Jackie tossed me the wallet. Inside was a Massachusetts driver’s license, identifying the man before us as one Alexis Murnos. There were also some business cards in his name for a company named Dresden Enterprises, with offices in the Prudential in Boston. Murnos was the head of corporate security.
“I hear you’ve been asking questions about me, Mr. Murnos. It would have been a lot easier to approach me directly.”
Murnos didn’t reply.
“Find out about his friends,” I told Jackie.
Jackie stepped back to make a call on his cell. Most of it consisted of “uh-huh’s” and “yeahs,” apart from one worrying interjection of “Jesus, it broke that easy? Guy must have brittle bones.”
“The Fulcis have them in the bed of their truck,” he told me when he was done. “They’re rent-a-cops from some security agency in Saugus. Tony says he thinks they’ll stop bleeding soon.”
If Murnos was troubled by the news, he didn’t show it. I had a feeling that Murnos was probably better at his job than the other two jokers, but somebody had asked him to do too much too quickly, and with limited resources. It seemed like time to prick his professional pride.
“You’re not very good at this, Mr. Murnos,” I said. “Corporate security at Dresden Enterprises must leave a little something to be desired.”
“We don’t even know what Dresden Enterprises is,” said Jackie. “He could be responsible for guarding chickens.”
Murnos sucked air in through his teeth. He had reddened slightly.
“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me what this is about, maybe over a cup of coffee, or do you want us to take you to meet your friends? It sounds like they’re going to need a ride home, eventually, and maybe some medical attention. I’ll have to leave you with the gentlemen who are currently looking after them, but it’ll only be for a day or two until I find out more about the company you’re working for. That will mean paying a visit to Dresden Enterprises, possibly with a couple of people in tow, which could be very professionally embarrassing for you.”
Murnos considered his options. They were kind of limited.
“I guess coffee sounds good,” he said, finally.
“See?” I said to Jackie. “That was easy.”
“You got a way with people,” said Jackie. “We didn’t even have to hit him.”
He sounded mildly disappointed.
It transpired that Murnos was actually empowered to tell me a certain amount, and to deal with me directly. He just preferred to sneak around until he was certain of all the angles. In fact, he admitted that he had amassed a considerable quantity of information on me without ever leaving his office, and he had partly guessed that Matheson would contact me. If the worse came to the worst, as it just had, he would then get a chance to see what I did when my feathers were ruffled.
“My colleagues aren’t really bleeding in the back of a truck, are they?” he asked. We were sitting at a table in Big Sky. It smelled good in there. Behind the counter, the kids who did the baking were cleaning down baking trays and freshening the coffee.
I exchanged a guilty look with Jackie. He was eating an apple scone, his second.
“I’m pretty certain that they are,” I said.
“The guys that took care of them, they ain’t too particular about these things,” said Jackie. “Plus one of your people said something insensitive about their truck.”
I was grateful to Jackie for all that he’d done, but it was time to get him out of the way. I asked him to find the Fulcis and make sure they didn’t inflict any further damage on anyone. He bought them a bag of scones and went on his way.
“You have interesting friends,” said Murnos, once Jackie was gone.
“Believe me, you haven’t even met the most entertaining ones. If you have anything to share with me, then now’s the time.”
Murnos sipped his coffee.
“I work for Mr. Joachim Stuckler. He is the CEO of Dresden Enterprises. Mr. Stuckler is a venture capitalist specializing in software and multimedia.”
“So he’s wealthy?”
“Yes, I think that would be a fair comment.”
“If he’s wealthy, why does he hire cheap labor?”
“That was my fault. I needed men to help me, and I’d used those two before. I didn’t expect them to be beaten for their trouble. Neither did I expect to be cornered in a parking lot and relieved of my weapon by someone who then offered to buy me coffee and a scone.”
“It’s been one of those days for you.”
“Yes, it has. Mr. Stuckler is also a collector of note. He has the wealth to indulge his tastes.”
“What does he collect?”
“Art, antiques. Arcane material.”
I could see where this was leading.
“Such as little silver boxes from the fifteenth century?”
Murnos shrugged. “He is aware that you were the one who found the remains in the apartment. He believes that your case may impinge upon something of interest to him. He would like to meet you to discuss the matter further. If you were free, he would appreciate a few hours of your time. Naturally, he will pay you for your trouble.”
“Naturally, except I’m not really in the mood for a trip to Boston.”
Murnos shrugged again.
“You were looking for a woman,” he said matter-of-factly. “Mr. Stuckler may be able to provide you with some information on those responsible for her disappearance.”
I glanced over at the kids behind the counter. I wanted to hit Murnos. I wanted to beat him until he told me all that he knew. He saw that desire in my face.
“Believe me, Mr. Parker, my knowledge of this affair is limited, but I do know that Mr. Stuckler had nothing to do with whatever happened to the woman. He merely learned that you were the one who killed Homero Garcia and discovered human remains in his apartment. He is also aware of the opening of the chamber in the basement of the building. I made some inquiries on his behalf, and discovered that your interest lay in the woman. Mr. Stuckler is happy to share whatever insights he may have with you.”
“And in return?”
“You may be able to fill some gaps in his own knowledge. If you cannot, then Mr. Stuckler is still willing to talk with you, and to tell you whatever he feels may be of help to you. It is a win-win situation for you, Mr. Parker.”
Murnos recognized that I had no choice, but he had the decency not to gloat. I agreed to meet with his employer over the next couple of days. Murnos confirmed the arrangement in a cell phone conversation with one of Stuckler’s assistants, then asked me if it was okay if he left. I thought it was nice of him to ask, until I realized that he was only looking for his gun back. I accompanied him outside, emptied the bullets down a drain, and handed the gun to him.
“You should get another gun,” I said. “That one isn’t much use to you on your ankle.”
Murnos’s right hand flexed, and I was suddenly looking down the barrel of a Smith & Wesson Sigma .380, four inches tall and a pound in weight.
“I have another gun,” he said. “It looks like I’m not the only one who hires cheap.”
He kept the muzzle trained on me for just a second longer than necessary before allowing it to disappear back into the folds of his coat. He smiled at me, then got into his car and drove away.
Murnos was right. Jackie Garner was a lunkhead, but not as big a lunkhead as the guy who employed him.
I drove back toward Scarborough, stopping off first at the Bible store. The woman behind the counter was happy to help me, and seemed only slightly disappointed when I didn’t add some little silver angel statues or a “My Guardian Angel Says You’re Too Close” bumper sticker to my purchase of two books on the apocrypha.
“We sell a lot of those,” she told me. “There’s a heap of folks who think that the Catholic Church has been hiding something all these years.”
“What could they be hiding?” I asked, despite myself.
“I don’t know,” she said, s
peaking slowly as she would to an idiot child, “because it’s hidden.”
I left her to it. I sat in my car and flicked through the first of the books, but there wasn’t much that was of use to me. The second was better, as it contained the entire Book of Enoch. The names of the fallen angels appeared in chapter 7, and as Claudia Stern had said, Ashmael’s was among them. I glanced quickly through the rest of the book, much of which seemed fairly allegorical in nature, apart from the early descriptions of the angels’ banishment and fall. According to Enoch, they were not subject to death, even after they fell, and nor would they ever be forgiven for all that they had done. Instead, the fallen angels set about teaching men to make swords and shields, and lecturing them on astronomy and the movements of the stars, “so that the world became altered . . . And men, being destroyed, cried out.” There were also some details about the Greek theologian Origen, who was anathematized for suggesting that the angels who fell were those “in whom the divine love had grown cold” and that they were then “hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men.”
I saw again the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop; the figure of the Captain; the bloody grapnel on the dead monks’ robes; and the grossest figure of all — the fat, distorted creature marching by his leader’s side, all bloodied and grinning with the joy of killing.
I picked up a sandwich at Amato’s on Route I and filled up on gas before heading east for home. At the pump beside me, two men, one bearded and overweight, the other younger and trimmer, were consulting a map in their grimy black Peugeot. The bearded man was wearing a gray hand-knitted sweater. A clerical collar was visible at his neck. They didn’t pay me any attention, and I didn’t offer them any help.
As I drew near my house, I saw a car parked in front of the driveway. It wasn’t quite blocking me, but it would be difficult to go around it without slowing down. A man was leaning against the hood, and the weight of his body had forced the front of the car down so far that the fender was on the verge of nuzzling the ground. He was taller than I by five or six inches, and massively, obesely overweight, shaped like a great egg, with a huge wad of fat at his belly that hung down over his groin and lapped at his thighs. His legs were very short, so short that his arms appeared longer than they. His hands, far from being flabby and awkward, were slim and almost delicate, although the wrists were heavy and swollen. Taken together, the various parts of his body appeared to have been inexpertly assembled from a variety of donors, as though a young Baron Frankenstein had been let loose in his toy box with the leftovers from a massacre at Weight Watchers. He wore plain black shoes on small feet, and tan trousers that had been altered at the legs to fit, the ends folded inside and inexpertly stitched, making it possible to judge the extent of the alterations by the circle of holes halfway up his shins. The swelling at his stomach was too big, or too uncomfortable, to encompass, so the waistband of the trousers ran underneath it, thereby allowing it to hang free beneath his billowing white shirt. The shirt was buttoned right to the neck, constricting it to such an extent that the circle of flab concealing the collar was a violent reddish purple in color, like the terrible discoloration that occurs in a corpse when the blood has gathered at the extremities. I could see no hint of a jacket under his brown camel-hair overcoat. There were buttons missing from the front, possibly after some futile and ultimately doomed attempt to close it. His head balanced finely on the layered fats of his neck, narrowing from a very round skull to a small, distinctly weak chin, an inverted sparrow’s egg atop the larger ostrich egg of his body. His features should have been lost in jowls and flab, sunken into them like a child’s drawing of the man in the moon. Instead, they retained their definition, losing themselves only as they drew nearer his neck. His eyes were closer to gray than green, as though capable only of a monochrome version of human sight, and no lines extended from them. He had long eyelashes, and a thin nose that flared slightly at the end, exposing his nostrils. His mouth was small and feminine, with something almost sensual about the curvature of the lips. He had small ears with very pronounced lobes. His head was closely shaved but his hair was very dark, so that it was easy to discern the imprint of the faded widow’s peak above his forehead. His resemblance to the foul creature in the painting at Claudia Stern’s auction house was startling. This man was fatter, perhaps, and his features more worn, but it was still as though the figure with the bloodied mouth had detached himself from the canvas and assumed a new existence in this world.
I stopped my Mustang a short distance from him. I preferred not to draw up alongside him. He didn’t move as I stepped from my car. His hands remained clasped below his chest, resting upon the first swelling of his belly.
“Can I help you?” I said.
He thought about the question.
“Perhaps,” he said.
His washed-out eyes regarded me. He did not blink. I felt a further slight glimmer of recognition, this time more personal, as when one hears a song playing on the radio, one that dates from one’s earliest childhood and is recalled only on the faintest of levels.
“I don’t usually conduct business at my home,” I said.
“You don’t have an office,” he replied. “You make yourself difficult to find, for an investigator. One might almost suspect that you didn’t want to be traced.”
He moved away from his car. He was strangely graceful, seeming almost to skate across the ground rather than to walk. His hands remained clasped on his belly until he was only a couple of feet away from me, then his right hand extended toward me.
“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Brightwell. I believe we have matters to discuss.”
As his hand moved through the air, the sleeve of his coat dangled loosely, and I glimpsed the beginnings of a mark upon his arm, like twin arrowheads recently burned into the flesh. Immediately I backed away, and my hand moved for the gun beneath my jacket, but he was faster than I, so fast that I barely saw him move. One moment there was space between us, the next there was none, and he was pressed hard against me, his left hand digging into my right forearm, the nails tearing through the fabric of my coat and into my skin, drawing blood from the flesh. His face touched mine, his nose brushing against my cheek, his lips an inch from my mouth. Sweat dropped from his brow and fell upon my lips before slowly dripping onto my tongue. I tried to spit it away but it congealed inside, coating my teeth and adhering to the roof of my mouth like gum, its force so strong that it snapped my mouth closed, causing me to bite the tip of my tongue. His own lips parted, and I saw that his teeth came to slightly blunted points, as though they had gnawed too long on bone.
“Found,” he said, and I smelled his breath. It smelled of sweet wine and broken bread.
I felt myself falling, tumbling through space, overcome by shame and sorrow and a sense of loss that would never end, a denial of all that I loved that would stay with me through all eternity. I was aflame, screaming and howling, beating at the fires with my fists, but they would not be extinguished. My whole being was alive with burning. The heat coursed through my veins. It animated my muscles. It gave form to my speech and light to my eyes. I twisted in the air and saw, far below, the waters of a great ocean. I glimpsed my own burning shape reflected in them, and others beside me. This world was dark, but we would bring light to it.
Found.
And so we fell like stars, and at the moment of impact I wrapped the tattered remnants of charred black wings around me, and the fires went out at last.
I was being dragged somewhere by the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to go. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, so that the world drifted between darkness and half-light. I heard myself speaking, muttering the same words over and over.
“Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
I was almost at Brightwell’s car. It was a big blue Mercedes, but the backseat had been removed to enable him to push back the driver’s seat and give him room to move. The car stank of meat. I tried to fight him but I
was weak and disoriented. I felt drunk, and the taste of sweet wine was upon my tongue. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with burning flesh. My eyes closed for the last time.
And a voice called my name.
“Charlie,” it said. “How have you been? I hope we’re not interrupting.”
I opened my eyes.
I was still standing at the open door of my Mustang. Brightwell had moved a few steps from his car, but had not yet reached me. To my right was the black Peugeot, and the bearded man with the clerical collar had jumped from the car and was now pumping my hand furiously.
“It’s been a long time. We had some trouble finding this place, let me tell you. I never thought that a city boy like you would end up out in the boonies. You remember Paul?”
The younger man stepped around the hood of the Peugeot. He was careful not to turn his back on the huge figure watching us from a short distance away. Brightwell seemed uncertain of how to proceed, then turned around, got in his car, and drove in the direction of Black Point. I tried to make out the license plate, but my brain was unable to make sense of the numbers.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Friends,” said the bearded priest.
I looked down at my right hand. There was blood dripping from my fingers. I rolled up my sleeve and saw five deep puncture wounds upon my arm.
I stared at the road ahead, but the Mercedes was gone from sight.
The priest handed me a handkerchief to stem the bleeding.
“On the other hand,” he said, “that was definitely not a friend.”
IV
I tell them there is no forgiveness,
and yet there is always forgiveness.
Michael Collins (1890–1922)
17
We sat around the kitchen table while the marshes prepared to flood, waiting for the coming of the tides that would bring with them death and regeneration. Already the air felt different; there was a stillness to nature, a watchfulness, as though every living thing that depended on the marshes for its existence was attuned to its rhythms and knew instinctively what was about to occur.
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