by Jackson, Gil
‘Listen.’ He waited until he had their full attention. ‘You’re both being given the opportunity to continue your fight against the forces of evil within the Bureau if you want it. We need people of your grit and conviction, God knows your kind of policing is little enough on the ground as it is and when it does appear ... well ... we have no intention of letting you go without a fight.’ He waited for them to catch up with what he had been saying before continuing. Think about it,’ he said getting up to go. ‘Let me know your decision’s tomorrow. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Of course, thank you,’ Frank said relieved at this outcome.
‘Yes, I’ll let you know in the morning,’ Charlie added holding out his hand for him to shake.
Agent Johnson thought that enough hand shaking had gone on, but reluctantly took it anyway.
Charlie couldn’t help noticing that Agent Johnson had both the hint of a grin and a boxer’s nose.
They turned and went out the door. Halfway down the corridor there came a call.
‘Lieutenant! A second please.’
‘See you outside, Charlie.’
Turning round he went back to Agent Johnson’s office and entered to see him holding out his hand.
‘Just between you and me, I’ll thank you for the rotor arm you took from my car.’
* * *
Harry Rivers woke with a start. Sleep had not come easy to him this night. He leant over looked at his fob watch. He rubbed himself for the umpteenth time in the area he supposed his heart to be. He’d suffered pains since he first went to bed, first noticing it when the woman he had been dreaming; without skin on her head, had closed in on him and shouted: BOO! That was the cause of his waking this time. The fob showed three am. Rooks were squabbling in the trees that surrounded his house; their shrieks strange to his ears echoing as only the closeness of a night’s darkness can imitate. Except — it was too early for their chorus, and that had not escaped his notice. In fact it only added to his anxiety and made him more aware that his heartbeat was racing. His breathing had become laboured and with an adrenal gland working overtime he was in a vicious cycle of increasing stress.
Not having been well for some time this business with the Bureau of Investigation was not helping. Heart-stroke his doctor had called it and told him to eat more meat and not to worry. Christ, however did he get caught up in all of this business with Brent? Well, it was all too late; his career was in ruins to mention nothing of his reputation. Police Commissioner of Police of New York City, the newspapers were tearing into him. How many times he had gone over it and regretted his actions for such meagre gains. But that wasn’t his main concern at the moment. Something had woken those rooks and was in the grounds of his house. The house for which he had sold so much of his soul was more than adequate but less than meaningless.
The sound wasn’t the usual snapping of dead branches that an intruder would cause stepping through them. He had experience of thieves trying to break in and that was the first give away signal. That and the brushing past of clothes in the camellia and ground cover shrubs which surrounded the house. The white horizontally timber planked building with its clump of chimneys brought together in the middle of its steep gabled roof. The diamond-paned windows not being the easiest to view in from and the added natural growth acting as an early warning of approach both friendly and not so gave him security of mind.
It was at these he was staring, his eyes straining to see beyond the reflection of the moon that was picking out imperfections in the glass, his eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, picked out the familiar landscape of the grounds and the gravel drive approach. There was nothing to see. Only the cracking of fallen branches under foot. Sounds that would not give way in the imagination — leaving him to face them alone.
* * *
Connie Rivers had left her husband to visit her family attorney. Trying to get into her name as much as possible of their assets before her fool of a husband was made to hand over anything that could not be accounted for and proven rightly theirs. She had her head screwed on in such matters having come from a family background that lived by the unofficial family motto: Keep ill-gotten by whatever means. She had every intention of living up to it. Her husband no longer counted in the game and was to leave him to fend for himself.
* * *
By the time Harry Rivers had thought of returning to his bed he had lost the feeling in his upper body. Crawling: he tried to haul himself across the counterpane, which he managed after not some considerable effort, laying there eyes closed trying to get his breath back. When he opened them he discovered that his left eye was slightly out of focus. At first he thought that the darkness of the room was playing tricks on him but realised that it wasn’t. He heard of people being scared stiff - and wondered if this eye problem was a symptom. Scared stiff? He was wasn’t he? But of what, he had no reason to be. The sounds of the night? He’d heard them before - why should it bother him. The prowler outside? He had to admit to himself, the possibility, but again this was his house and he was certainly capable of dealing with any intruder from that quarter. At least he would have been if he could move, for at the moment he was prostrate across his bed, his other gun, hidden in a slit hole in one of the bed supports to ward off any night time mortals, in his hand, his head hanging ever so slightly off the other side of the bed. Lying there in the darkness eyes darting around the room like a wounded animal, for that was how he was now feeling; the camellia and the dead branches of the night continuing to snap and getting louder until all went quiet. The rooks stopped their squawking as if they, like him, were waiting for something. Like a curtain at a music hall about to be thrown open, the audience became silent at an expectation.
He gathered himself together and managed to reach across to his telephone by his bedside table and removed the stem from the cradle. Dialled a number he listened for the response.
A voice answered. ‘Agent Sullivan, how can we help you, Police Commissioner?’
That wasn’t his doctor. ‘What the devil are you doing in my house?’ He shouted out the words in frustration after all the effort he had put in to make the call.
‘Bureau of Investigation, Agent Sullivan, how can we help you, Police Commissioner?’
‘What the fuck? What are you bastards doing on the end of my telephone; I want a doctor, not a shitehawk.’
‘Just protecting you, Police Commissioner, no need to get personal, what’s the problem?’
‘Get off my telephone, Sullivan, and let me call my doctor.’
‘Just give me his number, Police Commissioner; I’ll get him for you.’
‘What am I, a prisoner in my own house? Get off my telephone I’m quite capable of dealing with my own
affairs ... hello, hello, Sullivan, where the fuck you gone?’
The telephone was dead and it slipped from his fingers. The effort had exhausted him and the confrontation with Sullivan had momentarily driven away the fear from his mind, at the same time felt a curious sense of relief before he began to get angry again. He was being treated like a criminal with no respect for his rank. It dawned on him that they apart from being in his house, the way he was feeling, must have drugged him. Some kind of muscle paralysing substance and were digging up more evidence against him. He laughed to himself. Did they think that someone like him was stupid enough to leave things hanging around the house - they have nothing on me he smiled to himself? It was all a bluff and the nightmare would be over in the morning.
There was still that damn silence outside though, still in his head, making him become fearsome again; the snap of the branch was in his head, a blinding flash of lightning. Then he didn’t hear or see anything ever again.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 6 – 1920
Charlie stood next to Frank looking down at the blood-stained bed. It was everywhere. On the carpet. Up the wall. Running down the lattice windows. ‘Blessed Mary ever Virgin. Whatever he
did ... fook. This is two now!
Frank looked at him hard. ‘Can’t you, I can!’
‘Yeh well. A loose thought, Frank, I didn’t mean—’
‘No, I know that, Charlie.’ He turned to the police surgeon standing between them and to one side. Behind him, a tea trolley that he was using as a makeshift post mortem table for the tools of his trade. Covered in a bloody white sheet on top of which was a kidney dish with various surgeon’s knives and other accoutrements of his bloody trade; there were bits of flesh pieces, some white; others black: sticking to them. Frank felt the urge to be sick, or collapse, or leave the scene; but having decided that it wouldn’t be fitting for a lieutenant from the police department to act in such a manner found it in himself to carry on. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t hacked off; it doesn’t show any indication of being pulled!’ He screwed his face up trying to overcome the emotion of what he had said and of not believing a word the police surgeon had told them.
‘I can assure you,’ the surgeon said repeating himself, ‘look,’ he lifted the upper torso and pulled it round so they could both get a better view. ‘The head’s been twisted round three or four times until it gave way - see the windpipe, the arteries and veins have wrapped round the stump of the upper vertebrae; the blackening of the neck skin and the tearing before the head was ripped from the body so powerfully in my opinion, that the body hardly moved from where it ... he, was lying on the bed.’
Charlie’s screwed his face up and drew his breath from between gritted teeth as if he was feeling something like nausea then butted in. ‘You’ve made your point,’ adding for his own light relief, ‘it certainly pulls the old scrotum bag tight, so it does,’ before being overcome and excusing himself from the bedroom with his hand over his mouth.
Frank felt stronger the result of his sergeant’s weakness. ‘The only thing I’ve ever heard of that was powerful enough to rip a head off like that was a black bear, and that was off a pig; and a pig’s head is well stuck on!’
‘Yes.... Well, if you’re both finished with me here, I’ll arrange to get the departed transferred to the morgue. Is there anything else?’
Frank took a long last look at the grisliest scene that he’d hope he’d never have to see again in his lifetime. ‘No, ok, that’s fine, doc, and thanks; send your report to the office will you?’
‘Well, any thoughts, Charlie? Frank said seeing a rather green Irishman entering the room.’
Charlie dabbed a handkerchief to his mouth. He coughed and swallowed. ‘You mean, apart from your black bear theory?’
‘Yes.’
He thought long and hard before answering. ‘No!’
‘Well in that case the death certificate is going to have to show unnatural causes.’
‘Jesus, the papers will have a good day with that one; New York is not crawling with bears this time of year.’
Frank nodded and carried on with his report: All he could tell Johnson about Rivers. He found it strange that the person - as far as he was concerned - the principal player in all this and the man behind the murder of Fariq’s daughter, his wife and that of his own disappearance was Marco Giuseppi. Was that what Johnson wanted? All they wanted, from he and Charlie were to concentrate their minds on were the events in Giuseppi’s house that night and did anything strange happen to any of them that they were aware and was not in their report. How Johnson ever got to be involved he didn’t know, and, up until that point, he was no longer sure of anything.
The puzzle for him was the motive behind their sudden elevation as lawmen to the Bureau of Investigation (section: Obscene), the dangers they would be in if left in the police department – that had not been explained and was not likely to be for “official reasons of state security” that was not within his (Johnson’s remit); and the picture that they had been shown by Johnson. Did they have any thoughts as to its structure? Its point of view? Were they moved by its beautification?
‘What’s beautification?’ Charlie had whispered quietly to him.
Johnson tried a more down-to-earth approach. ‘Does the painting remind either of you of anything that you may have seen lately?’
They both shook their heads at this and Frank hoped that he hadn’t been too keen to deny. He could not speak for Charlie. Later that day in the confines of their office Charlie admitted he had got a bit of a shock over that picture.
‘Where in Sweet Jesus’s name did that come from?’
Frank stared at him disapprovingly.
‘Sorry. Bad expression. But it did look as you described that woman; I’m beginning to smell blarney so I do.’
‘Why should the Bureau be interested in angels?’
‘Is that what she was?’
‘What’d you think, Charlie? Religiously speaking you’re closer to these icons than me? Perhaps they picked up something from someone else that may have been there – or it could all have been an elaborate charade.’
‘For what reason? You don’t believe that, do you, Frank. Mind you, Johnson wasn’t overly surprised at Rivers’s end, I mean the way he died. Not at first anyway.’
‘Maybe because they weren’t. What did Johnson say: promoted out of the PD for our own protection - as if we would be in danger. Strange wouldn’t you say?’
Charlie nodded. ‘Like I said before, blarney. Seems to me there’s more going on than being talked. Don’t suppose the government has produced a race of supermen and one has fallen into the hands of Giuseppi and they want him back, you know, someone that’s capable of pulling heads off?’
‘That’s a worrying imagination you’ve there, Charlie. For our own sakes thoughts like that need to be kept close to our chests, so they do.’
‘My life, you’re not wrong, moisher.’
* * *
Frank finished his report of events of that night and passed it to Charlie to read and sign. ‘That’s a good fairy tale that, Frank. You’d make a good Irishman, so you would. That needs taking good care of.’
***
Charlie O’Hare and Frank Weinberg took up the offers made to them by Johnson and were accorded congratulations on their decisions, which unfortunately, would not involve them continuing any further investigations into Marco Giuseppi, who according to Sullivan, ‘Is the subject of continuing inquiries by a higher authority.’
Agents Sullivan and Johnson’s names’ were denied as ever been heard of when Frank asked to be put in touch with them a year later on a matter concerning a lead that he had on Giuseppi’s whereabouts. He was however told that extensive searches by the Bureau in turning up Giuseppi had produced nothing and that he had probably perished in his house. Which didn’t wash with Frank or Charlie as they had both survived — as Agent Johnson, unbeknown to Charlie had.
* * *
Governor Brent was indicted for corruption and received two years’ penal servitude — released on parole after nine months for good behaviour. That all? Charlie had been heard to say to Frank in the office. Get more than that for buggering a leprechaun.
On his release he married his ex-lover of five years: Connie Rivers; she turned to the boards as a singer; became known as Connie Lamar. She and her new husband, made a fortune from real estate funded by money from sources unknown.
Charlie had commented. Goes to show, you can’t keep a good woman and her bugger down, so you can’t, Sweet Mother of Jesus. Frank had agreed but said nothing of his likely fate after he’d received an anonymous tip-off from a member of the public of a body being found in a trash container outside an apartment block in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Burnt beyond recognition; wearing the mask of a bloodhound melted to what remained of its skull. He could only assume that it was Governor Brent from a formal identification of its remains by Connie Lamar: that might have been slightly biased due to a larger than life insurance policy in his name with her as next of kin.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 7 – 1925
‘Are you going to try some of this cake, Charlie?’
He looked at Sarah Weinberg and smiled. ‘O
h, I’d better had, I can see you’ll give me little peace until I do, so you won’t.’
‘Come on, Charlie. I know you well enough. You like my cooking,’ she said offering up the cake-board.
‘Just a small piece.’
‘You’ll have a large or none at all.’
He smiled, took the wedge and a large bite. The contrast of fruit cake and hard icing made his taste buds salivate and he relished it even though he wasn’t hungry.
‘That’s a lovely drop of birthday cake, so it is, Sarah,’ he said between mouthfuls, adding, ‘God! Is it five years since you married Frank? Where have the year’s gone?’
She stroked him gently on the cheek. ‘You were a lovely best man too, Charlie.’
‘Get away with you, you married the best man.’
She smiled at his assumption that he would have been her suitor had Frank not won her. And he wouldn’t have been far off the mark had he been Jewish, she thought to herself: he would. But he had always been the perfect gentleman and what was more she could talk to him in a way that she could not talk to her husband, and she needed to do that.
The birthday card had been sent to her son, David and they had opened it together before she had snatched it away and pretended that something was in the kitchen boiling over. Written in the foulest of language — which she was not altogether unaccustomed having lived in Oregon. Her and her family quite often received newsletters from the Kluckers asking them to leave — their authors’ mentioning that it was time they considered their futures back in their own country — as if. This time it was different, no mention was made of moving. Only that she and Frank’s life would change with his death and that what had happened to Fariq’s daughter would happen to David when he came of age.
Sarah knew nothing of Frank’s latter work within the police department. She knew he had been working on something fairly important for him and Charlie to have been recruited out of it and into the Bureau of Investigation. She also knew a little of the Fariq family — it did make the papers as well as the officers involved, not to mention the strange death of Commissioner Rivers shortly after his suspension for corruption. She guessed it had been something to do with that and left the subject in peace. Something had been personal with this birthday card. And this coming of age? David’s bar mitzvah was eight years away.