Known to Evil

by Walter Mosley

  "HEY, YOU!" A MAN shouted in the first-floor entrance hall of the Tesla Building. "What are you doing here?"

  "Hey, Warren," I said to the building's security guard. "It's me."

  "Mr. McGill? What's, what's wrong, sir?"

  "It's that damn economic downturn," I said. "Cutting expenses left and right."

  The handsome black and Chinese Jamaican stared at me, trying to make sense of the presentation. I smiled at him and shambled out the revolving door.

  My heart was fluttering and the morning was just shedding night.

  45

  Twenty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh was my fiefdom that day.

  I found a small cardboard box and a shattered ink pen. On a scrap of stiff white paper I scrawled the word Homeless and squatted down next to a small alleyway between Patrick's car and John Prince's front door.

  Whenever somebody passed I muttered "Sir, please," or "Please help, ma'am." My voice warbled and my outstretched hand shook.

  After half an hour I was nearly lost to the role. Every fifth or sixth person, it seemed, dropped something into my box. It was cold that day and so the shiver came naturally to my voice. The pain I felt from losing Aura informed my pleas. Even the money added to my fabricated despair. That was the water that the Hard-Hearted Hannah of song poured on a drowning man.

  The hours went by and I brayed like an abandoned baby donkey left alone in the world by the harsh circumstances of life. Until . . .

  "Who the fuck you think you is, mothahfuckah?"

  It was a white guy backed up by a black man, both in clothes the same vintage as my own. They were quite a bit younger than they looked and still they looked younger than I was.

  The white one was speaking and I didn't need any deductive skills to uncover his motives. I had cleared upward of eighty-five dollars in the few hours that I'd been begging, and that piece of real estate was obviously their territory.

  My knees hurt as I stood up. You could hear the joints cracking.

  The men were tall for mendicants, around six foot each. I looked at them, knowing that I should have just given up their piece of my action to keep things running smoothly.

  But if I had ever in my life been able to make sensible choices like that I wouldn't have been on that street, in my marriage, under the scrutiny of New York's finest, or in any other way known to evil.

  "Y'all two mothahfuckahs better step the hell back," the man I was playing said.

  The white guy (who had Mediterranean blue eyes) took half a step forward before seeing the knife with the brass-knuckled handle in my right fist. No one but those two could see it thanks to the barrier of my stinking coat.

  Oh shit, said the faces of both men.

  "You best to step back or die right here," I said. "I'ma be around for a day or two and then I'll be movin' on. I can leave you bleedin' or I can leave you whole."

  The white man took a step back, bumping into his friend. They knew better than to make some parting threat. I was obviously deranged and their luck was not yet a certainty.

  A shiver went through my body and I sat back down, realizing, or maybe re-realizing, that I was my own worst enemy. The rage in me couldn't be tamped down for long.

  AT ABOUT TWO IN the afternoon I put a Bluetooth bud in my right ear and diddled the cell phone in my pocket. After negotiating an invisible obstacle course of codes I arrived at a single message at the nonexistent Miller Hotel.

  "Mr. Oure?" a young woman's pleasant but sad voice asked. "Hi. I think this is your room. This is Angelique Lear. I don't remember you but I know, I knew, your niece. If you call the same number you called yesterday after eight tonight I'll tell you what I can."

  It was the first time I'd heard my client's voice. She chose her words carefully but it was obvious that she wanted to offer some kind of closure to her friend's kin.

  I was liking her all the more, which was good, because my street role was difficult. The air was cold and my joints were rusty.

  FOR THE NEXT FIVE hours I bleated and begged, stood up to stamp my feet now and again, and kept an eye on the two street entrepreneurs that I had humiliated.

  They passed by every hour or so, keeping their distance but studying me still and all. I had made a mistake alienating them but that water had passed under the bridge and flowed out to sea hours before.

  I wasn't worried about my newfound antagonists. The trouble I had was in the nature of any through street: Angie could come from either direction. If she came from the west, I was between her and Patrick. If she came from the east, she had to pass him before she passed me. My little piece of turf, I decided, was too far away from Patrick's car--and so I started talking to myself.

  "Goddamn mothahfuckahs!" I shouted, leaping up from the wall as if it were alive and my enemy. I kicked my box, scattering change and dollar bills over my little piece of turf. I kicked it again and followed it.

  "Oh no," I promised. "You two ain't gonna get me. Shit. I will break y'all necks."

  I hunkered down against a wall not seven feet from Patrick's car. The driver's seat was by the curb, so I had my hat pulled down, my coat collar pulled up, and kept my head bowed as I called out curses to imagined foes.

  This was the test.

  If Patrick was just on a fact-finding mission he would ignore me. But if he was there to kill my soft-spoken client, then my presence would prove unacceptable.

  "People sittin' in they mothahfuckin' cars spyin' on us," I said to two passing teenagers, pointing at Patrick. "They got spies all ovah the city tryin' to bring us down."

  I was hoping that by calling attention to him, I would force Patrick to retreat and reconsider his plan. The last thing he wanted was people looking at his car--or his face.

  The boys laughed at me and passed on.

  Patrick looked into the driver's-side mirror. There he must have seen the slender young woman bopping along, grooving on the invisible music of life.

  "Miss," I said when she was within earshot. "Miss, let me ask you something."

  "What's that, father?" the brown-skinned girl asked. She wore brightly striped hose that shot up under a brown leather skirt. Her sweater was Afghan and the voluminous multicolored hat I thought was probably the repository for long dreadlocks.

  "What you think a white man be doin' just sittin' in his car lookin' at a man like me?"

  I pointed at Patrick and the child turned to look.

  He did a masterful job of turning his head just enough not to seem obvious but at the same time obscuring his features.

  "Do you need something, father?" the girl asked.

  Her eyes were an unsettling golden brown. I felt their scrutiny and was suddenly ashamed for pulling her into my deadly game.

  "I'm all right," I said in my normal voice. "You just go on and I'll make my way to shelter."

  She leaned over and touched the foul-smelling homeless man's cheek, reminding me exactly why I was trying to find the off-ramp to redemption from the dark highway I was on.

  When the flower child was fifty feet away I saw Patrick checking his rearview mirror again. There was no one at that moment coming down our side of the block.

  When I heard the snick of his car door I knew one thing for sure--that Angie was very important to Patrick and that he meant to kill her as soon as she came within range.

  This one possibility was why I had contacted Diego.

  This fact also meant that my life was soon to be threatened by a man that even Hush had respect for.

  I raised my left hand to the ski-mask hat that I was wearing. I had gotten the hat from Twill when he was planning to use it for cover when assassinating Mardi's father. I foiled that attempt, but liked the hat. Now it was my good-luck charm.

  I pulled the mask over my face and rose to my feet at the same time. I was almost to his door when dumpy little Patrick surged from behind the steering wheel with disheartening speed.

  There was something in his right hand.

  I had something in
my right, too.

  He came up fast. My boxer's training made my body sway to the right. As I swung the brass knuckles of my killing knife I felt the searing hot pain of his blade in my left triceps. He made ready to attack again but my first blow had slowed him. The second chopping punch knocked him back into the open door of his Dodge.

  His head was on the passenger's seat and his feet were tangled on the driver's side. I could feel warm blood trickling down the baby finger of my left hand, but before I saw to my own health I leaned in and hit Patrick one more time.

  That pudgy little guy had come closer to killing me than anyone ever had. Four inches and he would have had my heart on a skewer.

  I shoved him into the car, jumped in behind, closed the door, and secured his wrists behind him and his ankles together with police-grade plastic ties that I always carry on serious cases.

  It was only after putting electrical tape over his mouth and shoving his unconscious body into the backseat that I pulled off my coat, sweater, and shirt to check out the wound.

  Another thing I carry around when I'm doing fieldwork is a first-aid kit.

  The cut was deep but the bleeding was only moderate. I slapped two broad cloth bandages over the wound. Patrick had left the keys in the ignition. I drove to a comparatively desolate block near the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of the Convention Center. There I stopped to put pressure on the wound until the bleeding stopped--or at least slowed. That took about twenty minutes.

  I slumped down then, exhausted from the survival mode I'd been in.

  When the head popped up in the backseat, I sat up, too. Without thinking I threw a deadly straight right hand, knocking Patrick at least into unconsciousness.

  After four more minutes had passed I used my newfound energy to drive some blocks to the north, where I knew there was street parking and a few pay phones.

  46

  There's a man I know named Barry Holcombe. Barry's business is subletting various specialty properties around New York. People often need rooms for assignations, secret meetings, and other activities that have to be held off the grid. Sometimes these rooms need to be soundproofed and partitioned, with see-through, one-way glass between one space and the next.

  I only ever call Barry from a pay phone.

  "Hello," he answered on the first ring.

  "It's Leonid. I need a place to interview a potential employee."

  "I might have something. You want to see the property?"

  "No time."

  "Rent's gone up five hundred."

  "That's not a concern."

  "It's a pleasure doing business with you."

  I DROVE DOWN TO Eighteenth Street near the West Side Highway, opened the trunk of Patrick's car, and was pleasantly surprised to find a large swath of burlap deposited back there. Then I went to the backseat and trussed the unconscious Patrick up, making him seem somewhat less than human. Then I waited seventeen long minutes--until no car or pedestrian was coming.

  I hefted the little man, moving as quickly as I could, and installed him in the trunk. I used two more ties to secure his feet and hands to a hook under the latch. This greatly lessened his chances of noisily beating against the trunk lid.

  There was an envelope waiting for me at the front desk of the Tesla. Barry Holcombe is an efficient and speedy landlord.

  THE ADDRESS I WAS given was near the Brooklyn Naval Yards. The directions led me down an alley on a street of abandoned warehouses. I drove down the narrow lane, used the first of three keys on an outer door and the second one on a two-man elevator. I dragged Patrick's body into the lift and traveled three floors down to a hallway that ended at a maroon metal door. This led to two concrete rooms that were connected by a door and by a jury-rigged monitor and camera that allowed a man in one room to watch what happened in the other. The second of these rooms had an aluminum chair that was bolted to the floor replete with manacles and leg irons, also bolted down, for the prisoner's hands and feet.

  Just when I'd finished chaining Patrick my cell phone sounded.

  I went into the watcher's room, closing the door behind me, and answered the phone.

  "Hello?"

  "It's me," Diego said. "Baggage of American Airlines, international."

  "Twenty-five minutes."

  STANDING STRAIGHT, AN OLIVE duffel bag on the floor next to him, Diego was an image of something not of this world. His collarless jacket was black, as were his shapeless trousers. His shoes were of woven red-brown leather, and the straw hat he wore was an ancient ancestor of the Guatemalan-made Panama variety.

  Diego's skin was the dusky color of dark-red brick that they made factories from when children still worked fourteen hours a day. His face was wide and filled with empathy for something long gone--or maybe just hidden.

  "Hey, man," I said, approaching him. No names in public.

  He was my height, with only a slightly smaller bone structure. There was a vitality to the South American that made me appear sleepy by comparison. His hands seemed powerful enough to crush single walnuts.

  He held out a paw and we tested our strength with the show of friendship.

  "Come on," I said.

  "THERE'S ONLY ONE THING I need to know from this guy," I was saying as we rode toward the temporary hideout. "Who hired him to kill Angelique Lear?"

  "That's all?"

  "That's everything."

  "How's Twill?" he asked then.

  Twill and I had gone fishing with Diego up near Lake Tahoe a few years before. Dimitri refused to come along, and Shelly didn't like doing anything where she couldn't wear a dress.

  "In trouble."

  Diego grinned.

  "He's a good boy," my very foreign friend said. "He will always be there for you like you are for him."

  My emotional state at that time made the timbre of my voice untrustworthy, so I nodded and drove on.

  WHEN WE GOT TO Barry Holcombe's rooms, Patrick was awake. We could see his eyes via the monitor. They were boring into the camera lens.

  After looking at him for a quarter of an hour Diego picked up a three-legged wooden stool from a corner and walked into the room. I watched him as he set the stool in front of Patrick and squatted down.

  A kind of jolt went through Patrick's body, giving the impression that the prisoner had something to say. He didn't speak, however, and neither did Diego.

  For at least twenty minutes the men stared at each other. Finally Diego stood and moved closer to the prisoner. The left side of Patrick's jaw was swollen from the blows he'd received in our brief contest. When Diego reached over to touch that side, Patrick tried to bite him. But my friend was quicker. He pulled the fingers away and delivered a vicious slap with his other hand.

  Again he tried to touch the swelling. Again Patrick snapped, and was slapped. Again . . .

  Somewhere around the thirteenth or fourteenth attempt, Patrick allowed Diego to touch the swollen left side of his face. By this time the right side was puffed up, too. His mouth was bloody and his right eye almost closed.

  Diego sat there, staring, for six or seven minutes more. Then he picked up the stool and exited the room.

  He didn't talk to me at first, instead moving close to the CCTV to watch his unwilling penitent.

  IT'S NOT EASY TO explain my relationship with Diego. We rarely talked, and yet a certain sympathy had formed between us on that job in L.A.

  One day when we were following the actress's brother, mapping out his routine, we were sitting in a car near a big house. There was a team of men in the front yard hacking away at a broad and hunched-over old oak. The tree was gnarled with age. It took a lot of work to bring that old monster down.

  "You see them?" Diego had said out of the silence of the ages.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Not one of them men is over thirty. That tree is two hundred years old, maybe three. It's been there since before their grandparents were born, but they still come at it with their axes and saws. Somebody said it's in the way. So
mebody paid somebody, and life is torn from the ground."

  That's the reason I called on Diego. Hush was like those axmen. He lived by a logic that was completely of the modern world. Hush had the sensibility of a long history of conquerors. His laws were man-made, while Diego's came from a deeper place.

  "CAN I KILL HIM?" he asked me.

  "No."

  "You can see in his eyes that he's a killer. He might come after you."

  "He doesn't know who I am. And I doubt if he could ever figure out who you are."

  "You don't know who hired him, but you will before the sun rises."

  "Do we have a problem?" I asked.

  "No. I'm not afraid of him."

  Diego looked into my eyes, seeking my response. Then he grinned. The light in his face spoke of innocence and strength, something that maybe I knew at one time, before the roots of New York had gotten tangled in my soul.

  WHEN DIEGO ENTERED THE room again he was carrying my brutal knife. Without a word he began cutting off Patrick's clothes. First he followed the seams of his windbreaker, going from the left wrist up over the shoulders and down the right side. He pulled off the segmented jacket and then did the same with the dark-blue woolen shirt. After that he started in on the khaki pants.

  Like some kind of mad tailor, working in reverse, Diego cut off all of Patrick's clothes, leaving him wearing only his socks, shoes, and chains.

  It was cold in that room, very cold.

  Patrick's skin grew pale. He shivered slightly but otherwise bore up under the divestment rather well.

  Diego settled down and stared at his victim for over an hour.

  Suddenly, without warning, Diego stood up, took Patrick's left wrist, and cut into it with the point of the knife. Then he calmly returned to his stool, and we both watched the blood trickle down onto Patrick's knee, flowing from there around his calf, past the ankle, to pool on the cold concrete around his feet.