The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  ‘Call your men back from the city,’ said Bliss, and now he sounded weary. ‘All of them. Do you understand?’

  ‘They’re already on their way.’

  ‘Good. Who fired the shots?’

  ‘I don’t think that –’

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  ‘Benton. Benton fired the shots.’

  ‘Benton,’ said Bliss, seemingly committing the name to memory, and Michael wondered if he had somehow condemned Benton by naming him.

  ‘When are you coming up here?’

  ‘Soon,’ said Bliss, ‘soon . . .’

  12

  Louis stared down at the man on the bed. Gabriel looked even smaller and more ancient than before, so old that he was nearly unrecognizable to Louis. Even in the space of a day, he seemed to have lost too much weight. His skin was gray, marked with a deep yellow in places where a salve had been applied. His eyes were sunken in blue-black pools, so that they seemed bruised, like those of a fighter who has spent too long trapped against the ropes, pummeled into unconsciousness by his opponent. His breathing was shallow, hardly there at all. The gunshot wounds, covered by a layer of dressings, had allowed some of his critical, and already dwindling, life force to dissipate, as though, had he been a witness to the shooting, Louis might have perceived it emerging from the exit holes, a pale cloud amid the blood. It would never return. It was lost, and an elemental part of Gabriel had been lost with it. If he survived, he would not be the same. Like all men, he had always been fighting death, the pace of the struggle increasing as the years drew on, but now death had the upper hand and would not relinquish it.

  He had expected a police presence near the old man, but there was none. It troubled him, until he realized that others would be keeping vigil over Gabriel now. There was a small camera fixed to the upper righthand corner of the room, but he could not tell if it was a recent addition to the decor. He assumed that they were watching him. He waited for them to show themselves, but they did not come. Still, the fact that he had been allowed to get so close to Gabriel meant they knew who he was. It did not concern him. They had always known where to find him, if they chose.

  He touched Gabriel’s hand, black on white. There was a tenderness to the gesture, and a sense of regret, but something else played across Louis’s face: a kind of hatred.

  You created me, thought Louis. Without you, what would I have become?

  The door behind him opened. He had seen the nurse approaching, her shape reflected in the polished wall behind Gabriel’s bed.

  ‘Sir, you’ll have to leave now,’ she said.

  He acknowledged her with a slight inclination of his head, then leaned down and kissed Gabriel gently on the cheek, like Judas consigning his Savior to death. He was both a man without a father and a man with many fathers. Gabriel was one of them, and Louis had yet to find a way to forgive him for all that he had done.

  Milton stood in a small office steps away from Gabriel’s room. The door was marked ‘Private’, and behind it sat a desk, two chairs, and an array of monitoring equipment, including both video and audio recording facilities. It was known in the law enforcement community as the Auxiliary Nurses’ Station, or ANSTAT, and was a shared resource, which meant that, in theory, all agencies had an equal call on its use. In reality, there was a pecking order that had to be observed, and Milton was king rooster. He hovered over the two armed agents, watching as Louis left Gabriel’s room and the nurse closed the door softly behind him.

  ‘Action, sir?’

  ‘None,’ said Milton, after only a moment’s hesitation. ‘Let him go.’

  They stood in Louis’s office, Hoyle’s papers and maps spread across Louis’s desk. Louis had added his own notes and observations with a red pen. This would be the last time that all of the information they had would be presented in this way. Once this discussion was over, it would be destroyed: shredded, and then burned. On a chair nearby lay fresh maps, and copies of the photographs and satellite images that they would show to the others.

  ‘How many?’ asked Angel.

  ‘To do the job, or to do the job right?’

  ‘To do it right.’

  ‘Sixteen, at least. Two to hold each of the bridges, maybe more. Four in the town for backup. Two teams of four approaching the property cross-country. And, if we lived in an ideal world, a big-ass chopper to take them all out once they were done. Even then, there would be problems with communication. There’s no cell phone coverage that deep into the mountains. The trees and the gradient of the land mean that there’s no line of sight, so walkie talkies are out of the question for us.’

  ‘Satellite phones?’

  ‘Yeah, and maybe we could send the cops a letter of confession as well.’

  Angel shrugged. At least he’d asked.

  ‘So how many do we have?’

  ‘Ten, ourselves included.’

  ‘We could bring in Parker. That would give us eleven.’

  Louis shook his head. ‘This is our game. Let’s play it, see what numbers we roll.’

  He picked up four images, photographs of Leehagen’s house taken with increasing degrees of magnification, and set them alongside one another, comparing angles, revealing points of access, weaknesses, strengths.

  And Angel walked away, leaving him to his plans.

  They both understood that this was not the way such things were done. There should have been background checks carried out, weeks – even months – of preparation, alternative entry and exit strategies examined, yet they did none of these things. In part, they recognized the urgency of the situation. Their friends, their home, had been targeted. Gabriel had been grievously wounded. Even without the information provided by Hoyle, they knew that it was in the nature of a man who would act in such a reckless way not to retreat after initial reverses. He would come at them again and again until he succeeded, and everyone close to them was at risk as a consequence.

  As in most matters that concerned them both, it was Angel who was the more perceptive, the one who recognized underlying motives, the one who instinctively homed in on the feelings of others. Despite all that remained hidden about his partner, he was attuned to the other man’s rhythms, his modes of thought and methods of reasoning, in a way that he believed was alien to Louis in their relationship. For a man who had lived so long in a gray world, drained of morality and conscience, Louis was always most comfortable with what was black and white. He was not prone to self-examination, and when he did analyze himself he did so entirely at one remove, as though he were a detached observer of his own follies and failings. Angel sometimes wondered if that was a consequence of the lifestyle he had chosen, but he suspected that it was probably an integral aspect of Louis’s makeup, as much a part of him as his color and his sexuality, a thing stamped upon his consciousness before he even left his mother’s womb, waiting to be called into being as the boy grew older. Gabriel had recognized that singlemindedness, and had harnessed it.

  Now circumstances had intervened and, in a way, Louis was once again serving Gabriel, although this time as his avenger. The problem was that his desire to act, to strike, to release some of that pent-up energy had made him incautious. They were moving too quickly against Leehagen. There were too many gaps in their knowledge, too many sides upon which they were exposed.

  So Angel broke a cardinal rule. He confided in another. Not everything, but enough that, if things began to fall apart, someone would know where to look for them, and whom to punish.

  That evening, they ate together at River on Amsterdam. It was a quiet meal, even by their standards. Afterward, they had a beer in Pete’s, once the office crowd had departed along with the free munchies, and half-watched the Celtics make dull work of the Knicks. To amuse himself, Angel counted the number of people who were using hand sanitizer, and stopped once it threatened to move into double figures. Hand sanitizer: what was the city coming to, he wondered. He could understand the logic of it. Not everyone who used the subway was exactly
spotlessly clean, and he’d taken cab rides that had required him to send his clothes to the laundry the following day just to get the stink out but, seriously, he wasn’t sure that a little bottle of mild hand sanitizer was the answer. There was stuff breeding in the city that could survive a nuclear attack, and not just cockroaches. Angel had read somewhere that they’d found the gonorrhea virus in the Gowanus Canal. On one level, it was hardly surprising: the only thing that you couldn’t find in the Gowanus Canal was fish, or at least any fish that you could eat and live for longer than a day or two, but how dirty did a stretch of water have to be to contract a social disease?

  Usually, he would have shared these thoughts with his partner, but Louis was elsewhere, his eyes on the flow of the game but his mind intent upon very different strategies. Angel finished his beer. Louis still had a half glass left, but there was more life in the Gowanus.

  ‘We done?’ said Angel.

  ‘Sure,’ said Louis.

  ‘We can watch the end of the game, if you want.’

  Louis’s eyes drifted lazily toward him. ‘There’s a game?’ he said.

  ‘I guess there is, somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah, somewhere.’

  They walked through the brightly lit streets, side by side, together but apart. Outside a bar at the corner of 75th, Navy boys were shouting come-ons to the young women strolling by, drawing smiles and daggered glances in equal measure. One of the sailors had an unlit cigarette in his mouth as he stood at the door of the bar. He patted his pockets for a lighter or a book of matches, then looked up to see Angel and Louis approaching.

  ‘Buddy, you got a light?’ he asked.

  Louis reached into his pocket and withdrew a brass Zippo. A man, he believed, should never be without a lighter or a gun. He flipped and flicked, and the sailor shielded the flame instinctively with his left hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ said Louis.

  ‘Where you from?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Iowa.’

  ‘The hell is someone from Iowa doing in the Navy?’

  The sailor shrugged. ‘Thought it might be good to see some ocean.’

  ‘Yeah, not a lot of ocean in Iowa,’ said Angel. ‘So, you seen enough yet?’

  The sailor looked downcast. ‘Buddy, I seen enough ocean to last me a lifetime.’ He took a long drag on his cigarette and tapped the heel of a shiny black shoe upon the ground.

  ‘Terror firmer,’ said Angel.

  ‘Amen to that. Thanks for the light.’

  ‘Our pleasure,’ said Louis.

  He and Angel walked on.

  ‘Why would anyone join the Navy?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Damned if I know. Iowa. There’s a guy only ever saw pictures of the sea, and decided it was for him. Dreamers, man. They forget they have to wake up sometime.’

  And in that moment, their silence became more companionable than it had previously been, and Angel resigned himself to what was being done, for he was a dreamer too.

  II

  The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

  Matthew 9,37

  13

  The meeting was held in one of the private dining rooms of a members’ club between Park and Madison, almost within complaining distance of the latest Guggenheim exhibition. There was no sign on the wall beside the door to indicate the nature of the establishment, perhaps because it was not necessary. Those who needed to know its location were already aware of it, and even a casual observer would have realized that here was a place defined by its exclusivity: if one had to ask what it was, then one had no business doing so, since the answer, if given, would be entirely irrelevant to one’s circumstances.

  The precise nature of the club’s exclusivity was difficult to explain. It was more recently established than similar institutions in the vicinity, although it was by no means without history. Because of its relative youth, it had never turned away a prospective member on the grounds of race, sex, or creed. Neither was great wealth a prerequisite of membership, since there were those on its books who might have struggled to pay for a round of drinks in an institution less tolerant of its members’ occasional struggles with solvency. Instead, the club operated a policy that might most accurately have been described as reasonably benevolent protectionism, based upon the understanding that it was a club that existed for those who disliked clubs, either because of an inherently antisocial bent or because they preferred others to know as little about their business as possible. Phones of any kind were forbidden in the public areas. Conversation was tolerated if it was conducted in the kind of whispers usually audible only to bats and dogs. Its formal dining room was one of the quietest places to eat in the city, in part because of the virtual ban on any form of vocal communication, but mostly because its members generally preferred to dine in the private rooms, where all business was guaranteed to remain undisclosed, for the club prided itself on its discretion, even unto death. The waiters were one step removed from being deaf, dumb, and blind; there were no security cameras; and nobody was ever referred to by name, unless they indicated a preference for such familiarity. Membership cards carried only a number. The top two floors contained twelve tastefully, although not opulently, furnished bedrooms for those who chose to spend the night in the city and preferred not to trouble themselves with hotels. The only questions ever asked of guests tended to involve variations upon certain themes, like whether or not they might like more wine, and if they might, perhaps, require some assistance making their way up the stairs to bed.

  There were eight men, including Angel and Louis, gathered on this particular evening in what was unofficially known as ‘The Presidential Room,’ a reference to a famous night when a holder of the highest office in the land had used the room to satisfy a number of his needs, of which eating was only one.

  The men ate at a circular table, dining on red meat – venison and fillet steak – and drinking Dark Horse shiraz from South Africa. When the table was cleared, and coffee and digestifs had been served to those who required them, Louis locked the door and spread his maps and graphs before them. He went over the plan once, without interruption. The six guests listened intently, while Angel watched their faces carefully for any flickers, any reactions that might indicate that others shared his own doubts. He saw nothing. Even when they began asking questions, they were purely on matters of detail. The reasons for what was about to take place did not concern them. Neither did the risks, not unduly. They were being well paid for their time and expertise, and they trusted Louis. They were men used to fighting and they understood that their compensation was generous precisely because of the dangers involved.

  At least three – the Englishman, Blake; Marsh, from Alabama; and the mongrel Lynott, a man who had more accents than the average continent – were veterans of any number of foreign conflicts, their allegiances determined by mood, money and morality, and generally in that order. The two Harrys – Hara and Harada – were Japanese, or said they were, although they possessed passports from four or five Asian countries. They looked like the kind of tourists one saw at the Grand Canyon, mugging cheerfully for the camera and making peace signs for the folks back home. They were both small and dark, and Harada wore black-framed glasses that he always pushed up on the bridge of his nose with his middle finger before speaking, a tic that had led Angel to wonder if it wasn’t simply a subtle way of giving the world the bird whenever he opened his mouth. He and Hara looked so innocuous that Angel found them deeply unsettling. He had heard of some of the things they had done. He hadn’t been sure whether to believe the stories or not until the two Harrys passed on a film to him that they claimed had made them laugh harder than anything they had seen before, tears already rolling down their cheeks as they exchanged favorite plot points in their native tongue. Angel had blocked out the name of the film for the sake of his own sanity, although he had a memory of acupuncture needles being inserted between a guy’s eyelid and eyeball and then being pinged gently with a
fingertip. What was particularly disturbing was that the movie had been the Harrys’ Christmas present to him. Angel wasn’t a guy to go around branding people as abnormal without good reason, but he figured the Harrys should have been strangled at birth. They were their mothers’ little joke at the world’s expense.

  The sixth member of the team was Weis, a tall Swiss who had once served in the Pope’s guard. He and Lynott seemed to have some minor beef going, if the look that passed between them when they had realized they were to dine together was anything to go by. It was just one more reason for Angel to feel uneasy. Those kinds of tensions, especially in a small team, tended to spread out and make everyone edgy. Still, they all knew one another, even if only by reputation, and Weis and Blake were soon deep in conversation about mutual acquaintances, both living and dead, while Lynott appeared to have found a point of shared interest with the Harrys, which confirmed Angel’s suspicions about all three of them.

  By the end of the evening, the teams had been decided: Weis and Blake would secure the northern bridge, Lynott and Marsh the southern. The Harrys would work the road between the two bridges, traveling back and forth at regular intervals. If required, they could move to support either of the bridge teams, or take it upon themselves to hold a bridge if one of those teams had to cross the river to support Angel and Louis in their escape.

  It was decided that they would leave the next day, staggering their departures, staying in preassigned motels within easy reach of their target. Shortly before dawn, when each team was in position, Angel and Louis would cross the Roubaud to kill Arthur Leehagen, his son Michael, and anyone else who got in the way of this stated aim.