The Wrath of Angels

IV



For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed . . .

‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’,





Lord Byron (1788–1824)





35





The lawyer Eldritch turned the key and opened the door to the basement. The light came on automatically, a piece of electrical engineering that never ceased to give him pleasure, and not a little relief, for the truth was that Eldritch was afraid of the dark.

After all, he knew what the dark concealed.

He carefully made his way down the stairs, one hand on the wooden banister rail, the other trailing along the cool wall. He kept a close watch on his footsteps, taking each step slowly and firmly. Eldritch was no longer a young man; in fact, he could barely remember a time when he was other than he was now. Childhood was a dream, early adulthood a blur, the memories of another man somehow adopted as his own, fragments of love and loss; sepia-tinted, as though soaked in tea and faded by sunlight.

He reached the final step and let out an involuntary sigh of satisfaction: another series of obstacles negotiated without incident, his fragile bones still intact. Five years earlier he had stumbled on the sidewalk and broken his hip: the first serious injury or illness of his senior years. The damage had necessitated a full replacement, and now he was acutely conscious of his own vulnerability. His confidence had been badly shaken.

But more than the pain, and the inconvenience of the long period of convalescence, he remembered the dread of the anesthetic, his unwillingness to surrender himself to the void, his struggle against the fluids that coursed through his body when the anesthetist inserted the needle. Darkness: shadows, and more-than-shadows. He recalled his relief when he awoke in the recovery ward, and his gratitude that he had almost no memory of what had occurred while he slept. Not in relation to the operation itself, of course: that was a separate, purely physical reality, a surrender of the body to the ministrations of the surgeon. No, the phantom images that returned with consciousness were of another realm of existence entirely. The surgeon had told him that he would not dream, but this was a lie. There were always dreams, remembered or unremembered, and Eldritch dreamed more than most, if what he experienced when the need for rest overcame him could truly be termed dreams. It was also why he slept less than most, preferring a low-level lassitude to the torments of night.

And so he had returned to this world with pain in his lower body, dulled greatly by the medication but still terrible to him, a nurse with skin of alabaster translucence asking him how he felt, assuring him that he was fine and all had gone well, and he had tried to smile even as frayed threads of memories caught upon the splinters of another realm.

Hands: that was what he remembered. Hands with hooked claws for nails, tugging at him as the anesthetic wore off, trying to pull him down to the place in which they lay; and above them the Hollow Men, soulless wraiths burning with rage at what had been done to them by Eldritch and his client, desperate to see him punished just as they were being punished. Later, once it was clear that the operation had been a complete success and he was out of danger, the surgeon had admitted to Eldritch that there had been a problem when the final stitches were being put in place. Strange, he had said: most patients emerged easily from the anesthetic as its effects wore off, but for almost two minutes it had seemed as if Eldritch were moving deeper into sleep, and they had feared that he was about to lapse into a coma. Then, in a startling reversal, his heart rate had increased to such a degree that they thought he might be about to go into cardiac arrest.

‘You gave us quite a scare,’ said the surgeon, patting Eldritch on the shoulder, and his touch had caused the old lawyer to tense with unease, for the pressure on his skin reminded him uncomfortably of those clawed fingers.

And throughout his period of recovery, both inside and outside the hospital, the Collector had kept watch over him, for Eldritch’s vulnerability was also his own, and their existences were mutually dependent. Eldritch would wake to find the Collector sitting in the soft light of the bedside lamp, his fingers twitching uneasily, his body temporarily deprived of the nicotine that seemed perpetually to fuel it. The lawyer was never entirely sure how the Collector managed to be omnipresent during those early days, for the hospital, so very private and so very expensive, still had certain rules about the appropriateness of visiting times. But in Eldritch’s experience people tended to avoid confrontations with the Collector. He trailed unease just as he trailed the stink and smoke of his cigarettes. That smell: how prevalent it was, how insidious, and how grateful they all should have been for it, for the foul nicotine taint masked a different odor. Even without the cigarettes, the Collector brought with him the smell of the charnel house.

Sometimes, Eldritch himself almost feared him. The Collector was entirely without mercy, entirely committed to his mission in this world. Eldritch was still human enough to have doubts; the Collector was not. There was no humanity left in him; Eldritch wondered if there ever had been. He suspected that the Collector had simply come into the world that way, and his true nature had become more obvious over time.

How strange, thought Eldritch, that a man should fear one to whom he was so closely bound: a client; a source of income; a protector.

A son.

Eldritch had come down to the basement for two reasons. The first was to check the fusebox: there had been two brief interruptions to the power supply that afternoon, and such occurrences were always a source of concern. There was so much information here, so much knowledge, and although it was well secured, there would always be concerns about potential vulnerabilities. Eldritch opened the box and checked it by the beam of a flashlight, but as far as he could tell all appeared to be well. Tomorrow, though, he would contact Bowden, who took care of such things for him. Eldritch trusted Bowden.

His movements on the basement floor had triggered the next set of overhead lights, illuminating shelf upon shelf of files. Some were so old that he was reluctant even to touch them for fear that they would crumble to dust, but the necessity of reaching for them rarely arose. For the most part, these were the closed cases. Judgement had been passed and they had been found wanting.

Someone had once pointed out to him a distinction, real or imagined, between ‘judgement’ and ‘judgment’, although to the old man it was largely a matter of preference, the former having more heft and substantiality in his view.

‘“Judgment”,’ the man had said, his voice booming in the confines of the parquet-floored Washington hotel room, ‘refers to human justice, but judgement with an ‘‘e’’ refers to the Divine,’ and he had leaned back and smiled in satisfaction, his teeth perfect and white against the flawless ebony beauty of his skin, his hands clasped upon his small belly, hands with so much hidden blood on them that Eldritch was convinced it might well show up under a combination of luminol and ultraviolet light. Before him lay a document detailing allegations of rape, torture, and mass murder, a product of years of investigation by a group of men who were themselves now dead, killed by this man’s agents, and in the fallen leader’s eyes Eldritch could see a similar fate being planned for him.

‘Really?’ Eldritch had replied. ‘That is fascinating, although my understanding is that the King James Bible favors “judgment”.’

‘This is not true,’ said the man, with the unalloyed confidence of the truly ignorant. ‘I tell you this so you will understand: I will not be judged by a human court but by the Lord God, and He will smile upon me for what I was forced to do to His enemies. They were animals. They were bad men.’

‘And women?’ added Eldritch. ‘And children? Were they all bad? How unfortunate for them.’

The man bristled.

‘I told you: I do recognize or accept these allegations. My enemies continue to spread lies about me, to vilify me, but I am not guilty of the accusations made against me. If I were, the International Court of Justice in the Hague would have taken action against me, but it has not. This tells the world that I have no case to answer.’

That was not entirely true. The International Court of Justice was in the process of assembling a dossier on this man, but its progress was being hampered by the ongoing deaths of crucial witnesses, both outside the nation in which he had conducted a genocidal guerilla war for over a decade, and within it, where there were those now in power who had utilized this man and his forces for their own ends, and would have preferred it if the more embarrassing details of the past were forgotten in the rush to embrace something like democracy. Even in the US, there were politicians who had embraced this butcher, this rapist, as an ally in the fight against Islamic terrorists. He was, in every way, an embarrassment and a disgrace: to his allies, to his enemies, and to the entire human race.

‘So you see, Mr Eldritch, I do not understand why you have chosen to believe the lies of these men, and to accept them as clients. What is this, this ‘‘civil case’’? I do not know what this means.’ He held up like a dead fish the sheaf of papers that Eldritch had brought with him, with its accounts of butchery and violation, and its names of the dead. ‘I agreed to meet you because you told my assistant you had information that might be of use to me in these ongoing attacks on my character, that you might be able to help me in my struggle against the blackening of my name. Instead, you side with these bad men, these fantastists. How can this be of help to me, uh? How?’

He was growing angry now, but Eldritch was not concerned.

‘If you were to admit your failings and your crimes, then you might yet save yourself,’ said Eldritch.

‘Save myself? From what?’

‘From damnation,’ said Eldritch.

The man looked at him in astonishment, then began to giggle.

‘Are you a preacher? Are you a man of God?’ The giggles turned to laughter. ‘I am a man of God. Look!’ He reached into his shirt and pulled out an ornate gold cross. ‘See? I am a Christian. That is why I fought God’s enemies in my country. That is why your government gave me money and guns. That is why men from the CIA advised me on tactics. We were all engaged in God’s work. Now, old man, go with God before you make me mad, and take your ridiculous papers with you.’

Eldritch stood. The window before him looked down on the busy street below. There the Collector waited, his black form like a smudge upon the glass.

‘Thank you for your time,’ said Eldritch. ‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of more help to you.’

He passed the Collector on the way out of the hotel, but they did not look at each other. The Collector disappeared into a crowd of conference delegates, and later that night the man of God in his high room learned for himself that there was no practical distinction between ‘judgment’ and ‘judgement’.

His file, now closed, was somewhere in this basement. Eldritch could have placed a hand on it in an instant, but there was no need. His memory was perfect, and anyway he was unlikely to be required to recite chapter and verse of the circumstances of the fallen leader’s death, not in this life. Rarely did he trouble courtrooms these days, and he sometimes missed the cut and thrust of legal argument, the pleasure that lay in winning a difficult case, and the lessons to be learned by losing one.

At the same time, he no longer needed to be concerned by the distinction between law and justice. Like every lawyer, he had seen too many cases fail because justice was, in the end, subservient to the requirements of the law. Now he and the Collector were, in their way, restoring the natural order in the most extreme of cases, those from which any reasonable doubt had been excluded to the satisfaction of all but the law itself.

But there were some case files in the basement that were not closed. They were those that Eldritch chose to regard as ‘inconclusive’ or ‘difficult’, and for the most part no action had been taken against the individuals named within them. The files had simply increased in girth as more and more details were added, each another ounce of evidence that might yet tip the scales against those concerned.

One of these files concerned the detective, Charlie Parker, and the men who worked alongside him, their files connected to his both figuratively and literally by means of two lengths of black ribbon fed through holes in the top and bottom of each green folder. Eldritch had long counseled that the files should remain as they were: as mere records, not indicators of an intention to pursue a case. Ultimately he believed that Parker was engaged in the same struggle as they were, even if he might not have wanted to accept that it was so. The detective’s colleagues, and the ones named Angel and Louis in particular, were more problematical, especially the latter, but Eldritch was convinced that present actions could make up for past sins, even if he had not yet managed to inculcate a similar faith in the Collector. While they might have differed in this crucial aspect, common sense nevertheless dictated that Parker and his acolytes should be left alone insofar as was practical. To damn one would require damning all, or else the survivors would avenge themselves upon everyone involved, and neither age nor sex would be an impediment to their wrath.

But the question of Parker had become increasingly complex, for his name had been on the list sent to them by Barbara Kelly, though with no indication of a reason for its presence. Parker’s visit had been troubling to Eldritch. Parker knew of the existence of the list, and he knew that his name was on it, probably because the old Jew had shown it to him. Parker suspected, too, that Eldritch and the Collector had a copy of a similar list, and by coming to Eldritch’s office he had been sending a warning to them both: keep your distance from me. I will not be one of your victims.

Only certain conclusions could be drawn from this. Either Parker knew why his name was on the list, and his inclusion was therefore justified, in which case he was secretly in league with everything against which they were fighting, and was worthy of damnation; or he did not know why his name was on it, which opened up two further possibilities: his own nature was compromised, and he was polluted, although the pollution had not yet manifested itself fully; or someone, possibly Barbara Kelly or others known to her, had deliberately added his name to the list in the hope that it would cause his allies to turn against him, thereby ridding his enemies of an increasingly dangerous thorn in their side without risk to themselves.

But Kelly was now dead, killed, it seemed, by her own kind. Her medical records, accessed by Eldritch through his network of informants, confirmed that her body had been riddled with cancer. She was dying, and her efforts at repentance appeared genuine, if ultimately doomed. In a sense, it was apt that lymphoma should have been eating away at her, for she herself had been responsible for a steady, ceaseless corruption, insidiously metastasizing life after life, soul after soul. One act of defiance, born out of fear and desperation, would not have been enough to save her, whatever she might have hoped.

But then Eldritch was not God, and could not pretend to have any understanding of His works. He examined each case on its own merits, but simply from a lawyer’s viewpoint. Only the Collector, touched by something that might have been the Divine and transformed into a channel between realms, claimed to have an insight into a consciousness infinitely more complex than his own.

And, if he was to be believed, infinitely more merciless.

Eldritch did not doubt for a moment the veracity of the Collector’s claims. Eldritch had seen too much, and knew too much, to try to fool himself into believing that some conventional reason, one unconnected to the existence of a divinity and its opposite, could be found for all that he had learned or witnessed, and the Collector had insights into the matter that were far deeper than Eldritch’s. But now the Collector had instructed him to make Parker’s file active, even as he began killing the others on the list, and for the first time Eldritch found himself in serious conflict with his son.

Son.

As he stood before Parker’s file, his fingers hovering above it like the talons of an ancient predatory bird, a weariness swept over Eldritch. It was easier to think of his son as another: as Kushiel, as the Collector. Eldritch had long ceased wondering if some part of him or his wife had been responsible for the creation of this murderous presence in their lives. No, whatever had colonized his son’s spirit had come from outside themselves. A second dwelled within him, and the two were now indivisible, indistinguishable from each other.

But Parker was right: his son’s bloodlust was growing, his desire to collect tokens of lives ended becoming ever greater, and his actions with regard to the list represented their latest, and most disturbing, manifestation. There was insufficient proof of guilt to act against most of these people. Some had probably been corrupted without even knowing it, while others might simply have accepted money, or a piece of information that gave them an advantage over others, a small victory against the system which, although wrong in itself, was not enough to render them worthy of condemnation. If a single sin was enough to invite damnation, then the whole human race would roast.

Yet great evils were frequently the product of the slow accumulation of such small sins, and Eldritch knew that, when the time came for the people on the list to keep their side of the bargain they had made, the nature of the harm they would be required to do would be great. They were viruses incubating, according to the Collector’s view. They were cancer cells lying dormant. Should they not be eradicated or removed before they could begin to destroy healthy bodies? His son thought so, but to Eldritch these were not viruses, not cancers: these were people, flawed, compromised individuals, and thus no different from the great mass of humanity.

In doing this, thought Eldritch, in killing without just cause, we may well damn ourselves.

He removed Parker’s file, heavy because of the weight of the others it carried with it, heavy with the weight of their actions, both right and wrong, and slipped it under his arm. The lights went off behind him as he left the basement, and he ascended the stairs with more confidence than he had descended. Rarely did he take files home with him, but this was an exceptional case. He wanted to re-examine Parker’s file, checking every detail for one that he might previously have overlooked, one that would give him confirmation of the man’s true aims.

He waited in the hall while his secretary locked the office doors above, and watched as she lumbered down the stairs, the omnipresent cigarette in her mouth. Since the death of his wife nearly three decades before, she had been the sole constant presence in his life, the Collector flitting in and out of it as necessity required like a poisonous moth. Without this woman, he would be lost. He needed her, and at his age need and love were merely the same suitor wearing different coats.

Inside the front door was a locked alarm panel. He put Parker’s file on a shelf, opened the panel, and checked the exterior camera on the small embedded screen; there was no one nearby. He nodded at the woman, and she opened the door while he activated the alarm. There was a ten-second delay once it began to beep, which was sometimes barely sufficient for him to get out and lock the door, but on this occasion he managed with a second or two to spare.

He winced as they crossed the street to his car.

‘Your hip?’ she said.

‘Those basement stairs,’ he said. ‘They kill me.’

‘You should have let me go down.’

‘What do you know about fuses?’

‘More than you.’

Which was true, even if he chose not to admit it.

‘Well, I needed—’

He swore. He’d left Parker’s file on the shelf beside the alarm panel.

‘– the file,’ he finished. He lifted his empty hands to her, and she rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll go back,’ she said. ‘You stay here.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and leaned against the car.

She looked at him with concern. ‘Are you sure that it’s nothing more serious?’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Just a little tired.’

But she knew otherwise. He had no secrets from her: not about the Collector, not about Parker, not about anything. He was worried. She could tell.

‘Let’s go for dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk about it.’

‘The Blue Ox?’

‘Where else?’

‘My treat, then.’

‘You don’t pay me enough for it to be mine.’

Which was both true and untrue: he paid her a lot, but he could never pay her enough.

She waited until a car passed, then walked back to the office, her fingers fumbling in her huge purse for her keys. Eldritch looked around. So empty the streets tonight; barely a soul in sight except for themselves. His skin prickled. A man was approaching, his hands buried deep in the folds of a parka jacket, his head down. Eldritch gripped the key fob of his car, the index finger of his left hand poised over the alarm button while his right drifted to the pocket of his overcoat that contained the small derringer. He thought that the man might have glanced at him as he went by, but, if so, it was the slightest shift of his eyes, nothing more, and his head barely moved. Then he was gone, and he did not look back.

Eldritch relaxed. The Collector had made him so wary that he occasionally tipped over into paranoia: justifiable paranoia, perhaps, but paranoia nonetheless. By now his secretary had opened the office door. He heard the alarm beep for a time before going silent as she briefly deactivated it. He could not see her in the gloom of the hallway.

There was movement to his right. The man in the parka had stopped at the corner and was staring back at him. Eldritch thought that he might have shouted something, but whatever he said was lost in the sound of the explosion that blew out the windows of Eldritch’s building, deafening him even as it sent plumes of fire and smoke shooting through the gaps, showering him with glass that ripped into his face and body, the wave of heat lifting him up and throwing him to the ground. Nobody came to help him. The man in the parka was already gone.

Eldritch crawled to his knees. He was temporarily deaf, and he hurt all over. For a moment he thought that he was hallucinating as a figure appeared in the doorway of the building, silhouetted against smoke and fire. Slowly the woman walked out, and even from this distance Eldritch could see the dazed look on her face. Her hair was smoldering. She put her hand to the top of her head and patted out the smoke. She stumbled slightly on the curb but kept walking, and she seemed to smile at him as she saw that he was safe, and he found himself smiling back at her in relief.

Then she turned round to take in the sight of the burning building, and he saw that the back of her head was devoid of hair, a deep, terrible wound gleaming wetly in her exposed skull. Her spine showed red and white through her ruined back, and he glimpsed the muscles exposed in her thighs and calves through the shreds of her dress.

She stayed upright just a moment longer before collapsing facedown upon the road, her body unmoving. By then Eldritch was on his feet, running and weeping, but he could not reach her in time to say goodbye.





36





While the lawyer knelt and wept, the rabbi Epstein prepared to catch a flight to Toronto.

Epstein had managed to get in touch with Eleanor Wildon, the widow of Arthur Wildon, and she had agreed to meet with him at her apartment in Toronto, where she had moved following her husband’s disappearance. She had never remarried, and had not sought to have her husband declared legally deceased. This had led to speculation in certain quarters that she had some knowledge of where he might be. Some said he had fled to avoid his financial obligations, others that he had committed suicide because of the depth of his money problems, a situation exacerbated by his grief. He had lost focus on his business interests following the deaths of his daughters, driven instead to find the person or persons responsible, and those to whom he had entrusted the care of his principal company and his investments had mismanaged both, with the result that, when he disappeared, he was worth only a fraction of what he once had been, and the Canadian revenue service was about to hit him with a massive tax bill.

Tonya Wildon was due to leave for a short trip to Europe the following evening: her nephew was being married in London, she told Epstein, and she was booked on Air Canada’s 6.15 p.m. flight to Heathrow. Rather than wait until the following morning, Epstein decided to catch American Airlines’ 9.25 p.m. flight out of LaGuardia and spend the night at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto. Adiv and Liat would see him safely on to the plane. At Toronto he would be met by another associate, a former major in the Canadian armed forces who now specialized in personal protection details.

While Epstein rarely traveled without security, he was more conscious than ever of his safety and that of the men and women who worked alongside him. The existence of the list offered them a chance to strike at previously hidden enemies, but the actions of the Collector had endangered them all. Davis Tate was dead, and his producer, Becky Phipps, was reported to be missing, which led Epstein to believe that she was also being hunted by the Collector, or had already suffered at his hands.

It was possible that Barbara Kelly had died before revealing to her tormentors the names of those to whom she had sent the partial list. Even so, those who had ordered her death might have suspected that Epstein would be among the likeliest of recipients, and possibly the lawyer too. By starting to work through the list, the Collector would have confirmed those suspicions: if the Collector and the lawyer had received a communication from Barbara Kelly, then their enemies would surmise that Epstein almost certainly had received one as well.

Eldritch and Epstein: men of similar name, of similar age, and with similar aims, yet they had never met. Epstein had once suggested a meeting, and had received in return a handwritten note from the lawyer politely declining his approach. It had made Epstein feel like a spurned suitor. Now the lawyer’s pet killer was running loose, assuming Eldritch ever had any real control over the man to begin with, which Epstein doubted. Perhaps it was as well that they had never sat across a table from each other, for they were not really the same. Epstein did no man’s bidding, while the lawyer was the Collector’s creature.

Adiv, driving his own car, collected Liat and Epstein from the latter’s home on Park Slope. They were waiting to turn at the corner of 4th and Carroll when a young man dressed in jeans and an overlong sweater, and wearing worn sneakers, threw a carton of milk at the car, smearing the windshield. His skin was sallow but unhealthy, as though he were suffering from jaundice. Spying Epstein’s clothing and Adiv’s yarmulka, he then began kicking the side of the car while screaming, ‘F*cking Jews! F*cking Jews! You’re leeches. The whole country’s going to hell because of you.’

Epstein placed a hand on Adiv’s shoulder to restrain him.

‘Ignore him,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

And that might have been the end of it had not the young man struck the windshield a hard blow with something in his right hand. It appeared to be a pool ball, and it cracked the glass instantly. Furious, Adiv got out of the car, slamming his door shut behind him. A shoving match ensued, with the sallow-skinned man seemingly trying to get around Adiv, not away from him. It ended when the sallow-skinned man spat in Adiv’s face and tried to run away.

‘Leave him, Adiv,’ ordered Epstein, but Adiv’s blood was up. This had been a bad week for him, and he now had an outlet for his anger. He started running, but his prey was too fast for him, and Adiv’s legs still ached from the long walk through the Jersey Pine Barrens. He still managed to grab the strap of the running man’s battered satchel, which he was holding in his hand instead of wearing over his shoulder. The bag came away so suddenly that Adiv fell backwards, landing painfully on his coccyx. The young man paused and looked back, as if debating whether it was worth trying to retrieve his satchel and possibly take a beating for his troubles, then decided to sacrifice it.

‘Jew bastard!’ he shouted once more, before disappearing into the night.

‘I have your bag, a*shole!’ cried Adiv. ‘You lose, you prick!’

He got to his feet and dusted himself off. His butt ached. He limped painfully back to the car. Liat had opened the passenger door on the far side and stood on the road, watching him. He could see the gun in her hand.

‘I got his bag!’ said Adiv, raising the satchel.

Liat shook her head. No, no, she mouthed. Her eyes were wide. She waved her arms. Drop it, Adiv. Drop it and run. Liat pulled Epstein from the car and began dragging him to safety, keeping her body between Epstein, and Adiv, and the satchel.

Understanding dawned on Adiv. He looked down at the satchel. It was made of soft brown leather, and only one of the buckles on the front was tied. Adiv lifted the unsecured end of the bag and peered inside. There was a package wrapped in aluminum foil, like sandwiches, and beside it a thermos flask.

‘I think it’s okay,’ said Adiv. ‘I think—’

And then he was gone.





37





I was anxious to head north to speak with Marielle Vetters again. Once I had done that, I could start figuring out how to get to the plane. For now, though, my daughter, Sam, and her mother, Rachel, were in Portland for an evening, which was good.

Unfortunately, so was Jeff, Rachel’s current squeeze, which was bad.

How did I dislike Jeff? Well, let me count the ways. I disliked Jeff because he was so right-wing he made Mussolini look like Che Guevara; because his hair and his teeth were too perfect, especially for a man who was old enough to have started losing most of the former, and some of the latter; because he called me ‘big guy’ and ‘fella’ whenever we met, but couldn’t seem to bring himself to use my actual name; oh, and because he was sleeping with my ex-girlfriend, and every ex-boyfriend secretly wants his former partner to get herself to a nunnery immediately after their separation, there to rue the day she ever let such a treasure slip through her fingers, and hold herself celibate forever after on the grounds that, having had the best, there really was no call to settle for an inferior product.

Okay, so mostly I didn’t like Jeff because of that last part, but the other reasons were pretty important too.

I wanted to see Sam more often, and Rachel and I were agreed that this was a good thing. I had tried to hold my daughter at a distance for too long, perhaps out of some not entirely misguided effort to keep her safe, but I didn’t really want things to be that way, and she didn’t either. Now we saw each other at least once or twice every month, which was both better and worse than before: better because I was spending time with her, but worse because I missed her more when she wasn’t there.

This night, though, was a bonus: Jeff was speaking at a dinner event at the Holiday Inn in Portland, and Rachel had used the trip as an opportunity to let Sam spend an extra night hanging out with me while she played the supportive partner to whatever self-serving bullshit Jeff was spouting about the banking system. According to the Portland Phoenix, his speech was entitled ‘The Return to Light-Touch Regulation: Making America Wealthy Again.’ The Phoenix’s columnist had been so stricken by apoplexy over this that the paper had given him an extra half page to vent his spleen, and it still hadn’t been enough. He would probably have filled the entire edition if Jeff’s appearance in the city hadn’t given him an opportunity to tackle the object of his rage in person. It might almost have been worth attending the event just to hear what the Phoenix reporter had to say to Jeff if only it wouldn’t have required listening to Jeff too.

I took Sam for pizza down at the Flatbread Pizza Company on the Portland waterfront, where she got to create intricate crayon drawings on the paper tablecloth, and then over to Beal’s ice-cream parlor for a sundae to finish. Angel and Louis joined us as we were finishing our meal at Flatbread, and the four of us walked up to Beal’s together. Sam tended to be slightly in awe of Angel and Louis on the rare occasions she got to meet them. She was comfortable with Angel, who made her laugh, but she had also developed a certain shy fondness for Louis. She hadn’t yet managed to convince him to hold her hand, but he seemed to tolerate the way that she clutched the belt of his overcoat. Deep down, I suspected that he even liked it. So we presented quite the picture walking into Beal’s, and it was to the server’s credit that she recovered herself so quickly when it came time to serve us.

I ordered one-scoop sundaes for us all, except for Angel who wanted two scoops.

‘The fu—?’ Louis began to say, before he remembered where he was, and the fact that there was a small child holding onto his belt and gazing up at him adoringly. ‘I mean,’ he went on, struggling to find a way of expressing his disapproval without the use of obscenities, ‘maybe one scoop might be, uh, sufficient for your, uh, needs.’

‘You saying I’m fat?’ said Angel.

‘If you ain’t, you can see fat from where you’re at. You may not be able to see your feet, but you can see fat.’

Sam giggled.

‘You’re fat,’ she told Angel. ‘Fat fat.’

‘That’s rude, Sam,’ I said. ‘Uncle Angel isn’t fat. He’s just big boned.’

‘Go fu—’. Angel too realized where he was, and with whom. ‘I’m not fat, honey,’ he told Sam. ‘This is all muscle, and your daddy and Uncle Louis are just jealous because they have to watch what they eat, while you and I can order any sundae we want and we only get prettier.’

Sam looked dubious, but wasn’t about to argue with someone who said that she was getting prettier.

‘You still want the two-scoop?’ asked the server.

‘Yeah, I still want the two-scoop,’ said Angel, then added quietly, as Louis swept by him, trailing Sam, ‘but make it with sugar-free ice cream, and hold the cherry.’

The server went to work. Beal’s was quiet, with only one other table occupied. It was almost the end of Beal’s season. Shortly it would close for the winter.

‘Maybe I should have had something with sugar,’ said Angel. ‘The flavors are better.’

‘And you have the fat to worry about anyway.’

‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I’m making sacrifices and I still feel guilty.’

‘Soon you’ll have no pleasures left at all,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I remember pleasures,’ said Angel. ‘I think. It’s been so long.’

‘As you get older, they say that certain physical needs grow less urgent.’

‘Who the fu—?’

Sam tapped him on the thigh, and handed him a napkin. ‘For when you mess up,’ she said, then trotted off to join Louis at a table.

‘Thank you, honey,’ said Angel, before returning to the subject in hand, minus the swearing. ‘I mean, who are you calling old?’

‘Older,’ I corrected.

Our sundaes came, and we carried them over to where Louis and Sam were waiting.

‘Like that makes it better,’ said Angel. ‘Fat, old: you want to add anything else before I go throw myself in the sea?’

‘Don’t do it,’ said Louis.

‘Why, because you’d miss me?’

‘No, ’cause you’d just float. Bob like a cork until hypothermia took you, or you got eaten by sharks.’

‘No!’ said Sam. ‘Not eaten!’

‘It’s okay, Sam,’ Angel assured her. ‘I won’t get eaten. Am I right, Uncle Louis?’

Sam looked to Louis for confirmation of this.

‘That’s right,’ said Louis. ‘He won’t get eaten. Shark’s mouth wouldn’t be big enough to fit him in.’

Sam seemed content with this, even if Angel wasn’t, so she started work on her sundae and forgot about everything else.

‘I’m substituting ice cream for affection,’ whispered Angel glumly, in deference to Sim’s presence. ‘I’ll be watching The View next, and considering male HRT.’

‘It’ll never get that bad,’ I said.

‘HRT?’

‘Watching The View. What are you, gay?’

‘I used to be. I’m a sexless being now.’

‘That’s good. I didn’t like thinking of you as a sexual being. It was kind of gross.’

‘What, gay sex?’

‘No, just you and any form of sex.’

Angel thought about this. ‘I guess it kind of was,’ he concluded.

Behind us, at the other occupied table, a couple of loud-mouths were discussing a mutual acquaintance in borderline obscene terms. One of them was wearing a Yankees cap even though his accent was Down East. In a town like Portland, a Yankees cap invited harsh words at best, but being a Mainer and wearing one was an act of treachery that made Benedict Arnold and Alger Hiss seem harmless by comparison.

The men moved from borderline to outright obscenity. They smelled of beer. What they were doing in an ice-cream parlor, I couldn’t quite figure.

I leaned over. ‘Hey, guys, could you keep it clean? I got a kid here.’

They ignored me and kept talking. If anything, the volume increased, and they managed to squeeze in a few more swear words, separating syllables where necessary to accommodate them.

‘Guys, I asked you nicely,’ I said.

‘It’s after nine,’ said the older of the two. ‘Your kid should be at home.’

‘It’s an ice-cream parlor,’ said Angel. ‘You ought to watch your f*cking language.’

‘Was that helpful?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Sorry.’

I returned my attention to the men nearby.

‘I won’t ask you again,’ I told them.

‘And what are you going to do if we don’t?’ asked the same man. He was tall and broad, and his features had an alcoholic blur to them. His friend, whose back had been to us, turned around, and his eyes widened slightly at the sight of Louis. He looked more sober than his friend, and smarter too.

‘My daddy will shoot you,’ said Sam. She made a little gun with her fingers, pointed it at the man who had spoken, and said ‘Bang!’

I looked at her. Good grief.

‘And then I’ll shoot you too,’ said Louis.

He grinned, and the temperature dropped.

‘Bang,’ Louis added, for effect. He too had made a gun with his fingers. He aimed it at the big man’s groin.

‘Bang’, he repeated: at his chest.

‘Bang’: closing one eye to focus, at his head.

Both men visibly blanched.

‘Not a Yankees fan,’ explained Angel.

‘Go find a bar, fellas,’ I said, and they left.

‘I like bullying people,’ said Angel. ‘When I grow up, I’m going to do nothing else all day long.’

‘Bang,’ said Sam. ‘They’re dead.’

Angel, Louis and I exchanged glances. Angel shrugged.

‘She must get it from her mother.’

Sam was staying with me that night. When she had finished brushing her teeth, and her two rag dolls were tucked up to her satisfaction alongside her, I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her cheek.

‘You warm enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘You feel cold.’

‘That’s because it’s cold outside, but I’m not cold. I’m warm inside.’

It sounded plausible.

‘Look, I think it might be best if you didn’t tell your mom about what happened tonight.’

‘About the pizza? Why?’

‘No, the pizza’s fine. I mean what happened after, when we went for ice cream.’

‘You mean about the two men?’

‘Yes.’

‘What part?’

‘The part about you saying that I would shoot them. You can’t talk like that to strangers, honey. You can’t talk like that to anyone. It’s not just rude: it’ll get Daddy into trouble.’

‘With Mommy?’

‘Absolutely with Mommy, but also maybe with the people you say it to. They won’t like it. That’s how fights start.’

She considered this.

‘But you have a gun.’

‘Yes. I try not to shoot people with it, though.’

‘Then why do you have it?’

‘Because sometimes, in my job, I have to show it to people to make them behave themselves.’ God, I felt like a spokesman for the NRA.

‘But you have shot people with your gun. I heard Mommy say.’

This was new. ‘When did you hear that?’

‘When she was talking to Jeff about you.’

‘Sam, were you listening when you shouldn’t have been listening?’

Sam squirmed. She knew that she had said too much.

She shook her head. ‘It was a accident.’

‘An accident.’ A spokesman for the Society for Better English too, it seemed. Still, it gave me time to think.

‘Look, that’s true, Sam, but I didn’t like doing it, and those people left me with no other choice. I’d be happy if I never had to do it again, and I hope that I don’t. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Were they bad people?’

‘Yes, they were very bad people.’

I watched her face carefully. She was building up to something, skirting the subject warily, like a dog circling a snake, uncertain of whether it were dead and harmless, or alive and capable of striking.

‘Was one of them the man who made Jennifer and her mommy dead?’

She always called them that: Jennifer and her mommy. Although she knew Susan’s name, she felt uncomfortable using it. Susan was an adult unfamiliar to her, a grown-up, and grown-ups had names that began with Mr or Mrs, Aunt or Uncle, Grandma or Grandpa. Sam had chosen to define her as Jennifer’s mommy because Jennifer had been a little girl just like her, but a little girl who had died. The subject held a kind of awful fascination for her, not simply because Jennifer had been my child and, by extension, a half-sister to Sam, but because Sam did not know of any other children who had died. It seemed somehow impossible to her that a child could die – that anyone she knew of could die – but this one had.

Sam understood a little of what had happened to my wife and my daughter. She had picked up nuggets of information gleaned from other overheard conversations and hidden them away, examining them in solitude, trying to understand their meaning and their value, and only recently had she revealed her conclusions to her mother and me. She knew that something awful had happened to them, that one man had been responsible, and that man was now dead. We had tried to deal with it as carefully yet as honestly as possible. Our concern was that she might fear for her own safety, but she did not seem to make that particular connection. Her focus was entirely on Jennifer and, to a lesser extent, her mommy. She was, she told us, ‘sad for them’, and sad for me.

‘I—’ Speaking of Jennifer and Susan with her was difficult for me at the best of times, but this was new and dangerous territory. ‘I think he would have hurt me if I had not,’ I said at last. ‘And he would have kept on hurting other people too. He gave me no choice.’

I swallowed the taste of the lie, even if it was a lie of omission. He gave me no choice, but neither did I give him a choice. I had wanted it that way.

‘So does that make it all right?’

Although Sam was a precocious, unusual child, that was still a very adult question, one that plumbed murky moral depths. Even her tone was adult. This was not coming from Sam. There was the voice of another under her own.

‘Is that one of your questions, Sam?’

Again, a shake of the head. ‘It was what Jeff asked Mommy when they were talking about how you shot people.’

‘And what did Mommy say?’ I asked despite myself, and I was ashamed.

‘She said that you always tried to do the right thing.’

I bet Jeff didn’t like that.

‘After that, I had to go pee,’ said Sam.

‘Good. Well, no more listening to conversations that aren’t your business, all right? And no more talking about shooting people. We clear?’

‘Yes. I won’t tell Mommy.’

‘She’d just worry, and you don’t want to get Daddy into trouble.’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Can I tell her about Uncle Angel saying a bad word?’

I thought about it.

‘Sure, why not?’

I went downstairs, where Angel and Louis had opened a bottle of red wine.

‘Make yourselves at home.’

Angel waved a glass at me. ‘You want some?’

‘No, I’m good.’

Louis poured, sipped, tasted, made a face, shrugged resignedly, and filled two glasses.

‘Hey,’ said Angel, ‘Sam’s not going to tell Rachel I swore at those guys, is she?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re in the clear.’

He looked relieved. ‘Thank Christ. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with Rachel.’

While they drank, I called Marielle Vetters. The phone rang four times, then went to the machine. I left a short message to tell her that I’d be heading up there to talk with her the next day, and she should go over all that her father had told her in case she’d forgotten to share with me anything that might be useful. I asked her to give Ernie Scollay a nudge too, on the off-chance that he might recall something that his brother had said. I kept the message deliberately vague, just in case she had company or someone else, like Marielle’s brother, happened to hear it.

After an hour of conversation I went to my room, but not before looking in on the strange, beautiful, empathic child fast asleep in her bed, and I felt that I had never loved her more, or understood her less.