Walter is building a fire in the living room. Tamara sits in the nearby rocking chair, her knees tucked against her chest. The descending autumn has put a bite in the night air.
“I thought you two came here for a country retirement, Dev.” The young wood catches. Walter leans back on his heels. “If tonight’s any measure, you’d have had a more peaceful time slinging drinks in the Pelican.”
“With vice squad breathing down my neck? With Pea about to go down for at least ten counts of murder one?”
Tamara’s breath hitches and Walter gives her an uncharacteristically scornful look. “Get off it, Tammy. You know what she is.”
“I just … didn’t know it was so bad, that’s all. All this for Victor.” She shakes her head.
“Not just for Victor,” Walter says softly.
The sound of running water and clinking glasses echoes from the kitchen. Walter proffers a fat, hand-rolled cigarette. Not packed with tobacco, I realize after a puff. I savor the quality and offer it to Tamara. She smiles sweetly at me and takes three hard drags before alighting from the chair.
“Got any music for that turntable?”
Pea and Alvin appear in the doorway with two bottles of wine and glasses. Already, Walter’s reefer has given my perception a pleasant distance. An instability that makes everything feel worth noticing.
Tamara puts on an old Bessie Smith album of Pea’s. Alvin coughs like an emphysemic old man. He drinks some wine and tries again. Walter and I clink glasses.
“We should talk,” he says softly. “Give me your letter, and I’ll make it my business. You can trust me with that.”
“I know.”
Pea sprawls on the couch by the fire. “So when you planning to tell us what those cards had to say, Tammy?”
Tamara was looking at me, but she glances away when I meet her eyes. “In a bit, sugar,” she says, and drinks half a cup of wine in one gulp.
Pea and Tamara and Alvin are passing the butt of Walter’s reefer. He takes another from his pocket.
“Let’s take Alvin back home,” Walter says. “No, stay, Phyllis. No need to trouble yourself. Dev and I will take care of it.”
I look back at Pea. She meets my gaze, indecipherable and hard. A Pelican look, a Phyllis look. My response is desire, now and always.
We give Alvin a ride home. There’s no hiding the old-boy exclusion of her. I only kiss her softly and promise to explain later. She grips my hand hard enough to hurt, and lets go.
Alvin gives us directions in a wandering voice that seems to emanate from the smoke filling the Packard. His house is half the size of my modest cottage, two rooms and a porch. An old tractor hulks beside a muddy pickup. A small light shines in the kitchen. Mae Spalding stands at the door. Her hair in curlers and her arms wrapped around a tiny waist.
“Alvin!” she calls. He climbs from the back seat as though from a high wall. “You all right, child? I heard things in town. I heard…” Reflected kitchen light flattens her expression. Her voice is strangled with fear.
“I’m fine, Ma,” he says. “Dev and that angel and their friends, they took good care of me.”
His voice changes when he talks to his mother. He speaks with an upward lilt, like he wishes she would smile.
“Alvin,” I say, “why did you go with Craver tonight? If you aren’t after Junior, and he isn’t after you…”
Alvin freezes comically, his right foot hanging in the air six inches from the soil. “He might be,” he says, finally.
“We both know that’s a lie. What is going on?”
“I just want—those damn Bells—”
He stops abruptly. His mother calls him again, a soft question. Alvin walks to the porch, pauses, comes back to where I’m sitting.
“That angel,” he pronounces, “she’s dangerous as a fire.”
Walter barks a laugh.
“And fire, it ain’t evil, it just is, right? But you can use it for evil. You and me, what we have is the Lord’s own strength. Maybe your angel is reformed, like she says. But if not, there’s a greater good in this world.” His cadences change to a voice older than his years, a mimicked oratory. “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell!”
I am astonished into speechlessness. Beside me, Walter crosses his arms. “Matthew 5:30. Not very original, kid.”
“The truth don’t need to be.”
Behind him, his mother calls once more. He starts and half turns.
“You’d give her up?” I ask, softly, nodding toward his mother. “Did she offend thee, wouldst thou cast her into the flames, and save thyself?”
Alvin’s eyes widen and his shoulders twitch, as though to break free of my empty grip.
He goes to his mother and hugs her, hard.
* * *
The rain turns icy sometime after two that morning. It hits the windows with tiny sighs. Like the voices of the wronged dead. It isn’t just Victor with me now. It’s Trent, and Maryann. It’s everyone she killed because I had kept my silence.
I wake sweating. My breath mists in the still air of the room. On colder nights than this, Mother and I would camp beside the living room fire in a nest of blankets. We could never afford to install heating. My mother’s shame, but I secretly relished the closeness it imposed. The smell of pressed roses and woodsmoke. Her soft hand brushing back the hair on my forehead when she thought I slept.
Tonight a fire already burns in the living room hearth. It paints the woman beside it in planes of light and shadow.
“The sleet’s killed the new shoots by now,” she says, “but at least we won’t have to worry about the aphids. Silly of me to keep growing so late in September.”
Her knees are pulled tight against her chest. Her face is flushed with heat. A slight shiver shakes her shoulders, sharp beneath her cream silk robe. She winces and traces one of the scars on her left hand.
I kneel beside her. She looks at me sidelong and then away.
“The cards,” I say.
She gives a small shrug. “You know how Tammy is when she really gets going with those things. Give the girl some black candles and goopher dust and she could make serious money as a conjure woman. Suicide kings and laughing jacks and spades and spades, I don’t know. She says it means violence, coming soon. Something brutal. She says it means the past coming back to haunt us.” She laughs. “’Cause that could never happen.”
“Did she say anything about the hands?”
Pea levels a look at me. “Did she need to? What am I without them? Dead, or might as well be.”
“They can’t just desert you, Pea. They don’t have a mind, or a spirit apart from yours. If you think they’re judging you—”
“Oh, they already have.”
“Then it is simply you judging yourself. The soul feels its own weight.”
She takes a breath. Considers. “Some card tricks did not bring Walter up three hours from the city.”
My pulse jumps. I reach out to touch her hand. She grabs me before I can pull away.
“You cannot honestly think,” she says, “that I don’t know how much you lie to me.”
The air leaves my lungs. I knew this day would come. I knew. “You didn’t before.”
She squeezes my wrist hard enough to leave marks. “You must have thought I was very stupid. All those years, and I never even wondered about your story. Why the hell were you in that alley, Dev?” She laughs. “You were waiting for me, you son of a bitch. Waiting for a killer to give to your cops. You were lying from hello.”
Her stare goes into me like two hot drills. Three shaky breaths. “I never said hello.”
“No,” she agrees. “No.” She shakes her head slowly. Lowers her eyes to our entwined fingers. Smiles, suddenly, brilliantly. “Ain’t that like life, to give you your big break, a stone-cold killer naked in your bed, and you go and fall in love with her!�
�
I can’t meet that bleeding gaiety. I can’t match it.
“Poor Dev. I ruined your life, didn’t I? But turnabout is fair play, I’m sure you ruined mine.”
Sleet beats the windows and French doors. A log cracks in the fire, sends up a shower of sparks. I am crying. Nothing will stop it. Victor’s curse was just the beginning. It’s Pea’s that will get me in the end. Her love, despite everything, her love.
“You knew it all. You knew about the hands—”
“Stop—”
“—about what Victor was really doing to those poor people.”
“Pea, please…”
“Christ, how many were there, Dev? Fifteen? Twenty?”
She pauses, waits out my sobs like they’re the slushing rain. How many? I don’t want to know, but the answer bobs to the surface anyway. I can be as brutal to myself as to Pea.
“At the end … nearly thirty. His mouth was—he hardly had any of his real teeth left—Pea—”
She slaps me. “We are getting to the end of this!”
She is Kali filled with fury, with the power of death. Her skin, her hair glows orange with firelight. This is only what I deserve.
“When Walter came here that day and showed me the photos of those dead bodies. He told me they were Trent’s kills. Did you know then?”
“Yes.”
“But I—” She closes her eyes. “I left before you came back. I couldn’t face what I imagined you would say to me. I had promised not to kill again.”
“You didn’t—”
“I had promised. Maybe I wouldn’t have if I had known what you were.”
“You did know. Even when I lied, you felt around it.”
“And when you found me, after. When you found me and washed that blood away and brought me back, just so you could leave me, oh fuck you, Dev, did you ever think for a minute that I couldn’t have known? Not then. Didn’t you think to tell me? Didn’t you know me at all?”
And I am run through. No comfort, nothing but this ringing guilt, and a blade to fall on. But she deserves it cleanly.
“I—decided that you knew, because—you were a killer, I had heard you kill him—and you are brutal and hard as diamond, Pea—it—you terrified me—I told myself I had misjudged you. To protect myself. You had lied, that’s what I said—you broke your promise. So I had been wrong. So you must have known. I am”—I hold up my hand with a smile that twists around my heart—“aware of the irony.”
She holds my gaze for a minute, searching. For something withheld, for one last drop of blood. Then she heaves a breath and releases it in a sob. She is trembling.
“Devajyoti, full of light,” she says, and briefly closes her eyes. “They nearly shot you at dinner today.” She traces my lips with her fingers. “Don’t leave me for my own good. Don’t hide from me to protect me. You think you owe me anything? If you think you owe me anything, give me yourself. If he had shot you, what do you think I’d have let lie? What peace do you see in me that could survive something … happening…”
The silk of her robe slides against my arms when I lift her, slips askew to bare one breast. The other presses hard against the fabric. Her breath catches in surprise.
“Do you promise?” she asks.
All I say is, “Let’s sleep here tonight.”
On the sooty floor before the fireplace, I slide Pea’s robe from her shoulders. I see for the first time the scar from Maryann West’s bullet. An ugly keloid lump of pink tissue, stretching an inch below her collarbone to the far side of her armpit. She is stoic as I take this in. There are other scars on her beautiful, naked body. But this is the only one I know.
“You told me it didn’t hurt anymore.”
She smiles briefly. “And you let me lie.”
We can be so cruel to one another. So full of love and hate and need and almost nothing of compassion. But this I can give her—this, and my promise. I bend down, kiss her shoulder. My lips slide down its smooth, freckled expanse. I wait for her to relax. I rub my thumb lightly over her left nipple, wrinkled and erect. She arches, very slightly, over my bracing right hand. I kiss, slowly, slowly, down the length of that hideous reminder, until I understand it as part of her. A part of what I love, and of my amends.
She comes against my hand, crying out without thought for Walter and Tamara sleeping upstairs. She grips me and breathes my name over and over. It could just as easily be sweat, the salt on our skins in the dying firelight.
10
The Long Island City address had once been a supply shop for the nearby factories. But the crash had hit all industry hard. No surprise to see it abandoned out here, among the deserted warehouses. At night it seemed two-dimensional. Gray as a photograph.
I jumped the fence. I was athletic and skilled at this particular sport. The razor-topped wire only swayed. I rolled, paused in a crouch. Pressed my hands to the earth and felt for anyone listening. No one near—but faint vibrations told me that someone approached. In back, I found the window Trent had promised behind a row of depilated bushes. Grimy, dirt- and smog-encrusted, it opened barely two inches. Judging by the rusted hinges, I doubted it could be moved from that position. I peered through. About half of the space below was visible. The light had been left on. Cement floor, swept clean. Black walls on which someone had recently chalked two pentagrams. A series of symbols radiated from the points of each one in intersecting curves that reminded me of mandalas.
In front of each pentagram hung one meat hook. It seemed more ominous, somehow, that they were all clean.
“You got him, Red Man?”
Victor’s voice, always higher than I expected. Tonight it seemed reedy, breathless. But Red Man was the one hauling the body. One body, but two hooks. Someone groaned.
“Coming round already?” Victor laughed. “Aren’t you a good one. Should give me plenty. Red Man, lay him under again. I’m going…”
Red Man sighed. “To get it over with.”
Victor barked a laugh. I finally saw him when he descended the stairs to the basement. In and out of my field of vision, he opened crates, placed small objects at the cardinal points beneath each hook. I couldn’t see the objects clearly enough until he passed beneath the window. But that sick feeling in my stomach was recognition, not surprise. They were hands. A dozen shrunken, mummified hands.
Red Man called from the staircase. “He’s coming to again. You ready, Vic?”
“Bring him down.”
Victor was dragging something large and heavy across the floor. A man-shaped bundle, with short legs and hideously elongated arms. A bit of straw and cotton stuffing leaked from where the head had been crudely stitched to the torso with hide thread. The face, however, was finely worked papier-mâché over cotton batting. It had gray eyes and a brown mop of a wig and a wide, grinning mouth. Inside were four or five teeth, firmly affixed.
Even the gap-toothed smile seemed like Victor’s.
He hung the effigy from a metal loop affixed to its back on the hook to the left. The procedure felt practiced. Once hooked, the figure’s arms ended just before the points of the pentagram on the wall behind it. It had no hands.
Red Man thumped heavily down the stairs. He carried their captive like a baby, a lolling head propped against a sturdy chest. A black man, my age or even a bit younger. He had been spiffy before they found him: slicked-back hair and tailored vest. His jacket and shoes were long gone, but the man still had on one of his spats.
“You know I’m not staying for this.”
Victor snorted. He fingered his waistband, where he kept one of his guns. But beneath the posturing I glimpsed something oddly vulnerable.
“God damn, have you got some nerve getting squeamish now.”
“What I do is business. Not hocus-pocus.”
“This hocus-pocus is gonna keep us in business and then richer than ever. You don’t think I know how jumpy our boys at the precinct are getting with old Judge Seabury breathing down their necks? That upstart Valen
tine and his so-called Confidentials are trying to make everyone turn rat, but we won’t let ’em, now will we?”
“Better ways to hunt down informants, Vic. I keep telling you.”
Victor turned abruptly away and stalked out of my field of vision.
“Hang him, you bloody Indian.”
Something sparked behind Red Man’s eyes. Colder than rage. So tightly controlled it made Victor’s outburst seem like a child’s. I wondered, for the first time, who really had the power in that relationship.
Red Man set the man on the floor and tied a rope around his chest and shoulders. It formed a harness, which then held his weight when he dangled from the meat hook. His legs jerked and sent him tracing an oblong star in the air. He gasped and coughed, but though his eyes fluttered, they did not open.
Victor returned to the center of the room. He held a small pair of pliers and a handsaw. His eyes were glassy and blazing. The handsaw he put beneath the swinging man’s feet. The pliers he handed to Red Man.
“Do it,” he said. “I have the rest.”
Red Man, whose name was Walter Finch, though I did not know it at the time, glanced again at the hanging man. He nodded.
“Upper right bicuspid,” Victor said.
I was trying to parse the code—or was it slang?—when Red Man pressed Victor against the pentagram wall behind the straw-and-cotton man. Pressed him with one large hand over the chest. Victor gazed up at him like a lover, sick with anticipation. He opened his mouth. Red Man kissed him with the pliers. Grabbed the tooth and yanked. Victor trembled and jerked. He would have fallen down if not for the one hand pinning him like a butterfly. When it was done, Red Man pressed the bloody thing into Victor’s palm.
“I’ll be upstairs,” he said. His gaze slid over the far wall, where I was hiding behind the lone window. My breath stopped. But he just turned his head and left. Victor, alone, shook and cursed and spit blood onto the concrete floor. Then he lit a menthol cigarette, and started to work.
The man woke in the middle of it. He screamed so loudly I thought my skin would peel. There were incantations, which Victor hurled like curses around the hole in his mouth. There were signs burned into skin and an invocation of the devil and his unholy helpmeets. The man screamed until Victor broke his jaw. Then he just cried.
Trouble the Saints Page 17