The Wrath of Angels

23





Davis Tate slumped in one of the leatherette booths of the bar and looked at his ratings for the fourth time, hoping to find some cause for celebration, or even mild optimism.

His figures should have been through the roof: the economy was still unsteady, the president was hogtied by his own compromised idealism, and the right had succeeded in vilifying unions, immigrants, and welfare cases, making them carry the can for the greed of bankers and Wall Street sharks, thereby somehow convincing sane people that the poorest and weakest in the nation were responsible for most of its ills. What never ceased to amaze Tate was that many of those same individuals – the dirt poor, the unemployed, the welfare recipients – listened to his show, even as he castigated those – the union organizers, the bleeding-heart liberals – who most wanted to help them. Bitterness, stupidity, and self-interest, he had discovered, would win out over reasoned arguments every time. He sometimes asked himself how this generation differed from that of his grandparents when it came to the election of a president, and he had decided that previous generations wanted to be governed by men who were smarter than they were, while today’s voters preferred to be led by those who were as dumb as themselves. He knew them well, for he made his living by pandering to their basest instincts. He understood that they were frightened, and he fanned the flickering flames of their fear.

Yet still his figures remained stubbornly plateaued. In some states – Kansas, for crying out loud, and Utah, where being a liberal meant having only one wife – his listenership was actually going down. It was unbelievable, just unbelievable. He finished his beer and waved to the waitress for another.

‘What the hell is happening?’ he asked. ‘I mean, is it my voice, my personality, what?’

There were those who might have said that it was all of the above, and more. Strangely, Tate might well have empathized. He knew that he was not particularly talented and not particularly charismatic, but he could rabble-rouse with the best of them. He was also brighter than his enemies gave him credit for, bright enough to understand that most people in America, whether liberal or conservative, just wanted to get along with their lives, and generally didn’t wish ill on anyone who had not done them actual harm. They were fundamentally good people, and pretty tolerant to boot. For those reasons, they were of absolutely no use to Tate and his kind. His role in life was to target those who had resentment and animosity simmering inside, and put those base materials to political and social use. Where there is love, he prayed, let me sow hatred. Where there is risk of pardon, a renewed sense of injury. Where there is faith, doubt. Where there is hope, despair. Where there is light . . .

Darkness.

His producer, Becky Phipps, sat across from him, toying with the olive in her dirty martini; dirty both figuratively and literally. Tate had no idea what she thought she was doing, ordering a cocktail in a dump like this. Tate didn’t even want to use the beer glasses, and he’d wiped clean his bottle of beer before drinking from it. Just because this was the kind of dump frequented by regular Joes didn’t mean that he had to drink there too, not unless it was going to boost his ratings, and right now he didn’t hear anyone applauding.

Tate was also concerned that the bartender might be gay. He was all muscled up, but he was too tanned for Tate’s liking, and he seemed to be camping it up some for a couple of the customers who looked like queer bait. The bar had been Becky’s choice. She said it was better to have this discussion away from the usual watering holes. There would be fewer distractions, but also fewer ears listening in on their conversation.

‘It’s not a crisis yet, but it could become one unless we tackle it now,’ said Becky. ‘There have been some rumblings from advertisers, but assurances are being offered. We’re talking, and they’re listening.’

‘They’re not cutting advertising rates, are they?’ asked Tate, unable to keep a hint of rising panic out of his voice. That could be the kiss of death. Cutting rates, even temporarily, was a dangerous business. It might be taken as an admission that the slide in listeners couldn’t be arrested, and that was like starting a run on a bank.

‘No, but I won’t lie to you: the possibility has been suggested.’

‘How long have we got?’

‘A couple of months. We’ll get together a focus group next week, do some blue-sky thinking, spitball the whole business.’

Tate hated it when Becky used all of that business school jargon. In his experience, people only spoke that way when they had no idea what they were doing, which was a cause for alarm in the case of his producer, even if Becky was a producer more in name than in practice. She monitored Tate, guided him, suggested targets for his tirades, and he never disagreed with her. He knew better than to do that. He and Becky had been together for five years, and she’d been good for him, but his vanity made him reluctant to attribute too much of his success to her input. On the other hand, Barbara Kelly, the woman who had recommended Becky, had also been responsible for providing seed capital, and for putting him in touch with a whole network of likeminded people: advertisers, syndicators, dealers in influence and information.

But Barbara Kelly was dead. He had to tread carefully here.

‘If you think it will help,’ said Tate.

He tried not to sound too skeptical. He lived in fear of being dropped, of being sent back to the minors. His third beer arrived. He looked over at the bar and saw the bartender staring back at him. The freak took the empty bottle from the waitress, stuck his finger in the top, and dumped it in the recycling bin. While Tate looked on, he then sucked the finger that had been in Tate’s bottle, and winked.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Tate.

‘What?’

‘That fag bartender put his finger in my bottle and sucked it.’

‘What, that bottle?’

‘No, the last one, the one I just drank from.’

‘Force of habit.’

‘He winked at me while he did it.’

‘Maybe he likes you.’

‘Jesus. You think he did something with this one too?’ Tate eyed the bottle suspiciously. ‘Maybe his finger isn’t the only thing he tries to put in bottles.’

‘I got a wipe, if you want to use it.’

‘It’ll make the beer taste bad. Maybe not as bad as if the bartender stuck his dick in it, but still bad.’

‘You’re overreacting.’

‘He recognizes me. I’m sure that he does. He did that deliberately because he thinks I’m a homophobe.’

‘You are a homophobe.’

‘That’s not the point. I should be able to express my opinions without fear of queer bartenders sticking their fingers, or anything else, in my beer. He could have a disease.’

‘You told me he sucked his finger after you drank from the bottle, not before. If anyone’s going to catch anything, it’s him.’

‘What are you, an epidemiologist? And what’s that supposed to mean anyway? You implying that I have something he could catch?’

‘Paranoia, maybe.’

‘I’m telling you, he knows who I am.’

‘It would be great if he did,’ said Becky, and the sarcasm distracted him from fingers and bottles. ‘If every bartender in New York recognized you it would mean that you were a national figure, and all of your problems would be solved.’

‘You mean “our” problems, right?’

Becky sipped her drink. ‘Of course. I misspoke.’

Tate folded his arms huffily and turned away from her, then quickly reconsidered as he found himself catching the bartender’s eye again. Becky swore softly. It was up to her to make some conciliatory gesture. It always was. Sometimes she wished Barbara Kelly had never asked her to take Tate under her wing. He had seemed to be on the verge of breaking through in a big way, at least until recently, but he was a miserable, whiny sonofabitch. It came with the territory. You couldn’t spend hours every day spitting out that kind of bile, then more hours working up more bile to spit out the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, and not pollute your spirit. Although she’d never told Tate this, there were times when she muted the volume in the producer’s booth to give her a break from his poisonous rants, and she agreed with most of what he said. She couldn’t have done the job otherwise. At least Tate represented only part of her responsibilities. In a way, being his producer was little more than a cover story for her.

‘You smell smoke?’ asked Tate. He was sniffing the air like a rat, his head slightly raised. He had even lifted his hands from the bar, and they hung in front of his chest like paws.

‘What, like fire?’ she said.

‘No, tobacco smoke.’ He peered over the top of the booth, but there was no one nearby. They’d chosen the table for precisely that reason. ‘Stinks like cleaning out time at the lung cancer ward.’

For someone who was ostensibly a libertarian, Tate had his peculiarities and inconsistencies. Like so many of those who described themselves as pro-life, Tate was only pro the kind of life that was curled up in someone’s womb. If it emerged from that same womb and committed a crime, then it was fair game for the needle. Similarly he was inordinately fond of war, as long as that war involved kicking someone’s ass in a place far away from decent bars and good restaurants, and was fought by the kind of men and women whom Tate secretly despised when they weren’t wearing a uniform. But he was also cautiously in favor of some form of gun control, albeit a control mechanism that allowed him to own guns and kept them out of the hands of the non-white and the non-Christian; and he certainly did not approve of those who smoked in his vicinity, even while advocating the sort of lax environmental policing that in the long run was likely to have a significantly more damaging effect on the quality of the air that he breathed than the occasional breath of secondhand smoke.

In short, Becky thought, Davis Tate was an a*shole, but that was why he was so useful. Still, recruiting men such as he required a degree of care, and their continued use involved careful diplomacy. They couldn’t be stupid or else they would be unable to perform their appointed role in the media, and they couldn’t be too smart in case they began questioning what they were doing, or how they were being used. The easiest way to ensure their continued compliance was to stroke their ego and surround them with those most like themselves. Hatred, like love, needed to be regularly fed and watered.

Tate continued to sniff the air.

‘You sure you don’t smell it?’ he said.

Becky sniffed. There was something, she admitted. It was faint, but unpleasant. She could almost taste it on her tongue, as though she’d just licked a smoker’s fingers.

‘It’s old,’ she said. ‘It’s on someone’s clothing.’ Their skin and hair too, because you didn’t get to smell that way unless the nicotine had ingrained itself upon your system. She could almost hear the cells metastasizing.

She glanced over her shoulder. At the very back of the bar, where the light was at its dimmest, she saw a figure seated in a booth against the wall, a newspaper spread before him, a brandy snifter in one hand, the index finger of the other gently tapping a rhythm upon the table as he read. She couldn’t see his face, but his hair looked greasy and untidy. He struck her as unclean, a polluted man, and not just because the tobacco smell was certainly coming from him.

‘It’s the guy in the corner,’ she said.

‘There’s no excuse for a man smelling that bad,’ said Tate. ‘At least he won’t outlive us.’

Tate was not certain, but for a moment he believed that the rhythm of the man’s tapping might have been interrupted, and then it resumed and he forgot about it.

‘Ignore him,’ said Becky. ‘He’s not why we’re here.’

‘Goddamn disloyal advertisers and fat station managers without an original idea in their heads is why we’re here,’ said Tate.

‘It’s not just the advertisers and the stations we have to worry about, though,’ she replied. ‘You realize that? The Backers are concerned.’

Tate’s mouthful of beer tasted wrong. It wasn’t just his suspicions about the bartender, misplaced or otherwise. He always felt this way when the subject of the Backers was raised. At first, their existence hadn’t bothered him so much. The Kelly woman had approached him when he was a minor player broadcasting out of San Antonio, with barely a dozen statewide syndications to his name. She’d arranged to meet him for coffee in the lobby of the Menger Hotel, and he hadn’t been impressed with her at first. She was dowdy and plain, and Tate suspected that she was also a dyke. He had no objection to dykes as long as they were pretty – that was probably as close to a liberal viewpoint as he’d ever managed to come – but the butch, masculine-looking ones bothered him. They always seemed so angry, and frankly they scared the shit out of him. Kelly wasn’t an extreme case: her hair was shoulder length, and she wasn’t making some protest about oppressive male views of women by refusing to wear makeup or avoiding skirts and high heels. No man would have given her a second look in a bar or a mall, though, and most wouldn’t even have bothered with the first look.

But when she started speaking he found himself leaning forward, hanging on her every word. She had a soft, melodious voice, one that seemed to him both entirely at odds with her appearance yet also curiously appropriate if you considered her as some kind of mother figure instead of a sexual being. She spoke of how there was a change coming, and voices like his needed to be heard if that change was to become permanent. She said that there were powerful, influential figures with an interest in ensuring this was the case, and they had favors to call in, and money to spend. Davis Tate didn’t have to spend the rest of his career broadcasting out of a roach-filled studio in Valley Hi, driving between it and his similarly roach-filled apartment in Camelot in his piece-of-shit Concord hatchback. He could become a big player in syndicated talk radio if he wanted to be. He just had to trust in others to guide him.

Tate might have been a serious hatemonger-in-waiting, but he wasn’t dumb. Even back then he was self-aware enough to know that, at best, most of what he said didn’t make a whole lot of sense and, at worst, was just damned lies, but he’d been saying it all for so long that even he was starting to believe it. Neither was his ego so out of control as to allow him to think that a northern dyke would come all the way to San Antonio just because of his verbal dexterity and his unerring ability to blame the problems of hardworking white, Christian Americans on niggers, spics, queers and feminists without ever having to go so far as to name them as such. There was always a catch, wasn’t there?

‘Are we talking about a loan?’ he asked. He could barely cover his rent and the repayments on his vehicle as it was, and his credit card was maxed out. The word ‘loan’ now had the same appeal to him as the word ‘noose’.

‘No, any money you receive will be offered on an entirely non-repayable basis,’ said Kelly. ‘Consider it an investment in your career.’

She flicked through the papers on the table before her, and removed a four-page document. It was closely printed, and looked kind of official to Tate. ‘This is the initial paperwork for the corporation we propose to set up in your name. Funding would come from a number of 509(a) and 501(c) bodies.’

Tate read through the document. He was no lawyer, but even he could tell that there was a tangle of legalese here. He could also do addition and multiplication, and what he was being offered amounted to many times what he was earning in San Antonio, with further bonuses promised as syndication increased.

‘We’d also like to place a separate 501(c) organization under your direct control,’ said Kelly. ‘As you’re probably aware, any such organization is tax-exempt and, as long as it accrues less than twenty-five thousand dollars in gross yearly income, is not required to make an annual return to the IRS. In your line of work, it’s often necessary to provide hospitality, and the more hospitable you are, the more friends you’ll have. That requires some disposable income, which we’re prepared to provide. Sometimes, you may even have to use those funds to put individuals in a position where they become vulnerable to pressure, or exposure.’

‘You mean set them up?’

Kelly gave him the kind of look his third-grade teacher used to give him when he failed to master a piece of simple addition, but she masked it with an indulgent smile.

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Let’s say you heard that a local union organizer was known to cheat on his wife with the occasional waitress, or even with some of the very immigrants whose rights he was ostensibly working to protect. You could take the view that you had a moral and social obligation to expose his behavior. After all, it’s hypocrisy, as well as exploitation. In that case, baiting a hook wouldn’t be viewed as a set-up. He would be under no obligation to act on his appetites, and you would not be forcing him to do so. It would be a matter of free choice on his part. That’s very important, Mr Tate: in all things, the freedom to choose between right and wrong is crucial. Otherwise, well –’ Her smile widened. – ‘I’d be out of a job.’

Tate still had the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing the point, and the complexity of the legal document in his hand had only increased his suspicion that somewhere a mass of fine print was waiting to come back and bite him in the ass.

‘Excuse me, but what is your job, exactly?’

‘It’s on my business card.’ She pointed at the card where it lay next to Tate’s coffee cup. ‘I’m a consultant.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that I consult. How much simpler can it be?’

‘But for whom?’

‘You see, that’s why we want you, Mr Tate: ‘‘for whom.’’ You’re bright, and you can speak well, but you never talk down to your listeners. You address them as equals, even if they’re not. You give the impression that you’re one of them, but you know that you’re superior. You have to be. Someone has to guide ignorant men and women. Someone has to explain the reality of a situation in a way that’s comprehensible to ordinary people or, if necessary, adjust the nature of that reality slightly so it can be comprehended. You’re not the only person in the media to receive this approach from us. You’re not alone. I’m offering you the chance to become part of a greater purpose, to put your gifts to their optimum use.’

Tate was almost convinced. He wanted to be convinced but still he doubted.

‘What’s the catch?’ he said, and he was surprised that Kelly looked pleased he’d asked.

‘Finally,’ she said.

‘Finally?’

‘I always wait for that question. It’s proof that we have the right person. Because there’s always a catch, right? There’s always something in the fine print that could come right back to bite you in the ass?’

Tate stared at her. She had used almost exactly the words that he had spoken in his head. He tried to remember if he might have said them aloud, but he was certain that he had not.

‘Don’t be shocked, Mr Tate,’ she said. ‘In your position, I’d be thinking the same thing.’

She removed another sheet of paper from her briefcase and placed it before him. There was a single long paragraph at the center of the page. Typed neatly in the middle of an ornate script was his name. It reminded him of a university scroll, not least because it appeared to be written in Latin.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘The catch,’ she replied. ‘In your hand you hold the formal contract, the minor one. This is your private contract, your agreement with us.’

‘Why is it written in Latin?’

‘The Backers are very old-fashioned, and Latin is the language of jurisprudence.’

‘I don’t read Latin.’

‘Allow me to summarize, then.’ Tate noticed that she didn’t even have to look at the page. She knew its contents by heart. She rattled off what sounded to him like the pledge of allegiance, except it was loyalty promised not to a country, but to a private body.

‘Excercitus Noctis?’

‘The Army of Night. Catchy, don’t you think?’

Tate didn’t think it was catchy at all. It sounded like one of those ‘Reclaim the Streets’ movements. More dykes, he thought.

‘And that’s it? That’s all I have to sign?’

‘Nothing else. It will never be publicized, and you will never see the name of our organization written anywhere but here. In fact, the Army of Night doesn’t exist. Call it a private joke. Basically, some suitable nomenclature was required, and that one appealed to the Backers. This particular contract is really just to reassure them. We wouldn’t want you to take our money and head to Belize.’

Tate didn’t even know where Belize was, but he wasn’t about to head there even if he did know. He was ambitious, and he’d never get a better opportunity than this one to advance himself in his chosen field.

‘Uh, who are these Backers?’

‘Wealthy, concerned individuals. They’re worried about the direction in which this country is heading. In fact, they’re worried about the direction in which the whole world is heading. They want to alter its course before it’s too late.’

‘When do I get to meet them?’

‘The Backers like to keep their distance. They prefer to operate discreetly through others.’

‘Like you.’

‘Exactly.’

He looked again at the documents before him. One was written in a language that he didn’t understand, and the rest were written in a language that he should have understood but didn’t.

‘Maybe I ought to run these by my attorney,’ said Tate.

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. This is a one-time offer. If I leave here with these papers unsigned, the offer will be rescinded.’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Perhaps this will be enough to convince you of our bona fides,’ said Kelly.

She passed him a plain white envelope. When he opened it, he found that it contained access details for three bank accounts, including the 501(c) organization that Kelly had implied was merely being considered. It was called the American League for Equality and Freedom. Together, the accounts contained more money than he had earned in the last ten years.

Tate signed the papers.

‘All this money is mine?’ he asked. He couldn’t quite believe it.

‘Look upon it as your war chest,’ said Kelly.

‘With whom are we going to war?’ he asked.

‘Again with the “whom”,’ said Kelly, admiringly. ‘I just love the way you talk.’

‘The question remains,’ insisted Tate. ‘Who are we fighting?’

‘Everyone,’ said Kelly. ‘Everyone who is not like us.’

One week later, he was being introduced to Becky Phipps. One year later, he was a rising star. Now that star appeared to be on the wane, and Becky was alluding darkly to the Backers. The Backers, Tate knew, tended to act when they were displeased. He’d learned that early on. Kelly hadn’t just been speculating when she spoke about the union organizer with a taste for skirt: his name was George Keys. He liked to tell people that he was named after George Orwell. Nobody knew if that was true or not, but Keys certainly came from socialist stock. His father had been a union organizer all his life, and his mother continued to be heavily involved with Planned Parenthood. His grandfather, meanwhile, had set up a Catholic Worker camp in California and was personally close to the CW founder, Dorothy Day, who ticked every box on Tate’s hate list: Catholic, anarchist, socialist radical, even anti-Franco, which, as far as Tate was concerned, meant that she wasn’t even consistent in her own wrongheadedness because the Catholics were supposed to be for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, right? If the son was one-tenth of the man his grandfather was, then he deserved to be wiped from the earth, even without screwing Mexican factory workers on the side.

It hadn’t been difficult to bribe a whore who worked part-time as a waitress – or was she a waitress who worked part-time as a whore? Tate could never quite tell – to come on to Keys with a sad story about her family back in Mexico, and her cousins working in indentured servitude on Texas chicken farms. Keys bought her some drinks, and the whore bought some back, and one thing led to another until Keys and the whore ended up back at Keys’ place.

What happened after that Tate didn’t know, and didn’t care, but he had photographs of Keys and the woman together. He then shared what he knew with his listeners, and made sure the photographs were disseminated to every newspaper in the state, and for an outlay of five hundred dollars he did his part in setting back union activism in the state of Texas. Keys denied everything, and Tate later learned from the waitress-cum-whore that all he’d done back at his place was to play her some jazz that she didn’t like, talk about his dying mother, and then start crying before calling her a cab. Afterward, Kelly had contacted him personally to say that the Backers were pleased, and he’d received a substantial bonus in cash through Becky. The waitress-whore was shipped back to Mexico on some trumped-up immigration charge, and there she quietly vanished into the sands somewhere around Ciudad Juarez, or so Becky had hinted when she was drunk one evening and he was almost considering making a pass at her, until she told him about what probably happened to the girl in Mexico, and how the Backers had contacts down there. She grinned as she said it, and any desire for Becky on Tate’s part had vanished there and then and had never returned.

Unfortunately, there were other individuals who weren’t so pleased with what Tate had done, and he hadn’t yet learned to be clever enough to protect himself from his own vices. Tate wasn’t above doing a little banging of his own. He wasn’t married, but he did have a weakness for colored girls, and particularly the colored whores over at Dicky’s on Dolorosa, a hangover from the days when San Antonio’s red light district was one of the largest in the state, and the least racially segregated. Anyway, on those nights when a colored whore wasn’t available Tate wasn’t above dipping in some dark Mexican, and one thing led to another, and somehow it became known that Davis Tate frequented Dicky’s, and when he emerged one evening smelling of the disinfectant soap that Dicky’s provided for the hygiene needs of its customers he was photographed by a white man in a car, and when he objected, the car doors opened and three Mexicans piled out, and Davis Tate got the beating of his life. But he remembered the number plate of the car, oh yes, and he made the call while he was still waiting for treatment at San Antonio Community Hospital. Barbara Kelly had assured him that the matter would be taken care of, and it was.

The car was registered to one Francis ‘Frankie’ Russell, a cousin of George Keys who did a little PI work on the side: marital stuff, mostly. Twenty-four hours later, the body of Frankie Russell was found at the eastern edge of Government Canyon. He had been castrated, and it was suggested that he shared some of the weaknesses of his cousin, and the story of the union organizer who liked screwing immigrant women, illegal and otherwise, was dragged up again. No connection was made between Russell’s murder and the discovery a week later of the remains of three Mexican chicken farm workers dumped in Calaveras Lake. After all, they had not been castrated, simply shot.

It was, said those who knew about such matters, probably a gang affair.

But Davis Tate knew better, and he was very, very frightened. He hadn’t signed up to murder. All he wanted was for one beating to be avenged with another. On the night that the bodies were pulled from Calaveras Lake he got shitfaced drunk and made a call to Barbara Kelly, in the course of which he complained that he had not wanted the men who attacked him to be killed, merely taught a lesson, and Kelly had replied that they had been taught a lesson, and Tate had begun shouting, and making threats, and talking about his conscience. He’d hung up, and opened another bottle, and somehow he must have fallen asleep on the floor because he wasn’t sure that he was even awake when he opened his eyes and saw the beautiful, dark-haired woman looking down at him.

‘My name is Darina Flores,’ she said. ‘Barbara Kelly sent me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to warn you about the importance of remaining faithful to the cause. I want to make sure that you understand the seriousness of the document that you signed.’

She knelt beside him and clutched his hair in her left hand, while her right fixed itself on his throat. She was very, very strong.

‘And I want to tell you about the Backers, and more.’

She whispered in his ear, and her words became images, and something inside Davis Tate died that night.

That memory came back to him now as Becky spoke. She wasn’t on his side. He’d guessed that a long time ago. She represented the interests of the Backers, and those who used them in turn.

‘What should I do?’ he said. ‘How do I get these ratings back up?’

‘It has been suggested that you’re too subtle, that you’re not being radical enough. You need to stir up some controversy.’

‘How?’

‘Tomorrow you’re going to hear about the disappearance of a teenage girl from upstate New York. Her name is Penny Moss, and she’s fifteen years old. You’ll be given an exclusive: when Penny Moss’s remains are discovered, you’ll be supplied with proof that her killer is a Muslim convert who decided to make an example of her for wearing inappropriate dress. Even the cops won’t know before you do. The material will be sent to you anonymously. We’ll have speakers ready to comment. You’re about to become the eye of the storm.’

Tate almost vomited up his beer. He didn’t mind tearing meat from the bones of liberals because, say what you liked about liberals – and Tate did, more than most – they didn’t tend to voice their objections by pointing a gun at someone, just as they didn’t blow up federal buildings in Oklahoma. Muslims were another matter: he was happy to bait them from the safety of his radio station as long as he was just one voice among many, but he didn’t want to become a figurehead for anti-Islamic feeling. He owned a nice apartment in Murray Hill, and parts of Marray Hill were becoming like Karachi or Kabul. He preferred being able to walk the streets there without endangering his life, and he certainly didn’t want to have to move because of a radio show.

‘But how do I know that it’s true?’

‘Because we’ll make it true.’

All of his taste for beer had left him. If this went down the way Becky was suggesting it would, he was going to need a clear head. Only one further detail bothered him.

‘This girl, this Penny Moss, I haven’t heard anything about her. When did she go missing?’

Later, just as he was about to die, he would realize that he had known the answer already, had guessed it before Becky even opened her lips and began to speak, and he could almost have mouthed the words along with her if he chose.

‘Tonight,’ said Becky. ‘She goes missing tonight.’





24





Back at Nicola’s, Epstein had resigned himself to the absence of his bodyguards, not that he had a whole lot of choice in the matter. Nick’s office was warm and smelled faintly of fresh baked bread, and his coffee was very good. At first I felt that I was being more hospitable to Epstein than he probably deserved given the nature of our previous encounter, but it didn’t take me long to realize something about the confrontation that my anger had caused me to underestimate at the time: the extent to which Epstein had been frightened, and frightened of me. Even now he remained uneasy, and it wasn’t due only to the absence of his protectors. Despite all of my protestations, and Liat’s nod of salvation, I was still a troubling figure for the old man. The presence of Louis in the room probably wasn’t making him feel any better about the situation. Louis could make the dead nervous.

‘Your hand is shaking,’ I said, as I watched him sip from his cup.

‘It’s strong coffee.’

‘Really? I could have walked on the surface of that Arab stuff you served me last night if the cup had been big enough, and Nick’s coffee is too strong for you?’

He shrugged. ‘Chacun à son goût.’

Louis tapped me on the shoulder

‘That’s French,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘It means,’ said Louis very carefully, as if explaining something to a small, slow child, ‘“Everyone to his own taste.”’

‘You done?’ Sometimes I wondered if Angel didn’t act as some kind of stabilizing influence on Louis. It was a possibility that I found worrying.

‘Just helping,’ said Louis. He looked at Walter Cole as if to say, ‘What’s a man to do?’

‘I didn’t know it was French,’ said Walter.

‘See?’ said Louis to me. ‘He didn’t know.’

‘He’s never been further east than Cape May,’ I said. ‘The closest he’s been to France is patting a poodle.’

‘What does it mean?’ resumed Walter. ‘What he said?’

‘I just explained what it meant,’ said Louis. ‘Everyone to his own taste.’

‘Oh,’ said Walter. ‘It sounded different the other way.’

‘That’s because it was in French,’ said Louis.

‘I guess,’ said Walter. ‘French people got a lot of words for stuff, don’t they?’

At that point, Louis stopped talking to him, and therefore missed the wink that Walter threw my way.

‘So what now?’ asked Epstein.

‘You speak German, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I speak German.’

‘Jesus,’ said Walter, ‘it’s like Ellis Island in here.’

‘Do you know what Seitensprung is?’ I continued.

‘Yes,’ said Epstein. ‘It is the act of changing partners while one is dancing.’

Walter shifted in his seat and tapped Louis on the arm.

‘The Germans got a lot of words for stuff too, don’t they?’ he said.

‘You’re f*cking with me, man, I know it.’

‘No, it’s like a whole other language . . .’

I tried to ignore them and concentrated on Epstein. ‘I don’t know why or how I ended up on that list, but you have no reason to believe that I’d harm you. That’s why I brought you here, and that’s why you’re without your bodyguards. If I’d wanted you dead, then you’d be dead, and these two men wouldn’t be here to witness it.’ I caught Louis’s eye. ‘Well, one of them wouldn’t be.’

‘My fear, as I explained to you last night, is that there may be a presence within you that has not yet revealed itself,’ said Epstein.

‘And I told you that, if I was like them, whatever was sleeping inside me would have awakened by now. There were so many times when, if I was a host for something foul lying dormant in me, it could have shrugged off its torpor and intervened to save those like it, but it didn’t. It didn’t because it isn’t there.’

Epstein’s shoulders slumped. He looked old, older even than he was.

‘There is so much at stake,’ he said.

‘I know that.’

‘If we were wrong about you—’

– ‘then you’d all be dead, every one of you. There would be no percentage in not killing you.’

Epstein did not answer. He closed his eyes. I thought he might be praying. When he opened them again, he appeared to have reached a decision.

‘Seitensprung,’ he said, and nodded. ‘We don’t change partners during the dance.’

‘No.’

‘So what now?’

‘What do you think?’

‘We need to find that plane,’ said Epstein.

‘Why?’ asked Louis.

‘Because there’s another version of the list on it,’ I said. ‘Barbara Kelly was killed because the people she worked for found out that she was trying to repent, to save herself by revealing what she knew. Her list is gone, but that list in the forest remains. It’s probably older than Kelly’s, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still worth securing.’

‘But we don’t know where the plane is,’ said Walter.

‘You could call your friend, Special Agent Ross, at the FBI,’ I said to Epstein. ‘He could look at satellite images, try to track changes in the forest that might reveal the path of a fallen airplane.’

‘No,’ said Epstein.

‘Don’t you trust him?’

‘I trust him implicitly, but as I told you yesterday, we don’t know who else is on that list. It may be that even the FBI is infected. The risk of alerting them to what we’re trying to do is too high.’ He leaned forward on the table, clasping his hands together. ‘Are you sure that the Vetters woman doesn’t know the location of the plane?’

‘She told me that her father didn’t say.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘Her father and his buddy were lost when they came across it. It may be that he gave some more specific indication of the area to her before he died, although if he did then she didn’t share it with me.’

‘You have to go back to her and discover everything that she knows. Everything. Meanwhile, we’ll try to trace the movements of Barbara Kelly and find out all that we can about her. It may be that she secreted away a copy of the list before she died.’

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. Epstein might have been right about Kelly making a second copy of the list and storing it away from her house, but if she did I was pretty certain that she gave up its location under torture.

‘Marielle Vetters,’ I said.

Epstein looked confused.

‘What?’ he said.

‘That’s the name of the woman who gave me that list. Her father’s name was Harlan, and his friend’s name was Paul Scollay. They come from a town called Falls End, at the edge of the Great North Woods.’

Epstein’s face cleared.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, although I think he already knew the answer to the question.

‘Because I trust you.’

‘Even after what happened last night?’

‘Maybe especially after what happened last night. I didn’t like it at the time, and I don’t want a repeat of it, but I understand why you reacted the way that you did. We’re on the same side, rabbi.’

‘The side of light,’ he said.

‘Lightish,’ I corrected him. ‘I’ll talk to Marielle, and to Ernie Scollay, just in case his brother might have let something slip over the years. You’ll keep your people away from them, though.’

‘Only Liat will know their names.’

‘And Liat doesn’t tell, right?’

‘No, Mr Parker, Liat doesn’t tell. She is very good at keeping secrets.’

He glanced at Louis and Walter. There was more than he wanted to say about this.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of them.’

‘She spoke to me only of your wounds,’ he said. ‘Nothing more. And I did not ask her to sleep with you, in case you were wondering. She did that for her own reasons.’

‘I knew you got laid,’ said Louis’s voice from behind me. He turned to Walter. ‘I knew he got laid.’

‘I didn’t know he got laid,’ said Walter. ‘Nobody tells me anything.’

‘Shut up, both of you,’ I said.

‘You might also be interested to know that she believed in you from the start,’ said Epstein. ‘It was I who had doubts, not her. She had none, but she indulged an old man’s fears. She said that she knew from the moment she took you inside herself.’

‘Goddamn . . .’

‘I told you to shut up.’

‘So,’ said Epstein. He stood, and buttoned his jacket. ‘We move forward. You’ll talk to the woman today?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer to speak to her in person, her and Scollay. Along the way, though, I may stop off to meet with a lawyer in Lynn.’

‘Eldritch,’ said Epstein. He didn’t look pleased to be speaking that name.

‘I’ll be careful what I tell him.’

‘I suspect that whatever we know, he already knows more: he and his client.’

‘My enemy’s enemy –’ I said.

– ‘may be my enemy too,’ Epstein concluded. ‘We don’t share their aims.’

‘Sometimes I think we do. We may even share some of their methods.’

Epstein chose not to argue further, and he and I shook hands.

‘We have a car waiting for you outside,’ I said. ‘Louis will escort you back to Brooklyn.’

‘And my young friends?’

‘They’ll be fine,’ I assured him. ‘Well, mostly fine.’

I planned to fly up to Boston a couple of hours later. Louis and Angel would drive up in a day or two, along with their toys. In the meantime, I went back over what Marielle Vetters had told me, because there was one detail of her tale that stood out, and only because it conflicted with another story I had heard many years before. It might have been nothing, a piece of misremembering on my part or on the part of the man who had shared the tale with me, but if Marielle Vetters genuinely did not know anything more about the location of the plane it was possible that I could find another means of narrowing down the search area.

It would just mean talking to a man about a ghost.





25





Adiv and Yonathan trudged south through the wilds of the Jersey Pine Barrens. They had been driven for what seemed like hours over rough terrain before eventually being dumped in the woods. The man named Angel had suggested to them the direction in which they should walk if they wanted to get to Winslow or Hammonton, but they had not been sure whether to trust him and, to tell the truth, Angel had seemed a little vague about the directions to begin with.

‘I don’t like nature,’ he told them, as they stood under his gun, birds calling above their heads. ‘Too many trees. And garter snakes, and bobcats, and bears.’

‘Bears?’ asked Adiv.

‘And garter snakes, and bobcats,’ said Angel. ‘Don’t get too hung up on the bears.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re more scared of you than you are of them.’

‘Really?’ said Yonathan.

‘Really,’ confirmed Angel. He thought for a second. ‘Or maybe that’s spiders. Well, happy trails.’

The doors closed, and Adiv and Yonathan were abandoned in a spray of dirt and mud and twigs. Now it was growing darker, but at least they had found a road, even if there were no vehicles upon it and they could not yet see any signs of artificial light.

‘I thought they were going to kill us,’ said Adiv.

‘Perhaps you’ll be more polite in future,’ said Yonathan.

‘Perhaps,’ admitted Adiv. ‘And perhaps you won’t go pointing guns at the wrong people.’

They walked on. All was quiet.

‘We’re bound to find a store or a gas station soon,’ said Adiv.

Yonathan wasn’t so sure. It seemed like they’d driven far into the wilderness, and it had taken them a while simply to find something that was more than a trail. He just wanted to be out of the woods before night fell in earnest. He hoped that the rabbi was okay. It was one thing to be personally and professionally embarrassed as they had been, but if anything were to happen to the rabbi . . .

‘At least they left us with some quarters for the phone,’ he said.

Adiv checked his pocket, and came out with the four coins. He clutched them tightly in his fist, kissed the back of his hand, then opened it again. He stopped and examined them more closely, squinting in the poor light.

‘What is it?’ said Yonathan.

‘Sonofabitch,’ said Adiv quietly.

He dropped the coins into Yonathan’s hand before switching loudly to Hebrew. ‘Ben zona! Ya chatichat chara! Ata zevel sheba’olam!’ He shook his fist in the general direction of the southeast, then slapped the back of his right hand hard against his left palm.

Yonathan pushed the coins around with the tip of a finger.

‘Canadian quarters,’ he said. ‘The bastard.’