Angel was sleeping. A day had passed since his return to the Upper West Side apartment he shared with Louis, in the building they jointly owned, because all that was Louis’s was also Angel’s. This, Louis reflected, was probably not an unfamiliar situation for Angel: as a professional thief for much of his life, Angel was comfortable with fluid concepts of ownership, and associated transfers of the same.
In the ground-floor apartment, Louis knew, Mrs Bondarchuk would be watching TV surrounded by yappy Pomeranians, a watchdog among watchdogs. Mrs Bondarchuk was the sitting tenant when Louis first bought the building, and he had seen no reason to alter that arrangement. Mrs Bondarchuk paid a rent so small that even she was embarrassed by it, and provided a range of hearty stews and baked goods to make up for any perceived shortfall. She also maintained unceasing vigil over the building, its neighbors, its environs, and anyone who might pause on the street for longer than was necessary to tie a shoelace, take a phone call, or hail a cab. Her TV was positioned so that only a glance to her left was required to ensure all was well. She also chose to collude in the fiction that the two gentlemen occupying the upper floors were merely tenants like herself; and although her upbringing was Eastern European, Catholic, and deeply conservative, she was pleasantly scandalized by their sexuality. It made her feel exotic by association.
Louis took a damp cloth and wiped the sweat from Angel’s face. Angel did not react, but continued to breathe shallowly in his narcosis-induced sleep. Only the rise and fall of his chest disturbed the stillness of his form.
He will appear like this when he is dead, Louis thought. He is forcing me to look at him this way.
Behind Louis, the nurse appeared.
I do not want him to leave me. I will break.
‘I can take over, if you like,’ she said.
The team of three nurses that would alternately care for Angel, each overlapping with another for an hour each day, had been carefully sourced. Their agency was noted for its discretion, its staff having ministered to the needs of princes, dictators, and criminals. The criminals, according to the head of the agency, were always the most polite.
‘Thank you,’ said Louis. He returned the cloth to its bowl, adjusted the blanket over Angel’s chest, and smoothed away the wrinkles in the material. ‘You have the number. Call me for anything.’
Louis knew that he should remain with Angel, but he could not. He was running away once again. He was a coward.
‘I will,’ said the nurse, ‘but he’ll be fine.’
She took the chair, and Louis closed the door softly behind him. When he woke, Angel would understand the reason for his partner’s absence. These periods of escape were the only means by which Louis could discharge the fear that built up within him, and so allow him to be strong for this man he loved.
The building housed three apartments, of which only two were ever occupied. The one on the second floor was variously used as a workshop, an office, and a place of retreat when either Angel or Louis – mostly the former, but occasionally the latter – was getting on his partner’s nerves. At the moment it was home to the Fulci brothers, whose guardianship of Angel had now extended – very temporarily, Louis prayed – to the early period of his recuperation, thus facilitating Louis’s truancy. Mrs Bondarchuk, for all her vigilance, did not own a gun.
On the other hand, Mrs Bondarchuk was not crazy.
Then again, she did seem curiously fond of the Fulcis, and Paulie in particular, who was currently watching TV with her. Tony, meanwhile, was sitting in their living quarters, the door open while he worked on a massive kit of the USS Constitution. According to his brother, Tony’s therapist had recommended the building of model ships as a calming measure. Tony had calculated that the bigger the kit, the greater the therapeutic value, and so the USS Constitution would measure three feet in length when completed.
No, scratch that: if completed. This was, it seemed, the twelfth kit upon which Tony had embarked. The previous eleven had been destroyed in fits of rage at varying stages of construction. Tony’s therapist, Louis believed, was clutching at fucking straws.
Louis put on his suit jacket, and picked up his overcoat. The car was waiting for him outside. When not driving himself, Louis employed the services of an Uzbek chauffeur named Alex. Louis did not trust many people, but Alex was one of them.
He said goodbye to the Fulcis, and to Mrs Bondarchuk. He instinctively checked the street before opening the outer door of the building, although he knew that Alex would have done the same, or else he would not have been standing patiently by the car, his face a vision of Central Asian calm.
‘Good evening, Alex.’
‘Good evening, sir.’
‘Is the family well?’
‘Very well, sir, thank you for asking.’
Always the same conversation. Louis sometimes questioned if Alex would even admit if any member of his family were unwell. Perhaps, under Alex’s careful stewardship, it had ceased to be a possibility.
Louis had only a small leather satchel to carry with him on the flight to Portland. It contained a pen and a book. He had moved on to Montaigne’s Essays. Louis felt that he might have enjoyed meeting Montaigne, whom he found not just wise, but sensible.
The car pulled away from the curb. Louis opened the Essays, but instead of reading anew, he returned to a page he had marked only earlier in the week, as he listened from outside the hospital room while a young nurse helped Angel shift position to prevent bedsores. From the introduction to the volume, Louis had learned that Montaigne was close to a poet named étienne de La Boétie, whose death had plunged Montaigne into grief. Of their friendship, Montaigne wrote: ‘If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.’
Louis touched his fingers to the page.
Yes, he thought. Yes.
72
Billy Ocean pulled into the parking lot behind the three-unit rental in Auburn. The building was temporarily empty due to an ongoing damp problem that technically rendered it unsuitable for human habitation, although Billy knew people who’d pay good money to live in it, even at risk to their health. It smelled some, and only a fool would have chanced putting any significant weight on a couple of the boards, but it was better than sleeping under the stars.
Billy was holding off on getting the necessary work done because his usual handyman – who worked cheap but billed high, enabling Billy and him to split the difference – was languishing in the Cumberland County Jail for failing to pay child support. He was unlikely to be breathing free air anytime soon either, since he owed $15,000 for his kids, who lived with their mother in New Jersey. Under federal law, it was a crime for a person to maintain a residence in a different state from his children if that person owed more than $5,000 in child support, which meant Billy’s handyman was looking at two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Even with a sympathetic report from the federal probation office, he still wasn’t going to be in a position to deal with Billy’s damp problem before parts of the building started caving in. This left Billy with the problem of locating a sufficiently crooked contractor to replace him, and good men were hard to find.