The Wrath of Angels

III



I rage, I melt, I burn,

The feeble God has stab’d me to the Heart.

‘Acis and Galatea’, John Gay





(1685–1732)





19





Darina Flores sat in an armchair, the boy sitting, unmoving, at her feet. She stroked his thinning hair, the scalp damp yet curiously cold against her fingertips. It was the first time she had left her bed since what she now thought of as the ‘incident’. She had insisted that the dosages of pain medication should be decreased, for she hated the wooziness and the loss of control it brought. Instead she was striving for a balance between tolerable pain and a degree of clarity.

The doctor had come again that morning. He had removed the dressings from her face and she had watched him closely as he did so, seeking some clue in his eyes to the damage that had been inflicted upon her, but his expression remained disinterested throughout. He was a slight man in his early fifties, his fingers long and tapering, the nails professionally manicured. He struck her as mildly effeminate, although she knew that he was straight. She knew everything about him: it was the main reason why he had been chosen to treat her. One of the great benefits of having detailed personal knowledge of an individual was the way in which it deprived that person of the ability to decline an invitation.

‘It’s healing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances,’ he told her. ‘How does your eye feel?’

‘Like there are needles sticking in it,’ she replied.

‘You’re keeping it lubricated? That’s important.’

‘Will my sight—?’ Her throat felt very dry, and she had trouble enunciating her words. She thought for a moment that there might have been some damage to her tongue, or her vocal cords, until she realized that she had hardly spoken more than a few words in days. When she tried again, speech came more easily. ‘Will my sight be restored?’

‘I expect so, in time, although I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever have perfect vision in that eye.’ She resisted the urge to lash out at him, so casual was his tone. ‘The cornea is also likely to grow opaque in the long term. We could, of course, examine the possibility of a corneal transplant. It’s a relatively commonplace procedure now, generally done on an outpatient basis. The main issue is securing a suitable cornea from a recently deceased individual.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ she said.

He smiled indulgently. ‘I didn’t mean that we should do it right now.’

‘Neither did I.’

His smile faded, and she noticed a slight tremor creep into his fingers.

‘I haven’t looked at myself,’ she said. ‘There are no mirrors in the room, and my son has kept the ones in the bathroom covered.’

‘Those were my instructions,’ said the doctor.

‘Why? Am I so terrible now?’

He was good, she gave him that. He did not look away, and he did not betray his true feelings about her.

‘It’s too early. The burns are still raw. Once they begin to heal, we’ll have options. Sometimes, patients will look at themselves in the immediate aftermath of an . . . accident like yours, and they will despair. That’s true of any serious injury or illness. The early days and weeks are always the hardest. Patients feel that they can’t go on, or don’t want to go on. In your case, time will heal your wounds, and, as I’ve told you, what time can’t heal, surgeons can. We’ve come a long way in our ability to treat burn victims.’

He patted her on the arm, a gesture of comfort and assurance that he had probably made to his patients a thousand times before, and she hated him for it, hated him for his lies, and his blank visage, and for even thinking he could get away with patronizing her. He sensed that he had overstepped some mark, so he turned his back on her and began putting away his equipment and dressings. Still, her obvious antagonism seemed to have goaded him, and he could not resist attempting to assert his superiority over her.

‘You should have gone to a hospital, though,’ he said. ‘I warned you at the beginning: had you submitted to proper care, I might be more optimistic about any possible outcomes. Now we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.’

The boy appeared beside him. The doctor had not even heard him enter the room, and so it seemed to the older man that he had somehow materialized out of the shadows, drawing black atoms from the ether to reconstitute himself in the gloomy room. In his hand the boy held a photograph of a girl aged sixteen, perhaps a little younger. Her hairstyle and mode of dress indicated that the picture had not been taken recently. He turned the photograph so that it faced the doctor, like a conjuror displaying the crucial card in a sleight-of-hand trick. The doctor paled visibly.

‘Remember your manners, Doctor,’ said Darina. ‘Don’t forget who disposed of the evidence of your last botched procedure. Use that tone with me again, and we’ll bury you next to that girl and her fetus.’

The doctor said nothing more, and left the room without looking back.

Now here she was, out of bed for the first time since that bitch had scarred her. She wore a loose, open-necked shirt over a pair of sweat pants, and her feet were bare. It was hardly elegant, but wearing a buttoned shirt meant that she did not have to pull anything on over her head, and the sweats were comfortable and nothing more. The boy had brought her a glass of brandy at her request. She sipped it through a straw in order to avoid stinging her damaged lips with liquor. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mix alcohol and painkillers, but it was only a small glass, and she had been thirsting for a proper drink for days.

The boy began playing with his toy soldiers in their big wooden fort. They were knights on foot and on horseback, made from tin and carefully painted. She had bought them for him at a booth in Prague’s Old Town Square. The artisan who sold them also made imitation medieval weapons, and heavy gauntlets and helms, but it was the soldiers that had caught her eye. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of them: sixty or seventy in total. The boy was only a year old then. She had left him in the care of a nanny in Boston, the first time she had been separated from him since his birth, and had traveled to the Czech Republic to retrace his steps. All she knew was that this was the country to which he had departed in his final days, the last place in which he had drawn breath before that stage of his existence was ended, and a new one begun. He had no memory of it, and so could not recall the trauma of his dying. It would come as he grew older, but she had hoped to unearth some clue as to what had occurred there. She found nothing: those responsible had covered their tracks too well.

But she was patient, and the boy would have his revenge.

It surprised her how the old and the new could co-exist inside him. He was so like a regular child now, lost in games of war, but this was the same boy who had helped her to torture Barbara Kelly to death. At times like that his older nature took over, and he seemed almost surprised at the damage that his hands could wreak.

She checked email on her laptop, and began listening to the messages that had been left on her various phones. There was nothing of consequence on the main numbers, and it was with some surprise that she found a message waiting for her at one of the oldest of the numbers, the one that had been earmarked for a very particular cause, and on which she had almost given up by now.

The message began haltingly, the voice slightly slurred. Alcohol, and more: a little toke, possibly, to take the edge off.

‘Uh, hey, this is a message for, um, Darina Flores. You don’t know me, but a while back you came to Falls End, Maine asking about a plane . . .’

She put down the glass while she listened to the rest of the message. No name left, only a number, but unless the caller had acquired a throwaway phone for the express purpose of calling her, his identity would be easy to establish. She played the message again, concentrating on every word, registering hesitations, emphases, intonation. There had been a lot of pointless calls in the early days, a lot of frustrated men with fantasies of getting her in the sack, and a couple of drunken, anonymous calls from women expressing the opinion that she was a bitch and a slut, and worse. She had responded to none, but recalled them all. She had an extraordinary memory for voices, but she could not remember ever having heard this one on the system before.

And there were details in this message, fragments of knowledge and description, that told her this was worth pursuing, that this would not be a wasted journey. There was truth here, small details that could only have come from someone who had actually seen the plane, and one in particular that made her gasp.

A passenger: the caller mentioned a passenger.

She rose and headed for the bathroom. A small nightlight burned in the outlet by the toilet, far from the big mirror which the boy had covered with a towel, but Darina turned on the main bathroom light as she entered. She reached for the towel, and felt the boy’s hand on her arm. She looked down at him, and was touched by the expression of concern on his face.

Touched, and unnerved.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’

He let his hand fall. She removed the towel. Even through the dressings, the appalling damage to her face was clear.

Darina Flores began to cry.