She opened the door. He stepped inside. When he tried to reach for her, she moved away.
‘I saw them,’ she said. ‘I saw them coming for me.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw them too.’
‘The one who got hit . . .’
‘He’s dead.’
She shook her head.
‘No.’
‘I’m telling you, he’s dead. His skull was crushed.’
She was leaning against the wall now. He gripped her shoulders.
‘Look at me,’ he said. She did as he asked, and he saw hidden knowledge in her eyes.
‘He’s dead,’ he said, for the third time.
She let out a deep breath. Her eyes flicked toward the window.
‘Okay,’ she said, and he knew that she did not believe him, although he could not understand why. ‘What about the woman?’
‘Gone.’
‘She’ll come back.’
‘We’ll move you.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere safe.’
‘This place was supposed to be safe.’
‘I was wrong.’
‘You didn’t believe me.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right. I didn’t. I do now. I don’t know how they found you, but I was wrong. Look, did you make any calls? Did you tell anyone – a friend, a relative – where you were?’
Her eyes turned back to him. She looked tired. Not frightened or angry, just weary.
‘Who would I call?’ she asked. ‘I have no one. There’s only you.’
And with nowhere else to turn, Will called Jimmy Gallagher, so that while the cops gathered statements, Jimmy was moving Caroline to a motel in Queens, but not before driving around for hours, trying to shake off anyone who might be following them. When he had her safely checked in, he stayed with her in her room until, at last, she fell asleep, then he watched TV until morning came.
While he did so, Will was lying to the cops on the scene. He told the officers that he’d been uptown visiting a friend, and had seen a man crossing the street with a gun in his hand. He had challenged him, and the man had been turning in response, his gun raised, when the truck hit him. None of the other witnesses seemed to recall the woman who had been with him; in fact, the other witnesses couldn’t even remember seeing the man cross the street. It was as though, for them, he had materialized in that spot. Even the driver of the truck said that one second the street in front of him was empty, and the next there was a man being pulled under the wheels of his vehicle. The driver was in shock, although there was no question of any blame accruing to him; the lights had been in his favor, and he had been well within the speed limit.
Once he had made his statement, Will waited for a time in a coffee shop, watching the front of the now empty apartment house and the bustle at the spot of the man’s death, hoping to see the woman with the washed-out face and the dark eyes, but she did not come. If she was mourning the loss of her partner, she was doing so elsewhere. Finally, he gave up and joined Jimmy and Caroline at the motel, and while Caroline slept, he told Jimmy everything.
‘He told me about the pregnancy, the woman, the dead man,’ said Jimmy. ‘He kept returning to the way the guy had looked, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so . . . wrong.’
‘And what did he decide?’ I asked.
‘Another man’s clothes,’ said Jimmy.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You ever see somebody wearing a suit that isn’t his, or trying to fit his feet into borrowed shoes, ones that are maybe a size too small or too large? Well, that was what was wrong with the dead man, according to your father. It was like he’d borrowed another man’s body, but it didn’t fit the way that it should. Your old man worried at it like a dog at a bone, and that was the best that he could come up with, weeks later: it was almost as if he felt there was something living inside that guy’s body, but it wasn’t him. Whatever he had once been, or whoever he had once been, was long gone. This thing had chewed it away.’
He watched me then, waiting for a response. When none came, he said: ‘I’m tempted to ask if you think that sounds crazy, but I know too much about you to believe you if you said “yes.”’
‘You ever get a name on him?’ I asked, ignoring what he had just said.
‘There wasn’t much of the guy left to identify. A sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness, though, based on your father’s description, and we circulated it. Bingo! A woman comes forward, says it looks like her husband, name of Peter Ackerman. He’d run off on her five years before. Met some girl in a bar, and that was it. Thing about it was, the wife said it was completely out of character for her husband. He was an accountant, a by-the-numbers guy. Loved her, loved his kids. He had his routines, and he stuck to them.’
I shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t be the first man to disappoint his wife in that way.’
‘No, I guess not. But we haven’t even gotten to the strange stuff. Ackerman had served in Korea, so his prints eventually checked out. The wife gave a detailed description of his appearance though, since his face was gone: he had a Marine tat on his left arm, an appendectomy scar on his abdomen, and a chunk missing from his right calf where a bullet had caught him at the Chosin Reservoir. The body taken from under the truck had all of those markings, and one more. It seemed like he’d picked up another tattoo since he’d deserted his wife and family. Well, not so much a tattoo. More of a brand.’
‘A brand?’
‘It was burned into his right arm. Hard to describe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but your old man followed it up. He found out what it was.’
‘And?’
‘It was the symbol of an angel. A fallen angel. “An—” something, was the name. Animal. No, that’s not it. Hell, it’ll come to me.’
I was treading carefully now. I didn’t know how much Jimmy knew of some of the men and women I had encountered in the past, and of how some of them shared strange beliefs, convinced that they were fallen beings, wandering spirits.
Demons.
‘This man was marked with an occult symbol?’
‘That’s right.’
‘A fork?’ That was a mark I had seen before. The ones who bore it had called themselves ‘Believers.’
‘What?’ Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then his expression changed and I understood that he knew more about me than I might have wished, and I wondered how. ‘No, not a fork. It was different. It didn’t seem like anything that had meaning, but everything does, if you look hard enough at it.’
‘And the woman?’
Jimmy stood. He went to his wine rack and removed another bottle.
‘Oh, she came back,’ he said. ‘With a vengeance.’
20
The two men kept Caroline Carr on the move, never allowing her to stay in any one place for more than a week. They used motels and short-term rentals. For a time, they put her in a cabin in the woods upstate, close to a small town where a former cop from the Ninth, a cousin of Eddie Grace’s, had moved to become chief of police. The cabin was occasionally used to stash witnesses, or those who just needed to be hidden away until a particular situation cooled off, but Caroline hated the quiet and the isolation. It made her more nervous than she had been before, for she was a creature of cities. Out in the country, every sound signaled an approaching threat. After three days in the cabin, her nerves were shredded. She was so frightened that she even called Will at home. Thankfully, his wife wasn’t there, but the call shook Will. Their affair had already come to a mutually agreed-upon end, but sometimes he would stand in his yard and wonder just how he had managed to screw everything up so badly. He was constantly tempted to confess all to his wife. He even dreamed that he had done so, and he would wake wondering why she was still sleeping beside him. He felt sure that she must suspect something and was just waiting for the right moment to voice those suspicions. Nothing was ever said, but her silence served only to increase his paranoia.
He was also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that he knew almost nothing about Caroline Carr. She had sketched only the barest details of her life for him: an upbringing in Modesto, California; the death of her mother in a fire; and her growing awareness of the two figures that were now pursuing her. Caroline had managed to stay ahead of them for so long, but she had grown careless, and become tired of running. She had almost begun to welcome the thought that they might find her, until that night when they tried to break into her apartment and her fear of them overcame any misplaced desire she might have had to end the chase. She could not tell Will why they had targeted her, for she said that she did not know. She knew only that they were a threat, and they wanted to end her life. When he asked her why she had not gone to the police, she had laughed at him, and the scorn in her voice had hurt.
‘You think I didn’t? I went to them after my mother died. I told them that the fire had been started deliberately, but they were looking at a disturbed, grief-stricken girl, and they didn’t listen to a word I said. After that, I decided that the best thing to do was to look after myself. What else could I do? Tell people I was being hunted for no reason by a man and woman that nobody had ever seen except me? They’d have locked me up, and then I would have been trapped. I kept everything to myself until I met you. I thought that you were different.’
And Will had held her and told her that he was different, even as he wondered if he was being drawn into a frightened young woman’s elaborate fantasy. But then he recalled the man with the gun, and the pale woman with the dead eyes, and he knew that there was some truth in all that Caroline Carr had told him.
He had begun to make informal inquiries about the tattoo on the late Peter Ackerman’s arm, and eventually he was referred to a young rabbi by the name of Epstein out in Brooklyn Heights. Over a glass of sweet kosher wine, the rabbi had talked to him of angels, of obscure books that, as far as Will could tell, had been left out of the Bible because they were even stranger than most of the stuff that had been left in, and that was saying something. As they spoke, Will began to realize that the rabbi was interrogating him as much as he was interrogating the rabbi.
‘So this is a sect, a cult of some kind, that Peter Ackerman became involved with?’ said Will.
‘Perhaps,’ said the rabbi. Then: ‘Why does this man interest you so much?’
‘I’m a cop. I was there when he died.’
‘No, there’s more to this.’ The rabbi sat back in his chair and tugged on his short beard. His eyes never left Will’s face. Eventually, he seemed to reach a decision. ‘May I call you Will?’
Will nodded his assent.
‘I am going to tell you something now, Will. If I have guessed right, then I would appreciate it if you would confirm that it is so.’
Will felt that he had no choice but to agree. As he told Jimmy later, he had somehow become involved in an exchange of information.
‘This man was not alone,’ said Epstein. ‘There was a woman with him. She was probably close to his own age. Is that correct?’
‘How did you know that?’
Epstein produced a copy of the symbol that had been found on Peter Ackerman’s body.
‘Because of this. They always hunt in pairs. After all, they are lovers. The male—’ He pointed to the Ackerman symbol before slipping another sheet of paper from behind it. ‘—and the female.’
Will examined them both.
‘So this woman is part of the same cult?’
‘No, Will. I don’t believe that this is a cult at all. This is something much worse . . .’
Jimmy pressed his fingertips to his head. He was thinking hard. I left him to it. Epstein: I had met the rabbi on a number of occasions, and had helped him to track down his son’s killers, and in all that time he had never told me that he had known my father.
‘Their names,’ Jimmy said. ‘I can’t remember their names.’
‘What names?’
‘The names the rabbi told Will. The man and the woman, they each had names. Like I told you, the man’s was “An—” something, but I can’t remember the woman’s. It’s like they’ve been cut from my memory.’
He was becoming frustrated and distracted.
‘It doesn’t matter for now,’ I said. ‘We can come back to it later.’
‘They all had names,’ said Jimmy. He sounded confused.
‘What?’
‘It was something else the rabbi told Will. He said that they all had names.’ He looked at me with something like despair. ‘What does that mean?’
And I remembered my own grandfather in Maine uttering those same words as Alzheimer’s began snuffing out his memories like candle flames caught between fingers. ‘They all have names, Charlie,’ he had said, his face bright with a terrible urgency. ‘They all have names.’ I didn’t know what he meant, not then. It was only later, when faced by creatures like Kittim and Brightwell, that I began to learn.
‘It means that even the worst of things can be named,’ I told Jimmy. ‘And it’s important to know those names.’
Because with naming came an understanding of the thing.
And with understanding came the possibility of its destruction.
The need to protect Caroline Carr put huge additional pressure on them both, at a time when the city was in turmoil, and the demands upon them as police officers were seemingly unceasing. In January of 1966, the transit workers had gone out on strike, all 34,000 of them, crippling the transport network and wreaking havoc with the city’s economy. Eventually, Mayor Lindsay, who had succeeded Wagner in 1966, had buckled, what with the public complaining and Michael Quill, the union leader, taunting him from behind bars as a ‘pipsqueak’ and ‘a boy in short trousers.’ By giving in to the transit workers, though, Lindsay – who was a good mayor in so many ways, let no one say otherwise – had opened the floodgates to an ongoing series of municipal strikes that would blight his administration. The anti-draft movement was starting to simmer, a pot that had been threatening to come to a boil ever since 400 activists had picketed the Whitehall Street induction center, a couple of them even burning their draft cards. It was still open season on dissenters, though, because most of the country was behind LBJ, even though US troop strength had escalated from 180,000 to 385,000, US casualties had tripled, and 5,000 US soldiers would be dead by the end of that year alone. It would be another year before public opinion truly began to turn, but for now activists were more concerned with civil rights than Vietnam, even as some were gradually beginning to realize that one fed into the other, that the draft was unfair because most of those being called up by white draft boards were young black men who couldn’t use college as an excuse to defer since they had no chance of going to college in the first place. There were so-called ‘new bohemians’ in the East Village, and marijuana and LSD were becoming the drugs of choice.
And Will Parker and Jimmy Gallagher, both young men themselves, and not unintelligent, put on their uniforms each day and wondered when they would be asked to break the heads of kids their own age, kids with whom, at least in Will’s case, they were largely in agreement. Everything was changing. They could smell it in the air.
Meanwhile, Jimmy was wishing that they’d never met Caroline Carr. After she made the call to Will’s home, Jimmy had to drive up and take her back to Brooklyn, where she stayed in his mother’s house in Gerritsen Beach, close to the Shell Bank Creek. Mrs. Gallagher owned a small, one-story bungalow, with a peaked roof and no yard, that stood on Melba Court, one of the warren of alphabetically ordered streets that had once served as a summer resort for Irish-Americans, until Gerritsen proved so popular that the houses were winterized so that people could live there year-round. Hiding her in Gerritsen gave Jimmy and, occasionally, Will, an excuse to see her, because Jimmy went down to visit his mother at least once every week. In addition, this part of Gerritsen was small and tightly knit. Strangers would stand out, and Mrs. Gallagher had been warned that there were people looking for the girl. It
made Jimmy’s mother yet more vigilant than she already was; even at her most relaxed, she put the average presidential bodyguard to shame. When neighbors asked about the young woman who was staying with her, Mrs. Gallagher told them that she was a friend of a friend and had recently been bereaved. A terrible shame, what with the poor girl expecting. She gave Caroline a thin gold band that had once belonged to her own mother, and told her to wear it on her ring finger. Her supposed bereavement kept even the worst snoopers at bay, and on the handful of occasions when Caroline joined Mrs. Gallagher for an evening at the Ancient Order of Hibernians on Gerritsen Avenue, she was treated with a gentleness and respect that made her feel both grateful and guilty.
In Gerritsen, Caroline was content: she was close to the sea, and to the residents-only Kiddie Beach. Perhaps she even saw herself playing there on the sand with her own child, spending summer days eating at the concession stand, listening to bands on the stage and watching the big parade on Memorial Day. But if she did imagine such a future for herself and her unborn child, she never spoke of it. It might have been that she did not want to put a hex on her wish by speaking it aloud, or maybe – and this was what Mrs. Gallagher told her son on the phone when he called one day to check on the girl – she saw no future for herself at all.
‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Mrs. Gallagher. ‘She’s quiet and respectful. She doesn’t smoke and she doesn’t drink, and that’s good. But when I try to talk to her about what she plans to do once the baby is born, she just smiles and changes the subject. And it’s not a happy smile, Jimmy. She’s sad all the way through. More than that: she’s frightened. I hear her crying out in her sleep. For God’s sake, Jimmy, why are these people after her? She doesn’t look like she could do harm to a fly.’
But Jimmy Gallagher didn’t have the answer, and neither did Will Parker. But then, Will had problems of his own.
His wife was pregnant again.
Will watched her bloom as her term drew on. Even though she’d suffered so many miscarriages in the past, she told him that this one felt different. At home, he would catch her humming softly in the chair by the kitchen window, her right hand resting on her belly. She could stay that way for hours, watching clouds scud by and the last leaves slowly spiraling from the trees in the garden as winter began to take hold. It was almost funny, he thought. He’d slept with Caroline Carr three or four times, and she’d become pregnant. Now his wife, after so many miscarriages, had managed to carry their unborn child for seven months. She looked like she was glowing from within. He had never seen her happier, more content within herself. He knew of the guilt that she had experienced after the earlier losses. Her body had betrayed her. It would not do what it was supposed to do. It was not strong enough. Now, at last, she had what she wanted, what they had both wanted for so long.
The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers Page 147