CHAPTER NINE
ANGEL SAT ALONE AT his workbench. Before him were scattered the components of an assortment of keyless entry systems: pushbutton handsets, hard-wired keypads, wireless remote deadbolts, and even a proximity card reader and a fingerprint reader, the latter alone representing about two thousand dollars worth of butchered electronics. Angel liked to keep up with developments in his area of expertise. Most of the equipment he was examining was capable of being used for both commercial and domestic purposes, but homeowners and contractors had, in his experience, yet to embrace the new technology. Equally, most locksmiths were not adept at dealing with keyless locks. Many were suspicious of the new systems, regarding them as being more open to corruption or breakdown. The reality was that electronic systems had fewer moving parts and, once they were installed, were potentially much harder to access than traditional mechanical systems. Angel could pick a five-pin tumbler lock with a screwdriver and a pin. A biometric reader was another matter entirely.
Usually, he would be fascinated by the equipment he had disassembled, like an anatomist given an opportunity to examine the internal organs of a particularly fine specimen, but on this occasion his mind was elsewhere. The attack on the apartment building had unnerved him, and the evening’s developments at Hoyle’s apartment had done nothing to set his mind at ease. In the aftermath of the attacks, he and Louis had discussed the possibility of lying low for a time, but had quickly discounted it. To begin with, there was Mrs. Bondarchuk, who refused to move, arguing that it would disturb her Pomeranians. She also pointed out that her grandfather had refused to flee from the Communists in Russia, fighting on with the Whites, and that her father had fought the Nazis at Stalingrad. They had not run, and neither would she. The fact that both her grandfather and father had died in the course of their respective stands against the enemy did not affect her argument in any way.
Louis, in turn, did not believe that their enemies would attack them again at the apartment. Between that incident, and the encounter at the auto shop, three men had been lost. At the very least, they would be licking their wounds. A little time had been bought, and it could best be used at their home, not at some makeshift safe house, or in a vulnerable hotel. Angel had acquiesced, but there was something in the way Louis spoke that had disturbed him. He wants them to come, he thought. He wants this to continue. He likes it. Angel had never told a soul that Louis sometimes frightened him. He had not even told Louis, although he wondered if Louis might not have guessed that fact for himself. It was not that he feared Louis might turn on him. While his partner could charitably be described as “acidtongued” on occasion, none of the violence of which he was capable had ever been directed at Angel. No, what frightened Angel was Louis’s need for that violence. There was a hunger inside him that could only be fed by it, and Angel did not fully understand the source of that hunger. Oh, he knew a great deal about Louis’s past. Not everything, though: there were parts of it that remained hidden, even from him, but then it was also true that Angel had not told Louis everything about himself either. After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
But the details of Louis’s past were not enough to explain the man that he had become, not for Angel. When faced with a threat to his own safety and that of the women with whom he lived, the young Louis had acted immediately to remove that threat. He had set out, quite coldbloodedly, to kill the man named Deber whom he suspected of murdering his mother, and who had now returned to the house that she had occupied with her own mother, her sisters, and her young son, to replace her with another. Louis had smelt his mother’s blood upon him, and Deber in turn, his senses attuned to potential threats, had seen the desire for vengeance bubbling beneath the placid surface of the boy. Their small world could not contain both of them, and Deber had felt certain that, when the time came for the boy to act, he would do so in the way of a hot-headed young man. It would be direct: a blade, or a cheap gun acquired for the purpose. Deber would see him coming. The boy would want to look into Deber’s eyes as he died, for that was the kind of revenge that a child sought. There could be no gratification at a distance, Deber believed.
But the boy was not like that. From his earliest years, there was something inside him that could not be touched, an old soul living in a young body. Deber was cunning and cruel, but the boy was clever and dispassionate. Deber did not die from a bullet wound, or a knife to the chest or belly. He did not see death coming for him, for death arrived camouflaged. It came in the guise of a cheap metal whistle, an item of which Deber was inordinately fond. He used it to summon the boy for meals, to get the attention of his woman, to organize the gangs of men whose work he oversaw. When he raised it to his mouth on that fateful morning, he might just have had enough time to wonder why it did not emit its usual shrill call before the small ball of homemade explosive blew his face and part of his skull away. The boy’s last memory of Deber was of a small, dapper man leaving the house to drive to work, the whistle hanging on a chain around his neck. He did not need to see the whistle being raised, to witness the burst of red and black that came with the explosion, to stare down upon the ruined human being dying in a pauper’s bed, in order to achieve satisfaction.
Deber’s murder had come naturally to Louis, so it would not be true to say that his first fatal act of violence had set him on the path to becoming what he now was. He had always had that capacity within him, and the catalyst for its eruption into the world had been largely unimportant. But once it was unleashed, it flowed through his veins as naturally as blood. Angel, too, had killed, but the reasons behind the killings had been less complicated than those that motivated Louis. Angel had killed, variously, because he had to; because had he not done so he himself would have died; and because, most of all, it had seemed like the thing to do at the time. He was not haunted or tormented by those whom he had killed. He wondered, on occasion, if that meant there was something wrong with him. He suspected that it did. But Angel had no urge to kill. He did not seek out violent men in order to confront them, or to test himself against them. Had someone informed him that, from this day forth, he would never have to hold a gun again and would live out his days doing nothing more challenging than breaking locks and eating fried food, he would have been content to do so, as long as Louis was by his side. But therein lay the problem: a life like that was beyond Louis, and to embrace such an existence would have meant sacrificing his partner. Angel’s violence was born out of circumstance; Louis’s was elemental.
That was, in part, why they had remained close to Charlie Parker over the years. Angel owed a debt to the private detective, who had done his best, as a cop, to protect Angel from those who would have harmed him while he was in prison. Angel had never fully understood why Parker had chosen to do that. Angel had helped him with information from time to time, as long as it didn’t involve naming too many names, and he was sure, although they had never spoken of it, that Parker knew something of Angel’s past, of the abuse that he had endured as a child. But there were a lot of criminals out there who could point to troubled childhoods, some of them even worse than Angel’s; pity or empathy were not enough to explain why Parker had chosen to help and, ultimately, befriend him. It was almost, thought Angel, as though Parker had known what was to come. No, not known. That wasn’t it. There were things about Parker that were unusual, even downright spooky, but he wasn’t a seer. Perhaps it was just something as simple as meeting another human being and understanding, immediately and deeply, that this was an individual who belonged in one’s life, for reasons readily apparent or yet to be revealed. Louis had found difficulty in understanding that, at least at the start. Louis did not want cops or ex-cops in his life. Yet he knew what Parker had done for Angel, knew that Angel would not be alive were it not for the strange, troubled private detective who seemed about to break under the weight of his grief and loss, yet somehow refused to do so. In time, Louis had seen something of himself in the other man. They began by respecting each other, and that had developed into a kind of friendship, albeit one that had been tested on more than one occasion. But what Louis and Parker had in common more than anything else, Angel believed, was a kind of darkness. A version of Louis’s fire burned in Parker; a stranger yet more refined form of Louis’s hunger gnawed at him. In a way, they used each other, but each did so with the knowledge, and consent, of his peer.
Things had changed, though, in recent months. Parker was no longer a licensed PI. He felt that he was being watched by those who had taken his license away, that a wrong move could put him in jail, or draw attention to his friends, to Louis and Angel. Angel wasn’t certain how they had managed to avoid that attention until now. They had been careful and professional, and luck had played a part at times, but those factors in themselves should not have been enough, could not have been enough. It was an enigma.
But with Parker out of commission, Louis had been denied one of the outlets for his urges. He had begun to speak of taking on jobs again. The move against the Russians had been inspired less by the immediate threat to Parker than by Louis’s desire to flex his muscles. Now it seemed that he and Angel were under attack from forces they had not yet fully identified. And what most disturbed Angel was the suspicion that Louis was secretly pleased at this development. Then there was Gabriel, who bore some responsibility for their current situation, since, if what Hoyle had told them was true, it was he who had dispatched Louis to kill Leehagen’s son to begin with. Angel had never met the old man, but he knew all about him. The relationship that existed between Gabriel and Louis was ineffably complex. Louis seemed to feel that he owed some debt to Gabriel, even though Angel believed that Gabriel had manipulated and, possibly, corrupted Louis for his own ends. Now Gabriel was, however peripherally, back in Louis’s life, like a hibernating spider spurred into motion by the warmth of the sun and the vibrations of insects close to its dusty web. It suggested to Angel that aspects of Louis’s past, his old life, were now leaching into the present, and poisoning them as they came.
If Louis sometimes frightened Angel, then Angel remained frustratingly unknowable to his partner. Despite all that had happened to him, there was a gentleness at the heart of Angel that might almost have been construed as a weakness. Angel felt things: compassion, empathy, sorrow. He felt them for those who were most like him, troubled children in particular, for Louis knew that every adult who was abused as a child holds that child forever in his heart. That did not make his emotions any less admirable, and Louis recognized that he himself had been colored and changed by the years he had spent in the company of this odd, disheveled man. He had been humanized by him, yet what was a virtue in Angel had become a chink in Louis’s armor. But then the moment he began to have feelings for Angel he had sacrificed a crucial element of his defenses. His forces, in a sense, had been divided. Where once he had only to worry about himself—and that concern was tied up with the nature of his profession—he now had to contend with his fears for another. When Angel had almost been taken from him, held to ransom and mutilated by a family that had no intention of ever releasing him alive, Louis had seen, for an instant, what he would become without his partner: a creature of pure rage who would be consumed by his own fire.
What he did not tell Angel was that part of him devoutly wished for such a consummation. Parker, too, had altered him, for in the detective Louis saw elements of both Angel and himself combined: he had Angel’s compassion, his desire not to let the weak be ground down by the strong and the ruthless, but also something of Louis’s willingness, even need, to strike out, to judge and to inflict punishment. There was a delicate balance between Parker and Louis, the latter knew: Parker held the worst of Louis back, but Louis allowed the worst of Parker to find an outlet. And Angel? Well, Angel was the pivot around whom the other two moved, a confidant of both, containing within himself echoes of both Louis and Parker. Yet wasn’t that true of all of them? It was what bound them together, that and an emerging sense that Parker was moving toward a confrontation of which they, too, were destined to be a part. He had never imagined that he would end up tied to such a man as Angel. In fact, for many years he had chosen not to acknowledge his sexuality to himself. It was a shameful thing when he was young, and he had suppressed it so well that any expression of it had proved difficult for him as he grew older.
And then this strange person had tried to burgle his apartment. He hadn’t even done it particularly well, the proof being that he had ended up under Louis’s gun while attempting to get his television out of a window. Who, Louis often wondered, enters an apartment that is clearly tastefully decorated, with some small, easily transportable objets d’art, and then tries to steal a heavy TV set? It was no wonder that Angel had ended up in jail. As a thief, he was a spectacular failure, but as a lockpicker, well, that was where his true genius lay. In that, he was gifted. It was, Louis suspected, God’s little joke on Angel: he would give him the skills required to gain access to any locked room, but would then deprive him of the guile required to make practical use of those skills, short, of course, of actually becoming a locksmith and earning an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, a concept that Angel found repugnant.
Almost as repugnant to Louis was his partner’s distinctive fashion sense. At first, Louis thought it was an affectation; that, or pure cheapness. Angel would scour the bargain racks at Filene’s, TJ
Maxx, Marshalls, anywhere that primary colors were gathered together in unlikely combinations. He didn’t care much for outlet malls, unless their stores, too, had a rail that had been discounted so much that the stores were pretty much paying customers to take stuff away. No, outlet malls were too easy. Angel liked the hunt, the thrill of the chase, that moment of pleasure that came from unexpectedly finding a lime-green Armani shirt reduced to one tenth of its original price, and a pair of designer jeans to match, assuming by “matching” one meant “clashing unbearably.”
The thing about it was, Angel would be immensely, genuinely proud of his purchases, and it had taken years for Louis to realize that, every time he commented unfavorably on his partner’s choice of attire, something inside Angel cringed, like a child that has tried to please a parent by cooking a meal, only to get all of the ingredients wrong and find himself chastised instead of praised for his efforts. It didn’t matter that, when it came to clothing, Angel seemed to be colorblind. This was designer clothing. It had cost him next to nothing, but it was good quality and had a label that people would know. As a child, Angel had probably dreamed of wearing nice clothes, of owning expensive things, but as an adult he could not justify to himself the expense of such items. They were meant for others, not for him. He did not consider himself worthy of them. But he could cheat by buying them for next to nothing, since no justification would be required if they were cheap.
Louis had once bought Angel a beautiful Brioni jacket as a gift, and the garment had languished in a closet for years. When Louis had eventually confronted Angel about it, Angel had explained that it was too expensive to wear, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who wore expensive clothes. Louis hadn’t understood the response then, and he wasn’t sure that he understood it a whole lot better now, but he had since learned to bite his tongue when Angel presented his latest purchases for approval, unless faced with provocation beyond the tolerance of mortal man to endure. For his part, Angel had started to learn that a bargain wasn’t a bargain if no one could look at it without shades or antinausea medication. An accommodation of sorts had therefore been reached.
Now, while Angel sat in his workroom and stared vacantly at the electronic components arrayed before him, Louis was in an anonymous office ten blocks away, a computer screen glowing before him, wondering if it might not be better to deal with Leehagen himself, to leave Angel behind. The thought lasted about as long as a bug in an oven. Angel would not stay. It was not in him to do so. Yet, unlike Angel, this was Louis’s purpose: to hunt, to provide the ultimate solution to any problem. He enjoyed it. Ever since the emergence of the Leehagen threat, he had felt more alive than he had at any other point in the last year. Old muscles were returning to life, old instincts coming to the fore. He, and the things and people that mattered to him, were in danger, but he felt himself capable of meeting and neutralizing the threat. Angel would stand alongside him, but he would not share Louis’s pleasure in what was to come, and Louis would try to hide his own as best he could. It was not a pleasure in killing, he told himself, but the pleasure that a craftsman takes in exercising his skills. Without that opportunity, well, he was just a man, and Louis did not care for being “just” anything.
He switched on the computer, and began tracking Arthur Leehagen. Gabriel sat in Wooster’s observation room. The boy was tall, although a little too slim, but that would change. He was handsome now, and would be handsome yet. There was a stillness to him that boded well. Despite his hours of interrogation, he held his head high. His eyes were bright and watchful. He did not blink often.
After a couple of minutes had passed, the boy’s posture changed slightly. He tensed, and his head tilted, like an animal that has sensed the approach of another but has not yet decided if it represents a threat. He knew that he was being watched and that it was no longer Wooster who was observing him.
Gabriel leaned forward in his seat and touched the glass, running his fingers over the boy’s head, his cheekbones, his chin, like a breeder checking the quality of a thoroughbred horse. Yes, he thought, you have the potential to become what I need.
There is a Reaper in you.
Gabriel knew that the vast majority of men were not born killers. True, there were many who believed themselves to be capable of killing, and it was possible to condition men to become killers, but few were born with that innate ability to take the life of another. In fact, throughout history it had been known that men in combat demonstrated a marked reluctance to kill, and would not do so even to save their own lives, or the lives of their comrades. During World War II, it was estimated that as few as 15 percent of all American riflemen in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. Some would fire wide or high, if they fired at all. Others would take on ancillary tasks such as carrying messages, transporting ammunition, even rescuing under fire fellow soldiers who had been injured, sometimes at far greater risk to themselves than might have been the case had they stayed in position and used their weapons. In other words, this was not a matter of cowardice, but a consequence of an innate resistance among humans to the killing of their own species.
All of that would change, of course, with improvements in the conditioning of soldiers to kill. Yet conditioning was one thing, while finding a man for whom that conditioning was not required was quite another. At times of fear or anger, human beings stop thinking with their forebrain, which is, in effect, the first, intellectual filter against killing, and start thinking with their midbrain, their animal side, which acts as a second filter. While there were those who suggested that, at this stage, the “fight or flight” mechanism came into play, the range of responses was actually more complex than that. In fact, to fight or to flee was the final choice, once posturing or submission had been eliminated.
Overcoming that second filter was one of the aims of conditioning, but there were those in whom that midbrain filter was absent. They were sociopaths, and in a sense, the purpose of conditioning was to create a pseudosociopath, one who could be controlled, one who would obey orders to fight and kill. A sociopath obeyed no orders, and therefore could not be controlled. A properly trained and conditioned soldier was a weapon in himself. In that process, of course, something good was lost, perhaps even the best part of the human being involved: it was the understanding that we do not exist merely as independent entities, but are part of a collective whole and that each death lessens that whole and, by extension, ourselves. Military training required that understanding to be nullified, that realization to be cauterized. The problem was that, like the early surgical procedures of ancients, this process of cauterization was based upon an inadequate understanding of the workings of human beings.
Fears of death or injury were not the main causes of mental breakdowns in combat; in fact, they were found to be among the least important factors. Nor was exhaustion, although it could be a contributor. Rather, it was the burden of killing, and of killing up close and knowing that it was your bullet or your bayonet that had brought a life to an end. Sailors did not suffer psychiatric casualties to any similar degree. Neither did bomber pilots dropping their loads high above cities that might have been, from their distant vantage point, entirely empty of citizens. The difference was one of proximity, of, for want of a better term, intimacy. This was death heard and smelled and tasted and felt. This was to face the aggression and hostility of another directed entirely at oneself, and to be forced to acknowledge one’s own aggression and hatred in turn. It was to recognize that one had become, potentially, both victim and executioner. This was a denial of one’s own humanity, and the humanity of others.
The boy named Louis was unusual. Here was an individual who had responded to a hostile stimulus in a forebrained way, approaching the threat as a problem to be solved. It wasn’t simply that the second, midbrain filter had been overcome; instead, Gabriel wondered if the issue had ever even reached that stage. This was a cold-blooded, premeditated killing. It indicated significant potential. The difficulty, from Gabriel’s point of view, lay in the physical distance from the killing itself that the boy had maintained. Gabriel understood the relationship between physical proximity and the trauma of killing. It was harder to kill someone up close with a knife than it was to shoot him at long range with a sniper’s rifle. Similarly, the sense of elation that frequently came with a kill was increasingly short-lived the closer the killer was to the victim, because in that situation guilt was as close as the body. Gabriel had even known soldiers to comfort the man whose life they had taken as he lay dying, whispering apologies for what had been done.
In real terms, the apparent ease with which the boy had killed suggested a possible dissociation, a reluctance or inability to recognize the consequences of his actions; that, or an intellectual understanding that he had murdered someone combined with an emotional denial of the act, and with that any real responsibility for it. He would have to be tested further so that his true nature might be revealed. The boy did not appear to be showing signs of undue stress. He had, it seemed, handled himself calmly when faced with sometimes violent interrogation. He had not broken. He was not seeking an opportunity to confess, to expiate his sin. True, stress might reveal itself later, but for the moment he appeared relatively untroubled by what he had done. It was only a small percentage of men, that elusive 2 percent, who, under the right circumstances, could kill without remorse. Those circumstances did not necessarily involve personal risk, or even a risk to the lives of others. It was, at one level, a matter of conditioning and situation. At some point, the boy would have to be placed in the right environment in order to see how he might respond. If he did not react correctly, that would be the end of the matter. It might also, Gabriel knew, mean the boy’s death.
There was also the matter of how he would respond to authority. It was one thing to kill for oneself, and quite another to kill because someone told you to do so. Soldiers were more likely to fire their weapons when their leaders were present, and were more effective when they were bound to that leader by their respect for him. Gabriel was in a different position: his charges had to be willing to do what he told them even while he himself was far away. He was like a general, but without subordinates in the field who could ensure that his orders were carried out to the letter. In turn, leaders in combat had a degree of legitimacy that came from their status in the hierarchy of their nations, but Gabriel’s position was far more ambiguous. For all of these reasons, Gabriel picked those whom he used with great care. True sociopaths were of no use to him, because they did not respect authority. The younger his charges were, the better, because the young were more open to manipulation. He tried to look for weaknesses to exploit, ways to fill the gaps in their lives. The boy Louis lacked a father figure, but he had not been so desperate to find one that he was prepared to acquiesce to Deber’s authority, or to flee from him in order to seek another when it became apparent that Deber considered him a threat. Gabriel would have to tread lightly. Louis’s trust would be hard-earned. But from what Gabriel had learned, Louis was also a natural loner. He had no close friends, and he lived as the only male in a household of women. He was not the kind who would form relationships within larger groups, which meant that, if his natural instincts were channeled, he would not seek absolution for his actions from others. Absolution was one thing Gabriel could not offer, and that, in turn, was why he preferred those who were not unduly troubled by guilt. Neither did he want those who might identify excessively with their victims. To do what he required of them necessitated emotional distance, and on occasion Gabriel was prepared to alter his approach in order to exploit social, moral, or cultural differences between his Reapers and their victims. Nevertheless, he did not seek to eradicate empathy entirely, for the absence of empathy was another indicator of sociopathy. Some empathy was a necessary restraint upon hostile or sadistic behavior. A delicate balance had to be maintained. It was the difference between being prepared to hurt someone when required, and hurting someone when one desired. According to what Gabriel had learned before his arrival at the little police department, the boy was a fighter, one who would stand his ground when provoked. That was good. It indicated an important predisposition to aggression, even a longing for an opportunity to display it. Louis’s experiences with Deber had been the trigger for what followed but, to complete the analogy, the weapon had already been loaded long before then. There were also rumors that the boy was a homosexual; if not a practicing one, for he was still very young, then he had at least exhibited sufficient tendencies to allow rumors about his sexuality to circulate locally. Gabriel, as in so many other areas, was enlightened about matters of individual sexuality. He distinguished between those aspects that were aberrant—a predilection toward violence, for example, or the impulse to abuse children—and those that were not. Aberrant sexual behavior indicated a degree of unreliability that tended to exhibit itself in other areas as well, and rendered its practitioners unsuitable for Gabriel’s purposes. Gabriel was not a homosexual, but he understood the nature of sexual desire, just as he understood the nature of aggression and hostility, for the two were not as distant as some liked to believe. While there were some aspects of human behavior that could be controlled and altered, there were some that could not, and one’s sexual orientation was among them. Louis’s sexuality interested Gabriel only in the sense that it might make him vulnerable or conflicted. Such weaknesses could be exploited.
And so Gabriel watched Louis through the glass, and the boy stared back. Five minutes passed in this way, and at the end Gabriel nodded once to himself in apparent satisfaction, then stood and left the room to face the fifteen-year-old killer.
Like any good leader, Gabriel loved his people, in his fashion, even though he was prepared, at all times, to sacrifice them if the need arose. Over the years that followed, Louis fulfilled, and even exceeded, Gabriel’s expectations, except in one regard: he refused to kill women on Gabriel’s orders. It was, Gabriel supposed, a legacy of his upbringing, and Gabriel made allowances for it, for he did indeed love Louis. He became like a son to him and Gabriel, in turn, became the father of the man.
Gabriel stepped into the interrogation room and took a seat across the table from Louis. The room smelled of perspiration and other less pleasant things, but Gabriel did not give any indication that he noticed. The boy’s face was shiny with sweat. Gabriel unplugged the tape recorder from the wall, then sat across from Louis and placed his hands upon the table. “My name is Gabriel,” he said. “And you, I believe, are Louis.”
The boy did not answer, but simply regarded the older man silently, waiting to see what might be revealed.
“You’re free to go, by the way,” said Gabriel. “You will not be charged with the commission of any crime.”
This time, the boy reacted. His mouth opened slightly, and his eyebrows lifted an inch. He looked at the door.
“Yes, you can walk out of here right now, if you choose,” Gabriel continued. “Nobody will try to stop you. Your grandmother is waiting outside for you. She will take you back to your little cabin. You can sleep in your own bed, be among familiar things. All will be as it once was.”
He smiled. The boy had not moved.
“Or don’t you believe that?”
“What do you want?” said Louis.
“Want? I want to help you. I think you are a very unusual young man. I might even go so far as to say that you’re gifted, although your gift is one that might not be appreciated in circles such as these.”
He waved his right hand gently, taking in the interrogation room, the station house, Wooster, the law…
“I can help you to find your place in the world. In return, your skills can be put to better use than they would be here. You see, if you stay in this town you’ll overstep the mark. You’ll be challenged, threatened. That threat may come from the police, or from others. You’ll respond to it, but you’re known now. You won’t get away a second time with what you did, and you’ll die for it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gabriel wagged a finger, but it was not a disapproving gesture.
“Very good, very good,” he said. He chuckled, then allowed sound to drift into silence before he spoke again.
“Let me tell you what will happen next. Deber had friends, or perhaps ‘acquaintances’ would be a better word for them. They are men like him, and worse. They cannot allow his death to go unremarked. It would damage their own reputations, and suggest a degree of weakness that might leave them open to attack by others. Already, they will know that you have been questioned about what happened to him, and they will not be as skeptical as the state police. If you return to your home, they will find you and they will kill you. Perhaps, along the way, they will hurt the women who share that home with you. Even if you run, they will come after you.”
“Why should you care?”
“Care? I don’t care. I can walk away from here, and leave you and your family to your fate, and it will cause me not a moment’s regret. Or you can hear my offer, and perhaps something mutually beneficial may result. Your problem is that you do not know me, and therefore cannot trust me. I fully understand your predicament. I realize that you will need time to consider what I am suggesting—”
“I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” said Louis. “You haven’t said.”
He is almost droll, thought Gabriel. He is old beyond his years.
“I offer discipline, training. I offer a way for you to channel your anger, to use your talents.”
“Protection?”
“I can help you to protect yourself.”
“And my family?”
“They’re at risk only as long as you remain here, and only if they know where you are.”
“So I can go with you, or I can walk out of here?”
“That’s right.”
Louis pursed his lips in thought.
“Thank you for your time, sir,” he said, after some moments had passed. “I’m going to leave now.”
Gabriel nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope. He handed it to the boy. After a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it and opened it. He tried to hide his reaction to what was inside, but the widening of his eyes betrayed him.
“There’s a thousand dollars in that envelope,” said Gabriel. “There’s also a card with a telephone number on it. Through that number I can be reached at any time, day or night. You think about my offer, but remember what I said: you can’t go home again. You need to get far away from here—far, far away—and then you need to figure out what you’re going to do when those men come calling on you. Because they will.”
Louis closed the envelope and left the room. Gabriel did not follow him. He did not have to. He knew the boy would leave this town. If he did not, then Gabriel had misjudged him and he was of no use to him anyway. The money did not matter. Gabriel had faith in his own judgment. The money would come back to him many times over.
After he was released, Louis walked back with his grandmother to the cabin in the woods. They did not speak, even though it was a two-mile walk. When they reached home, Louis packed a bag with his clothes and some mementos of his mother—photos, one or two items of jewelry that had been passed on to him—then took two hundred dollars from the envelope and secreted the cash in various pockets, in a slash in the waist-band of his trousers, and in one of his shoes. The remainder he divided into two piles, slipping the smaller into the right front pocket of his jeans and the rest back into the envelope. Then he kissed good-bye to the women who had raised him, handed the envelope and the five hundred dollars it contained to his grandmother, and got a ride on Mr. Otis’s truck to the bus station. He asked to make only one stop along the way. Mr. Otis was reluctant to oblige him, but he saw what Wooster had seen in the boy, and what Gabriel had seen, too, and he understood that he was not to be crossed, not in this thing or in any other. So Mr. Otis pulled up just past Little Tom’s bar, his truck hidden by the bushes that lined the road and watched the boy walk into the dirt lot, then disappear from view. Mr. Otis began to sweat.
Little Tom looked up from the newspaper that lay open on the bar. There were no customers to distract him, not yet, and the radio was tuned to a football game. He liked these quiet moments. For the rest of the night he would serve drinks and make small talk with his customers. He would discuss sports, the weather, men’s relationships with their womenfolk (for women did not trouble Little Tom’s bar, any more than the coloreds did, and thus the bar was a refuge for a certain type of man). Little Tom understood the role his bar performed: no decisions of great import were made here, and no conversations of any consequence took place. There was no trouble, for Little Tom would not tolerate it, and no drunkenness, for Little Tom did not approve of that either. When a man had consumed what Little Tom adjudged to be “enough,” he would be sent on his way with some words of advice about driving carefully and not getting into any arguments once he was home. The police were rarely called to Little Tom’s premises. He was in good standing with the town fathers.
None of this distracted from the fact that, like many men who practiced a public and superficial version of what they considered to be a reasonable way of life, Little Tom was an animal, a creature of violent and abusive appetites, sexually incontinent and filled with loathing for all those who were different from himself: women, especially those who would not touch him unless money was involved; Jews, although he did not know any; churchgoers of any liberal stripe or persuasion; Polish, Irish, Germans, and any others who spoke American with an accent or who had names that Little Tom could not pronounce with ease; and all coloreds, without exception.
Now, a young black man was standing on the threshold of Little Tom’s bar, watching him as he read his newspaper. Little Tom didn’t know how long the colored had been standing there, but however long it had been, it was too long.
“Be on your way, boy,” said Little Tom. “This ain’t a place for you.”
The boy did not move. Little Tom shifted position and began to walk toward the raised hatch in the bar. Along the way, he picked up the bat that lay beneath the bar. There was a shotgun there, too, but Little Tom figured that the sight of the bat would be enough.
“You hear what I said? Be about your business.”
The boy spoke. “I know what you did,” he said.
Little Tom stopped. They boy’s composure unnerved him. His tone was even, and he had not blinked since Little Tom had first noticed him, not once. His gaze seemed to penetrate Little Tom’s skull and crawl like a spider over the surface of his brain.
“The hell are you talking about?”
“I know what you did to Errol Rich.”
Little Tom grinned. The grin grew slowly, spreading like oil. So that was what this was about: a colored, a nigger, letting his anger get the better of his senses. Well, Little Tom knew all about dealing with coloreds who couldn’t keep a civil tongue in their mouths in front of a white man.
“He got what was coming to him,” said Little Tom. “You’re about to get what’s coming to you, too.”
He moved swiftly, swinging the bat as he came, striking up instead of down, aiming for the boy’s ribs, but the boy stepped nimbly forward, into the stroke instead of away from it, so that the bat struck the wood of the door frame at the same time as fingers gripped Little Tom’s throat and spun him against the wall. The impact of the bat on the wood sent a painful vibration up Little Tom’s arm, so that it was still weak when the edge of the boy’s left hand hit it, causing the bat to fall to the floor.
Little Tom was too surprised to react. No colored had ever touched him before, not even a black woman, for Little Tom did not consort with other races, either forcibly or with their consent. He smelled the boy’s breath as he leaned closer. The fingers tightened on his throat, and then he heard the back door of the bar open and a man shouted something. The grip upon him eased a little, and then he was flung to one side, tripping over a stool and landing heavily.
“Hey,” said the voice, and Little Tom recognized Willard Hoag’s gravelly tones. “The fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?”
The boy picked up the bat and turned to face the new threat. Hoag, unarmed, stopped. The boy looked at Little Tom.
“Another time,” he said.
He backed out of the bar, taking the bat with him. Seconds after he left, the bat came crashing through Little Tom’s window, showering the floor with glass. Little Tom heard a truck pull away, but when he got to the road it was no longer in sight, and he never did find out who had driven the colored to his place. It troubled him for a long time, even after he discovered the boy’s identity and found a way to pass it on to those who had their own reasons for dealing with him. As he grew older, the memory of the offense grew dim. Lots of memories faded, for by the time that he died, Little Tom was succumbing to dementia, even if he managed to hide its effects from those who frequented his increasingly ailing little bar, as the business went into decline along with its owner. Thus it was that when the boy eventually returned as a man, and made Little Tom pay the price for what he had done to Errol Rich, Little Tom was unable to connect him to the only colored who had ever laid a hand upon him.
And as for why Louis took so long to avenge Errol Rich’s death, well, as he liked to tell Angel, Little Tom was worth killing, but he wasn’t worth traveling very far to kill, so Louis just waited until he happened to be in the neighborhood. It was, he said, a matter of convenience. That came later, though. For now, he headed west, and he did not stop until he could see and smell the ocean. He found a place in which to live and work, and there he waited for the men to come.