After all, people sometimes had to be killed in places where the sun was not shining, and his bills had to be paid.
Yet pickings had been thin these last few months. In truth, he was mildly concerned. It had not always been thus. Once, he had enjoyed a considerable reputation. He had been a Reaper, and that name had carried a certain weight. Now he still had a reputation, but it was not entirely a good one. He was known as a man with certain appetites who had simply learned to channel them into his work, but who was sometimes overcome by them. He understood that he had overstepped the mark at least once during the past twelve months. The kill was supposed to have been simple and fast, not protracted and painful. It had caused confusion, and had angered those who had hired him. Since then, work had become less plentiful, and without work his appetites needed to find another outlet.
He had been following the kill for two days. It was practice as much as pleasure. He always thought of them as ‘kills’. They were never targets, and he never used the word ‘potential’. As far as he was concerned, once he focused upon them they were already dead. He could have chosen a more challenging individual, a more interesting kill, but there was something about the fat man that repelled him, a lingering stench of sadness and failure that suggested the world would be no poorer without him. By his actions, the fat man had drawn the predator to him, like the slowest animal in the herd attracting the attentions of a cheetah.
And so they stayed that way, predator and prey sharing the same space, listening to the same music, for almost an hour, until the fat man rose to go to the men’s room, and the time came to end the dance that had begun 48 hours earlier, a dance in which the fat man did not even know he was a participant. The predator followed him, keeping ten paces back. He allowed the men’s room door to settle in its frame before entering. Only the fat man was inside, standing at a urinal, his face creased with effort and pain.
Bladder trouble. Kidney stones, perhaps. I will end it all.
The doors to both stalls were open as the predator approached. There was nobody inside. The knife was already in his hand, and he heard a satisfying click, the sound of a blade locking into position.
And then, a second later, the sound came again, and he realized that the first click had not come from his own blade, but the blade of another. The speed of his every motion increased, even as his throat suddenly grew dry and he heard the pounding of his heart. The fat man was also moving now, his right hand a blur of pink and silver, and then the preda tor felt a pressure at his chest, followed by a sharp pain that quickly spread through his body, paralyzing him as it grew, so that when he tried to walk his legs would not answer the signals from his brain and instead he collapsed on the cold, damp tiles, his knife falling from the fingers of his right hand as his left clasped the horned handle of the throwing blade now lodged in his heart. Blood pumped from the wound and began to spread upon the floor. A pair of brown brogues carefully stepped aside to avoid the growing stain.
With all of his failing strength, the predator raised his head and stared into the face of the fat man, but the fat man was not as he had once seemed. Fat was now muscle, slumped shoulders were straight, and even the perspiration had disappeared, evaporating into the cool evening air. There was only death and purpose, and for an instant the two had become one.
The predator saw scarring at the man’s neck, and knew that the predator had been burned at some time in the past. Even as he lay dying, he began to make associations, to fill in the blanks.
‘You should have been more careful, William,’ said the fat man. ‘One should never confuse business with pleasure.’
The predator made a sound in his throat, and his mouth moved. He might have been trying to form words, but no words would come. Still, the fat man knew what he was trying to say.
‘Who am I?’ he said. ‘Oh, you knew me once. The years have changed me: age, the actions of others, the surgeon’s knife. My name is Bliss.’
The predator’s eyes rolled in desperation as he began to understand, and his fingers clawed at the tiled floor in a vain effort to reach his knife. Bliss watched for a moment, then leaned down and twisted the blade in the predator’s heart before pulling it free. He wiped the blade upon the dead man’s shirt before taking a small glass bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket and holding it to the wound in the predator’s chest, using a little pressure to increase the flow. When the bottle was full, he screwed a cap on it and left the men’s room, his body changing as he walked, becoming once again the torpid, sweaty carrier of a failure’s soul. Nobody, not even the bartender, looked at him as he left, and by the time the predator’s body was found and the police summoned, Bliss was long gone.
The final killing took place on a patch of bare ground about twenty miles south of the St Lawrence river in the northern Adirondacks. This was land shaped by fire and drought, by farming and railroads, by blowdowns and mining. For a time, iron brought in more revenue than lumber, and the railroads cut a swath through the forests, the sparks from their smokestacks sometimes starting fires that could take as many as 5000 men to bring under control.
One of those old railroads, now abandoned, curved through a forest of hemlock, maple, birch, and small beech before emerging into a patch of clear ground, a relic of the Big Blowdown of 1950 that had never been repaired. Only a single hemlock had survived the storm, and now a man knelt in its shadow upon the damp earth. Beside him was a gravestone. The kneeling man had read the name carved upon it when he was brought to this place. It had been displayed for him in a flashlight’s beam, before the beating had begun. There was a house in the distance, lights burning in one of the upper windows. He thought that he had seen a figure seated at the glass, watching as they tore him apart methodically with their fists.
They had taken him in his cabin near Lake Placid. There was a girl with him. He had asked them not to hurt her. They had bound and gagged her and left her weeping in the bathroom. It was a small mercy that they had not killed her, but no such mercy would be shown to him.
He could no longer see properly. One eye had closed itself entirely, never to reopen, not in this world. His lips had split, and he had lost teeth. There were ribs broken: he had no idea how many. The punishment had been methodical, but not sadistic. They had wanted information and, after a time, he had provided it. Then the beating had stopped. Since then, he had remained kneeling on the soft earth, his knees slowly sinking into the ground, presaging the final burial that was to come.
A van appeared from the direction of the house. It followed a well-worn track to the grave, then stopped. The back doors opened, and he heard the sound of machinery as a ramp was lowered.
The kneeling man turned his head. An elderly, hunched figure was being pushed slowly down the ramp in a wheelchair. He was swaddled in blankets like a withered infant, and his head was protected from the evening chill by a red wool hat. His face was almost totally obscured by the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, fed by a tank mounted on the back of the chair. Only the eyes, brown and milky, were visible. The chair was being pushed by a man in his early forties, who halted when the chair was feet from where the kneeling man waited.
The old man removed his mask with trembling fingers.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked.
The kneeling man nodded, but the other continued as though he had not given an answer. He pointed a finger at the gravestone.
‘My firstborn, my son,’ he said. ‘You had him killed. Why?’
‘What does it matter?’ He struggled to enunciate.
‘It matters to me.’
‘Go to hell.’ The effort made his lips begin to bleed again. ‘I’ve told them all I know.’
The old man held the mask to his face and drew a rasping breath before he spoke again.
‘It took me a long time to find you,’ he said. ‘You hid yourself well, you and the others responsible. Cowards, all of you. You thought I’d lose myself in grief, but I did not. I never forgot, never stopped searc
hing. I swore that their blood would be spilled upon his grave.’
The kneeling man looked away, and spat on the ground beneath the stone. ‘Finish it,’ he said. ‘I don’t care about your grief.’
The old man raised an emaciated hand. A shadow passed over the kneeling man and two shots were fired into his back. He fell forward onto the grave, and his blood began to seep into the ground. The old man nodded contentedly to himself.
‘It has begun.’
2
Willie Brew stood in the men’s room of Nate’s Tap Joint and stared at himself in the battered mirror above the similarly battered sink. He decided that he didn’t look sixty. In the right light, he could pass for fifty-five. Okay, fifty-six. Unfortunately, he had yet to find that particular light. It certainly wasn’t in Nate’s men’s room, where the light was so bright that taking a leak felt like it was being performed under interrogation.
Willie was bald. He had lost most of his hair by the time he was thirty. After that, he’d experimented with various ways of disguising his baldness: combovers, hats, even a wig. He’d gone for an expensive one, the kind made from realistic-looking fibers. He figured he’d picked the wrong color or something, because even little kids used to laugh at him, and the guys who hung around the auto shop when they had nothing better to do, which was most of the time, had opened a book on the various shades of red his head assumed as he passed through the light and shade of the garage. Willie had enough troubles without becoming an object of amusement for the seldom gainfully employed, like some Coney Island freak: ‘Come see the Wig Guy: A Modern Marvel. All the Colors of the Rainbow . . .’ He’d thrown away the wig after six months. Now he was just happy if his head didn’t shine too brightly in public.
He tugged at the skin below his cheekbones. There were deep-set wrinkles around his mouth and eyes that might have passed for laughter lines if Willie Brew was the kind of guy who did a whole lot of laughing, which he wasn’t. Willie did a brief count of the lines and wondered just how funny someone would have to find the world to build up that many wrinkles. Anyone who found the world that amusing was insane. There were broken veins on his nose, relics of his troubled middle years, and a few of his teeth felt loose. Somewhere along the path of life, he had also picked up a couple of extra chins.
Perhaps he did look sixty after all.
His eyesight remained good, although this merely enabled him to see more clearly the effects of the aging process upon him. He wondered if people with bad eyesight ever saw themselves as they truly were. Bad eyesight was the equivalent of those soft filters they used to take pictures of movie stars. You could have a third eye in the center of your forehead and, as long as it didn’t see any better than the other two, you could fool yourself into believing that you looked like Cary Grant.
He stepped back and examined his paunch, supporting it with his hands like an expectant mother showing off her bump, an image that made him quickly release his grip and wipe his hands instinctively on his pants, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He’d always had a paunch. He was just one of those guys. From the time he came out of the womb, he’d looked like his diet consisted entirely of pizza and beer, which wasn’t true. Willie actually ate pretty well for a single man. The problem was that he led what Arno, his assistant, described as a ‘classic indolent lifestyle’, which Willie took to mean that he didn’t run around in Spandex like a moron. Willie tried to picture himself in Spandex, and decided that he’d already had too much to drink if that was the kind of thing he was imagining alone in a men’s room on his birthday night.
He had changed out of his bib overalls for the occasion, which had been traumatic in itself. Willie was a guy born for overalls. They were loose fitting, which was important for a man of his age and girth. They gave him useful pockets in which to keep things, and a place to store his hands when he wasn’t using them without looking like a slob. Out of overalls, everything felt too tight, and he had too much stuff and too few holes in which to keep it. Tonight, he bulged in places where a man shouldn’t bulge.
Willie was wearing black Sta-Prest trousers, a white shirt veering toward yellow due to age, and a gray jacket that he liked to think of as a classic of tailoring but was, in fact, just old. He was also sporting the new tie that Arno had handed to him that morning with the words, ‘Happy birthday, boss. You gonna retire now and leave me the place?’ It was an expensive tie: black silk embroidered with thin strands of gold. This wasn’t the kind you picked up in Chinatown or Little Italy from a guy selling do-rags and knockoff watches on the side of the street, everything wrapped in plastic and bearing a name like ‘Guci’ or ‘Armoni’ for rubes who couldn’t tell the difference, or who figured that nobody else could. No, the tie was pretty tasteful, given that Arno had bought it. Willie figured that maybe he’d had a little help in choosing it since, as far as Willie could recall from a funeral that they had attended together earlier in the year, Arno only had one tie in his wardrobe, and that one was maroon polyester and stained with axle grease.
The thing about it was, Willie didn’t feel sixty. He’d lived through a lot – Vietnam, a painful divorce, some heart trouble a couple of years back – and it had certainly aged him on the outside (those lines and his few remaining gray hairs were hard earned), but inside he still felt like he always had, or at least the way he had since he was in his mid- to late twenties. That was when he had been at his peak. He’d survived two years in the Marines, and had returned home to a woman who’d loved him enough to become his wife. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t exactly been Lassie in the faithful companion stakes, but that came later. For a time, they had seemed pretty happy. He’d borrowed some money from his father-in-law, started renting premises in Queens, over by Kissena Park, and applied the mechanical skills that he had honed in the military to maintaining and repairing automobiles. It turned out that he was even better at it than he had thought, and there was always enough business to keep him occupied, so that after a few years he had hired a small Scandinavian guy with bristly hair and the attitude of a junk-yard dog to help him out. Thirty years later, Arno was still with him, and still had the attitude of a junkyard dog, albeit one whose gums hurt and who could no longer scamper after female dogs with the same vigor that he once had shown.
Vietnam: Willie hadn’t come back scarred from his time in Nam, either physically or psychologically, or not so that he could tell. He’d landed in March 1965, part of the Third Marine Division assigned to create enclaves surrounding vital airstrips. Willie ended up in Chu Lai, sixty miles south of Da Nang, where the SeaBees constructed a 4000-foot aluminum runway in twenty-three days amid cactus and shifting sands. It was still one of the finest feats of engin eering under pressure that Willie had ever witnessed.
He had just turned nineteen when he signed up for service. He didn’t even wait for the draft to find him. His old man, who had come here in the twenties and had served in the military himself during WWII, told him that he owed something to his country, and Willie didn’t question his judgment. By the time he came home his father’s friends were breaking heads down on Wall Street and over at Washington Square Park, teaching the long-hairs a little something about patriotism. Willie neither condoned it nor objected to it. He’d done his time, but he could understand why other kids might not want to follow in his footsteps. It was a matter for their conscience, not his. Some of his buddies had served too, and they had all returned home more or less intact. One of them had lost an arm to a grenade hidden in a loaf of bread, but he could have lost a lot more. Another came back minus his left foot. He’d stepped on a bear trap, and the jaws had snapped shut above his ankle. The funny thing about those bear traps – funny if you didn’t have your foot caught in one – was that they needed a key to open them, and bear trap keys weren’t the kind of thing you just happened to have in your pack. The bear trap itself would be chained to a slab of concrete buried deep in the ground, so the only way to get the wounded soldier to safety was to dig up the whole ar
rangement, often while under fire, and then transport it back to camp, where a doctor would be waiting, along with a couple of men armed with hacksaws and cutting torches.
Both of those guys were gone now. They’d died young. Willie had attended their funerals. They were gone, but he was still here.
Sixty years, thirty-four of them in the same business, most in the same building. Only once had the security of his post-service existence been threatened. That was during the divorce, when his wife had sought half of all that he owned, and he was faced with the possibility of being forced to sell his beloved auto shop in order to meet her demands. While he might have been kept busy with a steady stream of repairs, there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the bank and much of Queens hadn’t been like it was now. Then there was no gentrification, no single men and women driving expensive automobiles that they didn’t know how to service for themselves. People drove their cars until the wheels came off, and then came to Willie looking for a way to get another three, six, nine months out of them, just until things improved, until there was a little cash to spare. There were cops being shot on the streets, and turf wars, and protection money to be handed over, even if it was paid in kind by carrying out repairs for free, or by not asking questions when someone required a quick spray job on a car that was so hot it ticked. Elmhurst and Jackson Heights became Little Colombia, and Queens was the main entry point for cocaine shipments into the United States, the money laundered through check-cashing businesses and travel agencies. Colombians were dying every day in Willie’s neighborhood. He had even known a couple of them, including Pedro Méndez, who campaigned for the antidrug president Cesar Trujillo and took three in the head, chest, and back for his troubles. Willie had serviced Pedro’s car the week before his death. It was a different city then, almost unrecognizable from the one that existed today.
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