by Jackson, Gil
He looked again at Charlie without any more formality inserted his fingers and broke the seal effectively destroying the written words from the outer surface layer of the envelope from its dermis. Flakes of year’s hardened red sealing wax fell onto the desk top. He blew and brushed these away with his hand fleetingly from what was left on the string pulling back the envelope flap he slipped out the content from inside and unfolded it. He gave a cursory glance over the pages and signatures and fingerprints, and commenced to read. Charlie, seeing part of his life being dismantled, finding it difficult, got up and went to the window; looked out over the streets that he and Frank had once patrolled. He turned to see a bespectacled Lomax reading their story with an unlit cigar sticking out from between his teeth.
* * *
Lomax finished reading and put the document down and looked back toward Charlie who was still looking out the window. He saw in his hand a handkerchief that he was wiping his eyes. He made out he was still reading when Charlie turned towards him before he looked up again. ‘And where has this been: this document, all this time?’
‘Wells Fargo Bank on
Macey Street, and that its last location would be written below it if it had to be moved on. The custodians being Frank and myself reverting to the custody of the last survivor of the one of us, to next of one of our kin at the second death. Mother of Jesus, there’s some dust in these files,’ he said pointing towards the bookcases full of peoples’ lives, ‘It’s got in me eyes, and up me nose, so it has.’ He sniffed putting his handkerchief away. ‘Well, what do you think, Franklin?’ Lomax began hesitantly, not wanting to see or say the wrong thing but settled on his instincts.
‘Well, Charlie, that is the most disturbing and astounding document that I would ever hope to see again in my lifetime; your contribution to duty: both of yours, and service to the protection of those that were unable to defend themselves, I find, quite frankly moving. I don’t know what else to say.’
Charlie looked at him. ‘There’s got to be nothing worse than exploiting children, Franklin. Anyone would have done the same as me and Frank.’
Lomax looked down again at the document. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘You wouldn’t turn a blind eye, surely?’
‘But I have, haven’t I? We all have. It’s still going on, I recognise that, it doesn’t seem to dominate headlines that other crimes seem to; it doesn’t seem to prioritise.’
Charlie nodded. ‘No it doesn’t. I don’t know why. Perhaps people don’t want to face up to this particular demon. Except perhaps it runs close to our own lives, our family and friends.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That there’s more of its kind going on that we would care to admit to. Who’s going to turn in one of their own: father, brother, husband. Son?’
‘Yeh, I see your point. Difficult.’
‘Anyway, I, we, Frank and me were persuaded to join the Bureau’s department to clean up that sort of thing, and it hasn’t happened,’ Charlie said, bucking up, ‘You wanted concrete proof or something like it, there’s more. About me.’
‘More?’
‘Yes, and this is going to require a leap of faith on your part.’
Lomax looked puzzled.
‘What do you see in me?’ Charlie said.
‘See in you. How’d you mean?’
‘Well, how would you describe me to someone?’
Lomax felt embarrassed and turned down his mouth. ‘Well. I don’t know. Not wanting to offend your feelings—’
‘Try Franklin, it’s not a proposal of marriage I’m seeking, be your usual self.’
Lomax laughed. ‘Well since you insist, I see before me an average looking sixty-year-old lawman with a slight limp, a stoop and an attitude; much like any other old Paddy lawman with which I’m acquainted. Happy?’
Charlie smiled. ‘Why pull punches?’
‘Well you did ask.’
‘And I’m grateful for you candidacy. Watch — and eat your heart out, agent director Franklin Lomax of the FBI, you are to be taken on a journey into the unknown!’
Lomax felt that perhaps he had overdone what he had said until Charlie stopped stooping. He watched him, before his eyes, grow upright. His mouth dropped agasp when Charlie walked across the attorney’s office with a gait of purposefulness; removed from his head a wig of grey hair revealing fresh brown and young underneath. Not first sure the transposition that he was witnessing. Charlie O’Hare had changed his anatomical appearance and was not the same man: he had neither limp nor stoop and he’d left twenty years behind on the carpet.
‘Christ!’ He appealed. ‘What in fuck’s name’s happened to you?’
Charlie sat down in the chair opposite. ‘You’re right to use the Lord’s name in vain, Franklin — I took His Mother’s. She’s done this to me: she’s not let me age, tire, or die. All of which I pray is some biological malfunction, but, unfortunately I have to report I’m not alone, or rather evidence suggests I’m not.’
Franklin Lomax didn’t know what to ask first this was altogether unbelievable and gave the only immediate response he could. ‘You’re not Charlie O’Hare!’
Charlie laughed and proceeded to knock down the man’s arguments; tapped his finger on the prints at the bottom.
‘Check them with records.’
‘It’s the tablets you took when you were in hospital.’
‘Come on you can do better than that.’
Harder. ‘It’s all a hoax.’
‘Twenty-four years and all the evidence that’s been laid before you, what profit would there be in that?’
Lomax couldn’t think straight he would need more time to take this in.
‘When you’ve come to no other conclusion, Franklin, and accept as I have had to do, come to terms with powers that are out of our hands and control, you can live with it and investigate—’
‘How can I? You’re asking me to accept something that’s not natural.’
‘No. I’m asking you to accept something that can’t be explained, like, God, like the Creation — that’s natural, it’s here and now, it’s not in our understanding of things, that’s all. Someday it may be, perhaps that day’s likely to be sooner than we think.’
‘Frank mentioned a “She” in this report. Who is, She?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘Best description? A night and day dream apparition of a woman I can only describe as an angel. And don’t take that literally. He shook his head. ‘Every seven years since this first started I’ve had heart conditions that have knocked me back health-wise for a period of time to recover with a new vigour. The last killed me, they said, and thus far I’ve been able to cover them up, but nonetheless, after each attack they have taken years off me. Every ailment, every illness that had become to cause me a problem has miraculously left me after these attacks. I fear that the medical profession is going to get suspicious if I have too many more of them.’
‘But why the act?’
‘The limp and the stoop—?’ He was smiling now. ‘And the general slowness ... what else could I do?’
Lomax looked at him again. There was little doubt that something had happened to the man that was not natural. Standing there before him at least two inches taller than he was when he had come in. He had to admit that he had always looked at Charlie as being old without noticing. But, if he had always dressed himself down, so to speak, it was not surprising. Looking at him now, in light of what he had said, he could see what he meant — he didn’t look his age. And if anything, he could see now, Charlie was going backwards senescence-speaking.
‘Now we come to my boring stand regarding Marco Giuseppe as you so eloquently describe it. Marco Giuseppe, well-known hoodlum, Union teamster and anything else that me and Frank could nail his arse for; now! also known as Frederic Spannocs: that man’s the same as me — and how old does he look, thirty? I know that, because we were both there when all this first happened. If Giuseppi is being shielded because the same thi
ng that happened to me has happened to him, well, I couldn’t take that chance of revealing it. If those same people that know him know that the ageing process affected more than him, what’d you think my chances of liberty would be?’
‘Wouldn’t he know of you?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘It may not be important to him. It’s him that’s important to others and conversely not the other way round. The same rules that applied are still in place. And I’m talking the same people or their successors.
‘You’re convinced that this Spannocs guy is him?’
‘I’m absolutely sure of it. And being protected. Look!’ Charlie pulled a copy of Wall Street out of his brief case and showed the picture of Spannocs to him.
Lomax studied it. Was it him? Charlie believed it to be. Clearly someone of Frank Weinberg’s reputation that had been taken out by such a man would have been extremely dangerous.
‘So how does he change his appearance? Plastic surgery? Is there a picture on file as he was?’
‘There was. It went missing — as everything else does that’s been connected to him. Change? What does a demon need plastic surgery for?’
‘A demon?’
Charlie shrugged.
‘So how is anyone to recognise him if he can do that? You the only one?’
‘Probably not, but I can tell.’ Charlie smiled again with the knowing look that there was more, but not today, Lomax had at last come round.
‘Well I’ll give you all the help I can — so you’d better keep me informed all the way. You’ve got to trust at least me if you want my backing, understand.’
Charlie nodded.
‘Who is she?’
‘She is a little girl that met a distasteful end many years ago because her father stood up against Marco Giuseppi.’
And David Weinberg is he in the same danger that his father was?’
‘Spannocs or whoever else is in league with him will know him; know he exists, absolutely. Expecting him to follow in his father’s footsteps? Absolutely! Want him dead, for that same reason, absofookinglutely.’
‘And does his mother know?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Take David Weinberg out of the frame. For his own safety. That’s what I want you to do. And I’ve told him my thoughts. He said he’d take my advice, until his mother happened to mention that Ty Colsson had been murdered, in an effort to persuade him to change a changed mind.
‘Human nature, Franklin, will only accept truth on its own terms; and I’m not prepared to alter the official record by disclosing that now. It’s cost many lives, some innocent and some not so and its disclosure could end mine. Frank Weinberg I’m convinced was one of other’s like me and Spannocs; and Frank was either murdered for what he knew or what he intended. So until I know otherwise this immortality that I suffer does not mean that I would be immune to Frank’s fate. Sufficient for me to say that Spannocs has enjoyed a charmed life for getting his side of the story into the wrong ears first. And you know that at least two of us could be immortal. And, hopefully, what I have told you and your friendship for me will keep this ageing of mine within your own council, because, until developments of this unpalatable business unfold further that is the way I want it kept. Apart from which I shall deny it and you can spend the rest of your working life trying to convince others before they put you away.’
Lomax was troubled taking what Charlie was saying about his immortality in, but for the sake of sanity, would for the moment, accept it. And the word worry once again echoed inside his head.
* * *
Charlie made up his mind a long time before that if ever the chance came to avenge the murder of his partner, he would see to personally. But there was more to it now. If David Weinberg, finding later, that he had kept back information; that Ty Colsson hadn’t died in an airplane accident but had had his head torn from his body in the next ward to David’s and that he personally had been party to the cover-up: well the consequence didn’t bear thinking.
* * *
Later that day Charlie looked again at the photograph of Frederik Spannocs and compared it with Forbes; though it was a large screen half-tone there was little doubt in his mind that the two men were one and the same. Though, he thought the hair, light-blondish, no longer black, but still slicked back. The moustache gone, making his lips more prominent. Lips that would issue a spray of saliva the odour a cross between excrement and bad scent. He remembered Frank wiping his face after questioning him over the disappearance of Fariq’s daughter and wondered if Giuseppi knew what he was doing; getting some wry humour out of the other’s discomfort. And Charlie for his part, not taking the rise out of Frank, like he would have done had it been another ‘customer’, such was the abhorrence the two of them had for the man; and he hadn’t began going down the road to depravity that was to make him the household name that he had become.
He turned the photograph into a different light, as if he was trying to see something more, but it was enough. David had taken a good photograph on his Minolta. Marco Giuseppi, the Great Magician was alive, and to kill a magician would take a powerful abracadabra. The kind of abracadabra that an angel might possess and be made available to him — still mortal? — if asked. He cannot have been the only one to have asked the favour of the Gods’ to kill another mortal, and wondered if he had the right. Surely to ask was not against the laws of nature if the slaying of another was. They could only say no. Would he be condemned to recite the fifteen mysteries till Kingdom Come for harbouring such sinful thoughts; and how did they arrive at such decisions of natural law that they could so happily settle in the psyche of the human soul so easily: because clearly they hadn’t. Or was that the purpose? For surely there must be a point where the taking of life was justified when those engaged in the freedom to do that, were concerned not in the slightest. Had they made that decision, or had they sought divine permission? And, if so, from whom? For if they hadn’t made a conscious decision and sought permission — and got it, from God knows whom, so could he.
The only problem as far as he could see: who would he be seeking the permission of? had they the authority to give it? For if the righteous God would not sanction the killing of another by a person that would destroy innocents He would be condoning the sin; whereas, the unrighteous, assuming he had given the permission by sanctioning the slaying of one of his own would be assisting in the destruction of evil in the first instance. It was a curious mix which seemed to leave man’s abuse of man in no other hands than His own as written; with no consciousness of good or evil, how could he be brought to account for his actions. Man’s justice can only ever declare evil or madness and does not take into account God’s permission or condemnation. Which comes back to Spannocs? If a man has no conception of good or evil, madness or sanity — he can only be one thing: Satan or one of his followers. Her purpose? Well, whatever that was, she was certainly taking her time over it — so not to place the Lord in an uncompromising position — I’d do well to ask her permission; to cover meself.
And God, I need a whiskey!
He dropped the closed magazine onto the table and took his jacket from the back of his chair, put it on and went out convinced that he had been right in persuading David Weinberg to take a desk job. It was up to Lomax to hammer that home by sending him to Europe.
* * *
A wind blew up, the sky went black and a page blew open revealing Spannocs’s picture. The face took on a smile before reverting to the same as the other 900,000 copies of the November issue, page 27.
* * *
Charlie and ‘Lucy’ settled into an uneasy relationship somewhere between conjugal fidelity and maternal care. He supposed that she could still all be a figment in his mind, knew she wasn’t and wondered if she felt he was in hers. The philosophical concept of each other kept driving him into a dead-end of confusion, his only apparent escape being not to dwell. Burying himself in English history and enacting wars of att
rition with armies of model soldiers his life began to take on the role of the parochial country gentleman for which he had always yearned. Growing into the role as an actor would, his personality changing immeasurably from his earlier younger days; finding himself thinking deeply all manner of human dispositions and understanding less why.
Taking an early morning stroll in the park, thinking who would win the 2.30 at Albany, his mind went back to his younger days when he was a dancer, and to Mary O’Grady, the girl he had pledged his undying love before their families separated them — he hadn’t taken up the calling of the priesthood they wanted for the husband of their child. He thought of his father’s brother, Sin O’Hare, and whether he was still alive.
His next natural thought was of lunch. Should it be Donheny & Nesbitt’s — he’d not been there for some time and the thought of sausage and mashed potato and onion washed down with Dublin Guinness made his mouth water; for no explicable reason he began to think of microbes on a gelatine slide. Acting out there lives in individual selfish fashion killing and eating each other, copulating freely with no sense of a need for any introduction only the gene need to procreate, being devoured, another’s food. The whole swarming mass in a soup of their own making, with no apparent reason why or where it was leading. The darkest, loneliest thought for him was that it was leading nowhere, there being little purpose, it was all a gigantic nightmare, an accident. Some designer’s joke played out for His own musing whim with no more thought for them than he for brandy. Although, he usually cheered himself up with the thought that his life was moderately more interesting than the microbes, as far as he could tell, and if the inevitability of the outcome was the same. He changed his attitude to the world of the unseen and disappeared into the half light of Doheny’s; took a seat at the bar and ordered.