The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  “No shit?” said Louis. “What you want, a medal? A gold star?”

  “Why are you here?” I asked, although I already knew.

  “Razborka,” he said. “We want, uh—” He searched for the English word.

  “—clarification,” he finished.

  “Well, let me give you clarification,” I said. “I don’t like armed men on my property. If I shot you now, you think that would be clarification enough for your bosses?”

  The redheaded one glanced at his partner, then spoke.

  “You kill us and this gets worse. We are here to talk about Demarcian.” His English was better than his partner’s. He spoke it with only the faintest hint of an accent. It was clear that he was the one in charge, although he had been content to hide the fact until it became obvious that his bald friend was out of his depth in the current negotiations.

  “I don’t know anything about him, apart from the fact that he’s dead.”

  “The police questioned you. The rumor is that your gun was used to kill him.”

  “The gun was taken from me,” I said. “I don’t know for certain that it was used to kill Demarcian. My guess is that it probably was, but I don’t go loaning it out for killings. The man who took it wanted it real bad.”

  “It was careless of you to lose your gun,” said the Russian.

  “As you can see, I have another. If I lose that, I can always borrow one from my friend behind you. He has lots of guns. Anyway, I didn’t have anything to do with Demarcian’s death, the weapon apart.”

  “So you say,” said the Russian.

  “Yeah, but we have guns and you don’t, so our word wins.”

  The Russian shrugged, as though the whole matter was immaterial to him anyway. “I believe you, then. We would still like to know about the man who killed Demarcian, this Merrick. Tell us about Merrick.”

  “Do your own homework. You want him, you find him.”

  “But we think you too are looking for him. You want your gun back. Perhaps we find him, and we get it back for you.”

  His bald companion snickered and said something under his breath. It sounded like “frayeri.” Louis responded by striking him across the back of the head with the barrel of the Glock. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, but it laid him flat on his face. His scalp began to bleed.

  “He called us suckers,” explained Louis. “That’s not nice.”

  The redheaded man didn’t move. He just shook his head in apparent disappointment at his colleague’s stupidity. “I think your friend does not like Russians very much,” he said.

  “My friend doesn’t like anybody very much, but he does appear to have a particular problem with you two,” I admitted.

  “Perhaps he is a racist. Is that what you are?”

  He turned his head slightly, trying to see Louis. I had to give him credit: he wasn’t easily intimidated.

  “I can’t be no racist, man,” said Louis. “I’m black.”

  It didn’t quite answer the Russian’s question, but he seemed content with what he heard. “We want Frank Merrick,” he continued. “We could make it worth your while if you tell us what you know.”

  “Money?”

  “Sure, money.” His face brightened. This was the kind of negotiation that he liked.

  “I don’t need money,” I said. “I got too much as it is. What I need is for you to take your friend and get out of here. He’s bleeding on my driveway.”

  The Russian looked genuinely regretful. “That is a shame.”

  “It’s okay, it’ll wash off.”

  “I meant about the money.”

  “I know. Get up.”

  He stood. Behind him, Louis was checking the interior of the Chevy. He found a little H&K P7 in the glove compartment, and a Benelli M1 tactical shotgun with a pistol grip stock and click-adjustable military ghost wing sights in a flip compartment under the rear seat. Again, he emptied both, then opened the back of the Chevy, wiped his prints from them, and stuck them under the gray lining in the trunk.

  “Go back to Boston,” I said. “We’re all done here.”

  “And what do I tell my bosses?” said the Russian. “Someone must answer for what happened to Demarcian. It has caused many problems for us.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  He sighed deeply. “Can I put my hands down now?” he asked.

  “Slowly,” I said.

  He let his hands drop then bent down to help his companion to his feet. The back of the bald man’s head was wet with blood. The redhead took in Louis for the first time. They exchanged nods of professional respect. Louis removed a pristine white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to the Russian.

  “For your friend’s head,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You know what blat means?” said Louis.

  “Sure,” said the Russian.

  “Well, my friend here has major blat. You be sure to tell your bosses that.”

  The Russian nodded again. The bald man climbed gingerly into the passenger seat and rested his left cheek against the cool leather, his eyes closed. His colleague turned back to me.

  “Good-bye, volk,” he said. “Until we meet again.”

  He climbed into the Chevy, then began to reverse it down the drive, Louis keeping pace with him all the way, the Glock never wavering. I went back to my Mustang and moved it out of the way, then watched the Chevy head toward Route 1, Louis beside me.

  “Ukrainians,” he said. “Maybe Georgians. Not Chechens.”

  “Is that good?”

  He shrugged. It seemed to be contagious. “They all bad,” he said. “Chechens just real bad.”

  “The redhead didn’t seem like a foot soldier.”

  “Underboss. Means they real pissed about Demarcian.”

  “He doesn’t seem worth that kind of effort.”

  “They lose business. Cops start tracing their clients, ask questions about pictures of children. Can’t let it slide.”

  But he seemed to be holding something back.

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know. Feels off. I’ll ask around, see what I hear.”

  “Will they be back?”

  “Uh-huh. Might help if we found Merrick first, buy us a little influence.”

  “I’m not going to give them Merrick.”

  “Might not have a choice.” He started to walk back to the house.

  “What does ‘blat’ mean?” I asked.

  “Connections,” he replied. “And not the legal kind.”

  “And ‘volk’?”

  “It’s slang, word for a cop or an investigator. Kind of a compliment.” He put his gun back in its shoulder holster. “It means ‘wolf.’”

  29

  We drove north to Jackman late that afternoon, through Shawmut and Hinckley and Skowhegan, through Solon and Bingham, Moscow and Caratunk, past places without names and names without places, the road following the bends and curves of the Kennebec, the banks lined with bare trees, the forest floor brilliant with their lost foliage. Gradually, the nature of the forest began to change as the evergreens raised their spires, dark against the dying light as winter winds whispered of the promise of snow. And as the cold began to bite, the woods would grow ever quieter as animals retreated into hibernation and even birds grew torpid to preserve their energy.

  We were following the route that Arnold took on his expedition up the Kennebec to Quebec. His force of twelve hundred men marched from Cambridge to Newburyport, then took to the river on transports, navigating the crooked channel of the Kennebec as far as Gardinerstown. From there, they transferred to light bateaux, more than two hundred of them, each capable of holding six or seven men along with their provisions and baggage, perhaps four hundred pounds of weight in all. They were built hastily and from green lumber by Reuben Colburn at Gardinerstown, and they quickly began to leak and fall to pieces, ruining the troops’ supplies of powder, bread, and flour. Three companie
s were sent ahead under Daniel Morgan to the Great Carrying Place between the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, the others following slowly behind, using ox teams borrowed from settlers to move the bateaux around the impassable falls above Fort Western, hoisting them up the steep, icy banks at Skowhegan Falls, most of the men reduced to walking in order to ease the burden on the boats until they came at last to the twelve low, marshy miles of the Carrying Place. The soldiers sank into deep, green moss that looked firm from a distance but proved treacherous underfoot, a kind of calenture on land, so that the madness suffered by sailors too long at sea, who hallucinated dry earth where there was no earth and drowned beneath the waves when they jumped, found its echo in ground that was soft and yielding as water. They stumbled on logs and fell in creeks, and in time they cleared a road in order to travel, so that for many years the path they took could be traced by the difference in the color of the foliage on either side of the route.

  I was struck by a sense of landscape layered upon landscape, past upon present. These rivers and forests were inseparable from their history; the distinction between what was now and what had gone before was fragile here. It was a place where the ghosts of dead soldiers passed through forests and over streams that had changed little in the intervening years, a place where family names had remained unaltered, where people still owned the land that their great-grandfathers had bought with gold and silver coin, a place where old sins persisted, for great change had not come to wash away the memory of them.

  So this was the land traversed by Arnold’s army, the soldiers equipped with rifles, axes, and long knives. Now other bands of armed men moved through this landscape, adding their clamor to the creeping silence of winter, holding it at bay with the roar of their guns and the growl of the trucks and quads that carried them into the wilderness. The woods were alive with orange-clad fools, businessmen from Massachusetts and New York taking a break from the golf course to blast at moose and bear and buck, guided by locals who were grateful for the money the outsiders spent yet remained resentful of the fact that they needed it to survive.

  We made but one stop along the way, at a house that was little more than a shack, three or four rooms in all, its windows unwashed and the interior hidden by cheap drapes. The yard was overgrown. A garage door gaped open, revealing rusted tools and stacks of firewood. There was no car, because one of the conditions of Mason Dubus’s parole was that he was not permitted to drive a vehicle.

  Louis waited outside. I think, perhaps, that he would have found Dubus’s company intolerable, for Dubus was a man like those who had abused Louis’s beloved Angel, and it was Louis’s greatest regret that he had never been given the opportunity to punish those who had scarred his lover’s soul. So he leaned against the car, and watched silently as the door was opened slightly, a chain securing it, and a man’s face appeared. His skin was yellow and his eyes were rheumy. His one visible hand shook with uncontrollable tremors.

  “Yes?” he said, and his voice was surprisingly firm.

  “Mr. Dubus, my name’s Charlie Parker. I think someone called to let you know I might want to speak with you.”

  The eyes narrowed. “Maybe. You got some, whatchacallit, ID? A license or something?”

  I showed him my PI’s license. He took it from me and held it close to his face, examining each and every word upon it, then handed it back to me. He looked beyond me to where Louis was standing.

  “Who’s the other fella?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “He’s gonna catch cold out there. He’s welcome to come in, if he chooses.”

  “I think he’d prefer to wait where he is.”

  “Well, it’s his call. Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

  The door closed for a moment, and I could hear the rattling as the security chain was removed. When it opened again, I got my first proper look at Dubus. He was hunched by age and illness, and by his years in prison, but there was still a vestige of the big, strong man that he had once been. His clothes were clean and carefully ironed. He wore dark trousers, a blue-striped shirt, and a tightly knotted pink tie. He was wearing an old-fashioned eau de cologne that bore hints of sandalwood and incense. The interior of the house gave the lie to any first impressions evoked by the exterior. The floorboards shone, and it smelled of furniture polish and air freshener. There were paperback books on a small shelf in the hallway, on top of which stood an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone. Nailed to the wall above it was a copy of the “Desiderata,” a kind of twelve-step program for those afflicted by the trials of modern life. The rest of the walls were decorated with prints of paintings in cheap frames— some modern, some much older, and most unfamiliar to me— although the images had clearly been carefully chosen.

  I followed Dubus into his living room. Again, everything was clean, even though the furniture had come from thrift stores and was scuffed and worn. A small TV sat on a pine table, tuned to a comedy show. There were more prints on the walls here, as well as a couple of originals, each depicting a landscape. One of them seemed familiar. I walked over to take a closer look at it. From a distance, it appeared to be a painting of a forest, a line of green trees against a red sunset, but then I saw that one of the trees stood taller than the rest, and had a cross at its highest point. Daniel Clay’s signature was visible in the bottom right-hand corner. It was Gilead.

  “He gave it to me,” said Dubus. He was standing at the opposite side of the room, keeping a distance between us. It was probably a result of his time in jail, when you learned to give every man his space, even in such a confined area, or you faced the consequences.

  “Why?”

  “For talking to him about Gilead. You mind if we sit down? I get tired. I have to take this medication.” He gestured at some bottles of pills on the mantel above the fireplace, where three logs were hissing and sparking. “It makes me drowsy.”

  I sat down on the couch across from him.

  “If you want coffee, I can make some,” he said.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Okay.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair, his eyes flicking toward the TV. It appeared that I had disturbed his viewing. Then, apparently resigning himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be left to watch it in peace, he hit a button on the remote and the picture died.

  “So what do you want to know?” he asked. “I get people through here now and again: students, doctors. You can’t ask me anything I ain’t already been asked a hundred times before.”

  “I’d like to know what you discussed with Daniel Clay.”

  “I talked about Gilead,” he said. “That’s all I ever talk about. They used to test me, show me pictures and stuff, but they don’t do that no more. I guess they think they know all that they need to know about me.”

  “And do they?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. I could hear the sound that it made deep in his throat. He regarded me for a time, then seemed to come to some decision.

  “No, they don’t,” he said. “They got as much as they’re going to get. Don’t think you’re going to get anything more than they did.”

  “What was Clay’s interest in Gilead?” I asked. I didn’t want to alienate Dubus. He might have been drowsy and medicated, but he was still sharp.

  “He wanted to know about what happened. I told him. I didn’t leave nothing out. I don’t have nothing to hide. I’m not ashamed of what we did together. It was all”—he screwed up his face in distaste—“misunderstood, misinterpreted. They made it out to be something it wasn’t.”

  “What we did together,” as though it was a mutual decision reached between the adults and the children, as natural as fishing, or picking berries in summer.

  “Children died, Mr. Dubus.”

  He nodded. “That was bad. That shouldn’t have happened. They was babies, though, and times were hard up there. Might almost have been a blessing, what happened to them.”

  “As I understand it, one was stabbed to death with a knittin
g needle. That’s a peculiar definition of a blessing.”

  “You judging me, sir?” He squinted at me, the trembling of his hands giving the impression that he was struggling, yet failing, to control great anger.

  “It’s not for me to do.”

  “That’s right. That was why I got on with Dr. Clay. He didn’t judge me.”

  “Did Daniel Clay ever talk about the children in his care?”

  “No.” Something unpleasant animated his features for an instant. “I tried, though. He didn’t bite.” Dubus snickered.

  “How many times did he come here?”

  “Two or three, far as I can remember. He visited me in jail, too, but that was just once.”

  “And it was all very businesslike. He interviewed you, and you talked.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And yet he gave you one of his paintings. I hear he was very careful about those to whom he gave his paintings. Very selective.”

  Dubus shifted in his chair. That Adam’s apple began bobbing again, and I was reminded of Andy Kellog worrying at his loose tooth. Both were indicators of stress.

  “Maybe I was helpful to him. Maybe he didn’t view me as no monster. I could see it in your friend’s face out there, and I could see it in yours when I opened the door. You tried to hide it with politeness and good manners, but I knew what you were thinking. And then you came in here, and you saw the pictures on my wall, and how clean and neat everything was. I wasn’t wallowing in my own filth. I wasn’t stinking, or dressed in filthy, tattered clothes. You think I want the outside of my place to look the way it does? You don’t think I want to paint it, to fix it up some? Well, I can’t. I do what I can around here, but there ain’t nobody going to help a man like me to keep his house in order. I paid for what they said I done, paid with years of my life, and they’re going to make me keep paying until I die, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of being ground down. You want monsters, you look elsewhere.”

  “Was Daniel Clay a monster?”

  The question seemed to shock him into silence. Then, for a second time, I saw the intelligence at work behind the withered façade, that creeping, nasty, corrupted thing that had allowed him to do what he had done, and to justify it to himself. I thought it might even have been what the children of Gilead had glimpsed as he moved upon them, his hand clasped across their mouths to stifle their cries.