Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  Each floor of the gallery was divided into rooms of various sizes where “compatible” pieces of artwork were displayed side by side. Viktor opened at noon, stayed open until midnight, and there were always crowds of people moving through the rooms, types ranging from ragtag, struggling artists eyeing the work of their more successful contemporaries, to oil sheikhs looking for good investments.

  Veil had a medium-sized room all to himself. Although I happened to know that Viktor had, at any one time, dozens of the prolific Veil’s paintings stored away in a humidity-controlled vault, he very shrewdly chose to display only a very few—sometimes only one—of the paintings at a time, and always out of sequence so that it was impossible to guess that they had been spawned from a much larger work. The effect of seeing one of Veil’s paintings, surreal and eerie, floating in its own cubical, monochrome sea of space bathed in soft blue or white light was striking, always intriguing, and sometimes disorienting. Viewing it in this way, whether alone in the room or with others, one might have been a passenger on a spaceship looking out a porthole over the surface of an alien world.

  “Mongo?”

  At the sound of the familiar, rumbling voice I turned away from the painting and found myself looking up into the round, bearded face of Viktor Raskolnikov hovering like a grizzled moon over his huge belly. As always, the Russian was dressed in a finely tailored tuxedo. He was holding a glass of white wine in each hand, and his green eyes glowed with bemused curiosity as he stared down at me.

  “Hi, Viktor,” I said, nodding my thanks as I took one of the glasses of wine.

  “I thought it was you,” the gargantuan art dealer said. “But what is with the dark glasses and big hat? I’ve never seen you wear a hat.”

  “I’m traveling incognito.”

  Viktor thought about it, then began to laugh. Viktor Raskolnikov laughing was truly a sight to hear and behold, and it served to stop traffic in the room and in the corridor outside. Viktor laughed with his whole body, which meant that his great belly heaved to and fro, and rolled, inside its vested confines, seemingly stretching the fabric to its breaking point. And he did it all without spilling a single drop of wine.

  “Ah, that’s a good one,” Viktor said when he had finally brought his laughter under control and was able to catch his breath. “Dr. Robert Frederickson, of all people, trying to hide his identity under a big hat. Yes, that’s very good. I’ve always loved your sense of humor.”

  “Yeah. Ho-ho.”

  Now Viktor frowned. “But I see that you are walking with a limp and using a cane. Is this part of your disguise?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Actually, I have two limps. I had a little accident; something bumped into me.”

  “I am sorry, my friend,” Viktor said, laying a huge hand on my shoulder. “I hope you are feeling better soon.”

  “Thanks, Viktor.” I paused, trying to think of a way of sliding into asking the questions I wanted to ask without giving away too much information and putting the art dealer into any more jeopardy than I’d already placed him simply by walking into his gallery. “You know,” I continued at last, “every time I see Veil’s work I’m struck by its originality and freshness.”

  “Yes,” Viktor said simply, glancing up at the painting above my head. “He’s truly one of a kind.”

  “At first, all of his pieces look the same. But then you gradually come to realize that they’re not; each painting in a series has subtle differences that make it unique.”

  Viktor nodded in agreement, sipped at his wine.

  “And all landscapes,” I continued. “No people—at least none that I’ve ever seen. Has he ever shown you any paintings with people in them?”

  The gallery owner looked at me strangely. “No. As far as I know, Veil has never done anything but landscapes, although his use of color has changed radically over the years. You can see it most dramatically when you compare slides of his earlier work with what he does now. That’s curious.”

  “What’s curious? The change in his use of color?”

  “No. It’s curious that I was asked the same question just yesterday.”

  “Really?” I could feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise.

  “Yes. Two men came in the gallery yesterday afternoon and expressly asked to talk to me. They offered to pay for my time, and I should have accepted; I spent close to an hour with them, and they left without buying anything.”

  “What did they want to know?” I asked in what I hoped was a very casual tone of voice.

  “A curious pair, with none of the aura of warmth and excitement people in the arts usually project. They asked questions like the one you just asked, about Veil’s present and earlier work. I had the suspicion they were dealers, and I made it clear to them that Veil has an exclusive contract with this gallery for the next fifteen years.”

  They were dealers, all right, I thought, brokers of pain and death. The discovery that my torturers had paid Viktor a visit the day before served to magnify my own feelings of being a very dangerous pariah; everyone I talked to now became a potential target for the men who had tried to kill me. I was fairly certain I hadn’t been followed, but couldn’t be absolutely sure; my enemies might not even know I’d survived the fire, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure of that, either. The gallery suddenly seemed very large and public, and I suddenly felt very vulnerable.

  “Viktor,” I said, shifting my weight heavily onto my cane, “I need a favor.”

  “What can I do for you, my friend?”

  “I have a friend in the art department at the university who’s putting together a collection of promotional material that’s been used by and for various artists. I told her I’d come by here and ask you for one of Veil’s publicity photos.”

  “Of course,” the Russian replied with an easy shrug. “Let’s go see what I have in my office.”

  With Viktor setting a slow pace, I hobbled after him out of the room, down the hallway, and into his office at the end. Grateful for the opportunity to rest my burning, throbbing feet, I slumped down on a leather couch while Viktor looked through a filing cabinet. After a minute or two he found what he was looking for—a four-page brochure from a one-man show Viktor had mounted the year before with Veil’s photograph prominently displayed on the cover. I took it from Viktor, had a second glass of wine, then thanked my friend and left the gallery, going down a back stairway leading to an exit door that opened into an alley.

  Now thoroughly exhausted, I took a cab back to Garth’s apartment. It took me a couple of minutes to go through the procedures for defusing the explosive devices with which Garth had booby-trapped the door. After resetting the devices, I took a couple of aspirin and soaked in a tepid tub for half an hour.

  The phone started to ring just as I came out of the bathroom and was headed toward the wet bar. I debated letting it ring, but since this was Garth’s apartment and the call was probably for him, I answered it. It was my brother.

  “Hey, brother,” Garth said. “I was just about to give up on you. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. You can hardly walk, and you’re supposed to be convalescing. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Just taking care of some business. Among other things, I wanted to pick up a photograph of Veil.”

  “You could have saved yourself the trouble. I have mug shots.”

  “I didn’t want mug shots. For one thing, they never look like the person.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like shit.”

  “Well, I want you to come and see something.”

  “Garth, my ass is dragging. I’ve got my heart set on a Scotch or three, a couple of the delicious sandwiches you were so sweet to make for me, and bed. Can it wait?”

  “It could, but I don’t want it to. Believe me, what I have to show you will give you a real happy heart; you’ll love it. It’s official business, so I’ll send a squad car around to pick you up. Why don’t you be down on the sidewalk in ten minutes?”


  “Garth, I really—”

  “See you in a few minutes.”

  “So?” Garth said.

  “Holy shit,” I replied.

  “Is it them?”

  “It’s them.”

  “What about the hair color?”

  “Forget the hair color. It’s them.”

  In the dim light of the morgue chamber, I stared in something approaching disbelief at the two naked, toe-tagged bodies laid out on separate stone slabs. The faces, and only the faces, of the two men who had tortured and tried to kill me were unmarked, at least in the sense that no blows had been struck there. However, even in death, lines and shadows of unspeakable agony were left in the folds of flesh around the eyes and mouths as indelibly as if they had been etched there with acid; they still looked as if they were screaming. From the neck down, both bodies were blue-black like a single great bruise, the result of innumerable ruptured blood vessels and prolonged internal bleeding. The right thumbs of both men had been severed.

  My night visitors had taken a long time to die; their hair had turned bone white.

  “Somebody really did a number on these guys,” Garth remarked dryly. “What we’ve got here are two fleshbags of broken bones and mushed guts. There’ll be an autopsy, of course, but it’s a waste of time. The pathologists will find that just about everything inside these men is broken; they’ll also find that the men were kept alive while they were being taken apart. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Neither have I,” I said in a hollow voice, numbed by the horror of what I was looking at as well as by the terrible, cold-blooded, and controlled savagery the man I thought of as a friend was capable of. Suddenly I was afraid of Veil Kendry—afraid of finding him, and afraid of his secret.

  “It looks like you were right about having a protector.”

  “Yeah. It looks that way.”

  “Nunchaku?”

  “I’d say so. Tap-tap-tap. I told you the man was a master.”

  “What do you think of the missing thumbs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trophies?”

  “No. Not Veil’s style.”

  “After seeing this, you still think you’re an authority on Veil Kendry’s style?”

  “Your point is well taken. I just don’t think Veil would take trophies.”

  “Shit. Why the hell would he cut thumbs off?”

  I thought about it, said: “For the fingerprints. The faces were left unmarked so that we’d have positive identification, and the thumb-prints will provide the same for somebody else.”

  “You think he sent them to somebody?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “And probably a good one. It would mean that the person on the other end has access to fingerprint apparatus and a record of those men’s prints.”

  “Yes. When and where did you find these jokers?”

  Garth laughed without humor. “A patrolman found them this morning, in the alley outside the station house. They were hanging upside down with their ankles wedged into the grating of our fire escape. It seems that Kendry not only takes care of our business for us, he makes free deliveries. Very witty.”

  “Speaking of identification, did they have any on them?”

  “Loads of it; credit cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards. All phony, of course, good work and untraceable. Each had over a thousand in cash in his wallet.”

  “I assume you ran a print check from the rest of their fingers?”

  “Sure. Nothing.”

  “Interpol?”

  “Nothing there, either.”

  It didn’t surprise me. “So they don’t have criminal records. What does that suggest to you, Garth?”

  “What does it suggest to you?”

  “That in somebody’s perception they’re good guys, not bad guys. They were thugs, but they were official thugs; not gangsters. They were trained by, and worked for, an agency of some government—probably our own.”

  Garth shrugged. “There are top-flight professional assassins around the world with no criminal records; that’s why they’re so successful and difficult to defend against. Hell, there’s no way to tell if these guys were even Americans.”

  “I think they were.”

  “Almost all government agencies, at least the kinds that would use men like this, fingerprint their agents.”

  “Yes; precisely the reason Veil cut off the thumbs and mailed them in. Some agencies keep their own computer files, so neither Interpol nor the F.B.I. would have any record of their agents. I think there’s a good chance these men were C.I.A. operatives. They were working domestic territory, which means that whatever they were involved in is a renegade operation. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “What makes you think they were C.I.A.?”

  I told Garth about the information I had gleaned from my trip to the library, stressing the common association between Americans fighting with the Hmong in Laos and the C.I.A. Garth listened attentively, nodded appreciatively when I’d finished.

  “You’ve done good work, Mongo. I’m going to check out some things. For openers, I’ll see if I can’t get hold of an official, written copy of Kendry’s complete service record.”

  “Good idea.” Suddenly I could hardly keep my eyes open, and my legs hurt all the way up to my hips. “Can I get a ride back to the apartment?”

  “You’ve got it. The squad car’s waiting outside for you.”

  “Good,” I said with a weary wave as I hobbled toward the door. “I need some sleep. In the morning, I’ve got to make some travel arrangements.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Seattle.”

  “What’s in Seattle?”

  “A lot of Hmong, and maybe a few pieces of Veil’s past.”

  7.

  Seattle seemed like a city sculpted from wet snow. The skies were leaden when I arrived and looked like they would stay that way for some time. Even more depressing than the dim winter light and biting cold was the realization that I was, in all likelihood, wasting time and money on an impossible task, trying to pick up a trail that was almost two decades cold. While it was true that there were thousands of Hmong in and around this city, I didn’t know a single one. I had no way of knowing how many Hmong had known Veil and fought with him, or if any of them had escaped from Laos and made it to the United States. All I had was a recent photograph of a man the Hmong hadn’t seen in half a lifetime; despite the fact that the younger Veil had been clearly recognizable to me in the painting, there was no telling how he had looked in those years, in or out of uniform, probably covered most of the time with mud and blood. I hated to think of what the odds might be against finding anyone who would recognize him.

  But the symbols on the robe in the painting had been specific, and the logic of my trip still seemed inescapable; the symbols were associated with the Hmong people; there were more Hmong in Seattle than anywhere else; I was in Seattle. The fact that my feet were feeling better was at least some consolation, and I could now walk without a cane.

  I learned that the Hmong had gathered together in a patchwork of interconnecting neighborhoods in the southeast sector of the city, and I found and checked into a hotel near the enclave. I knew that I could spend weeks working restaurants, bars, and other places where people gathered, and consequently needed a more systematic approach in my search for someone who might have known Veil. Figuring that I had certainly begun earning the ten thousand dollars Veil had left me, I began spending it, keeping a careful record of my expenditures in a small notebook.

  I made up a short message offering a five-hundred-dollar reward to anyone who had ever known Veil and could supply information about him. Then I went looking for a pay phone booth that possessed a number of specific characteristics: it had to be fairly close to the hotel where I was staying, isolated enough so that it would be almost completely unused for one or two hours a day, out of doors but with some kind of shelter or windbreak nearby, and sur
rounded by enough open space so that I could monitor the movements of any people who might pass by.

  I finally found what I was looking for in a small park about three-quarters of a mile from the hotel. There was a bank of three phones in the center of a small, lighted plaza circled by woods. Not too many people would be using those phones in the middle of winter, and there were more convenient phones for pedestrians to use on the sidewalks circling the park. All three phones were in working order, so I incorporated the number of the one on the right in my message, instructing anyone wishing to claim the reward to call that number between six and eight in the evening.

  The next step was risky, but seemed unavoidable. I had registered at the hotel under a false name, paid cash, and made a few noises about being a salesman for a manufacturer of designer jeans. I wanted as few people as possible to see me, and none at all to be able to connect me with a search for a missing American who had fought with the Hmong in Laos. But I needed a printer, which meant that I could not avoid dangerous personal contact altogether. I found a print shop with an owner who was bilingual in English and Hmong. He translated my message into Hmong, and I left him with instructions to blow up Veil’s photo to poster size, incorporate my message in both languages at the bottom, then print up a hundred copies on poster-weight paper as quickly as possible. I thought that the owner, a Hmong, reacted slightly when I gave him the brochure with Veil’s photo, but I told myself that it could be my imagination and that narrowly escaping being burned alive would make anyone paranoid.

  In any case, the posters were ready the next afternoon, as the man had promised. I paid for them and walked out with the bundle under my arm. The palm of my left hand, which had been resting on the butt of the Beretta in my coat pocket all the time, was sweaty, even in the cold air.