The Wrath of Angels

18





When I was seventeen, and my mother and I were living with my grandfather in Scarborough, Maine, following my father’s death, a man named Lambton Everett IV would come visit, and he and my grandfather would share a beer on a seat in the yard or, if the weather was cold, they’d share something stronger: blended Scotch, mostly, on the grounds that they weren’t single malt men or, if they were, then they couldn’t afford to be so on a regular basis, and therefore there was no point in raising false expectations for their palates.

Lambton Everett IV was a long string of misery, a man who never owned an item of clothing that fitted him correctly. In part this was because his body was so indiscriminately proportioned that no cloth that was not cut to measure could ever have accommodated his limbs without leaving a sock peeping or a forearm exposed halfway to the elbow. Shirts hung from him like collapsed sails from a mast, and his suits appeared to have been stolen randomly from the dead. Yet even had his suits been made from the finest Italian wool, and his shirts spun from silks beloved of kings, Lambton Everett IV would still have looked like a scarecrow that had tired of its frame and wobbled unsteadily from its field to seek pastures new. With his downturned mouth, and his huge ears, and his balding, pointed head, he was a source of genial terror at Halloween, and prided himself on the fact that he didn’t have to dress up as a ghoul to scare the children.

There hadn’t even been three Lambton Everetts before him: the numeral was an affectation, a private joke that not even my grandfather understood. It lent him a certain gravitas among those who didn’t know him well enough to be able to spot the fraud, and gave his friends and neighbors something over which to shake their heads, which is a very important gift to bequeath to others in certain circles.

But my grandfather liked Lambton Everett IV because he had known him for a long time and believed that his flaws were minor, and his decencies major. Lambton Everett IV appeared never to have been married, and it was said that he was a bachelor of the most pronounced kind. He seemed to have little sexual interest in women, and none whatsoever in men. There were those who were convinced that Lambton Everett IV would die a virgin; my grandfather speculated that he might possibly have tried intercourse once, if only to strike it from the short list of things he felt that he should do before he passed away.

But it turned out that my grandfather didn’t know Lambton Everett IV at all; or rather he knew only one Lambton, the face that Lambton had chosen to present to the world, but that face bore no more relation to the reality of the man than a mask bears to its wearer. Lambton shared little with my grandfather about his past; my grandfather knew him only in the present, in his Maine existence, and he accepted the fact of this with no rancor. In his bones, he knew Lambton to be a good man, and that was enough for him.

Lambton Everett IV was found dead in his house in Wells on a gray Tuesday morning in December. He had failed to turn up at the Big 20 Bowl for his regular Monday morning session, and telephone messages did not elicit a response from him. Two members of his bowling team visited him shortly after breakfast the next morning. They rang the doorbell with no result, then walked to the back of the house and peered in through the kitchen window, where they saw Lambton lying on the floor, his hand clutched to his chest and his face frozen in an agonized grimace. He had gone quickly, the coroner later said: the pain of the heart attack had been immense, but brief.

My grandfather was one of four men who carried the casket from the church on the morning of the funeral, but he was surprised to be informed by Lambton’s lawyer that Lambton had nominated him as executor of his will. The lawyer also gave my grandfather a letter addressed to him in Lambton’s messy scrawl. It was short and to the point: it apologized to my grandfather for springing the executorship on him but promised that it would not be an arduous task. Lambton’s instructions for the disposal of his estate were relatively simple, mostly involving the dispersal of the proceeds of the sale of his house and possessions among a number of named charities. Ten percent was to be given to my grandfather to do with as he saw fit, along with a gold-and-onyx pocket watch that had been in Lambton’s family for three generations. My grandfather was also directed to an album of photographs and newspaper clippings in Lambton’s bedroom closet, the contents of which Lambton requested he share only with those who might understand them.

It is difficult for men and women to keep secrets these days, especially concerning matters that might, at some point, have found their way into the media. A quick Internet search can expose even the most personal of histories to the light, and a generation has grown used to being able to access such information with the click of a mouse, but it was not always so. I think now of my grandfather seated at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table, the album open before him in the fading winter daylight, and the sense he had that Lambton’s shade was somewhere nearby, watching him carefully as his secret pain was exposed at last. Later my grandfather would say that, in looking through the album, he felt like a surgeon lancing a boil, releasing liquid and pus, scouring the infection so Lambton Everett IV might be permitted the peace in death that had been denied him in life.

The album revealed another Lambton Everett, a young man with a wife named Joyce and a son called James. He was still recognizably himself, according to my grandfather: a gangling man, an awkward yet strangely handsome individual, smiling contentedly beside his tiny, pretty wife and his grinning son. In the final picture taken of them, his wife and child were twenty-nine and six respectively. Lambton was thirty-two. The picture was dated May 14, 1965, the place Ankeny, Iowa. Three days later, Joyce and James Everett were dead.

Harman Truelove was twenty-three years old. He had been dismissed from his job slaughtering hogs for undue cruelty to the animals, his sadism exceptional even in a profession where casual brutality was the norm, inflicted by men of subnormal intelligence on animals that were probably smarter than themselves, and certainly more worthy of continuing their existence. Harman Truelove’s response to his firing was to set fire to the pens housing the hogs awaiting slaughter, burning two hundred of the animals alive, before hitting the road with only a single change of clothing, sixty-seven dollars, and a set of butcher knives. He hitched a ride as far as Bondurant with a man named Roger Madden, who lied and said that he was going no farther just to get Harman Truelove out of his truck because, as he later told police, ‘the boy wasn’t right’.

Harman ate a bowl of soup in the Hungry Owl Diner, left a quarter as a tip, and started walking. He had decided that he would stop when the sun began to set, which it did just as he reached the house of Joyce and Lambton Everett, and their son James. Lambton, who had traveled to a conference of insurance adjusters in Cleveland, was not home, but his wife and child were.

And they spent a long night with Harman Truelove and his knives.

Lambton got the call in Cleveland the following day. Harman Truelove had been picked up by police as he headed northwest on foot toward, he said, Polk City. He hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes, and he was sticky with blood. He had left a trail of it from the Everetts’ bedroom, all the way through the house, and halfway down their garden path. Curiously, he had cleaned his knives before he left.

This my grandfather learned from the album at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table. He would later recall softly touching the face of the woman and the boy in the picture with his fingertips, and allowing his hand to hover over Lambton’s image, just as he might have done if the man were seated before him, seeking to express his sorrow and regret yet conscious that Lambton was a man who had always refrained from unnecessary physical contact. Even his handshakes had been as delicate as the touch of an insect’s wings against one’s skin. My grandfather had always considered it merely to be another of Lambton’s peculiarities, like his refusal to eat meat of any kind and his particular hatred for the smell of bacon or pork. Now the odd details of Lambton’s personality began to take a new form, each making a terrible kind of sense in the context of what he had endured in life.

‘You should have told me, my friend,’ my grandfather said aloud to the listening silence, and the drapes behind him shifted slightly in a cool winter breeze, although the day outside was still as stone. ‘You should have told me, and I would have understood. I would never have mentioned it to another soul. I would have kept your secret. But you should have told me.’

And he was overcome by the knowledge of his old friend’s suffering, now at an end – no, almost at an end, for the story was not yet fully told, and there were more pages to come. Not many, but enough.

Harman Truelove refused to confess to his crime. He declined to speak to the police or even to his own public defender, and did not answer when his lawyer asked him where the bruises on his face and body had come from, for the police had tried hard to make him talk. There was a trial, although few witnesses were called, for Harman Truelove’s guilt was never in doubt. Something of Harman Truelove’s past was revealed in the course of the police investigation, but more was kept hidden, and only a handful of people were privy to it: years of physical abuse, dating back even to his time in the womb when Harman’s father, an alcoholic itinerant laborer and serial despoiler of women, had tried to induce an abortion in Harman’s mother by kicking her repeatedly in the stomach; the subsequent death of his mother when Harman was two years old, ostensibly by her own hand in a bath of lukewarm water, although the coroner was heard to wonder why a woman who had been intent upon slitting her arm open with a straight razor might also have bathwater in her lungs; the years spent on the road with his father, beating following beating until Harman Truelove could not speak without stammering; and the death at last of that terrible man who choked on his own vomit while lying unconscious in a drunken stupor, his twelve-year-old son found beside him holding his father’s cold hand, gripping it so tightly that the rigor mortis had sealed the child’s hand in the father’s and the police had to break the dead man’s fingers to release his son. By mutual agreement, the prosecutor and defender decided that it was unnecessary to share such information with the jury, and only after Harman Truelove had left this earth did it become public knowledge.

Before sentencing, Lambton Everett requested a moment with the judge, a dour yet fair man named Clarence P. Douglas, who, despite being at least two decades from retirement, tended to inhabit his role in the manner of a man who was set to throw it all in the following day and claim his watch and pension, with subsequent plans for nothing more arduous than fishing, drinking, and reading. He didn’t seem to care whom he offended by manner or decision just as long as whatever he did was in accordance, insofar as was possible, with the requirements of both law and justice.

A record of their conversation found its way into the local newspapers following Douglas’s eventual retirement, since Lambton Everett had placed no stipulation of secrecy upon him, and Douglas clearly felt that it did not reflect badly on the man: quite the opposite. The article in question was one of the final entries in the album, although my grandfather felt that it had been placed there with a degree of reluctance, as it had not been as carefully cut and pasted as the others, and was separated from the previous cutting by two blank pages. My grandfather took the view that it had been added out of a desire for completeness, but Lambton Everett was somehow embarrassed by it.

In the oak-lined quiet of his chambers, the judge was requested by Lambton Everett to spare Harman Truelove from death by hanging at the state penitentiary in Fort Madison. He did not want ‘the boy’ to be executed, he said. The judge was surprised, and more. He asked Lambton why Harman Truelove should not be subject to the full vengeance of the law.

‘You don’t need me to tell you, sir,’ said Judge Douglas, ‘that what Harman Truelove did was evil, as bad a thing as I ever heard of.’

And Lambton, who knew some but not all of Harman Truelove’s past, replied, ‘Yes, your honor, what he did was as close to pure evil as makes no difference, but the boy himself isn’t evil. He never had the start in life that the rest of us had. What followed wasn’t much better, and I think it drove him crazy. Somebody took a child and twisted him until he wasn’t even human any longer. I looked at him in that courtroom, and I reckoned that he was in even more pain than I was. Don’t misunderstand me, your honor: I hate him for what he did, and I can’t ever forgive him for it, but I don’t want his blood on my conscience. Put him away somewhere that he can’t hurt anyone ever again, but don’t kill him, not in my name.’

Judge Douglas sat back in his leather chair, folded his hands across his belly, and thought that Lambton Everett might well be the most unusual individual who had ever set foot in his chambers. He was more used to hearing the hounds baying for blood, ready to tear apart the accused themselves if the law wasn’t prepared to sate them. Few lambs crossed the threshold of his courtroom, and fewer merciful men.

‘I hear you, Mr Everett,’ he said. ‘I even admire you for your sentiments, and it could be you’re right in some of what you say, but the law requires that the boy should die. I suggest otherwise, and they’d curse my name right along with his until the day they put me in the ground. If it helps you to sleep any easier, his blood isn’t on your hands, nor on mine. And maybe ruminate on this: if that boy is in as much pain as you think, then it could be that the kindest thing anyone could do for him is to put an end to it once and for all.’

Lambton Everett took in his surroundings, the leather furnishings and the book-lined walls, as Clarence Douglas marked the traces of grief upon his face. He had not met Lambton until the case came to trial, but he was well versed in trauma and loss. What kind of man, he wondered, pleads for the life of another who has cut apart his wife and child? Not merely a good one, he decided, but a man who carried something of Christ Himself within him, and Clarence Douglas felt humbled in the man’s presence.

‘Mr Everett, I can tell the boy that you asked for his life to be spared. Should you choose to do so, it could also be arranged for you to visit with him, and you could tell him yourself. If you had any questions, you could put them to him, and see how he responds.’

‘Questions?’ said Lambton, looking up at the judge. ‘What questions could I have for him?’

‘Well, you might want to ask him why he did what he did,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘He never told anyone why he murdered your wife and son. He never said anything at all, barring the word “no” when they asked him if it was he who had taken the lives of your wife and boy, even though there’s no doubt that it was his hand that did for them. One word, that’s all they got out of him. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr Everett: there are doctors, psychiatrists and their kind, who are curious as all hell about that boy, but he’s as much an enigma to them now as he was when they put the cuffs on him. Even allowing for his history, there’s no explanation for what he did. There are folk who’ve had worse upbringings than him, worse by a country mile, but they never killed an innocent woman and her little boy because of it.’

He shuffled awkwardly in his seat, for there was a dreadful intensity to Lambton Everett’s gaze that made Clarence Douglas regret he had ever started talking about the murderer Harman Truelove, that he had ever even agreed to admit Lambton Everett into his chambers.

‘There is no “why”’, said Lambton, slowly and deliberately. ‘There can never be. Even if he came up with some answer for me, it would have no meaning, no weight in this world or the next, so I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t even want to look at him again after this day. I just didn’t want to add to his suffering, or to mine. I didn’t want to add to the suffering of the world itself. I figure it has enough to be getting along with. It’s never going to run out.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Everett,’ said Clarence Douglas. ‘I wish there was something more that I could do for you.’

So Lambton Everett returned to the courtroom, and the jury read their verdict, and Judge Clarence Douglas passed sentence, and some time later Harman Truelove took the long drop.

And Lambton Everett eventually traveled northeast, making for the sea, and he came to rest at last in Wells. Although he said nothing of his past, still he brought it with him in his heart, and in his mind, and in an album of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings.

My grandfather turned back to the picture of Lambton with his family. Yes, he was still recognizably a younger version of the man that my grandfather had known, but the years had exacerbated his awkwardness, and the flawed dimensions of his limbs. It struck my grandfather that people sometimes spoke of men and women being broken by grief and loss, and they meant by that a psychological or emotional fracturing, but Lambton Everett resembled a man who had been physically broken, one who had been torn apart and then imperfectly reassembled, and he had spent the remainder of his life struggling with the physical legacy of what had been visited upon him.

My grandfather closed the album, and he shut his eyes, and he registered Lambton Everett’s presence nearby, could almost smell the scent of pipe tobacco and Old Spice that had been so much a part of him.

‘Go on, now,’ said my grandfather. ‘Go to them. They’ve waited for you long enough.’

He thought that he heard the drapes flutter once more behind him, and there was a sound that might have been an exhalation, like a second dying, and then the scent faded, and he felt the emptiness of the room, and he opened his eyes again as his ears discerned a soft ticking.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah.’

On the table before him was Lambton Everett’s pocket watch, the one that he had bequeathed to my grandfather in his will. But my grandfather had not taken it from the closet in which he had found it alongside the album. He had left it on Lambton’s bed. He was certain of it, as certain as he was of anything in this world.

He slipped the watch into his pocket, and put the album under his arm, and that night, while I watched, he burned the record of Lambton Everett’s pain on a pyre behind his house. When I asked him what he was doing he shared with me Lambton Everett’s story, and it came to be a foretelling of what was to pass in my own life. For, like Lambton, I would see my wife and child torn apart, and I would travel to this northern state, and there my pain would find its form.

Now, seated at that small, dark table on the Lower East Side, the paper Epstein had given to me held tightly in my hand, I thought again of Lambton Everett, and that bond I had imagined as linking our experiences was severed. What kind of man pleads for the life of one who has taken his wife and child from him, Judge Douglas had asked himself: a good man, was the answer, a man worthy of salvation.

But what kind of man takes the life of one who has murdered his wife and child? A vengeful one? A man driven by wrath, twisted by grief? Lambton Everett had appeared broken in form, but the best of him had remained intact within. It was as if his body had been forced to absorb entirely the impact of the blow in order for his spirit, his soul, to remain unsullied.

I was not Lambton Everett. I had taken many lives. I had killed, over and over, in the hope that it might ease my pain, but instead I had fueled it. Had I damned myself by my actions, or had I always been damned? Was that why my name was on this list?

‘Liat, pour Mr Parker a glass of wine,’ said Epstein. ‘I will take one as well.’

The list contained eight names. Unlike the document given to me by Marielle Vetters it was printed, not typewritten. Davis Tate’s name was on this list too but, his apart, my own name was the only one that I recognized. There were no other letters or symbols beside it, no numbers that might be dates or figures. It stood alone, and was printed not in black ink, but in red.

Liat placed two glasses on the table, and filled them both with red wine, not white. She left the bottle.

‘Where did you get this list?’ I asked Epstein.

‘A woman contacted us through an intermediary, a lawyer in our employ,’ said Epstein. ‘She told him that she had been engaged for decades in a process of blackmail, bribery and solicitation. She had hundreds of names, of which this list was just a taster. She said that she had been responsible for the destruction of families, careers, even lives.’

‘On whose behalf?’

‘On behalf of an organization with no true name, although some of those like her termed it the “Army of Night”.’

‘Do we know anything about it?’

‘“We?”’

I realized that there were still guns surrounding me, and my life might well be in the balance here, but I would not give them the satisfaction of yielding to their doubts about me.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, are “we” still playing that game?’

‘You still haven’t explained why your name is on that list,’ said the blond man.

‘And I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.

‘Yonathan,’ he replied.

‘Well, Yonathan, I don’t know you well enough to submit to your questions. Neither do I know you well enough to care if something happens to you when this is all done, so why don’t you just keep quiet and let the grown-ups talk?’

I thought that I caught Liat’s smile, but it was gone before I could be sure. Yonathan bristled, and his face went red. Had Epstein not been present, he might have lunged for me. Even with Epstein’s presence to hold him in check, he still looked like he might take his chances. I was glad Liat had left the wine bottle. I hadn’t touched my glass, but the bottle was close by my right hand. If Yonathan or anyone else tried to lay a hand on me, I planned to shred some skulls before I went down.

‘Enough,’ said Epstein. He scowled at Yonathan before returning his attention to me. ‘The question remains pertinent: why is your name on that list?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘He’s lying,’ said Yonathan. ‘Even if he knew, he would not tell us.’

Yonathan clearly had testosterone issues. The hormones were clouding his brain.

‘Get out,’ said Epstein.

‘But—’ Yonathan began.

‘I told you once to keep quiet, and you did not listen. Go outside and keep Adiv company. You can brood together.’

Yonathan looked like he might be about to start objecting again, but it took only a scowl from Liat to convince him otherwise. He left with as much bad grace as he could muster, even going so far as to nudge me with his shoulder as he passed.

‘You need to organize one of those staff training weekends,’ I said to Epstein. ‘Take them out into the wilderness, then lose them and start all over again.’

‘He is young,’ Epstein replied. ‘They all are. And they’re concerned, as am I. You’ve managed to get too close to us, Mr Parker, and now your very nature is in doubt.’

There was too much tension in the air. I felt like I was taking it in with every breath. I paused for a moment and tried to let myself relax. It was difficult under the circumstances, but somehow I managed.

‘Tate apart, who are the others on this list?’ I asked.

‘Some have been definitely identified: two are members of the Kansas and Texas Houses of Representatives respectively – one liberal, one conservative. Both are tipped for greater things. Another is a corporate lawyer. The rest we’re still working on but they appear to be, for want of a better term, regular people.’

‘Did this woman give any indication as to why she had chosen to provide these particular names?’

‘Our lawyers received a follow-up email from a temporary Yahoo account. It claimed that substantial bribes had been paid to three of those on the list. Two more had been blackmailed: one over hidden homosexual tendencies, the other over a series of affairs with much younger women. Documentary evidence sent as attachments to the email appeared to support her claims.’

‘So that accounts for five of the names. Did she say anything about me?’

I saw the possibility of a lie flicker on Epstein’s face. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t.

‘She didn’t mention me, did she?’

‘No,’ said Epstein. ‘Not initially.’

‘But when your lawyer passed the list on to you, you instructed him to ask her, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She could not confirm if any approaches had been made to you. She said that she had not put your name on the list, and you had not been her responsibility.’

‘So who added my name to the list?’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me, because it’s left me under the gun. You know. Who was responsible?’

‘Brightwell,’ said Epstein. ‘She said Brightwell insisted that it should be added.’

‘When?’

‘Shortly before you killed him.’

We were coming close to it now, the point of all this, the nexus of Epstein’s doubts about me.

‘Do you think I killed Brightwell because I knew he put my name on this list?’

‘Well, did you?’

‘No. I killed him because he was a monster, and because he would have killed me otherwise.’

Epstein shook his head. ‘I don’t think that Brightwell wanted to kill you. I suspect he was convinced that you were like him. Brightwell believed you were a fallen angel, a rebel against the Divine. You had forgotten your own nature, or had turned against it, but you might still be convinced to turn again. He saw in you a potential ally.’

‘Or an enemy.’

‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’

‘Really? It feels like a kangaroo court. All that’s missing is the noose.’

‘You’re being overdramatic.’

‘I don’t think so. There are a lot of guns on show, and none of them belongs to me.’

‘Just a few more questions, Mr Parker. We’re almost done.’

I nodded. What more could I do?

‘The woman said something else about you. She said that your name had recently come up again, that there were those within her organization who considered you to be important. It was why she chose to send that particular list of names to us.’

Epstein reached out and took my hands in his. The pads of his index fingers pressed against the pulses on my wrists. To my right, I felt the intensity of Liat’s regard. It was like being hooked up to some kind of human lie detector, except this one would not be fooled.

‘Did they ever approach you with an offer, or a bribe?’

‘No.’

‘Did they ever threaten you?’

‘People have been threatening me for a decade, Brightwell and his kind among them.’

‘And how have you responded?’

‘You know how I’ve responded. I have their blood on my hands. In some cases, so do you.’

‘Do you belong to this Army of Night?’

‘No.’

I heard a buzzing to my left. A wasp was bouncing against the mirror above my head. From the sluggishness of its movements, it looked like it was dying. The sight of it recalled another meeting with Epstein, one in which he spoke of parasitic wasps that laid their eggs in spiders. The spider carried the larvae as they developed, and they in turn altered its behavior, causing it to change the webs that it spun so that, when the larvae finally erupted from its body, they would have a cushioned web upon which to rest while they fed upon the remains of the arachnid in which they had gestated. Epstein had told me that there were entities who did the same to men, dark passengers on the human soul, carried unawares for years, even decades, until it came time to reveal their true natures, and then they consumed the consciousness of their hosts.

I watched Epstein follow the progress of the dying insect, and I knew that he was remembering the same conversation.

‘I’d know,’ I said. ‘By now, I would know if I carried one of them inside me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘There have been too many opportunities for it to emerge, too many times when it could have changed the course of events by doing so. If it dwelled within me, it could have shown itself and saved some of its own, but nothing came to save them. Nothing.’

Again, Epstein’s eyes flicked to Liat, and I understood it was her response that would determine what happened next. The gunmen watched her too, and I saw them ease their fingers beneath the trigger guards in anticipation. A tiny bead of sweat leaked from Epstein’s scalp, like a tear from some hidden eye.

Liat nodded, and I felt myself tense to receive the bullets.

Instead, Epstein released his hold upon my wrists and sat back. The guns vanished, and so did the remaining gunman. Only Liat, Epstein, and I stayed.

‘Let us drink, Mr Parker,’ said Epstein. ‘We are done.’

I stared down at my hands. They were trembling slightly. I stilled them with an effort of will.

‘Go to hell,’ I said, and I left them to their wine.