The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  Melanie painstakingly filled in the last patch of clear nail upon her little toe, then placed the brush back in the polish, turning slightly as she did so. She saw Danny reaching out for her.

  She opened her mouth to speak at last, and heard a knock at the door.

  Edgar Certaz thumbed idly at the remote control, flashing through the channels. There were so many that by the time he had finished flicking through them all he had forgotten if there were any of the earlier ones that merited his attention. He settled at last upon a Western. He thought it very slow. Three men were waiting for a train. The train came. A man with a harmonica got off. He killed the three men. An Italian played an Irishman, and an American actor whose face was familiar to him appeared as the villain, which threw Certaz a little as he had only ever seen the American play good guys. There were few Mexicans that he could see, which was good. Certaz was tired of seeing peasants in white clutching sombreros as they appealed for help against bandits from gunmen in black, as though all Mexicans were either victims or cannibals who fed on their own.

  Certaz was a middleman, an intermediary. Like the woman in the next room he had connections with Juarez, and he and his fellow narcotraficantes had been responsible for many deaths in the city. His was a dangerous business, but he was paid well for his troubles. Tomorrow, he would meet two men and arrange for the delivery of $2 million worth of cocaine, for which he and his associates would receive a 40 percent commission. If the delivery proceeded without a hitch, the next consignment would be considerably larger, and his reward commensurately greater. Certaz would make all of the arrangements, but at no point would either drugs or money be in his possession. Edgar Certaz had learned to insulate himself from risk.

  The Colombians still controlled the manufacture of cocaine, but it was the Mexicans who were now the biggest traffickers of the drug in the world. The Colombians had given them their start in the trade, albeit unintentionally, by paying Mexican smugglers in cocaine instead of cash. Sometimes, up to half of every shipment into the United States went to the Mexicans. Certaz was one of the original mules, and had quickly worked his way up to a position of prominence in the Juarez cartel controlled by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “Lord of the Skies” after he pioneered the use of jumbo jets to transport huge shipments of drugs between territories.

  In November 1999, a joint raid by Mexican and U.S. law enforcement unearthed a mass grave at a desert ranch named La Campana, near Juarez. The grave contained two hundred bodies, maybe more. La Campana was once the property of Fuentes and his lieutenant, Alfonso Corral Olaguez. Carrillo had died in the summer of 1997, following an overdose of anesthesia administered in the course of plastic surgery intended to change his appearance. It was rumored that his Colombian suppliers, envious of his influence, had paid off the medics. Two months later Corral was shot and killed at the Maxfim restaurant in Juarez, leading to a bloody turf war headed by Carrillo’s brother Vicente. The bodies at La Campana, stored in the narco-bunkers that riddled the land, included the remains of those who had crossed Carrillo, among them members of the rival Tijuana cartel as well as unfortunate peasants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certaz knew this, because he had helped to put some of them there. The discovery of the bodies had increased the pressure on the Mexican dealers, forcing them to be ever more careful in their operations, and so the need for men with Certaz’s expertise had grown considerably. He had survived the investigations and the recriminations, and had emerged stronger and more secure than ever before.

  In the movie, a woman arrived on a train. She was expecting someone to meet her, but there was nobody waiting. She took a ride out to a homestead, where the Irishman lay dead on a picnic table alongside his children.

  Certaz was bored. He pressed his thumb against the remote to kill the picture, and heard a knock at the door.

  Danny Quinn draped a towel around his waist and went to the door.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Police.”

  It was a mistake, but Brightwell was distracted. It had been a long trip, and he was tired. The heat of the day had made him weary, and now the comparative cool of the desert night had taken him by surprise.

  Danny looked at Melanie. She took her purse and headed for the bathroom, closing the door behind her. They had a little weed in a Ziploc bag, but Melanie would just flush it down the john. It was a shame to lose it, but Danny could always get more.

  “You got some ID?” said Danny.

  He still had not opened the door. He looked through the spy hole and saw a fat man with a round face and a weird neck holding up a badge and a laminated identification card.

  “Come on,” said the man. “Open up. This is just routine. We’re searching for illegals. I just need to take a look inside, ask you some questions, then I’ll be gone.”

  Danny swore, but relaxed a little. He wondered if Melanie had already flushed their stash. He hoped not. He opened the door, and smelled something unpleasant. He tried to hide his shock at the man’s appearance, but failed. Already, he knew that he had made a mistake. This was no cop.

  “You alone?” asks the fat man.

  “My girlfriend is in the bathroom.”

  “Tell her to come out.”

  This is all wrong, thought Danny, all wrong.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let me have another look at that badge.”

  The fat man reached into his jacket pocket. When his hand reemerged, it was not holding a wallet. Danny Quinn saw a flash of silver, and then felt the blade enter his chest. The fat man grabbed Danny’s hair and pushed the blade up and to the left. He heard the girl’s voice calling from the bathroom.

  “Danny?” said Melanie. “Is everything okay?”

  Brightwell released his grip on Danny’s hair and yanked the blade free. The boy collapsed onto the floor. His body spasmed, and the fat man placed his foot upon his stomach to still him. Had he more time, Brightwell might have kissed him as he had Ruiz, but there were more pressing matters to which to attend.

  From the bathroom came the flushing of a toilet, but it was being used to mask another sound. There was the creak of a window sliding open, and a screen being forced. Brightwell walked to the bathroom and raised his right foot, then shattered the lock with the impact.

  Edgar Certaz heard the knock on the adjoining room seconds after someone commenced knocking on his own door. He then discerned a male voice identify himself as a cop claiming to be hunting illegals.

  Certaz was not dumb. He knew that when the cops came hunting, they didn’t do it so politely. They came hard and fast, and in force. He also knew that this motel was not on their shit list, because it was relatively expensive and well run. The sheets were clean and the towels in the bathroom were changed every day. It was also far from the main routes used by the illegals. Any Mexican who got this far was not going to check into the Spyhole Motel for a bath and a porno movie. He was going to be sitting in the back of a van headed north or west, congratulating himself and his buddies on making it across the desert.

  Certaz did not reply to the knock on his door. The knock came again.

  “Open up,” said a voice. “This is the police.”

  Certaz carried a lightweight Smith & Wesson mountain gun, with a short, four-inch barrel. He did not possess a license for it. While he did not have a criminal record, he knew that if he was taken in and fingerprinted, his prints would set off alarm bells in local and federal agencies and that he would be a very old man by the time he was released, assuming that they did not find an excuse to execute him first. So two thoughts crossed Edgar’s mind. The first was that if this really was a police raid, then he was in trouble. The second thought was that, if these men were not police, then they were still trouble, but trouble that could be dealt with. He heard a muffled scream from the room next door as Brightwell dealt with Danny Quinn’s girlfriend.

  You want me to open up, decided Edgar, then I’ll open up.

  He drew the Smith & Wess
on, walked to the wooden door, and began firing.

  Blue bucked as the first of the shots hit him in the chest, its force diminished slightly by its passage through the door. The second took him in the right shoulder as he spun, and he grunted loudly as he hit the sand. There was no use for silence now. He drew his own Double Eagle and fired from the ground as the door to the motel room opened.

  There was nobody in the gap. Then Certaz’s gun appeared, low down from the left, where the Mexican was hunched beneath the window. Blue saw the dark finger tense upon the trigger and prepared for the end.

  Shots came, but not from the Mexican. Brightwell was at the window, firing down at an angle through the glass. He shot Edgar Certaz in the top of the head and the Mexican tumbled forward, even as two more bullets entered his back.

  Blue rose to his feet. There was now blood on his shirt too. He swayed a little.

  From the back of the motel, they heard the sound of someone running. The door to the last motel room remained closed, but they knew that their quarry was no longer inside.

  “Go,” said Blue.

  Brightwell moved quickly. He ran less gracefully than he walked, rocking from side to side on his stubby legs, but he was still fast. He heard a car starting, then the engine being gunned. Seconds later, a yellow Buick shot around the corner of the motel. There was a young woman behind the wheel. Brightwell fired, aiming to the right of the driver’s head. The windshield was hit, but the car kept coming, forcing him to throw himself to one side to avoid being struck. His next shots took out the tires and blew out the rear window. He watched with satisfaction as the Buick hit the late Edgar Certaz’s truck and came to a sudden halt.

  Brightwell got to his feet and approached the ruined car. The young woman inside lay dazed in the driver’s seat. There was blood on her face, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.

  Good, thought Brightwell.

  He opened the door and pulled her from the car.

  “No,” Sereta whispered. “Please.”

  “Where is it, Sereta?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  Brightwell punched her in the nose. It broke under the impact.

  “I said, where is it?”

  Sereta fell to her knees, her hands against her face. He could barely understand her when she told him that it was in her purse.

  The fat man reached into the car and retrieved the purse. He began tossing the contents onto the ground until he found the small silver box. Carefully, he opened it and examined the piece of yellowed vellum within. He looked at it and, seemingly content, replaced it in the box.

  “Why did you take it?” he asked. He was genuinely curious.

  Sereta was crying. She said something, but it was muffled by her tears and the hands that she had cupped over her ruined nose. Brightwell leaned down.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said.

  “It was pretty,” said Sereta, “and I didn’t have any pretty things.”

  Brightwell stroked her hair almost tenderly.

  Blue was approaching. He staggered a little, but remained on his feet. Sereta crawled back against the car, trying to stem the bleeding from her nose. She looked at Blue, and he seemed to shimmer. For a moment she saw a black, emaciated body, tattered wings hanging from nodes upon its back, and long, taloned fingers that clutched feebly at the air. The figure’s eyes were yellow, shining in a face that was almost without features, apart from a mouth filled with small, sharp teeth. Then the shape before her was, once again, a man dying upon his feet.

  “Jesus, help me,” she said. “Jesus, Lord God, help me.”

  Brightwell kicked her hard in the side of the head, and her words ceased. He dragged her limp body to the trunk of her car, opened it, then dumped her inside before walking to his own Mercedes and returning with two plastic cans of gas.

  Blue leaned against the Buick as his colleague approached. His eyes lingered for a moment on the gasoline, then shifted away.

  “Don’t you want her?” he said.

  “I would taste her words in my mouth,” said Brightwell. “Strange, though.”

  “What is?” asked Blue.

  “That she should believe in God and not in us.”

  “Perhaps it is easier to believe in God,” says Blue. “God promises so much…”

  “…but delivers so little,” finished Brightwell. “We make fewer promises, but we keep them all.”

  Had Sereta been able to see him, then Blue would have shimmered again before her eyes. His companion did not notice. He saw Blue as he had always seen Blue.

  “I am fading,” said Blue.

  “I know. We were careless. I was careless.”

  “It does not matter. Perhaps I will wander for a time.”

  “Perhaps,” said Brightwell. “In time, we will find you again.”

  He sprayed gasoline upon his companion, dousing his clothes, his hair, his skin, then poured the remainder upon the interior of the Buick. He tossed the empty containers onto the backseat, then stood before Blue.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye,” said Blue. He was almost blinded by the gasoline, but he found the open door of the Buick and eased himself into the driver’s seat. Brightwell regarded him for a moment, then took a Zippo from his pocket and watched the flame take life. He tossed the lighter into the car and walked away. He did not look back, not even when the gas tank exploded and the darkness behind him was lit by a new fire as Blue passed from this world, and was transformed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Each of us lives two lives: our real life and our secret life.

  In our real life, we are what we appear to be. We love our husbands or our wives. We care for our children. Each morning we pick up a bag or a briefcase and we do what we must to oil the wheels of our existence. We sell bonds, we clean hotel rooms, we serve beer to the kind of men with whom we would not share our air if we had a choice in the matter. We eat our lunch in a diner, or on a bench in a park where people walk their dogs and children play in the sunlight. We feel a sentimental urge to smile at the animals because of the joy they take in the simplicity of a stroll through green grass, or at the children paddling in pools and racing through sprinklers; but still we return to our desks or our mops or our bars feeling less happy than we formerly were, unable to shake off the creeping sense that we are missing something, that there is supposed to be more than this to our lives.

  Our real life—anchored by those twin weights (and here they come again, our careworn friends) duty and responsibility, their edges considerately curved, the better to fit upon our shoulders—permits us our small pleasures, for which we are inordinately grateful. Come, take a walk in the countryside, the earth spongy and warm beneath your feet, but be aware always of the ticking clock, summoning you back to the cares of the city. Look, your husband has made dinner for you, lighting the candle that his mother gave you for a Christmas gift, the one that now makes the dining room smell of mull and spices although it is already mid-July. See, your wife has been reading Cosmo again, and in an effort to add a little spice to your waning sex life has for once gone farther than JCPenney for her lingerie, and has learned a new trick from the pages of her magazine. She had to read it twice just to understand some of the terminology, and had to rely on ancient memory to summon up a picture of the sad, semitumescent organ that she now proposes to service in this manner, so long has it been since any such matters passed between the two of you without the cover of blankets and smothered lights, the easier to fantasize about J. Lo or Brad, perhaps the girl who takes your order at the sandwich bar, or Liza’s kid from two doors down, the one who is just back from college and is now transformed from a geeky little kid with railroad braces into a veritable Adonis with white, even teeth and tanned, muscular legs.

  And in the darkness, one upon the other, the real life blurs at its margins, and the secret life intrudes with a rush and a moan and the flicking tongue of desire.

  For in our secret life, we are truly ourselve
s. We look at the pretty woman in marketing, the new arrival, the one with the dress that falls open when she crosses her legs, revealing a pristine expanse of pale thigh, and in our secret life we do not see the veins about to break beneath her skin, or the birthmark shaped like an old bruise that muddies the beauty of her whiteness. She is flawless, unlike the one we have left behind that morning, thoughts of her new bedroom trick already forgotten for it will be put away as surely as will be the Christmas candle, and neither trick nor light will see use for many months to come. And so we take instead the hand of the new fantasy, unsullied by reality, and we lead her away, and she sees us as we truly are as she takes us inside her and, for an instant, we live and die within her, for she needs no magazine to teach her arcane things.

  In our secret life, we are brave and strong, and know no loneliness, for others take the place of once-loved (and once-desired) partners. In our secret life, we take the other path, the one that was offered to us once but from which we shied away. We live the existence we were meant to lead, the one denied us by husbands and wives, by the demands of children, by the requirements of petty office tyrants. We become all that we were meant to be.

  In our secret life, we dream of striking back. We point a gun and we pull the trigger, and it costs us nothing. There is no regret at the wound inflicted, the body slumping backward, already crumpling as the spirit leaves it. (And perhaps there is another waiting at that moment, the one who tempted us, the one who promised us that this is as it was meant to be, that this is our destiny, and he asks only this one small indulgence: that he may place his lips against those of the dying man, the fading woman, and taste the sweetness of what passes from them so that it flutters briefly like a butterfly in his mouth before he swallows, trapping it deep inside him. This is all that he asks, and who are we to deny him?)