total, just wanted the stuff gone, and Tobias was happy to stick to that arrangement.

It took him more than an hour to get everything into the rig. Two of the pieces of statuary were particularly heavy. He had to use the dolly, and even then it was a struggle.

He left the gold box until last. As he was lifting it from the table, he thought that he felt something shift inside. Carefully, he tipped it, listening for any sign of movement, but there was nothing. The bone fragments, he knew, were slotted into holes carved in the metal, and held in place with the wire. Anyway, what he had felt was not a piece of bone moving, but an identifiable change in the distribution of the weight from right to left, as though an animal were crawling inside.

Then it was gone, and the box felt normal again. Not empty, exactly, but not as though anything had come loose. He carried it to the rig and placed it beside a pair of wall carvings. The interior was a mess of animal feed and torn sacks, but he’d done his best to clean it up. Most of the sacks had been salvageable and they were now serving as additional packing for the artifacts. He’d have to come up with a story, and compensation, for the customer in South Portland, but he could manage both. He locked the box trailer and climbed into the cab. He backed the rig carefully toward the forest in order to turn back on to the road. He was now facing the motel. He wondered if Proctor was down there. After all, his truck wasn’t gone, which meant that Proctor shouldn’t have been gone either. Something might have happened to him. He could have taken a fall.

Then Tobias thought again of the treasures left in open view in Proctor’s cabin, and the effort of moving them alone into the trailer, and the pain in his hands and face that had begun to return, and of Karen waiting for him back home, Karen with her smooth, unblemished skin, and her firm breasts, and her soft, red lips. The urge to see her, to take her, came to him so strongly that he almost wavered on his feet.

To hell with Proctor, he thought. Let him rot.

As he drove south, he felt no guilt at not searching the motel, at the possibility that he might have abandoned an injured man to death in a deserted motel, a veteran who had served his country just as he had served it. It did not strike him that such an action was not in his nature, for his thoughts and desires were elsewhere, and his nature was already changing. In truth, it had been changing ever since he had first set eyes on the box, and his willingness to countenance the killing of Jandreau and the torture of the detective was simply another aspect of it, but now the pace of that change was about to accelerate greatly. Only once, as he passed Augusta, did he feel discomfited. There was a sound in his head like waves breaking, as of the sea calling to the shore. It troubled him at first, but as the miles rolled by beneath him he began to find it soothing, even soporific. He no longer wanted that drink. He just wanted Karen. He would take her, and then he would sleep.

The road unspooled before him, and the sea sang softly in his head: breaking, hissing.

Whispering.

13

The Rojas warehouse stood on the northern outskirts of Lewiston. It had formerly been a bakery owned by the same family for half a century, and the family name, Bunder, was still visible, written in faded white paint, across the front of the building. The company’s slogan – ‘Bunder – the Wonder Bread!’ – used to run on local radio, sung to a tune not a million miles removed from that of the TV serial Champion the Wonder Horse. Franz Bunder, the father figure of the business in every way, had come up with the idea of using the tune himself, and neither he, nor the gentlemen responsible for creating the ad, bothered to concern themselves greatly with issues such as copyright or royalties. Given that the ad was only heard in eastern Maine, and no aggrieved fans of black-and-white horse dramas had ever complained, the tune remained in use until Bunder’s Bakery eventually baked its last loaf, forced out of business by the big boys in the early eighties long before people began to understand the value to a community of small, family-run operations.

Antonio Rojas, known to most of those in his ambit by his preferred pseudonym of Raul, could never be accused of making a similar mistake, for his business was entirely dependent on family, near and extended, and he was acutely aware of his links to the larger community, since it bought pot, cocaine, heroin, and, more recently, crystal meth from him, for which he was very grateful. Methamphetamine was the mostly widely abused narcotic in the state, both as powder and ‘ice,’ and Rojas had been quick to realize its profit potential, especially since its addictiveness guaranteed a greedy, and constantly expanding, market. He was further aided by the popularity of the Mexican variety of the drug, which meant that he was able to tap into his own connections south of the border instead of relying on local two-man meth labs which, even if they could source the raw materials, including ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, could rarely maintain the long-term consistency of supply that an operation like Rojas’s required. Instead, Rojas had it transported by road from Mexico, and now supplied not only Maine but the adjacent New England states. When necessary, he could call upon the smaller operations to boost his own supply. He tolerated these labs as long as they didn’t threaten him, and he made sure that they were taxed accordingly.

Rojas was also careful not to alienate any of his competitors. The Dominican cartels controlled the heroin trade in the state, and their operation was the most professional, so Rojas was scrupulous about buying wholesale from them whenever possible instead of cutting them out entirely and risking reprisals. The Dominicans also had their own meth business, but Rojas had organized a sit-down years before and together they had hammered out an agreement about spheres of influence to which everyone had so far adhered. Cocaine was a relatively open market, and Rojas dealt mainly in crack, which addicts preferred because it was simpler to use. Similarly, illegal pharmaceuticals from Canada represented pretty easy money, and there was a ready market for Viagra, Percocet, Vicodin, and ‘kicker,’ or OxyContin. So: coke and pharmaceuticals were in play for everyone, the Dominicans kept their heroin, Rojas looked after meth and marijuana, and everyone was happy.

Well, nearly everyone. The motorcycle gangs were another matter. Rojas tended to leave them alone. If they wanted to sell meth, or anything else, then God bless them and vaya con Diós, amigos. In Maine, the bikers had a big cut of the marijuana market, so Rojas was careful to sell his product, mainly BC bud, out of state. Screwing with the bikers was time-consuming, dangerous, and ultimately counterproductive. As far as Rojas was concerned, the bikers were crazy, and the only people who argued with crazies were other crazies.

Still, the bikers were a known quantity, and they could be factored into the overall equation so that equilibrium was maintained. Equilibrium was important, and in that he and Jimmy Jewel, whose transport links Rojas had long used, and who was a minority shareholder in some of Rojas’s business ventures, were of one mind. Without it, there was the potential for bloodshed, and for attracting the attention of the law.

Recently, though, Rojas had become concerned about a number of issues, including the prospect of forces beyond his control impacting upon his business. Rojas was linked by blood to the small but ambitious La Familia cartel, and La Familia was currently engaged in an escalating war, not merely with its rival cartels, but with the Mexican government of President Felipe Calderón. It meant a definite end to what had been termed the ‘Pax Mafiosa,’ a gentleman’s agreement between the government and the cartels to desist from actions against one another as long as movement of the product remained unaffected.

Rojas had not become a drug dealer in order to start an insurrection against anyone. He had become a drug dealer to get rich, and his ties by marriage to La Familia, and his status as a naturalized US citizen thanks to his now deceased engineer father, had made him eminently suited to his present role. La Familia ’s main problem, as far as Rojas was concerned, was its spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno González, also known, with some justification, as El Más Loco, or the Craziest One. While quite content to accept some of El Más Loco’s rulings, such as the ban on the sale of drugs within its home territory, which had no effect on his own operations, Rojas was of the opinion that spiritual leaders had no place in drug cartels. El Más Loco required his dealers and killers to refrain from alcohol, to the extent that he had set up a network of rehab centers from which La Familia actively recruited those who managed to abide by its rules. A couple of these converts had even been forced on Rojas, although he had managed to sideline them by sending them to BC to act as liaisons with the Canadian bud growers. Let the Canucks deal with them, and if the young killers suffered an unfortunate accident somewhere along the way, well, Rojas would smooth any ruffled feathers over a couple of beers, for Rojas liked his beer.

El Más Loco also seemed prepared to indulge, even encourage, what was, in Rojas’s opinion, an unfortunate taste for the theatrical: in 2006, a member of La Familia had walked into a nightclub in Uruapán and dumped five severed heads on the dance floor. Rojas didn’t approve of theatrics. He had learned from many years in the US that the less attention one attracted, the easier it was to do business. More over, he regarded his cousins in the south as barbarians who had forgotten how to behave like ordinary men, if they had ever truly known how to conduct themselves with discretion. He did his best to avoid visiting Mexico unless it was absolutely necessary, preferring to leave such matters to one of his trusted underlings. By now, he found the sight of los narcos in their big hats and ostrich leather boots absurd, even comical, and their predilection for beheadings and torture belonged to another time. He was also under increasing pressure through his trucking connections to facilitate the movement of weapons, easily acquired in the gun stores of Texas and Arizona, across the border. As far as Rojas was concerned, it could only be a matter of time before he became a target for La Familia ’s rivals or the DEA. Neither eventuality appealed to him.

Rojas’s problems had been compounded by the global financial recession. He had squirreled away a considerable amount of money, both cash to which he was entitled by virtue of his role in La Familia ’s operations, and some to which he was not. Even in the early days, he had invested funds in shell banks in Montserrat, internationally notorious for being almost all entirely fraudulent, and willing and able to launder money. His ‘bankers’ had operated out of a bar in Plymouth, until the FBI began putting pressure on Montserrat’s government, and they had been forced to transfer their operations to Antigua. There it was business as usual under the two Bird administrations, father and son, until the US government again began applying pressure. Unfortunately, Rojas had discovered too late one of the downsides of investing with fraudulent banks: they had a tendency to commit fraud, and their customers were usually the ones who suffered. Rojas’s principal banker was currently languishing in a maximum security prison, and Rojas’s investments, carefully funneled offshore over two decades, were now worth about twenty-five percent of what they should have been. He wanted an out, before he ended up dead or in prison which, for him, would be the same thing, as his life expectancy would be measured in hours once he was behind bars. If his rivals didn’t get him, his own people would kill him to keep him quiet.

He wanted to run, but he needed a big score before he could do so. Now, it seemed, Jimmy Jewel might just have given him that opportunity. He had already spoken with the old smuggler twice that day, initially to inform him of what had been found in the rig, then after Rojas had sent him photographs of the items in question. Neither Rojas nor Jimmy trusted email, as they knew what the feds were capable of when it came to surveillance. The solution they had come up with was to establish a free email account to which only they had the password. Emails would be written, but never sent. Instead, they were stored as drafts, where they could be read by one man or the other without ever attracting the attention of federal snoopers. After viewing the items, Jimmy had counseled caution until they evaluated precisely what they were dealing with. He would make inquiries, Jimmy told Rojas. Just keep the stuff safe.

Jimmy was as good as his word. He had contacts everywhere, and it didn’t take long for the items to be identified as ancient cylinder seals from Mesopotamia. Rojas, who was not usually interested in such details, had listened in fascination as Jimmy told him that the seals in his possession dated from about 2500 BC, or the Sumerian Early Dynastic Period, whatever that was. They were used to authenticate documents, as testaments of ownership, and also as amulets of luck, healing, and power, which appealed to Rojas. Jimmy told him that the caps at the end appeared to be gold, and the precious stones inset on the caps were emeralds and rubies and diamonds, but Rojas hadn’t needed Jimmy’s help to figure out what gold and precious stones looked like.

In the course of their second conversation, which had just ended, Jimmy had also told Rojas that the gentleman with whom he had spoken had predicted huge interest among wealthy collectors for the seals, and furious bidding could be anticipated. The expert also believed that he knew the source of the items: similar seals had been among the treasures looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad shortly after the invasion, which offered some clue as to how they might have come to be in the possession of an ex-soldier turned truck driver. The problem for Jimmy and Rojas lay in getting rid of the seals that Rojas wanted to sell as his ‘tax’ on the operation before the authorities realized that he had them and came knocking on his door.

But much as Rojas liked Jimmy Jewel, he was not about to trust him entirely. It was he, Rojas, who had taken the risk in hijacking the truck. He wanted to ensure that he was compensated appropriately for it, and he also wanted an independent assessment of the worth of the seals. He had already prized the gold and gemstones from two seals, and had them valued: even allowing for the middleman, and the fact that they couldn’t be disposed of on the open market, he was 200,000 dollars in profit from taking down the truck driver. He had experienced only a slight pang of regret when Jimmy had told him that the seals were much more valuable intact, so that by destroying them he had sacrificed four or five times as much money again, at the very least. The destruction of such ancient artifacts did not disturb Rojas unduly, for he knew how to make money from gold and precious stones, while the market for old seals, however valuable, was significantly smaller and more specialized. Rojas was now wondering how many other such seals or similar items the driver named Tobias and his associates might have in their possession. He didn’t like the idea that they might possibly have been running such goods through what he regarded as his territory without anyone suspecting, at least not until Jimmy Jewel became involved.

The upper floor of the Bunder warehouse had been converted into a loft apartment by Rojas. He had kept the brick walls, and had furnished it in a determinedly masculine style: leather, dark woods, and hand-woven rugs. There was a huge plasma screen TV in one corner, but Rojas rarely watched it. Neither did he entertain women here, preferring to use a bedroom in one of the houses nearby, all of which were owned by members of his family. Even meetings were conducted in venues other than his loft. This was his space, and he valued the solitude that it offered.

There were bunks on the floor below, and couches and chairs, and a TV that always seemed to be showing Mexican soap operas or soccer games. There was also a galley kitchen, and at any one time at least four armed men were in attendance. The floor of Rojas’s loft had been soundproofed, so he was barely aware of their presence. Even so, his men tended to keep conversation to a minimum, and the volume on the TV low, in order not to disturb their leader.

Now, seated at a table, an anglepoise lamp adjusted so that it shone its light directly over his shoulder, Rojas examined one of the remaining seals, tracing the lettering carved upon it and allowing the rubies and emeralds embedded in it to reflect red and green shards of light upon his skin. He had no intention of handing all of the undamaged seals back to Tobias and whomever else might be involved in their operation; he never had, and he already had plans for a number of the gemstones. For the first time, though, he considered holding on to some of the intact seals for himself, and not damaging them or selling them on. Everything in his loft had been bought new, and although it was all beautiful, it was also anonymous. There was nothing distinctive about it, nothing that could not have been acquired by any man with a modicum of money and taste. But these, these were different. He looked to his left, where there was a fireplace topped by a stone mantel, and imagined the seals resting on the granite. He could have a stand made for them. No, better still, he would carve one himself, for he had always been skilled with his hands.

The mantel already housed a shrine to Jesús Malverde, the Mexican Robin Hood and patron saint of drug dealers. The statue of Malverde, with its mustache and white shirt, bore a certain resemblance to the Mexican matinee idol Pedro Infante, even though Malverde had been killed by police in 1909, thirty years before Pedro was born. Rojas believed that Jesús Malverde would approve of the seals being laid beside him, and might smile in turn upon Rojas’s operations.

Thus ‘could’ became ‘would’, and the decision was made to keep the seals.

14

The room was almost entirely circular, as though set in a tower, and lined with books from floor to ceiling. It was perhaps forty feet in diameter, and dominated by an old banker’s desk lit by a green-shaded lamp. Nearby was a more modern source of illumination, stainless steel and hinged, with a light source that could be adjusted to a pinpoint. Beside it lay a magnifying glass and assorted tools: tiny blades, callipers, picks, and brushes. Reference volumes were piled one on top of another, their pages marked with lengths of colored ribbon. Photographs and drawings spilled from files. The floor itself was a maze of books and papers set in piles that seemed forever on the verge of collapsing, yet did not, a labyrinth of arcane knowledge through which only one man knew the true path.

The bookshelves, some of them seeming to bend slightly at the center beneath the weight of their volumes, had been pressed into service for other purposes as well. In front of the books, some leather-bound, some new, there were statues, ancient and pitted, and fragments of pottery, mostly Etruscan, although, curiously, no undamaged items; Iron Age tools, and Bronze Age jewelry; and, littered among the other relics like curious bugs, dozens of Egyptian scarabs.

There was not a speck of dust to be found on anything in the room, and there were no windows to look out upon the old Massachusetts village below. The only light came from the lamps, and the walls absorbed all noise. Despite some modern appliances, among them a small laptop computer discreetly set on a side table, there was a timelessness about this place, a sense that, were one to open the single oak door that led from the study to elsewhere, one would be confronted with darkness and stars above and below, as though the room were suspended in space.

At the great desk sat Herod, a fragment of a clay tablet before him. Pressed to one eye was a jeweler’s glass, through which Herod was examining a cuneiform symbol etched into the slab. It was the Sumerians who had first created and used the cuneiform writing system, which was soon adopted by neighboring tribes, most particularly the Akkadians, Semitic speakers who dwelt to the north of the Sumerians. With the ascendancy of the Akkadian dynasty in 2300 BC, Sumerian went into decline, eventually becoming a dead language used only for literary purposes, while Akkadian continued to flourish for two thousand years, eventually evolving into Babylonian and Assyrian.

Aside from the damage to the tablet over time, the difficulty facing Herod in determining the precise meaning of the logogram that he was examining lay in the difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Sumerian is agglutinative, which means that phonetically unchanging words and particles are joined together to form phrases. Akkadian, meanwhile, is inflectional, so that a basic root can be modified to create words with different, if related, meanings by adding vowels, suffixes, and prefixes. Thus Sumerian logographic signs, if used in Akkadian, would not convey the same exact meaning, while the same sign could, depending upon context, mean different words, a linguistic trait known as polyvalency. To avoid confusion, Akkadian used some signs for their phonetic values instead of their meanings in order to reproduce correct inflections. Akkadian also inherited homophony from Sumerian, the capacity of different signs to represent the same sound. Combined with a script that had between seven hundred and eight hundred signs, it meant that Akkadian was incredibly complex to translate. Clearly, the tablet was making reference to a god of the netherworld, but which god?

Herod loved such challenges. He was an extraordinary man. Largely self-educated, he had been fascinated by ancient things since childhood, with a preference for dead civilizations and near-forgotten languages. For many years, he had dabbled without purpose in such matters, a gifted amateur, until death changed him.

His death.

The computer beeped softly to Herod’s right. Herod did not like to keep the laptop on his work desk. It seemed to him wrong to mix the ancient and the modern in this way, even if the computer made some of his tasks immeasurably easier than they might once have been. Herod still liked to work with paper and pen, with books and manuscripts. Whatever he needed to know was contained in one of the many volumes in this room, or stored somewhere in his mind, of which the library in which he toiled was a physical representation.

Under ordinary circumstances, Herod would not have abandoned such a delicate task to answer an email, but his system was set up to alert him to messages from a number of specific contacts, for access to Herod was carefully regulated. The message that had just arrived came from a most trusted source, and had been sent to his priority box. Herod removed the eyeglass and tapped the Perspex lightly with the tip of a finger, like a player forced to leave the chessboard at a crucial moment, as if to say, ‘We are not done here. Eventually, you will yield to me.’ He stood and made his way carefully between the towers of paper and books until he reached the computer.

The message opened to reveal a series of high-resolution images depicting a cylindrical seal, its caps inset with precious stones. The seal had been laid upon a piece of black felt, then moved slightly for each photograph so that every part of it was revealed. Particular details – the jewels, a perfectly rendered carving of a king upon a throne – had been photographed in closeup.

Herod felt his heart beat faster. He drew closer to the screen, squinting at what he saw, then printed off all of the images and took them back to his desk, where he examined them again through a magnifying glass. When he was done, he made the call. The woman answered almost immediately, as he knew she would, her voice cracked and old, a fitting instrument for the withered old hag that she was. Nevertheless, she had been in the antique business for a long time, and had never yet led Herod astray. Their natures were also similar, although her malevolence was merely a dull echo of Herod’s own capacities.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘I don’t have it. It was brought to me, and I was asked to offer an opinion on its value.’

‘Who brought it to you?’

‘A Mexican. He calls himself Raul, but his real name is Antonio Rojas. He works closely with a man named, ironically, Jimmy Jewel, who is based in Portland, Maine. Rojas told me that there were other seals; a number, regrettably, have been destroyed.’

‘Destroyed?’

‘Taken apart for their gold and gemstones. The fragments, too, he showed to me. It was all that I could do not to cry.’

Under ordinary circumstances, Herod would also have mourned the annihilation of such a beautiful object, but there were other seals, and such treasures were not unique. What he wished to find was immeasurably more valuable.

‘And you believe that this is linked to what I seek?’

‘According to the catalog, it was stored in Locker 5. Other, less valuable seals from Locker 5 were found at the scene of the warehouse killings, along with the lock from the lead storage box.’

‘Where did this Raul get the seals?’ said Herod.

‘He wouldn’t say, but he is not a collector. He is a criminal, a drug dealer. I’ve facilitated him in the past with the sale of certain items, which is why he came to me. If he really has other seals, then my guess is that he stole them, or took them in payment of a debt. Either way, he has no idea of their true value.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I would make inquiries and get back to him. He gave me two days. Otherwise, he threatened to cut out the jewels on the remaining seals and sell them.’

Despite his priorities, Herod hissed in disapproval, and he found himself already despising the man who had uttered the threat. So much the better. It would make what he would have to do next even easier.

‘You’ve done very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll be amply rewarded.’

‘Thank you. Do you want me to find out more about Raul?’

‘Naturally, but be discreet.’

Herod hung up the phone. His earlier tiredness began to fade. This was important. He had been searching for so long, and now it seemed that he might be closing in on that which he sought: myth given form.

He felt an old man’s urge to visit the bathroom, so he left his library, breaking its bubble of solitude, and walked through the living room into his bedroom. He always used the master bath, never the main bathroom, because it was easier to clean. He stood over the toilet, his eyes closed, feeling the welcome release. Such a small pleasure, yet not one to be underestimated. His body was betraying him in so many ways that he felt a sense of elation at the minor triumph of an organ that functioned properly.

As the sound of the last trickle faded, Herod opened his eyes and regarded himself in the mirrored wall of the bathroom. The wound on his mouth tormented him. The surgeons wanted to try again to remove the necrotic tissue, and he would have no choice but to acquiesce. Yet they had failed before, just as the chemotherapy had not arrested the metastasizing of his cells. He was being eaten alive, inside and out. A lesser man would have succumbed by now, would have chosen to end it all, but Herod had a purpose. He had been promised a reward: an end to his suffering, and a visitation of greater suffering on others in turn. That promise had been made to him when he died, and upon his return to this life he had commenced his great search, and his collection had begun to grow.

He sighed, and buttoned himself up. No zippers for him. He was a man of older tastes. One of the buttons was giving him trouble, so he looked down as he struggled to slip it through its hole.

When he glanced back at the mirror, he had no eyes.

Herod had died on September 14th, 2003. His heart had stopped during an operation to remove a diseased kidney, the first of the fruitless attempts to stall the progress of his cancers. Later, the surgeons would describe the occurrence as extraordinary, even inexplicable. Herod’s heart should not have ceased beating, yet it did. They had fought to save him, to bring him back, and they had succeeded. A chaplain visited him while he was recovering in the ICU, inquiring if Herod wanted to talk, or to pray. Herod shook his head.

‘They tell me that your heart stopped on the operating table,’ said the priest. He was in his fifties, overweight and red-faced, with kind, twinkling eyes. ‘You’ve died and returned. Not many men can say they’ve done that.’

He smiled, but Herod did not smile back. His voice was weak, and his chest hurt as he spoke.

‘Are you trying to find out what’s beyond the grave, priest?’ he said, and even in the man’s weakened state, the chaplain detected the hostility in his voice. ‘It was like dark water closing over my head, like a pillow suffocating me. I felt it coming, and I knew. There is nothing beyond this life. Nothing. Are you happy now?’

The priest stood.

‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ he said. He was untroubled by the man’s venom. He had heard worse before, and his faith was strong. Strangely, too, he had the sense that the patient, Herod – and from where did such a name originate, or was it chosen as some bleak joke? – was lying. It was most peculiar, yet with it came another realization. If Herod was lying, the priest did not want to know the truth. Not that truth. Not Herod’s truth.

Herod watched the priest go, then closed his eyes and prepared to relive the moment of his own death.

There was light. It shone red against his eyelids. He opened his eyes.

He was lying on the operating table. There was an open wound in his side, but it gave him no pain. He touched his fingers to it, and they came away bloody. He looked around, but the theater was empty. No, not merely empty: it was abandoned, and had been for some time. From where he lay, he could see rust upon the instruments, and dust and filth upon the tiles and the steel trays. A clicking noise came from his right, and he watched as a cockroach skittered into hiding. He was lying in a pool of light that came from the great lamp that burned above the table, but a gentler illumination rippled around the walls of the theater, although he could not detect its source.

He sat up, then placed his feet on the floor. There was a bad smell, the stink of decay. He felt the dust between his toes, and looked down. There were no other footprints to be seen. He saw that the sinks to his right were stained brown with dried blood. He turned the faucet. No water came, but he heard sounds coming from the pipes. They echoed around the room, making him uneasy. He turned the faucet back to its previous position, and the sounds ceased.

Only when the noise from the pipes disturbed the quiet did he realize just how deep was the silence. He pushed through the theater doors, barely pausing to take in the deserted prep area. Here, too, the sinks were stained with blood, but it had also splashed on the floor and the walls, a great gusher that seemed to have come from the sinks themselves, as though the pipes had spit back all of the fluids that had been washed into them over time. The mirrors above the sinks were almost entirely obscured by the dried blood, but he caught a glimpse of himself in a dusty but otherwise unmarked spot. He looked pale, and there were yellow stains around his mouth but, the hole in his side apart, he appeared well. He still could not understand why there was no pain.

There should be pain. I want pain. Pain will confirm that I am alive and not…

Dead? Is this death?

He walked on. The corridor beyond the theater was empty but for a pair of wheelchairs, and the nurses’ station was deserted. Each ward room that he passed contained an unmade bed, filthy sheets tossed aside or trailing across the floor, pulled from beneath the mattress where-

Where the patients had resisted being dragged away, he thought, clinging to the sheets in a last effort to prevent what was about to occur. It resembled a hospital evacuated during wartime and never reoccupied, or perhaps one that had been in the process of moving its patients when the opposing forces had arrived, and the slaughter had begun. But if that was so, where were the bodies? Herod thought of the images from old news footage of the Second World War, of villages purged by the Nazis, littered with the scattered remains of the dead like broken crows dotting a highway on a warm, still day; of pale forms in camp pits lying on top of one another like figures from the nightmares of Bosch.

Bodies. Where were the bodies?

He turned a corner. A pair of elevator doors stood open, the shaft gaping emptily. He peered down cautiously, holding on to the wall for support. He could see nothing for a moment, only blackness, but as he prepared to withdraw he was certain that, far below, there was movement. The faintest scratching carried up to him, and there was a smear of gray in the dark, like a brush stroke on a black canvas. He tried to speak, to call for help, but no sound came from his lips. He was mute, struck dumb, and yet, in the depths of the elevator shaft, the presence below arrested its progress, and he felt its regard as an itch upon his face.

Softly, quietly, he stepped back, as behind him the lights in the corridor extinguished themselves, throwing the path that he had followed into shadow. What did it matter, he thought? What was there to go back to? He should continue searching. Yet even as he made the decision, the lights to his rear continued to go out, forcing him to go forward if he was not to find himself trapped in the gloom, and as he walked the darkness pressed against his back, urging him on. He thought that he heard movement behind him, but he did not look over his shoulder for fear that those gray smears might assume a more concrete form of tooth and claw.

The environs of the hospital grew older as he walked. The institutional paint faded and began flaking, until only bare walls remained. Tiles became wood. There was no longer glass in the doors. Instruments glimpsed in treatment rooms appeared cruder, more primitive. Operating tables were reduced to blocks of scarred and pitted wood, buckets of stinking water at their feet to sluice the blood from them. All that he saw spoke of pain both ancient and eternal, testament to the fragility of the body and the limits of its endurance.

At last he came to a pair of crude wooden doors that stood open to admit him. Inside was a light, slight and flickering. Behind him, the darkness encroached, and all that it contained.

He stepped through the doors.

The room, or what he could see of it, was empty of furniture. Its walls and ceiling were invisible to him, lost in shadow, but he imagined his surroundings as impossibly high and immeasurably wide. Still, he felt claustrophobic and constrained. He wanted to go back, to leave this place, but there was nowhere to which to return. The doors behind him had closed, and he could no longer see them. There was only the light: a hurricane lamp placed on the dirt floor in which a flame burned faintly.

The light, and what was illuminated by it.

At first he thought it a shapeless mass, an accumulation of detritus brushed into a pile and forgotten. Then, as he drew closer, he saw that it was covered in cobwebs, the threads so old that they were coated in dust, forming a blanket of strands that almost entirely obscured what lay beneath. It was much larger than a man, although it shared a man’s form. Herod could discern the muscles in its legs and the curvature of its spine, although its face was hidden from him, sunk deep into its chest, its arms flung over its head in an effort to shield itself from some impending hurt.

Then, as though slowly becoming aware of his presence, the figure moved, like an insect in its pupal shell, the arms lowering, the head beginning to turn. Herod’s senses were suddenly flooded with words and images-

books, statues, drawings

(a box)

– and in that moment his purpose became clear.

Suddenly, Herod’s body arched as the wound in his side was violated. It was followed by a violent convulsion. He saw

light

and heard

voices.

Before him, the patina of cobwebs was broken, and a thin finger emerged, topped by a sharp nail ingrained with dirt. The shock came again; longer now, more painful. His eyes were open, and there was something plastic in his mouth. There were masked faces above him, only the eyes visible. There were hands on his heart, and a voice was speaking to him, softly and insistently, talking of grave secrets, of things that must be done, and before his resurrection it spoke his name and told him that it would find him again, and he would know it when it came.

Now, as he stepped back from the bathroom mirror, the reflection remained in place, a featureless, eyeless mask hanging behind the glass, before it found its place above the collar of an old checked suit like a fairground barker’s, a red bow tie knotted tightly at the neck of a yellow shirt decorated with balloons.

Herod gazed, and he knew, and he was not afraid.

‘Oh Captain!’ he whispered. ‘Oh Captain! my Captain…’

15

The city was changing, but then it was in the nature of cities to change: perhaps it was just that I was getting older, and had already seen too much fall away to be entirely comfortable with the closure of restaurants and stores that I had known. The transformation of Portland from a city that was struggling not to drop into Casco Bay and sink to the bottom into one that was now thriving, artistic, and safe had begun in earnest at the start of the 1970s, funded largely with federal money through the kind of pork-barrel appropriations that are frowned upon by pretty much everyone except those profiting by them. Congress Street got brick sidewalks, the Old Port was rejuvenated, and the Municipal Airport became the International Jetport, which at least had the benefit of sounding futuristic, even if, for most of the last decade, you couldn’t fly direct to Canada from Portland, let alone anywhere that wasn’t part of the contiguous land mass, making the ‘International’ part largely superfluous.

Some of the gloss had gone from the Old Port in recent years. Exchange Street, one of the loveliest streets in the city, was in transition. Books Etc. was gone, Emerson Books was about to close due to the retirement of its owners, and soon only Longfellow Books would be left in the Old Port. Walter’s restaurant, where I had eaten with both Susan, my late wife, and Rachel, the mother of my second child, had shut its doors in preparation for a move to Union Street.

But Congress Street was still flying the flag for weirdness and eccentricity, like a little fragment of Austin, Texas, transported to the northeast. There was now a decent pizzeria, Otto, offering slices late into the night, and the various galleries and used bookstores, vinyl outlets and fossil stores, had been augmented by a comic book emporium and a new bookstore, Green Hand, that boasted a museum of cryptozoology in its back room, which was enough to gladden the heart of anybody with a taste for the bizarre.

Well, nearly anybody.

‘What the fuck is cryptozoology?’ asked Louis as we sat in Monument Square, drinking wine and watching the world go by. Today, Louis was wearing Dolce & Gabbana: a black three-button suit, white shirt, no tie. Even though his voice was not loud, an elderly woman eating soup outside the restaurant to our left looked at Louis disapprovingly. I had to admire her courage. Most people tended not to give Louis looks of any kind other than fear or envy. He was tall, and black, and quite lethal.

‘My apologies,’ said Louis, nodding to her. ‘I didn’t mean to use inappropriate words.’ He turned back to me, then said: ‘What the fuck is whatever it was you said?’

‘Cryptozoology,’ I explained. ‘It’s the science of creatures that may or may not exist, like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘The Loch Ness Monster is dead,’ said Angel.

Today, Angel was wearing tattered jeans, no-name sneakers in red and silver, and a virulently green t-shirt promoting a bar that had closed down sometime during the Kennedy era. Unlike his partner in love and life, Angel tended to provoke responses that varied between bemusement and outright concern that he might be color-blind. Angel was also lethal, although not quite as lethal as Louis. But then, that was true of most people, as well as most varieties of poisonous snake.

‘I read it somewhere,’ Angel continued. ‘This expert who was looking for it for years and years, he decided that it had died.’

‘Yeah, like two hundred and fifty million years ago,’ said Louis. ‘’Course it’s dead. The fuck else would it be?’

Angel shook his head in the manner of one faced with a child who can’t grasp a simple concept. ‘No, it died recently. Until then, it was still alive.’

Louis stared hard at his partner for a long time, then said: ‘You know, I think we need to set a limit on the conversations you can join in with.’

‘Like in a churrascaría,’ I offered. ‘We could turn up a green symbol when you can speak, and a red one when you have to sit quietly and digest whatever it is you’ve just heard.’

‘I hate you guys,’ said Angel.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘You don’t respect me.’

‘Well, that is true,’ I admitted. ‘But, then, we really have no reason to.’

Angel thought about this before conceding that I had a point. We moved on to the subject of my sex life which, although apparently endlessly entertaining to Angel, didn’t detain us for long.

‘What about that cop, the one who’d started coming into the Bear? Cagney?’

‘Macy.’

‘Yeah, her.’

Sharon Macy was pretty and dark, and she’d certainly been sending out signals of interest, but I had still been trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that Rachel and our daughter were now going to be living in Vermont, and that my relationship with Rachel was effectively over.

‘It was too soon,’ I said.

‘There’s no such thing as “too soon,”’ said Louis. ‘There’s just “too late,” and then there’s “dead.”’

A trio of young men in loose-fitting jeans, oversized t-shirts, and fresh-out-of-the-box sneakers oozed along Congress like algae on the surface of a pond, heading for the bars on Fore Street. They had ‘out of town’ written all over them – well, written anywhere that wasn’t already occupied by a brand, or the name of a rapper. One, God help us, even wore a retro Black Power t-shirt, complete with clenched fist, even though they were all so white they made Pee Wee Herman look like Malcolm X.

Beside us, two men were eating burgers and minding their own business. One of them wore a discreet rainbow triangle on the collar of his jacket, and a ‘Vote No on I’ badge beneath it, a reference to the impending proposition intended to overturn the possibility of gay marriage in the state.

‘You gonna marry him, bitch?’ said one of the passing strangers, and his friends laughed.

The two men tried to get on with their meal.

‘Fags,’ said the same guy, clearly on a roll. He was small, but muscled up. He leaned over and took a French fry from the plate of the man with the badges, who responded with an aggrieved ‘Hey!’

‘I ain’t gonna eat it, man,’ said their tormentor. ‘Never know what I might catch from you.’

‘Burn, Rod!’ said one of his buddies, and they high-fived.

Rod tossed the fry on the ground, then turned his attention to Angel and Louis, who were watching them without expression.

‘What you looking at?’ said Rod. ‘You faggots too?’

‘No,’ said Angel. ‘I’m an undercover heterosexual.’

‘And I’m really white,’ said Louis.

‘He is really white,’ I confirmed. ‘Takes him hours to put on his makeup before he can leave the house.’

Rod looked confused. His face fell into the appropriate expression without too much effort, so it probably wasn’t the first time.

‘So I’m just like you,’ continued Louis, ‘because you’re not really black either. Here’s something for you to think about: all those bands on your shirts, they only tolerate you because you put money in their pockets. They’re hardcore, and they’re talking to, and about, black people. In an ideal world, they wouldn’t need you, and you’d just have to go back to listening to Bread, or Coldplay, or some other maudlin shit that white boys are humming to these days. But, for now, those guys will take your money, and if you ever wander into any of the ’hoods they emerged from, you’ll get stomped and someone will take the rest of your money as well, and maybe your sneakers too. You want me to, I can draw you a map, and you can go express your solidarity with them, see how that works out for you. Otherwise, you run along, and take Curly and Larry there with you. Go on, now: bust a move, or whatever it is you homeboys do to help you perambulate.’

‘Bread?’ I said. ‘You’re a little out of touch with popular culture, aren’t you?’

‘All that shit sounds the same,’ said Louis. ‘I’m down with the kids.’

‘Yeah, the kids from the nineteenth century.’

‘I could kick your ass,’ said Rod, feeling the urge to contribute something to the conversation. He might have been dumb enough to believe it, but the two guys behind him were smarter, which wasn’t exactly something worth putting on their business cards. Already they were trying to move Rod along.

‘Yes, you could,’ said Louis. ‘Feel better now?’

‘By the way,’ said Angel, ‘I lied. I’m not really heterosexual, although he still really isn’t black.’

I looked at Angel in surprise. ‘Hey, you never told me you were gay. I knew that, I’d never have let you adopt those children.’

‘Too late now,’ said Angel. ‘The girls are all wearing comfortable shoes, and the boys are singing show tunes.’

‘Oh, you gays and your cunning ways. You could run the world if you weren’t so busy just making things prettier.’

Rod seemed about to say something else when Louis moved. He didn’t get up from his chair, and there was nothing obviously threatening about what he did, but it was the equivalent of a dozing rattlesnake adjusting its coils in preparation for a strike, or a spider tensing in the corner of its web as it watches the fly alight. Even through his fog of alcohol and stupidity, Rod glimpsed the possibility of serious suffering at some point in the near future: not here, perhaps, on a busy street with cop cars cruising by, but later, maybe in a bar, or a restroom, or a parking lot, and it would mark him for the rest of his life.

Without another word, the three young men slipped away, and they did not look back.

‘Nicely done,’ I said to Louis. ‘What are you going to do for an encore: scowl at a puppy?’

‘Might steal a toy from a kitten,’ said Louis. ‘Put it on a high shelf.’

‘Well, you struck a blow for something there. I’m just not sure what it was.’

‘Quality of life,’ said Louis.

‘I guess.’ Beside us, the two men abandoned their burgers, left a twenty and ten on the table, and hurried away without saying a word. ‘You even frighten your own people. You probably convinced that guy to vote yes on Prop One just in case you decide to move here.’

‘With that in mind, remind us why we’re here again,’ said Angel. They had arrived barely an hour before, and their bags were still in the trunk of their car. Louis and Angel only took planes when it was absolutely necessary to do so, as airlines tended to frown on the tools of their trade. I told them everything, from my first meeting with Bennett Patchett, through the discovery of the tracking device on my car, and finished with my conversation with Ronald Straydeer and the sending of the photographs from Damien Patchett’s funeral.

‘So they know that you haven’t dropped the case?’ said Angel.

‘If the GPS tracker was working, yes. They also know that I visited Karen Emory, which may not be good for her.’

‘You warn her?’

‘I left a message on her cell phone. Another call in person might just have compounded the problem.’

‘You think they’ll come at you again?’ asked Louis.

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d have killed you the first time,’ said Louis. ‘If they figured you for the kind of guy who walks away after some amateur waterboarding, they got you all wrong.’

‘Straydeer said that they’d started out with the intention of helping wounded soldiers. It may be that killing is a last resort. The one who interrogated me said that nobody was going to be hurt by what they were doing.’

‘But he made an exception for you. Funny how folk do that where you’re concerned.’

‘Which brings us back to why you’re here.’

‘And why we’re meeting in public, on a bright summer evening. If they’re watching, you want them to know that you’re not alone.’

‘I need a couple of days. If I can get them to keep their distance, it will make life that much easier.’

‘And if they don’t keep their distance?’

‘Then you can hurt them,’ I said.

Louis raised his glass, and drank.

‘Well, here’s to not keeping one’s distance,’ he said.

We paid our check, and headed to the Grill Room on Exchange for steak, for the prospect of hurting someone always made Louis hungry.

16

Jimmy Jewel sat in his usual seat as Earle finished closing up. It was close to midnight, and the bar had been quiet all evening: a few rummies looking for a straightener after the previous night’s excesses, yet without the stamina or the funds to embark on another bender; and a pair of Masshole tourists who had taken a wrong turn and then decided to order a couple of beers while congratulating themselves on the authentic squalor of their surroundings. Unfortunately, Earle didn’t take kindly to people making unkind remarks about his working environment, especially not urban preppies who, in the good old days, would have been kissing the lid of a trash can in a back alley as atonement for their bad manners. The Massholes’ attempt to order a second round was met by a blank stare and the suggestion that they should take their business elsewhere, preferably somewhere over the state line, or even over multiple state lines.

‘You got a way with people,’ Jimmy told Earle. ‘You ought to be with the UN, helping in trouble spots.’

‘You wanted them to stay, you should have said,’ Earle replied. His face was guileless. There were times when even Jimmy didn’t know if Earle was being sincere or not. Still waters, and all that, thought Jimmy. Occasionally, Earle would pass a remark, or make an observation, and Jimmy would stop whatever he was doing as his brain struggled to process what he had just heard, forcing him to reassess Earle just when he believed that he had him figured out. Lately, it was Earle’s choice of reading material that was throwing him: he seemed to be playing catch-up with classic literature, and not just Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn either. Earlier that evening, Earle had been reading a collection by Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories. When Jimmy had questioned him about it, Earle had described the plot of the title story, something about a wealthy guy who shields his serf after they both become lost in a winter storm, so that the serf lives and the wealthy guy dies. The wealthy guy made it to heaven as a consequence, though, so that was all right.

‘Is there supposed to be a message in that?’ Jimmy had asked.

‘For whom?’

‘For whom,’ like Earle was John Houseman now.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jimmy. ‘For wealthy guys with bad consciences.’

‘I’m not a wealthy guy,’ said Earle.

‘So you’re like the other guy?’

‘I guess. I mean, I didn’t take it that way. You don’t have to be one or the other. It’s just a story.’

‘If we get caught in a blizzard, and one of us is going to die, you think I’m not going to use you like a blanket to keep warm? You think I’d take a hit for you?’

Earle had considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think you would take a hit for me. Wouldn’t be the first time, either.’

And Jimmy knew that Earle was referring to Sally Cleaver, because he had sensed it playing on Earle’s conscience ever since the detective’s first visit. Jimmy knew Earle well enough by now to recognize when that particular ghost had chosen to whisper in Earle’s ear.

‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Jimmy.

‘Maybe,’ said Earle. ‘Thing of it is, I wouldn’t let you take that hit, Mr. Jewel. I’d keep you alive, even if I had to smother you to do it.’

That sounded to Jimmy like a contradiction in terms, and he was also mildly disturbed by the image of his slender frame lost in the folds of Earle’s fleshy body. He decided that this was a conversation that they didn’t need to have again. With no further customers likely to trouble them, and with other, more pressing matters on his mind, Jimmy had told Earle to lock the door for the night.

Now the floor was swept, the glasses were clean, and the night’s meager takings were safely locked up in the safe in Jimmy’s office. A newspaper lay, half read, by Jimmy’s left hand. This was unusual, thought Earle. By now, Jimmy would usually have dispensed with the paper entirely, even down to the crossword, but today he had seemed distracted, and he was currently staring at the pencil that lay on the bar before him, as though expecting it to move of its own volition and provide him with the answers that he sought.

Jimmy was right about Earle. Despite his bulk, and the impression he gave that his family tree still had members hanging from it making ook-ook noises, Earle was not an insensitive man. The routine of the bar gave an order to his life that allowed him to function with the minimum of unwanted complexities, but also gave him time to think. His role was to lift, carry, threaten, and guard, and he performed all of these tasks willingly and without complaint. He was paid relatively well for what he did, but he was also loyal to Jimmy. Jimmy looked out for him, and he, in turn, looked out for Jimmy.

But, as his boss had guessed, Earle had been brooding in recent days. He didn’t like being reminded about Sally Cleaver. Earle was sorry for what had happened to her, and he felt that he should have acted to prevent it, but it wasn’t like it was the first domestic that had ever broken out in the Blue Moon, and Earle was smart enough to know that the best course of action on such occasions was simply not to get involved but to move the feuding parties off the premises and let them sort everything out in the privacy of their own home. It was only when Cliffie Andreas had come back into the bar with blood on his fists and face that Earle had begun to realize his attitude amounted to an ‘abdication of responsibility,’ as one of the detectives had later put it, indicating that, in a just world, Earle would have spent some time behind bars alongside Cliffie for what had happened. Deep down, which was deeper than even Jimmy might have allowed, Earle knew that the cop was right, and so every year, on the anniversary of Sally Cleaver’s death, Earle would leave a bouquet of flowers in the garbage-strewn, weed-caked lot of the Blue Moon, and apologize to the shade of the dead girl.

But Jimmy had never ascribed even partial blame to Earle for what had occurred, even though it had led to the closure of the Blue Moon. He made sure that Earle had the best legal representation close by when there was talk of charging him as an accessory to the crime. They had only ever discussed Earle’s feelings about those events on one occasion, and that was on the day that Jimmy had told Earle he was not going to reopen the bar. Earle had assumed that this meant he would be looking for employment elsewhere, and that Jimmy was washing his hands of him, just like a lot of people said he should, because around town Earle’s name wasn’t worth the spittle it would take to say it. Earle had begun to apologize again for allowing Sally Cleaver to die, and as he did so, he found that his voice was breaking. He kept trying to form coherent sentences, but they wouldn’t come. Jimmy had sat him down and listened as Earle described going outside and seeing Sally Cleaver’s ruined face, and how he had knelt beside her as her lips moved and she spoke the last words that anyone would ever hear her speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, as Earle, not knowing what else to do, laid one of his huge hands on her forehead and gently brushed her bloodstained hair from her eyes. At night, Earle told Jimmy, he saw Sally Cleaver’s face, and his hand would reach out automatically to brush her hair from her eyes. Every night, Earle said. I see her every night, just before I fall asleep. And Jimmy had told him that it was a crying shame, and all he could do to make up for it was ensure that it never happened to another woman, either on his beat or off it, not if he could do anything to prevent it. The next day, Earle had started working at the Sailmaker, even though there was already barely enough custom for old Vern Sutcliffe, the regular bartender. When Vern died a year later, Earle became the sole bartender at the Sailmaker, and thus it had remained ever since.

Now, after ruminating for hours on how he might broach the subject, Earle had come to a conclusion. He placed the last bottles of beer in the cooler, collapsed the box, then made his way tentatively to where Jimmy was sitting. He laid his fists on the bar and said: ‘Anything wrong, Mr. Jewel?’

Jimmy emerged from his reverie, looking slightly shocked.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Anything wrong, Mr. Jewel?”’

Jimmy smiled. In all of the years that he had known him, Earle had probably asked no more than two or three questions of a remotely personal nature. Now here he was, his face filled with concern, and only minutes after indicating that he’d lay down his life for his employer. If things went any further, they’d be booking a church for the wedding and moving to Ogunquit, or Hallowell, or somewhere else with too many rainbow flags hanging from the windows.

‘Thank you for asking, Earle. Everything is fine. I’m just mulling over how to handle a certain matter. When I’ve figured it out, though, I may ask for your help.’

Earle looked relieved. He’d already come as close as he had ever done to expressing his affection for Mr. Jewel, and he wasn’t sure that he could cope with any further intimacy. He lumbered away to add the crushed box to the recycling pile, leaving Jimmy alone. Jimmy took a series of photographs from beneath the newspaper, and examined once again the images of the jeweled seals. The gems alone were worth a fortune, but combined with the artifacts themselves, well, Jimmy had no concept of how much the right person might pay for such an item.

Now Jimmy knew that Tobias and his buddies were not smuggling drugs; they were smuggling antiquities. Jimmy wondered what else in a similar vein they might have in their possession. He had spent a day trying to work out the angles, figuring out a way that he could profit from what he had learned, and at the same time expand his knowledge. His only regret was that Rojas was involved. Rojas had let slip that he had begun trying to sell on some of the gems and gold, promising Jimmy a cut of twenty percent as a finder’s fee, as though Jimmy were just some rube to be palmed off with a chump’s cut. Rojas couldn’t see the big picture. The trouble was, neither could Jimmy, but unlike him, Rojas wasn’t prepared to wait until it was revealed.

Jimmy twisted the saucer with his finger, causing the cold coffee in the cup to ripple slightly. He wasn’t hurting for money, but he could always do with more. The downturn in the economy, and the hiatus in the development of the waterfront, meant that he had cash tied up in buildings that were depreciating with every passing day. The market would bounce back – it always did – but Jimmy wasn’t getting any younger. He didn’t want it to bounce back just in time to provide him with a bigger headstone.

He shivered. There was an unseasonably cool breeze coming in off the water, and Jimmy was highly susceptible to cold. Even in the height of summer he wore a jacket. He had always been that way, ever since he was a little kid. There just wasn’t enough meat on his bones to keep him warm.

‘Hey, Earle!’ he called. ‘Close the goddamn door.’

There was no reply. Jimmy swore. He walked through the office and past the storeroom to where a door opened on to the bar’s small parking lot. He stepped outside. There was no sign of Earle. Jimmy called his name again, suddenly uneasy.

His foot slipped as he stepped into the lot. He looked down and saw the dark, spreading stain. To his left was Earle’s truck. The blood was coming from beneath it. Jimmy squatted so that he could see under the truck, and looked into Earle’s dead eyes. The big man was lying on his belly on the far side of the vehicle between the passenger door and the garbage cans by the wall, his mouth open, his face frozen in a final grimace of pain.

Jimmy stood, and felt the gun nudge his skull, like death’s first tentative touch.

‘Inside,’ said a voice, and Jimmy couldn’t hide his surprise at the sound of it, but he did as he was told. He glanced at the truck as he rose, and caught a glimpse of a masked figure reflected in the window. Then the blows rained down on him for having the temerity to look. Kicks followed, driving him along the hallway and into the storeroom. The assault ceased as Jimmy crawled over to the liquor shelves, looking for some kind of purchase so he could raise himself. He could taste blood in his mouth, and he had trouble seeing out of his left eye. He tried to speak, but the words came out as hoarse whispers. Still, it was clear that he was begging: for time to recover, for the blows to stop.

For more life.

One of the kicks had broken a rib, and he could feel it grinding as he moved. He slumped against the shelves, drawing ragged breaths. He raised his right hand in a placatory gesture.

‘You killed a man for a hundred and fifty dollars and change,’ said Jimmy. ‘You hear me?’

‘No, I killed him for much more than that.’

And Jimmy knew for sure that this wasn’t about the money in the safe. It was about Rojas, and the seal, and Jimmy Jewel understood that he was about to die as the black mouth of the suppressor gaped like the void into which Jimmy would soon pass.

He gave away everything after the first shot, but his interrogator had fired two more anyway, just to be sure that he wasn’t holding anything back.

‘No more,’ said Jimmy, ‘no more,’ his wounds bleeding onto the floor, and it was both a plea and an admission, a rejection of further pain and an acceptance that all was about to come to an end.

His interrogator nodded.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Jimmy, ‘I am heartily sorry-’

The final bullet came. He did not hear it, but only felt the mercy of it.

It would be days before his body, and that of Earle, were found. Summer rains came that night and washed away Earle’s blood, sending it flowing across the sloped surface of the lot, through the wooden pilings that supported the old pier, and into the sea, salt to salt. Earle’s truck was left at the Maine Mall, and when it was still there after two days mall security took an interest, and subsequently the police arrived, for by then it was clear that Jimmy Jewel had fallen off the radar. Calls were going unanswered, and beer could not be delivered to the Sailmaker, and the drunks who worshipped there missed its cloisters.

Jimmy was discovered in the storeroom. He had been shot through both feet, and one knee, by which point he had presumably told all that he knew, and therefore the fourth shot had taken him through the heart. Earle lay at Jimmy’s ruined feet, like a faithful hound dispatched to keep its master company in the afterlife. It was only later that someone noticed the correspondence of dates: Earle and Jimmy had died on June 2nd, ten years to the day since Sally Cleaver had breathed her last at the back of the Blue Moon.

And old men shrugged, and said that they were not surprised.

17

Karen Emory woke to find Joel gone from their bed. She listened for a time, but could hear no sound. Beside her, the clock on the night table read 4:03 a.m.

She had been dreaming, and now, as she lay awake trying to discern some indication of his presence in the house, she felt a kind of gratitude that she was no longer sleeping. It was foolish, of course. In less than three hours she would have to get up and get dressed for work. She had decided that she would keep working for Mr. Patchett for the moment, and had told Joel so when she came home and found him returned from his trip, a dressing on his face that he wouldn’t explain. He hadn’t objected, which had surprised her, but maybe her arguments had made sense to him, or so she thought at first: that work was hard to come by; that she couldn’t just sit around at home or she’d go crazy; that she’d give Mr. Patchett no further cause to go looking into her affairs, or Joel’s.

She needed to sleep. Soon, her legs and feet would be aching from hours of service, but then her feet always hurt. Even with the best shoes in the world, which she couldn’t have afforded anyway, not on her pay, she still would have experienced the ache in her heels and the balls of her feet that came from standing for eight hours a day. Mr. Patchett was a better boss than most, though, better, in fact, than any boss she’d ever had before, which was one of the reasons that she wanted to remain at the Downs Diner. She’d worked for enough sleazebags in her time to recognize a good soul when she encountered one, and she was grateful for the hours that he gave her. The diner could easily get by with one less waitress, and as one of the most recent employees she would be among the first to be shown the door, but he continued to put regular work her way. He was looking out for her, the way he looked out for all of the people who worked for him, and at a time when businesses were letting staff go left and right, there was something to be said for a man who was prepared to shuck a little profit in order to let people live.

But Mr. Patchett’s concern for her was a problem, especially since the private detective had started ‘nosing around,’ as Joel put it. She’d have to be careful what she said to Mr. Patchett, just as she’d tried to be careful when the detective came to the house, even though she’d ended up saying more than she should have.

It was Joel who had first spotted the detective. Joel had a kind of sixth sense about these things. For a man, he was very perceptive. He could tell when she was sad, or when there was something preying on her mind, just by looking at her, and she had never encountered a man like that before. Maybe she’d just been unlucky with her choices before Joel came along, and most men were as attuned to the women they were with, but she doubted it. Joel was unusual in that way, and in others.

And yet Karen hadn’t wanted to tell Joel about the detective’s visit. She couldn’t have said why, exactly, not at first, except for a vague sense that Joel wasn’t being straight with her about parts of his life, and because of her own fears for his safety, which was why she’d let some stuff slip to the detective when he came by. She had watched how the deaths of Joel’s friends had affected him: he was frightened, even though he didn’t want to show it. Then he had come home yesterday evening with the Band-Aid on his face and the wounds on his hands and wouldn’t speak of how he’d hurt himself. Instead, he’d retired to the basement, moving stuff in boxes down there from the truck, wincing sometimes when a box touched against his injuries.

And when he eventually came to bed…

Well, that hadn’t been so good.

She sighed and stretched. The clock had moved up two digits. There was still no sound, no flushing of the toilet or closing of the refrigerator door. She wondered what Joel was doing, but she was afraid to go looking for him, not after what happened earlier. Karen wondered if he had been hiding that aspect of himself all along, and if she had been mistaken in her assessment of him. No, not mistaken. Misled. Taken for a fool. Manipulated, and abused, by a man she hardly knew.

She had been looking to get away from the Patchett dorms. Oh, she’d been grateful for the room, and the company of the other women, but such places were always meant to be temporary stops, she felt, even though one of the waitresses, Eileen, had been living there for fifteen years now. That wasn’t going to happen to Karen, living like a spinster according to Mr. Patchett’s old-fashioned rules about not keeping male company in the dorm house. First, it had seemed like Damien might have provided an escape, but he had no interest in her. She thought that he might even have been gay, but Eileen assured her that he was not. He’d had a fling with the previous hostess in between deployments, and it had seemed like they might get together permanently, but she hadn’t wanted to become an army wife or, worse, an army widow, and it had fizzled out. Karen thought that Mr. Patchett might have liked it if she and Damien had become an item, and when Damien returned home permanently his father had done everything to steer the two of them together, inviting Karen to have dinner with them, or sending her off with Damien to buy produce and talk to suppliers. But by then she’d already begun seeing Joel, whom she’d met through Damien. When she had eventually allowed Joel to pick her up from work for the first time, she’d seen the disappointment in Mr. Patchett’s face. He hadn’t said anything, but it was there, and he’d never been quite as easy with her after that. When his son died, the possibility struck her that he might believe she was in some way to blame for what happened, that if Damien had someone to care for, and who cared for him, then he wouldn’t have taken his own life. Maybe that was what lay behind the hiring of the detective: Mr. Patchett was angry at her for dating Joel, but he was taking it out on Joel, not her.

Joel made good money driving his truck, more money than she thought an independent truck driver could, or should, make. Most of his work involved him moving back and forth across the border with Canada. She’d tried to find out about it from him, and he’d told her that he hauled whatever needed to be hauled, but the way he said it left her under no illusions that this was a discussion he either welcomed or wanted to continue, and she’d dropped the subject. Still, she wondered…

But she loved Joel. She had decided that within a couple of weeks of meeting him. She just knew. He was strong, he was kind, and he was older than she, so he understood more about the world, which made her feel secure. He had a place of his own, and when he asked her to move in with him he’d barely had time to finish the sentence before she’d said yes. It was a house, too, not some apartment where they’d be bumping into the walls and getting on each other’s nerves. There was plenty of space: two bedrooms upstairs, and a smaller box room; a big living area and a nice kitchen; and a basement where he kept his tools. He was clean, too, cleaner than most of the men that she’d known before. Oh, the bathroom had needed a good scrub, and the kitchen too, but they weren’t filthy, just untidy. She’d been happy to do it. She was proud of their house. That was how she thought of it: ‘their’ house. Not just his, not anymore. Slowly, she was imposing elements of her own personality upon it, and he seemed content to let her do so. There were flowers in vases, and more books than there had been before. She’d even picked up some pictures for the walls. When she’d asked him if he liked them, he’d said ‘Sure,’ and made an effort to examine each one, as though he were appraising them for a sale at some later date. She knew that he was just doing it to please her, though. He was a man largely unconcerned with trimmings, and she doubted if he would even have noticed the paintings if she hadn’t pointed them out to him, but she appreciated the fact that he’d made the effort to seem interested.

Was he a good man? She didn’t know. She’d thought so at the start, but he’d changed so much in recent weeks. Then again, she supposed that all men changed, once they got what they wanted. They stopped being quite as caring as before, as solicitous. It was as if they put up a front to attract women, and then slowly shed it once that was achieved. Some dispensed with it more quickly than others, and Lord knows she’d seen men switch from lambs to wolves with the flip of a coin or with one last drink for the road, but his change had appeared more gradual, and was somehow more disturbing because of that. At first, he’d just been distracted. He didn’t talk as much to her, and he sometimes snapped at her when she persisted in trying to have a conversation. She thought that it might have been something to do with his injuries. Sometimes, his hand hurt. He’d lost two fingers from his left in Iraq, and his hearing wasn’t so good in his left ear. He’d been lucky. The other guys hit by the IED hadn’t made it. He rarely talked about what had happened, but she knew enough. He was away a lot, driving his truck, and there were his army buddies, the ones who used to come to the house but didn’t anymore. They never said much to her, and one of them, Paul Bacci, gave her the creeps, the way his eyes wandered over her body, lingering on her breasts, her crotch. When they arrived, Joel would close the living room door, and she would hear the steady buzz of their soft tones through the walls, like insects trapped in the cavities.

‘Joel?’

There was no reply. She wanted to go and find him, but she was frightened. She was frightened because he had hit her again. It had come as she tried to question him about his wounds, after she opened the bathroom door and saw him applying salve to the burns on his hands, and the terrible one on his face. He had answered her question with one of his own.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about your visitor?’ he said, and it took her a moment to realize that she was referring to Parker, the detective. After all, how could he have known? She was still trying to come up with a suitable reply when his right hand had shot out and caught her. Not hard, and he’d seemed almost as shocked by what he’d done as she was, but it had been a strike nonetheless, catching her on the left cheek and causing her to stumble backward against the wall. It was different from the first time: that had been an accident. She was sure of it. This one had power and venom behind it. He’d apologized as soon as it happened, but she was already running to the bedroom, and it was a couple of minutes before he followed her. He kept trying to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. She couldn’t listen, she was crying so hard. Eventually, he just held her, and she felt him fall asleep against her, and in time she fell asleep too, because it was an escape from thinking about what he had just done. He woke her during the night to say sorry again, and his lips had brushed hers, his hands searching her body, and they had made up.

But, no, they hadn’t, not really. She had done it for him, not for herself. She hadn’t wanted him to feel bad, and she hadn’t wanted him to… hurt her.

Yes, that was it. That was the horror of it.

Now, as she lay in the darkness, she realized that her view of him had changed as much as he had. She’d wanted him to be a good man, or at least a better man than some of those she’d dated before him, but deep down she thought now that he wasn’t, not really, not if he could hit her like that, not if he was changing so dramatically. Sex was no longer gentle. He’d actually hurt her some when he’d woken her earlier, and when she’d asked him to be more tender with her he’d simply finished and turned away from her, leaving her staring at his bare back.

‘I’m talking to you,’ she’d said, and had tugged at his shoulder, trying to get him to look at her. She’d felt him tense up, and then he had turned, and the expression on his face, even in the darkness, had caused her to let her hand fall, and she had moved as far away from him as she could in their bed. For a moment, she had been certain that he was going to hit her again, but he had not.

‘Leave me alone,’ he had said, and there was something in his eyes that might almost have been fear, and she’d had the sense that he might have been talking both to her and to someone else, an unseen entity of whom only he was aware. Then she had dozed, and the dream had come. She couldn’t call it a nightmare, not really, although it made her uneasy. In it, she was trapped in a small space, almost like a coffin, but it was simultaneously larger and smaller than that, which made no sense to her. She was struggling for breath, and her mouth and nostrils were filling with dust.

But worst of all, she wasn’t alone. There was a presence in there with her, and it was whispering. She couldn’t understand what it was saying, and she wasn’t even sure that the words were meant for her anyway, but it never stopped speaking.

A noise came from downstairs, an unfamiliar sound that did not belong in the darkness of their home. It was a giggle, quickly stifled. There was something childlike about it, yet also unpleasant. It was a spontaneous eruption of mirth at a word or act that was more shocking than funny. It was laughter at a thing that should not be laughed at.

Carefully, she pushed back the blankets and put her feet to the floor. The boards did not creak. Joel had done much of the work on the house himself, and was proud of its solidity. She padded across the carpet and opened the door wider. Now she heard whispering, but it was his voice, not the voice of the others, the ones in her dream. Others. She had not recognized that before. It was not one, but more than one. There were many voices, all speaking in the same tongue, but using different words.

She moved to the top of the stairs, then knelt down and peered through the banisters. Joel was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the cellar door, his hands in his lap, tugging at his fingers. He reminded her of a small boy, and she almost smiled at the sight of him.

Almost.

He was carrying on a conversation with someone on the other side of the basement door. He always kept that door locked. It didn’t concern her unduly, not at first. She’d gone down there with him to help him bring up some paint during the first week after she’d moved in, and it had seemed to her just the usual clutter of boxes, junk, and old machinery. Since then, she had rarely gone down there, and always with Joel. He hadn’t forbidden her from entering the basement. He was smarter than that and, anyway, she had no cause to do so. In addition, she had never liked dark spaces, which was probably why her dream was troubling her so much.

She held her breath as she peered down, straining to hear what he was saying. He was whispering, but she could hear no response to his words. Instead, he would speak for a moment, then listen before responding. Sometimes he would nod his head silently, as though following the course of an argument that only he could hear.

He giggled again, and as he did so he put his hands to his mouth, smothering the sound. He glanced up instinctively as he did so, but she was hidden in the shadows.

‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘You’re naughty.’

Then he seemed to listen once more. ‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know how.’

He was silent again. His face grew serious. She heard him swallow hard, and thought that she could sense his fear, even from her perch above him.

‘No,’ he said, determinedly. ‘No, I won’t do that.’ He shook his head. ‘No, please. I won’t. You can’t ask me to do that. You can’t.’

He put his hands to his ears, trying to block out the voice that only he could hear. He stood up, keeping his hands in place.

‘Leave me alone,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Stop it. Stop whispering. You have to stop whispering.’

He banged against the wall as he began to climb the stairs.

‘Stop it,’ he said, and she could hear in his voice that he had begun to cry. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

She slipped back into the bedroom, and pulled the sheets around her seconds before he opened the door and stepped inside. He did it so noisily that she couldn’t help but react, but she did her best to sound sleepy and surprised.

‘Honey,’ she said, lifting her head from the pillow. ‘Are you okay?’

He didn’t answer her.

‘Joel?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

She saw him move toward her, and she was frightened. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and touched his hand to her hair.

‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ he said. ‘But I’d never hurt you bad. Not really.’ She felt her stomach contract so hard that she was sure she’d have to run to the bathroom to avoid soiling herself. It was those last two words. Not really: as if it was somehow okay to hurt someone a little now and again, but only when it was deserved, only when a nosy little bitch asked questions that she shouldn’t, or entertained snoops in the kitchen. Only then. And the punishment would fit the crime, and later she could spread herself for him and they’d make up, and it would be all right because he loved her, and that was what people who loved each other did.

‘When I hit you,’ he continued, ‘that wasn’t me. It was something else. It was like I was a puppet, and someone pulled my string. I don’t want to hurt you. I love you.’

‘I know,’ she replied, trying to keep the tremor from her voice, and only partly succeeding. ‘Honey, what’s wrong?’

He leaned into her, and she felt his tears as he put his cheek against hers. She wrapped her arms around him.

‘I had a bad dream,’ he said, and she heard the child in him. Even as she did so, she looked down and saw him staring up at her, and for an instant his eyes were cold and suspicious and even, she thought, amused, as though they were both playing a game here, but only he knew the rules. Then it was gone, his eyes closing as he nuzzled against her breasts. She held him tightly even as she felt the urge to cast him aside, to run from that house and never, ever return.

Stress damages the mind: that was what they didn’t understand, the people back home, the ones who hadn’t been there. Even the army didn’t understand that, not until it was too late. Take a little R & R, they said. Hang out with the family. Make love to your girlfriend. Occupy yourself. Get a job, find a routine, embrace normality.

But he couldn’t have done that, even if his legs didn’t end halfway down his thighs, because stress is like a poison, a toxin working its way through the system, except that it affects only one vital organ: the brain. He remembered how he’d been in an automobile accident out on Route I when he was thirteen, shortly before his dad died. It hadn’t been a bad smash: a truck had run a red light, and had hit the passenger side of their car. He’d been in the back, on the driver’s side. It was pure dumb luck: there was an automobile dealership on that part of the road, and it always had some cool old cars lined up outside if the weather was good. He liked looking at them, imagining himself behind the wheel of the best of them. At any other time, he’d have been on the passenger side so that he could talk to his dad, and who knows what might have happened then. Instead, they’d both been shaken up pretty badly, and he’d been cut some by the glass. Afterward, when the tow truck had gone and the Scarborough cops had given them a ride home, he’d gone pale and started shaking before puking up his breakfast.

That was what stress did. It made you ill, physically and mentally. And if you kept encountering stressful situations day after day, broken up by periods of tedium, of hanging around playing games, or eating, or catching some rack, or writing the compulsory monthly card home to let your nearest and dearest know that you weren’t dead yet, with no end in sight because your deployment kept being extended, then your neurons became so polluted that they couldn’t recover, and your brain began to rewire itself, altering its modes of operation. The nerve cell extensions in the hippocampus, which deals with learning and long-term memory, started to rot. The response capacity of the amygdala, which governs social behavior and emotional memory, changed. The medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in establishing feelings of fear and remorse, and enables us to interpret what is real and unreal, altered. Similar frazzling of the wiring could be found in schizophrenics, sociopaths, drug addicts, and long-term prisoners. You became like the dregs, and it wasn’t your fault, because you hadn’t done anything wrong. You’d simply done your duty.

During the Civil War, they called it ‘irritable heart.’ For the soldiers of the Great War, it was ‘shell shock,’ and in World War II it was ‘battle fatigue,’ or ‘war neurosis.’ Then it became ‘post-Vietnam syndrome,’ and now it was PTSD. He sometimes wondered if the Romans had a word for it, and the Greeks. He had read the Iliad upon his return, part of his attempt to understand war through its literature, and believed that he saw, in the grief of Achilles for his friend Patroclus, and in the rage that followed, something of his own grief for the comrades that he had lost, Damien most of all.

They left you this way. Your emotions are no longer under control. You are no longer under your own control. You become depressed, paranoid, removed from those who care about you. You believe that you are still at war. You fight your bedclothes at night. You become estranged from your loved ones, and they leave you.

And maybe, just maybe, you start believing that you are haunted, that demons speak to you from boxes, and when you can’t satisfy them, when you can’t do what they want you to do, they turn you against yourself, and they punish you for your failings.

And maybe, just maybe, that moment of obliteration comes as a relief.

18

Herod arrived in Portland by train at 11:30 a.m., carrying only a black garment bag, the leather old but undamaged, a testament to the quality of its manufacture. He was not averse to flying, and rarely felt the necessity to carry anything that might make a bag search at an airport awkward, if not actively unwelcome, but where possible he preferred to travel by train. It reminded him of a more civilized era, when the pace of life was slower and people had more time for small courtesies. In addition, his debilitated condition meant that he found driving for long distances to be uncomfortable and a chore, as well as potentially hazardous, for the medication that he took to control his pain often led to drowsiness. Unfortunately, this was not a particular problem at present: he had reduced the dosage to keep his head clear, and consequently he was suffering. On a train, he could get up and prowl the carriage, or stand in the café car sipping a drink, anything to distract himself from the torments of the body. He had taken a seat in a quiet car at Penn Station, a contented smile on his face as the train emerged from below ground into hazy sunshine. The blue surgical mask hid his mouth, and attracted only one or two glances from those who passed him.

He became aware of the Captain’s presence just as the Manhattan skyline vanished from view. The Captain was sitting in the seat directly across the aisle from Herod, visible only in the window glass, and then only partially: he was a smear, a blur, a moving figure captured by a camera lens when all around him was otherwise still. Herod found it easier to see him when he did not look directly at him.

The Captain was dressed as a clown. Say what you wanted about the Captain, Herod thought, but he had a fondness for the old reliables. The Captain wore a jacket of white and red stripes, and a small bowler hat from beneath which sections of a bedraggled red wig sprouted. There were cobwebs in the artificial hairs, and Herod thought that he could make out the shapes of spiders moving through them. His forearms were extended along the armrests of his seat, and his hands were mostly hidden by stained white gloves, except at the fingertips where sharp, blackened nails had erupted through the material. The forefinger of his right hand tapped rhythmically, slowly raising itself and then falling, like a mechanical device winding and then releasing, over and over. The Captain’s face was painted with white pan stick makeup. The mouth was large and red, and painted as a frown. There were blots of rouge on each cheek, but the eye sockets were empty and black. The Captain stared fixedly ahead, and only his finger moved.

The car was full, but the Captain’s seat, while apparently unoccupied, remained empty, as did the seat next to Herod’s, as though something of the Captain’s aura had extended across the aisle. The woman seated by the window next to the Captain was old, and Herod watched her discomfort grow as the journey progressed. She shifted in her seat. She tried to put her arm on the shared rest, but she would only allow it to remain in place for a second or two before she withdrew it and rubbed her skin in distress. Sometimes her nose wrinkled, her face crinkling in disgust. She began to brush at her hair and face, and when Herod looked at her reflection he could see that some of the Captain’s spiders had begun to colonize her gray strands. Eventually, she picked up her coat and bag and left for another car. New passengers passed through the car after each regional station stop, and although a number paused at the two empty seats, some atavistic instinct caused them to move on.

And all the time the Captain sat, and his finger went tap-tap-tap…

Herod alighted at Portland’s new transport terminal. He could still recall the old Union Station, where the service from Boston had once terminated. He had last taken it – when? 1964, he thought. Yes, certainly it was ’64. He could almost picture the big silver car with its interlinked blue B and white M. The fact that there was now a train, once again, between Boston and Maine, even if it meant switching stations at Boston, pleased him.

He took a cab to the airport in order to pick up a rental car. Like his train ticket, the reservation was not in his own name. Instead, he was traveling under the name Uccello. Herod always used the name of a Renaissance artist when he was obliged to show identification. He had driver’s licenses and passports in the name of Dürer, Bruegel, and Bellini, but he had a special fondness for Uccello, one of the first artists to use perspective in his paintings. Herod liked to think that he, too, had an awareness of perspective.

The Captain was no longer with him. The Captain was… elsewhere. Herod drove into Portland, and found the bar owned by the man named Jimmy Jewel. He parked behind the building opposite, and slipped his gun into the pocket of his overcoat before making his way to the other side of the wharf. The bar appeared to be closed, and he could see no signs of life inside. As he stared through the glass, the Captain returned, a bright reflected figure. He stood for a moment, that red frown fixed on his face, then turned and walked to the back of the bar. Herod followed, the Captain’s progress visible in the panes of the windows, like the frames of a film being projected too slowly. At the rear door, Herod knelt and examined the step. He touched his fingers to the spots of blood, then stared at the door for a moment before nodding to himself and turning away.

He was back at the car, and about to start the engine, when he felt a coldness on his forearm. He looked to the right and saw the Captain’s image in the passenger window, the Captain’s left hand holding him in place, the nails like the stingers of insects. The Captain’s attention was fixed upon the bar. There was a man at the main door, his actions mirroring Herod’s own earlier attempts to see inside. He was about five-ten in height, his hair graying at the temples. Herod watched him curiously. There was a sense of threat to the new arrival: it was in the way that he held himself, a kind of grim self-possession. But there was an ‘otherness’ to him too, and Herod, aided by the Captain, recognized one like himself, a man who spanned two worlds. He wondered what it was that had opened the fissure, that had enabled this one to see as Herod saw. Pain? Yes, inevitably so, but not merely physical, not where this man was concerned. Herod picked up grief, and rage, and guilt, the Captain acting like a transmitter, pulses of emotion coursing through him.

As if responding to Herod’s interest, the man turned. He stared at Herod. He frowned. The grip tightened on Herod’s arm and Herod understood the Captain’s desire to leave. He started the engine and pulled away, passing two other men as he turned right: a black man, exquisitely attired, and a smaller white man who appeared to have dressed in a hurry from his laundry basket. He saw them watching him in his rearview mirror, and then they were gone, and so too was the Captain.

‘You see that guy in the car?’ I asked Louis.

‘Yeah, the one with the mask. Didn’t get a good look at him, but I’d guess that he’s ailing for something.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes, was there someone else in the passenger seat beside him?’

Louis appeared puzzled. ‘No, it was just him. Why?’

‘Nothing, it must have been the sunlight on his window. No sign of Jimmy Jewel. I’ll try again later. Let’s go…’

Herod drove to Waldoboro, because that was where his contact lived, the old woman who ran the antique store. He ordered coffee and a sandwich in a diner, and made a call from a pay phone while he waited for his food to arrive. Only a handful of other customers were present, none of them nearby, so he had no fear of being overheard.

‘Where do we stand?’ he said when the call was answered.

‘He lives above a warehouse in Lewiston. An old bakery.’

Herod listened as the location was described to him in detail.

‘Does he keep company with his kind?’ he asked.

‘Some.’

‘And the items?’

‘It appears that some interested parties have already emerged, but they remain in his possession.’

Herod grimaced. ‘How did the other parties come to hear of them?’

‘He is a careless man. Word has spread.’

‘I am on my way. Make contact with him. Tell him I’d like to talk.’

‘I’ll tell Mr. Rojas that I may have a buyer, and that he should take no further action until we meet. As you know, he is not unaware of the value of the objects. It could be an expensive business.’

‘I’m sure that I can convince the seller to be reasonable, especially since I have no interest in what he is selling, merely in the source.’

‘Nevertheless, he is not a reasonable man.’

‘Really?’ said Herod. ‘How unfortunate.’

‘Neither is he unintelligent.’

‘Intelligent and unreasonable. One would have assumed such qualities were mutually contradictory.’

‘I have a photograph of him, if that might help. I printed it from the surveillance camera in my store.’ Herod described his car, and where it was parked. He told the woman that it was unlocked, and she should leave whatever material she had under the passenger seat. It was better, he felt, if they did not meet. The woman did her best not to sound disappointed at the news.

He hung up. His food had arrived. He ate it slowly, and in a corner far from the other customers. He knew that his appearance had a way of putting people off their food, but equally he found eating under such scrutiny to be unpleasant. Eating was hard enough for him as it was: his appetite was minimal at best, but he had to consume to keep his strength up. That was more important now than ever before. As he ate, he thought about the man at the window of the bar, and the Captain’s reaction to his presence.

There was a mirror on the wall opposite his booth. It reflected the road, where a little girl in a torn blue dress, her back to the diner, held a red balloon and watched the cars and trucks going by. A big Mack rig was heading her way, but she did not move, and the driver, high in his cab, did not appear to see her. Herod turned from the mirror as the truck hit the girl, driving straight over her. Herod almost cried out, and when the truck had passed the girl was gone. There was no sign that she had ever been there.

Slowly, Herod looked back at the mirror, and the girl was where she had always been, except now she was facing the diner, and Herod. She seemed to smile at him, even as the dark hollows of her eyes mocked the light. Gradually she faded from sight and, in the reflected world, her balloon floated up toward gray-black clouds streaked with purple and red, like wounds torn in the heavens. Then the sky cleared, and the mirror was merely a reflection of this dull world, not a window into another.

When Herod had eaten as much as he was able, he lingered over his coffee. After all, he had plenty of time. It would be some time before darkness fell, and Herod worked best in the dark. Then he would pay a visit to Mr. Rojas. Herod had no intention of waiting until the next day to begin negotiations. In fact, Herod had no intention of negotiating at all.

19

Far away, in an apartment on the Rue du Seine in Paris, just above the sales rooms of the esteemed ancient art dealers Rochman et Fils, a deal was about to be concluded. Emmanuel Rochman, the latest in a long line of Rochmans to make a very comfortable living from the sale of the rarest of antiquities, waited for the Iranian businessman seated across from him to cease prevaricating and announce the decision that they both knew he had already reached. After all, this face-to-face meeting in the presence of the ancient artifacts was but the final step in a lengthy negotiation that had begun many weeks before, and items as rare and beautiful as those currently before him were never likely to be offered to him again: two delicate ivories from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, and a pair of exquisite lapis lazuli cylindrical seals, 5,500 years old and therefore the oldest such items that Rochman had ever been able to offer for sale.

The Iranian sighed and shuffled on his seat. Rochman liked dealing with Iranians. The Iranians had been particularly keen pursuers of the stolen items from the Iraq museum that had so far made it on to the market, even if they, like the Jordanians, had ultimately been forced to relinquish most of the loot that had come their way. While many thousands of items remained missing, the most valuable of them had largely been recovered. Opportunities to acquire Iraqi treasures were growing increasingly rare, and the amount that collectors were willing to pay had increased accordingly. Although Rochman had not encountered this particular buyer before, he came strongly recommended by two former clients who had spent a great deal of money with Monsieur Rochman without troubling themselves unduly about matters of provenance and paperwork.

‘Will there be more?’ asked the Iranian. He called himself Mr. Abbas, ‘the Lion,’ which was clearly a pseudonym, but his goodwill deposit of two million dollars had cleared without a hitch, and those who vouched for him had assured Rochman that two million dollars barely represented a day’s earnings for Mr. Abbas. Nevertheless, Rochman was starting to grow weary of this particular lion hunt. Come, he thought, I know you’re going to buy them. Just say yes, and we can be done.

‘Not like these,’ said Rochman, then reconsidered. Who knew how much extra revenue a little patience might generate? ‘The ivories, or others even half as beautiful as them, are unlikely ever to resurface. If you decline, they will disappear. The seals-’ He tipped his right hand back and forth in the universal gesture of possibility, erring on the side of the negative. ‘But if you are satisfied with this particular purchase, artifacts of a similar quality may be made available to you.’

‘And provenance?’

‘The House of Rochman stands behind everything that it sells,’ said Rochman. ‘Naturally, were any legal issues to materialize, the buyer would be the first to know, but I am confident that no such difficulties will arise in this particular instance.’

It was a standard line on the rare occasions when Rochman truly breached the boundaries of legality. Oh, there were often gray areas when it came to ancient treasures, but this was not one of them. Both he and Abbas knew the source of the ivories and the seals. It did not need to be spoken aloud, and no receipts would accompany this particular sale.

Abbas nodded in apparent contentment. ‘Well, I am satisfied,’ he said. ‘Let us proceed.’

He reached into his pocket and removed a gold pen, pressing the top to make the nib appear.

‘You won’t need a pen, Monsieur Abbas,’ Rochman began to say, which is when the door burst open, and armed police appeared, and Mr. Abbas smiled at him and said, ‘The name is Al-Daini, Monsieur Rochman. My colleagues and I have some questions for you…’

20

Angel and Louis had stayed with me at my house, and I suspected that neither of them had slept simultaneously that night, conscious that a move might be made against us at any time. The next morning, I spent an hour with them going back over everything that I knew about Joel Tobias. He was the principal link, and it was a useful exercise. The fact that he had served in the military helped, since it meant the existence of an official paper trail for a big chunk of his life. It all seemed pretty straightforward. He had signed up in 1990, straight out of high school in Bangor, and had trained as a truck driver. He’d been invalided out early in 2007 after an IED exploded while he was escorting medical supplies to the Green Zone in Baghdad, removing part of his left calf and two fingers on his left hand. When he returned to Maine later that year, he applied for a Maine commercial driver’s license after passing the written exam, eye exam, and road exam. He had also received a hazmat endorsement after putting his fingerprints on record and passing the requisite Transportation Safety Administration background check. So far, his license was clean.

I found an obituary notice for his mother in the Bangor Daily News of July 19, 1998, and another for his father, who had served in Vietnam, in April 2007. It mentioned that his son, Joel, was also serving in the military, and was recuperating after being injured in the line of duty. There was even a picture of Tobias at the graveside. He was in full dress uniform, and was supporting himself on crutches. There were no siblings. Joel Tobias was an only child.

I felt an unwelcome pang, the guilt of someone who had not made sacrifices for his country now faced with someone who had. It seemed, on the surface, that Tobias had served honorably, and had suffered for it. I had never even considered the military as an option when I left school, but I respected those who had. I wondered what had made Tobias sign up. Was it family history, a belief that he should follow in his father’s footsteps? Then again, his father had not been a career soldier. The obit made it clear that he had been drafted. A lot of guys had come back from Vietnam with a burning desire to ensure that their kids didn’t have to go through what they had. I supposed that, since Tobias had signed up willingly, he was either rebelling against his old man, or seeking his approval.

I then opened up the file on Bobby Jandreau, who had gone to the same high school in Bangor as Tobias, although more than a decade separated them. During Jandreau’s final tour in Iraq, he’d been seriously injured in a gun battle in Gazaliya. The first bullet had hit him in the upper thigh, and while he was lying in the dirt the Shia militiamen who had attacked his convoy continued to fire shots at his legs in an effort to draw his comrades into a rescue and inflict further injuries on the squad. Jandreau had eventually been pulled to safety, but his legs were ruined. Amputation had been judged the only option.

I knew all this because his name had been mentioned in a newspaper article on wounded Maine veterans who were trying to cope with life outside the military. Damien Patchett was named as the fellow soldier who had saved Jandreau’s life, but if Damien had been asked to comment, he had declined. In the course of the article, Jandreau admitted that he was struggling. He spoke of an addiction to prescription medication, which he was overcoming with the help of his girlfriend. As the reporter noted: ‘Jandreau stares out of the window of his Bangor home, his hands clutching the arms of his wheelchair. “I never really thought I’d end up like this,” he says. “Like most guys, I knew that there was a chance that it could happen, but I always believed that it would be someone else who’d get hurt, not me. I’m trying to find some positive aspect to it, but there isn’t one, not that I can see. It just sucks.” His girlfriend, Mel Nelson, strokes his hair tenderly. There are tears in her eyes, but Jandreau’s are dry. It is as if he is still in shock, or as if he has no more tears left to shed.’

‘Tough break,’ said Angel. Louis, who was also reading from the screen, said nothing.

I couldn’t find an address for a Bobby Jandreau in Bangor, but the newspaper article had mentioned that Mel Nelson worked as an office manager in her father’s lumber company in Veazie. She was at her desk when I called, and we had a long conversation. Sometimes people are just waiting for the right call. It turned out that she was no longer Bobby’s girlfriend, and she wasn’t happy about the situation. She cared about him, and she loved him, but he had driven her away and she couldn’t understand why. When I hung up, I had Bobby Jandreau’s address and phone number, and a sense of admiration for Mel Nelson.

Carrie Saunders called while we were eating breakfast. It would be untrue to say that she sounded enthused at the prospect of meeting me, but I had learned not to take that kind of response personally. I told her that I was working for Bennett Patchett, Damien’s father, and she simply confirmed an appointment at her office in the Togus VA Medical Center up in Augusta at midday before hanging up. Louis and Angel shadowed me all the way up to Augusta. I was interested to see what might emerge as we drove north, but they detected no sign of pursuit.

21

Carrie Saunders’s office was located close to the Mental Health Service. Her name – simply ‘Dr. Saunders’ – was etched on a plastic plate by her door, and when I knocked the door was opened by a woman in her mid-thirties, with short blond hair and the build of a lightweight boxer. She was wearing a dark t-shirt over black business slacks, and the muscles on her forearms and shoulders were clearly defined. She was about five-seven, and sallow skinned. Her office was small, and maximum use had been made of all available space: there were three filing cabinets to my right, and to my left there were bookshelves lined with assorted medical texts and cardboard document storage boxes. On the walls was framed evidence of qualification from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and from Walter Reed. One impressive piece of paper indicated a specialization in disaster psychiatry. The floor was covered in hard-wearing gray carpet. Her desk was neat and functional. There was a disposable coffee cup beside the phone, and the remains of a bagel.

‘I eat when I can,’ she said, clearing away what was left of her lunch. ‘If you’re hungry, we can get something at the canteen.’

I told her that I was fine. She gestured to the plastic chair at the opposite side of her desk, and waited for me to sit before doing so herself.

‘How can I help you, Mr. Parker?’

‘I understand that you’re conducting research into post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘That’s right.’

‘With a particular emphasis on suicide.’

‘On suicide prevention,’ she corrected. ‘May I ask who told you about me?’

It was probably my natural antipathy toward authority, especially the kind of authority represented by the military, but it seemed a good idea to keep Ronald Straydeer out of this for now.

‘I’d prefer not to say,’ I replied. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No, just curious. I don’t often get private detectives requesting to see me.’

‘I noticed that you didn’t ask what this was about when we spoke on the phone.’

‘I did some checking up on you. You’ve got quite the reputation. I could hardly turn down the prospect of meeting you.’

‘My reputation is inflated. I wouldn’t believe everything that you read in the papers.’

She smiled. ‘I didn’t read about you in the papers. I prefer to deal with people.’

‘Then we have that in common.’

‘It may be the only thing. Tell me, Mr. Parker, have you ever been in therapy?’

‘No.’

‘Grief counseling?’

‘No. Are you hustling for business?’

‘As you noted, I’m interested in post-traumatic stress.’

‘And I seem like a candidate.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you agree? I know about what happened to your wife and child. It was appalling, almost beyond countenance. I say “almost” because I served my country in Iraq, and what I saw there, what I endured there, changed me. Every day, I deal with the consequences of violence. You might say that I have a context into which to place what you’ve gone through, and what you may still be going through.’

‘Is this relevant?’

‘It is if you’re here to talk about post-traumatic stress. Whatever you learn today will be dependent on your understanding of the concept. That understanding may be commensurately greater if you can relate to it personally, however peripherally. Are we clear so far?’

Her smile hadn’t gone away. It managed to stay just the right side of patronizing, but it was a close-run thing.

‘Very.’

‘Good. My research here is part of an ongoing effort on the part of the military to deal with the psychological effects of combat, both on those who have served and have been invalided out, and on those who have left for reasons unrelated to injury. That’s one aspect of it. The other relates to pre-empting trauma. At the moment, we are phasing in emotional resiliency programs designed to improve combat performance and minimize mental heath difficulties, including PTSD, anger, depression, and suicide. These symptoms have become increasingly recognizable as soldiers undertake repeated deployments.

‘Not every soldier who experiences trauma will suffer from post-traumatic stress, just as individuals in civilian life react differently to, say, assault, rape, natural disasters, or the violent death of a loved one. There will be a stress response, but PTSD is not an automatic consequence. Psychology, genetics, physical condition, and social factors all play a part. An individual with a good support structure – family, friends, professional intervention – may be less likely to develop PTSD than, say, a loner. On the other hand, the longer the delay in developing PTSD, then arguably the more severely it will be experienced. Immediate post-traumatic stress usually begins to improve after three to four months. Delayed PTSD may be more long-term, up to a decade or more, and is therefore harder to treat.’ She paused. ‘Okay, that’s the lecture part over with for now. Any questions?’

‘None. Yet.’

‘Good. Now you get to participate.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then you can leave. This is a trade-off, Mr. Parker. You want my help. I’m prepared to give it, but only in return for something. In this case, it’s your willingness to acknowledge when, and if, any of the symptoms I’m about to detail are familiar to you. You need answer only in the most general of terms. There are no records of this conversation being kept. If, at some point in the future, you would consider offering some deeper insights into what you’ve been through, then I would be grateful. You might even find it beneficial, or therapeutic. In any event, it goes back to what I said at the start. You’re here to find out about PTSD. This is your chance.’

I had to admire her. I could leave, but I would have learned nothing, except not to underestimate women who look like boxers, and I’d figured that out long before I met Carrie Saunders.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. I tried to keep the resignation out of my voice. I don’t think that I succeeded.

‘There are three main categories of post-traumatic stress disorder. The first involves flashbacks, the re-experiencing of the event that may have sparked the disorder or, less severely, and more commonly, a series of unwanted, intrusive thoughts that may feel like flashbacks, but aren’t. We’re talking about dreams and bad memories on one level, or making associations with the event from unrelated situations: you’d be surprised at how many soldiers dislike fireworks, and I’ve seen traumatized men hit the deck at the sound of a door banging, even a child shooting a toy gun. But on another level there may be an actual reliving of what occurred, to the extent that it feels real enough to disrupt ordinary, day-to-day functioning. One of my colleagues calls it “ghosting”. I don’t like the term myself, but I’ve spoken to sufferers who’ve seized on the concept.’

There was silence in the room. A bird flew by the window, and the sunlight caused its shadow to flit across the room: an unseen thing, separated from us by glass and brick, by the solidity of the actual, making its presence felt to us.

‘There were flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, or whatever you want to call them,’ I said at last.

‘Severe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frequent?’

‘Yes.’

‘What would bring them on?’

‘Blood. The sight of a child – a girl – on the street, with her mother or alone. Simple things. A chair. A blade. Advertisements for kitchens. Certain shapes, angled shapes. I don’t know why. As time went on, the images that would cause problems for me became fewer.’

‘And now?’

‘They’re rare. I still have bad dreams, but not so often.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

I was conscious of trying not to pause too long before my replies, of not giving the impression to Saunders that she might have hit on an interesting avenue to explore. The possibility that I believed myself to have been haunted by my wife and child, or some dark version of them that had since been replaced by forms less threatening but equally unknowable, would have qualified as an interesting avenue even if I’d been in group therapy with Hitler, Napoleon, and Jim Jones. Under the circumstances, I was pleased that my reply to her last question was virtually instantaneous.

‘I don’t know. Time?’

‘It doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s a myth.’

‘Maybe you just get used to the pain.’

She nodded. ‘You might even miss it when it’s gone.’

‘You think so?’

‘You might if it gave you purpose.’

If she wanted another response, she wasn’t going to get it. She seemed to realize it, because she moved on.

‘Then there are avoidance symptoms: numbness, detachment, social isolation.’

‘Not leaving the house?’

‘It may not be that literal. It could be just staying away from people or places associated with the incident: family, friends, former colleagues. Sufferers find it hard to care about anything. They may feel that there’s no point, that they have no future.’

‘There was some detachment,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t feel part of ordinary life. There was no such thing. There was just chaos, waiting to break through.’

‘And colleagues?’

‘I avoided them, and they avoided me.’

‘Friends?’

I thought of Angel and Louis, waiting outside in their car. ‘Some of them didn’t want to be avoided.’

‘Were you angry at them for that?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they were like me. They shared my purpose.’

‘Which was?’

‘To find the man who killed my wife and child. To find him, and to tear him apart.’

The answers were coming more quickly now. I was surprised, even angry at myself for letting this stranger get beneath my skin, but there was a pleasure in it too, a kind of release. Perhaps I was a narcissist, or perhaps I had simply not been so clinically incisive with myself in a very long time, if ever.

‘Did you feel that you had a future?’

‘An immediate one.’

‘That lay in killing this man.’

‘Yes.’

She was leaning forward slightly now, a white light in her eyes. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, until I realized that I was seeing my own face reflected in the depths of her pupils.

‘Arousal symptoms,’ she said. ‘Difficulty concentrating.’

‘No.’

‘Exaggerated responses to startling stimuli.’

‘Like gunshots?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘No, my responses to gunshots weren’t exaggerated.’

‘Anger. Irritability.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sleeping difficulties.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hypervigilance.’

‘Justified. A lot of people seemed to want me dead.’

‘Physical symptoms: fever, headache, dizziness.’

‘No, or not excessively so.’

She sat back. We were nearly done.

‘Survivor guilt,’ she said softly.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yes, all the time.

Carrie Saunders stepped from her office and came back with two cups of coffee. She took some sachets of sugar and creamer from her pocket and laid them on the desk.

‘You don’t need me to tell you, do you?’ she said as she filled her cup with enough sugar to make the spoon stand upright without a hand to support it.

‘No, but then you’re not the first one to try.’

I sipped the coffee. It was strong, and tasted bitter. I could see why she was adding so much sugar to it.

‘How are you doing now?’ she asked.

‘I’m doing okay.’

‘Without treatment?’

‘I found an outlet for my anger. It’s ongoing, and therapeutic.’

‘You hunt people down. And, sometimes, you kill them.’

I didn’t reply. Instead, I asked: ‘Where did you serve?’

‘In Baghdad. I was a major, initially attached to Task Force Ironhorse at Camp Boom in Ba Qubah.’

‘Camp Boom?’

‘Because there were so many explosions. It’s called Camp Gabe now, after a sapper, Dan Gabrielson, who was killed at Ba Qubah in 2003. It was basic as anything when I got there: no plumbing, no a/c, nothing. By the time I left there were CHEWS, central water for the showers and latrines, a new power grid, and they’d begun training the Iraqi National Guard there.’

‘CHEWS?’ I said. I felt as though I were listening to someone speaking pidgin English.

‘Containerized housing units. Big boxes to you.’

‘Must have been hard, being a female soldier out there.’

‘It was. This is a new war. In the past, female soldiers didn’t live and fight alongside men, not the way they do now. It’s brought its own problems. Technically, we’re barred from joining combat units, so instead we’re “attached” to them. In the end, we still fight, and we still die, just like men. Maybe not in the same numbers, but over a hundred women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds more have been injured. But we’re still called bitches and dykes and sluts. We’re still open to harassment and assault by our own men. We’re still advised to walk in pairs around our own bases to avoid rape. But I don’t regret serving, not for one minute. That’s why I’m here: there are a lot of soldiers who are still owed something.’

‘You said you started at Camp Boom. What about after that?’

‘I was seconded to Camp Warhorse, and then to Abu Ghraib as part of the restructuring of the prison.’

‘You mind if I ask what your duties there involved?’

‘Initially, I dealt with prisoners. We wanted information, and they were naturally hostile to us, especially after what happened in the prison in the early days. We needed to find other ways to get them to talk.’

‘When you say “other ways”…’

‘You saw the photographs: humiliation, torture – simulated and otherwise. That didn’t help our cause. Those idiots on talk radio who laughed about it had no understanding of the impact it had. It gave the Iraqis another reason to hate us, and they took it out on the military. American soldiers died because of Abu Ghraib.’

‘Just a few bad apples getting out of line.’

‘Nothing happened in Abu Ghraib that wasn’t sanctioned from above, in general if not in detail.’

‘And then you arrived with a new approach.’

‘I, and others. Our maxim was simple: don’t torture. Torture a man or woman for long enough, and you’ll be told exactly what you want to hear. In the end, all they want is for the torture to stop.’

She must have seen something in my face, because she stopped talking and eyed me intently over her coffee. ‘You’ve been hurt in that way?’

I didn’t answer.

‘I’ll take that as a “yes”’, she said. ‘Even moderate pressure, and by that I mean physical pain that doesn’t leave one in fear of death, is scarring. In my view, someone who has endured torture is never quite the same again. It removes a part of oneself, excises it entirely. Call it what you will: peace of mind, dignity. Sometimes, I wonder if it even has a name. Anyway, in the short term it has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the personality.’

‘And in the long term?’

‘Well, in your case, how long has it been?’

‘Since the last time?’

‘There’s been more than one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus. If I was dealing with a soldier in your position, I’d be making sure that he was undergoing intensive therapy.’

‘That’s reassuring to know. To get back to you…’

‘After my time in Abu Ghraib, I moved into counseling and therapy. It became clear at a very early stage that there were problems with stress levels, and those increased when the military instituted repeated deployments, stop-loss, and began calling up weekend warriors. I became part of a mental health team working out of the Green Zone, but with particular responsibility for two FOBs: Arrowhead and Warhorse.’

‘Arrowhead. That’s where the Third Infantry is based, right?’

‘Some brigades, yes.’

‘You ever encounter anyone from a Stryker unit while you were there?’

She set her cup aside. Her expression changed.

‘Is that why you’re here, to talk about the men of Stryker C?’

‘I didn’t mention Stryker C.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

She waited for me to proceed.

‘From what I can tell, three members of Stryker C, all known to one another, have died at their own hands,’ I said. ‘One of them took his wife with him. That sounds like a suicide cluster to me, which would probably be of interest to you.’

‘It is.’

‘Did you speak to any of those men before they died?’

‘I spoke to all of them, but Damien Patchett only inform ally. The first was Brett Harlan. He’d been attending the Veterans Outreach Center in Bangor. He was also a drug addict. For him, it helped that the needle exchange program was based next to a veterans center.’

I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘That’s confidential.’

‘He’s dead. He doesn’t care any longer.’

‘I’m still not going to reveal the substance of my discussions with him, but clearly you can take it that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, although-’

She stopped. I waited.

‘He was experiencing auditory phenomena,’ she added, slightly reluctantly.

‘So he was hearing voices.’

‘That doesn’t fit with the diagnosis criteria for PTSD. That’s closer to schizophrenia.’

‘Did you investigate further?’

‘He discontinued treatment. And then he died.’

‘Was there a specific event that triggered his problem?’

She looked away. ‘It was… nonspecific, as far as I could ascertain.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘There were nightmares, and he was having trouble sleeping, but he couldn’t relate it to a specific occurrence. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’

‘Was there any indication that he might have been about to murder his wife?’

‘None. Do you seriously think that we wouldn’t have intervened if we thought that there was such a risk? Come on.’

‘Is it possible that the same stimulus could have led all three to act as they did?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Could something have happened in Iraq that led to a form of… collective trauma?’

Her mouth twitched slightly in amusement. ‘Are you making up psychiatric terms, Mr. Parker?’

‘It sounded right. I couldn’t think of any other way to explain what I meant.’

‘Well, it’s not a bad effort. I dealt with Bernie Kramer twice, shortly after he returned. He displayed mild stress symptoms at the time, similar to those being experienced by Brett Harlan, but neither referred to any common traumatic occurrence in Iraq. Kramer declined to continue treatment. Damien Patchett I encountered briefly after Bernie Kramer died, as part of my research, and, again, he spoke of nothing that might correspond to what you’re suggesting.’

‘His father didn’t mention that he was receiving counseling.’

‘That’s because he wasn’t. We talked for a time after Kramer’s funeral, and met subsequently once, but there was no formal therapy. Actually, I’d have said that Damien appeared very well adjusted, apart from some insomnia.’

‘Did you prescribe drugs for any of those men?’

‘It’s part of my job, when necessary. I’m not a fan of heavily medicating troubled individuals. It just helps to mask the pain, without dealing with the underlying problem.’

‘But you did prescribe drugs.’

‘Trazodone.’

‘For Damien Patchett?’

‘No, just for Kramer and Harlan. I advised Damien to consult his own physician, if he was having trouble sleeping.’

‘But that wasn’t the limit of his problems.’

‘Apparently not. It may be that Kramer’s death was the catalyst for the emergence of Damien’s own difficulties. To be honest, I was surprised when Damien took his life. But I approached a number of Kramer’s former comrades at the funeral, Damien included, and offered to help facilitate counseling services for them, if they chose to avail themselves of them.’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because it would have helped with your research.’

For the first time, she got angry. ‘No, because it would have helped them. This isn’t merely some academic exercise, Mr. Parker. It’s about saving lives.’

‘It doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the Stryker C,’ I said. I was goading her, and I didn’t know why. I suspected that it was resentment at myself for opening up to her that I was now trying to throw back. Whatever the reason, I needed to stop. She precipitated it by standing, indicating that our time together was over. I stood and thanked her for her input, then turned to leave.

‘Oh, one last thing,’ I said, as she began to open folders on her desk and return to her work.

‘Yes,’ she said. She didn’t look up.

‘You attended Damien Patchett’s funeral?’

‘Yes. Well, I went to the church. I would have gone to the cemetery too, but I didn’t.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘It was communicated to me that I wouldn’t be welcome.’

‘By whom?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Joel Tobias?’

Her hand froze for an instant, and then continued turning a page.

‘Good-bye, Mr. Parker,’ she said. ‘If you’ll take some professional advice, you still have a lot of issues to work out. I’d speak to someone about them, if I were you. Someone other than myself,’ she added.

‘Does that mean you don’t want me to be part of your research?’

Now she looked up. ‘I think I’ve learned enough about you,’ she said. ‘Please close the door on your way out.’

22

Bobby Jandreau still lived in Bangor, a little over an hour north of Augusta, in a house at the top of Palm Street, off Stillwater Avenue. Once again, Angel and Louis stayed with me all the way there, but we reached Jandreau’s place without incident. It didn’t look like much from the outside: single-story, paintwork that flaked like bad skin, a lawn that was trying its best to pretend that it wouldn’t soon be overrun by weeds. The best that could be said about the exterior was that it didn’t raise any expectations that the interior of the house couldn’t live up to. Jandreau answered the door in his wheelchair. He was dressed in gray sweat pants pinned at the thighs and a matching t-shirt, both of which were stained. He was building up a gut that the shirt didn’t even attempt to conceal. His hair was shaved close to his skull, but he was growing a rough beard. The house smelled stale: in the kitchen behind him, I could see dishes piled up in the sink, and pizza boxes lying on the floor by the trash can.

‘Help you?’ he said.

I showed him my ID. He took it from me and held it on his lap, staring at it the way someone might examine the photograph of a missing child that had been presented to him by the cops, as though by gazing at it for long enough he might remember where he’d seen the kid. When he had finished examining it, he returned it to me and let his hands fall between his thighs, where they worried at each other like small animals fighting.

‘Did she send you?’

‘Did who send me?’

‘Mel.’

‘No.’ I wanted to ask him why she might have wanted to send a private detective to his home, because she’d given no indication of that level of trouble when we talked, but it wasn’t the time for that, not yet. Instead, I said: ‘I was hoping to talk to you about your army service.’

I waited for him to ask me why, but he didn’t. He just wheeled his chair backward and invited me inside. There was a wariness to him, a consciousness, perhaps, of his own vulnerability and the fact that, until he died, he would always be destined to look up at others. His upper arms were still strong and muscular, and when we went into the living room I saw a rack of dumbbells over by the window. He saw where I was looking, and said, ‘Just because my legs don’t work no more doesn’t mean I have to give up on the rest of me.’ There was no belligerence or defensiveness to his words. It was simply a statement of fact.

‘The arms are easy. The rest-’ He patted his belly. ‘-Is harder.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

‘You want a soda? I don’t have anything stronger. I’ve decided that it’s not good for me to have certain temptations around.’

‘I’m fine. You mind if I sit down?’

He pointed at a chair. I saw that my first impressions about the interior had been wrong, or at least unfair. This room was clean, if a little dusty. There were books – mainly science fiction, but history books too, most of them relating to Vietnam and World War II, from what I could see, but also some books on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology – and today’s newspapers, the Bangor Daily News and the Boston Globe. But there was a mark on the carpet where something had splattered recently and had been imperfectly cleaned up, and another on the wall and floor between the living room and the kitchen. I got the sense that Jandreau was trying his best to keep things together, but there was only so much that a man in a wheelchair could do about a stain on the carpet, not unless he was going to tip himself out of his chair to deal with it.

Jandreau was watching me carefully, gauging my reactions to his living space.

‘My mom comes around a couple of times a week to help me with the stuff I can’t do for myself. She’d be around here every day if I let her, but she fusses. You know how they can be.’

I nodded.

‘What happened to Mel?’

‘You know her?’

I didn’t want to tell him that I’d spoken with her until I was ready. ‘I read the interview with you in the newspaper last year. I saw her picture.’

‘She went away.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Because I was an asshole. Because she couldn’t deal with this.’ He patted his legs, then reconsidered: ‘No: because I couldn’t deal with this.’

‘Why would she hire a detective?’

‘What?’

‘You asked if Mel had sent me. I’m just wondering why you might have thought that.’

‘We had an argument before she left, a disagreement about money, about ownership of some stuff. I figured maybe she’d hired you to take it further.’

Mel had mentioned some of this in our conversation. The house was in both their names, but she hadn’t made any effort yet to seek legal advice about her position. The break-up was still new, and she hoped that they might yet be reconciled. Still, something in Jandreau’s tone gave the lie to what he just said, as though he had greater concerns than domestic issues.

‘And you trusted me when I told you that she hadn’t sent me?’

‘Yeah, I guess. You don’t seem like the kind of man who’d try to beat up on a cripple. And if you were, well-’

His right hand moved very fast. The gun was a Beretta, hidden in a makeshift holster attached to the underside of the chair. He held it upright for a couple of seconds, the muzzle pointing to the ceiling, before he restored it to its hiding place.

‘Are you worried about something?’ I asked, even if it seemed like a redundant question to ask a man with a gun in his hand.

‘I’m worried about lots of stuff: falling over while using the john, how I’m going to manage when winter comes around. You name it, I’ve got a worry for it. But I don’t like the idea of someone finding me an easy mark. That, at least, I can do something about. Now, Mr. Parker, how about you tell me why you’re interested in me.’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Joel Tobias.’

‘Suppose I told you that I don’t know any Joel Tobias.’

‘Then I’d have to assume that you were lying, since you served together in Iraq, and he was your sergeant in Stryker C. You were both at the funeral of Damien Patchett, and later you got into a fight with Tobias in Sully’s. So you still want to tell me that you don’t know any Joel Tobias?’

Jandreau looked away. I could see him sizing up his options, debating whether to talk to me or simply send me on my way. I could almost feel the suppressed anger rolling off him, waves of it breaking on me, on the furniture, on the stained walls, the spume of it splashing back on his own maimed body. Anger, grief, loss. His fingers created intricate patterns from themselves, interweaving and then coming apart, forming constructions that only he could understand.

‘So I know Joel Tobias,’ he said at last. ‘But we’re not close. Never were.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Joel’s old man was a soldier, so Joel had it in his blood. He liked the discipline, liked being the alpha dog. The army was just an extension of his nature.’

‘And you?’

He squinted at me. ‘How old are you?’

‘Forties.’

‘They ever try to recruit you?’

‘No more than they tried to recruit anyone else. They came to my high school, but I didn’t bite. But it wasn’t the same then. We weren’t at war.’

‘Yeah, well we are now, and I bit. They promised me cash, money for college. Promised me the sun, the moon, and the stars.’ He smiled sadly. ‘The sun part was true. Saw a lot of that. Sun, and dust. I’ve started working for Veterans for Peace now. I’m a counter-recruiter.’

I didn’t know what that was, so I asked him.

‘Army recruiters are trained only to answer the right question,’ he said. ‘You don’t ask the right question, then you don’t get the right answer. And if you’re a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid with poor prospects, faced with a guy in uniform who’s so slick you could skate on him, then you’re going to believe what you’re told, and you’re not going to examine the small print. We point out the small print.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as that your college fees aren’t guaranteed, that the army owes you nothing, that less than ten percent of recruits get the full amount of bonuses or fees that they were promised. Look, don’t get me wrong here: it’s honorable to serve your country, and a lot of these kids wouldn’t have any kind of career at all if it wasn’t for the army. I was one of them. My family was poor, and I’m still poor, but I’m proud that I served. I’d have preferred not to end up in a wheelchair, but I knew the risks. I just think the recruiters should be more upfront with the kids about what they’re getting themselves into. It’s the draft in all but name: you target the poor, the ones who got no job, no prospects, the ones who don’t know any better. You think Rumsfeld didn’t know that when he inserted a recruiter provision into the No Child Left Behind Act? You think he made it compulsory for public schools to provide the military with all of their student details because it would help the kids read better? There are quotas to be filled. You gotta plug the gaps in the ranks somehow.’

‘But if the recruiters were completely honest, then who’d join up?’

‘Shit, I’d still have signed on the dotted line. I’d have done anything to get away from my family, and this place. All that was here for me was a minimum wage job and beers after work on Friday. And Mel.’ That gave him pause. ‘I guess I still got the minimum wage job: four hundred dollars a month, but at least they threw in health care, and I saw most of my bonus.’ He grimaced. ‘Lot of contradictions, huh?’

‘Was that why you fought with Joel Tobias, because of your work with Veterans for Peace?’

Jandreau looked away. ‘No, it wasn’t. He tried to buy me a beer to quiet me down, but I didn’t want to drink on his dime.’

‘Again: why?’

But Jandreau skirted the question. As he himself had said, he was a man of contradictions. He wanted to talk, but only about what interested him. He appeared polite, but there was ferocity beneath the veneer. I knew now what Ronald Straydeer meant when he said that Jandreau was a man who looked like he was on the way down. If he didn’t use that gun on someone else, there was a chance that he might use it on himself, just like his buddies.

‘What’s your interest in Joel Tobias anyway?’ he asked.

‘I was hired to find out why Damien Patchett killed himself. I heard about the altercation at the funeral. I wanted to know if there was any connection.’

‘Between a bar fight and a suicide? You’re full of shit.’

‘That, or a really bad detective.’

There was a pause and then, for the first time, Jandreau laughed.

‘At least you’re honest.’ The laughter ceased, and the smile that followed was sad. ‘Damien shouldn’t have killed himself. I don’t mean that in a religious way, or a moral way, or because it was a waste of a life. I mean that he wasn’t the kind. He left his grief in Iraq, or most of it. He wasn’t traumatized, or suffering.’

‘I spoke to a shrink in Togus who said the same thing.’

‘Yeah? Who was that?’

‘Carrie Saunders.’

‘Saunders? Give me a break. She’s got more questions than Alex Trebek, but none of the answers.’

‘You’ve met her?’

‘She interviewed me as part of her study. Didn’t impress me at all. As for Damien, I served with him. I loved him. He was a good kid. I always thought of him like that, as a kid. He was intelligent, but he had no smarts. I tried to look out for him, but he ended up taking care of me in the end. Saved my life.’ His fist tightened on the arm of his chair. ‘Fuckin’ Joel Tobias,’ he whispered, and it sounded like a shout.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘I’m angry with Tobias. Doesn’t mean I’m going to rat him out, him or anyone else.’

‘I know that he’s running an operation. He’s smuggling, and I think he might have promised some of the proceeds to you. You, and men and women like you.’

Jandreau turned away and wheeled himself to the window.

‘Who are the guys outside?’ he asked.

‘Friends.’

‘Your friends don’t look like the friendly type.’

‘I felt like I needed some protection. If they looked too inviting, it would defeat the purpose.’

‘Protection? Who from?’

‘Maybe from the same people who’ve given you cause to carry that gun: your old buddies, led by Joel Tobias.’ He still hadn’t turned back to me, but I could see his reflection in the glass.

‘Why would I be frightened of Joel Tobias?’

Frightened: it was an interesting choice of words. Its very use was an admission of sorts.

‘Because you’re worried that they think you’re a weak link.’

‘Me? I’m a regular stand-up guy.’ He laughed again, and it was a terrible sound.

‘I think you were worried about Damien Patchett. You owed him, and you didn’t want anything to happen to him. Maybe he was in too deep, or he didn’t listen, but when he died, you decided to take action. Or perhaps you had to wait for what happened with Brett Harlan and his wife before you began to discern a pattern.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you spoke to your cousin. You called Foster Jandreau, because he was a cop, but a cop that you could trust, because he was family. You probably fed him a little, and hoped that he’d find out the rest for himself. When he started making inquiries, they killed him, and now you believe that’s it’s just a matter of time before they come for you. Does that sound about right?’

He spun the chair quickly, and the gun was back in his hand.

‘You don’t know that. You don’t know anything.’

‘This has to be stopped, Bobby. Whatever’s happening, people have begun to die, and no amount of money can be worth that, unless your conscience is up for bids.’

‘Get out of my house!’ he shouted. ‘Get out!’

Behind him, I could see Angel and Louis starting to run as they heard the noise from the house. If I didn’t defuse the situation, Bobby Jandreau’s door would be lying in his hallway, and he might have cause to use that gun, if he was fast enough.

I made my way to the door, opened it, and let Angel and Louis see that I was okay, but Bobby Jandreau chose that moment to wheel himself, one-handed, into the hallway. For a moment, I was trapped between three guns.

‘Take it easy! Everyone! Easy!’ Slowly, I dipped two fingers into my jacket pocket and removed one of my cards. I placed it on the table next to the door.

‘You owed Damien Patchett, Bobby,’ I said. ‘He’s gone, but your debt’s still in play. Now his father’s holding it. You think about that.’

‘Get lost,’ he said, but the anger was already disappearing, and he just managed to sound tired. His voice quavered on the word ‘lost,’ a recognition that he was the one who was drifting on dark, unknown seas.

‘And one more thing,’ I said, following up my advantage on a crippled veteran. ‘Go make up with your girlfriend. I think you forced her away because you’re scared of what’s coming, and you didn’t want her to be hurt if they did come after you. She still loves you, and you need someone like her in your life. You know it, and she knows it. You have my card, you need any more counseling.’

I walked away, Angel and Louis still watching my back. I heard the door close, and then they were beside me.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Louis as we reached the cars. ‘Man pulls a gun on you, and you give him relationship advice?’

‘Somebody had to.’

‘Yeah, but you? Dodo eggs got laid more recently than you.’

I ignored him. As I got in my car, I saw Bobby Jandreau at his window, watching me.

‘You think he’ll come around?’ asked Angel.

‘About his girlfriend, or Tobias?’

‘Both.’

‘He has to, on both. If he doesn’t, he’s dead. Without her, he’s dying already. He just hasn’t admitted it yet. Tobias and the others will just finish what he’s started himself.’

‘Wow,’ said Angel. ‘You think there’s a Hallmark card for that: “Shape Up or Die”?’

We drove away, Angel and Louis behind me, but only as far as the next street. They looked puzzled when I pulled over and then walked back to them.

‘I want you to stay here,’ I said.

‘Why?’ asked Angel.

‘Because they’re going to come for Bobby Jandreau.’

‘You seem pretty sure of that.’

I walked to the Mustang, and pointed out the GPS tracker on the rear fender.

‘This will bring them. That’s why it’s staying here with you while I take your car.’

‘Your car stays here,’ said Louis, ‘and they’ll think Jandreau is giving you chapter and verse, so they’ll try to take you both out.’

‘Except they won’t,’ I said, ‘because you’re going to kill them when they move on Jandreau.’

‘And then Jandreau will talk.’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘And where are you going to be?’ asked Angel.

‘Over by Rangeley.’

‘What’s in Rangeley?’

‘A motel.’

‘So we skulk in the bushes while you stay in a motel?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Yeah, good deal.’

We switched cars, but not before Louis and Angel emptied the rest of their toys from the compartment in the trunk. As it turned out, they’d traveled light, for them: two Glocks, a couple of knives, a pair of semiautomatic machine pistols, and some spare clips. Louis found a position in the woods with a clear view of Jandreau’s house, and they settled in to wait.

‘You got any questions you want us to ask before we kill them?’ asked Louis. ‘Assuming we got to kill them.’

I thought of the barrel of water in the Blue Moon, and the feel of the sack pressed hard against my nose and mouth. ‘If you don’t have to, then don’t, but I don’t much care either way. As for questions, you can ask them what you want.’

‘What would we have to ask them?’ asked Angel.

Louis thought about the question.

‘Eyes open, or eyes closed?’ he said.

All was movement. The pieces were on the board, and that night the game would reach its conclusion.

From her bedroom window, Karen Emory watched Joel Tobias leave. He had said a cursory good-bye to her, and kissed her with dry lips upon the cheek. She had held him tightly, even as she felt him pull away from her, and before she let him go, her fingertips touched against the gun at his back.

Tobias took the Silverado and drove north, but only as far as Falmouth, where the others were waiting with the van and two motorcycles. Vernon and Pritchard, the ex-Marines, constituted the main sniper team. Beside them stood Mallak and Bacci. Vernon and Pritchard were both big men, and even though the former was black, and the latter white, they were brothers beneath the skin. Tobias didn’t care for either of them, but that was at least as much about the mutual antipathy that existed between soldiers and Marines as it was about Vernon’s seeming inability to open his mouth without asking a question, and loading it with attitude.

‘Where are Twizell and Greenham?’ asked Vernon, referring to the second sniper team.

‘They’ll join us later,’ said Tobias. ‘They have something else to do first.’

‘Shit,’ said Vernon in reply. ‘Don’t suppose you feel like sharing the details with the troops?’

‘No,’ said Tobias, and held Vernon’s gaze until the other looked away.

Mallak and Bacci, who had served in Tobias’s squad in Iraq, exchanged a glance, but didn’t intervene. They knew better than to take sides in the ongoing pissing competition between Vernon and the sarge. Mallak had come home a corporal, and never questioned orders, even though he recognized that there was now a growing distance between Tobias and him. Tobias had grown strange in recent weeks, and pragmatic to the point of cruelty. It was Tobias who had suggested that the detective, Parker, should be disposed of entirely, and not simply questioned to find out what he knew. Mallak had argued for discretion, and had subsequently taken responsibility for the detective’s interrogation. He wasn’t in the business of killing Americans on home soil, or anywhere else. The climbdown over Parker was a small victory, and nothing more: Mallak had decided to pretend that he knew nothing about the death of Foster Jandreau, or any other actions.

Bacci, meanwhile, was a bald thug who just wanted his money, and was lucky that Tobias had not yet punched his lights out for the way he looked at Karen Emory.

We’re just one big happy family, thought Mallak, and the sooner all this is over, the better.

‘All right,’ said Tobias. ‘Let’s move out.’

Meanwhile, two men headed north in an anonymous brown sedan, passing Lewiston and Augusta and Waterville, Bangor slowly drawing nearer. One of them, the passenger, had a computer on his lap. Occasionally, he would refresh the map screen, but the blinking dot never moved.

‘That thing still working?’ asked Twizell.

‘Looks like it,’ said Greenham. He kept his eye on the blinking dot. It stayed close to the intersection of Palm and Stillwater, not far from the home of Bobby Jandreau. ‘We’ve got a sitting target,’ he confirmed, and Twizell grunted in satisfaction.

As Greenham and Twizell passed Lewiston, Rojas, still a little fuzzy from some recently administered dental anesthetic, and his teeth now aching, was sitting at a table working on the slab of red oak that would serve as a platform for the ornate seals. They lay beside him on a piece of black cloth as he worked, their presence a source of comfort to him, a reminder of the potential for beauty in this world.

And Herod drove north, drawing closer and closer to Rojas, grateful for the Captain’s absence, grateful that his pain was tolerable, for now. And as he went, another closed in on him.

For the Collector, too, was on the move.