CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MEETING WAS HELD in one of the private dining rooms of a members’ club between Park and Madison, almost within complaining distance of the latest Guggenheim exhibition. There was no sign on the wall beside the door to indicate the nature of the establishment, perhaps because it was not necessary. Those who needed to know its location were already aware of it, and even a casual observer would have realized that here was a place defined by its exclusivity: if one had to ask what it was, then one had no business doing so, since the answer, if given, would be entirely irrelevant to one’s circumstances.
The precise nature of the club’s exclusivity was difficult to explain. It was more recently established than similar institutions in the vicinity, although it was by no means without history. Because of its relative youth, it had never turned away a prospective member on the grounds of race, sex, or creed. Neither was great wealth a prerequisite of membership, since there were those on its books who might have struggled to pay for a round of drinks in an institution less tolerant of its members’ occasional struggles with solvency. Instead, the club operated a policy that might most accurately have been described as reasonably benevolent protectionism, based upon the understanding that it was a club that existed for those who disliked clubs, either because of an inherently antisocial bent or because they preferred others to know as little about their business as possible. Phones of any kind were forbidden in the public areas. Conversation was tolerated if it was conducted in the kind of whispers usually considered audible only to bats and dogs. Its formal dining room was one of the quietest places to eat in the city, in part because of the virtual ban on any form of vocal communication, but mostly because its members generally preferred to dine in the private rooms, where all business was guaranteed to remain undisclosed, for the club prided itself on its discretion, even unto death. The waiters were one step removed from being deaf, dumb, and blind; there were no security cameras; and nobody was ever referred to by name, unless they indicated a preference for such familiarity. Membership cards carried only a number. The top two floors contained twelve tastefully, although not opulently, furnished bedrooms for those who chose to spend the night in the city and preferred not to trouble themselves with hotels. The only questions ever asked of guests tended to involve variations upon certain themes, like whether they might like more wine, and if they might, perhaps, require some assistance making their way up the stairs to bed.
There were eight men, including Angel and Louis, gathered on this particular evening in what was unofficially known as “The Presidential Room,” a reference to a famous night when a holder of the highest office in the land had used the room to satisfy a number of his needs, of which eating was only one.
The men ate at a circular table, dining on red meat—venison and fillet steak—and drinking Dark Horse shiraz from South Africa. When the table was cleared, and coffee and digestifs had been served to those who required them, Louis locked the door and spread his maps and graphs before them. He went over the plan once, without interruption. The six guests listened intently, while Angel watched their faces carefully for any flickers, any reactions that might indicate that others shared his own doubts. He saw nothing. Even when they began asking questions, they were purely on matters of detail. The reasons for what was about to take place did not concern them. Neither did the risks, not unduly. They were being well paid for their time and expertise, and they trusted Louis. They were men used to fighting and they understood that their compensation was generous precisely because of the dangers involved.
At least three—the Englishman, Blake; Marsh, from Alabama; and the mongrel Lynott, a man who had more accents than the average continent—were veterans of any number of foreign conflicts, their allegiances determined by mood, money, and morality, and generally in that order. The two Harrys—Hara and Harada—were Japanese, or said they were, although they possessed passports from four or five Asian countries. They looked like the kind of tourists one saw at the Grand Canyon, mugging cheerfully for the camera and making peace signs for the folks back home. They were both small and dark, and Harada wore black-framed glasses that he always pushed up on the bridge of his nose with his middle finger before speaking, a tic that had led Angel to wonder if it wasn’t simply a subtle way of giving the world the bird whenever he opened his mouth. He and Hara looked so innocuous that Angel found them deeply unsettling. He had heard of some of the things they had done. He hadn’t been sure whether to believe the stories or not until the two Harrys passed on a film to him that they claimed had made them laugh harder than anything they had seen before, tears already rolling down their cheeks as they exchanged favorite plot points in their native tongue. Angel had blocked out the name of the film for the sake of his own sanity, although he had a memory of acupuncture needles being inserted between a guy’s eyelid and eyeball and then being “pinged” gently with a fingertip. What was particularly disturbing was that the movie had been the Harrys’ Christmas present to him. Angel wasn’t a guy to go around branding people as abnormal without good reason, but he figured the Harrys should have been strangled at birth. They were their mothers’ little joke at the world’s expense.
The sixth member of the team was Weis, a tall Swiss who had once served in the pope’s guard. He and Lynott seemed to have some minor beef going, if the look that passed between them when they had realized they were to dine together was anything to go by. It was just one more reason for Angel to feel uneasy. Those kinds of tensions, especially in a small team, tended to spread out and make everyone edgy. Still, they all knew one another, even if only by reputation, and Weis and Blake were soon deep in conversation about mutual acquaintances, both living and dead, while Lynott appeared to have found a point of shared interest with the Harrys, which confirmed Angel’s suspicions about all three of them.
By the end of the evening, the teams had been decided: Weis and Blake would secure the northern bridge, Lynott and Marsh the southern. The Harrys would work the road between the two bridges, traveling back and forth at regular intervals. If required, they could move to support either of the bridge teams, or take it upon themselves to hold a bridge if one of those teams had to cross the river to support Angel and Louis in their escape.
It was decided that they would leave the next day, staggering their departures, staying in preassigned motels within easy reach of their target. Shortly before dawn, when each team was in position, Angel and Louis would cross the Roubaud to kill Arthur Leehagen, his son Michael, and anyone else who got in the way of this stated aim.
When their six guests had departed, and the check had been settled, Angel and Louis separated. Angel returned to their apartment, while Louis went downtown to a loft in TriBeCa. There he shared a final glass of wine with a couple named Abigail and Philip Endall. The Endalls looked like any normal, well-to-do couple in their late thirties, although normal was not a word that applied to their chosen line of work. As they sat around the dining table, Louis went through a variation of his original plan with them. The Endalls were the jokers in Louis’s pack. He had no intention of tackling Leehagen with only Angel by his side. Before any of the other teams were even in place, the Endalls would be on Leehagen’s land, waiting.
That night, Angel lay awake in the darkness. Louis sensed his sleeplessness.
“What is it?” asked Louis.
“You didn’t tell them about the fifth team.”
“They didn’t need to know. Nobody needs to know every detail except us.”
Angel didn’t reply. Louis moved beside him, and the bedside light went on.
“What is it with you?” said Louis. “You been like a lost dog these last two days.”
Angel turned to look at him. “This isn’t right,” he said. “I’ll go along with it, but it isn’t right.”
“Taking Leehagen?”
“No, the way you’re going about it. Pieces aren’t fitting the way that they should.”
“You talking about Weis and Lynott? They’ll be fine. We keep them away from each other, that’s all.”
“Not just them. It’s this small team, and the holes in Hoyle’s story.”
“What holes?”
“I can’t put my finger on them. It just doesn’t ring true, not all of it.”
“Gabriel confirmed what Hoyle told us.”
“What, that there was a beef between him and Leehagen? Big deal. You think that’s enough of a reason to kill someone’s daughter and feed her to hogs, to pay the best part of a million dollars in bounty on the heads of two men? No, I don’t like it. It seemed like even Gabriel was holding something back. You said so yourself after you spoke to him. Then there’s Bliss…”
“We don’t know that he’s out there.”
“I smell him all over Billy Boy.”
“You’re turning into an old woman. Next you’ll be talking about getting a cat, and clipping coupons.”
“I’m telling you: something is off.”
“You that worried, then stay here.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Then get some sleep. I don’t need you any edgier than you already are for this.”
Louis turned out the light, leaving Angel in darkness. He did not sleep, but Louis did. It was a gift that he had: nothing ever got in the way of his rest. He did not dream that night, or he could not remember if he did, but he woke up just before dawn, Angel at last sleeping beside him, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of burning.
Their names were Alderman Rector and Atlas Griggs. Alderman was out of Oneida, Tennessee, a town where, as a child, he had witnessed police and civilians hunt down a Negro hobo who had stepped off a freight train at the wrong station. The man was pursued through the woods as he fled for his life until, after an hour had gone by, his bullet-riddled body was dragged through the dirt and left by the station house for all to see. His mother had named him Alderman out of spite for the white people who were determined that such a title would never be available to him in reality, and she stressed to the boy the importance of always being neatly dressed and of never giving a man, white or black, an excuse to disrespect him. That was why, when Griggs tracked him down at the cockfight, Alderman was dressed in a canary-yellow suit, a cream shirt, and a blood-orange tie, with two-tone cream and brown shoes on his feet and, screwed down so hard upon his head that it left a permanent ring in his hair, a yellow hat with a red feather in the band. Only when you got up close could you see the stains on the suit, the fraying on the collar of the shirt, the ripples in the tie where the elastic in the fabric had begun to give, and the bubbles of hardened glue holding his shoe leather together. Alderman owned only two suits, a yellow and a brown, and they were both items of dead men’s clothing, bought from the widows before the coffin lid had been screwed down on their previous owners, but, as he often pointed out to Griggs, that was two suits more than a whole lot of other men owned, whatever the color of their skin.
Alderman—nobody ever called him Rector, as though his Christian name had become the title that would always be denied him—was five-ten and so thin that he looked almost mummified, his high-yellow skin tight against his bones, with little flesh to suggest that Alderman was anything more than an animated corpse. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and his cheekbones were so pronounced that they threatened to shred his skin when he ate. His hair grew out in soft, dark curls that were turning to gray, and he had lost most of the teeth on the lower left side of his mouth to a bunch of crackers in Boone County, Arkansas, so that his jaws didn’t sit right, giving him the ruminative expression of one who had just been burdened with a piece of unsettling information. He was always softly spoken, forcing others to lean in closer to hear him, sometimes to their cost. Alderman might not have been strong, but he was fast, intelligent, and unflinching when it came to doing injury to others. He kept his fingernails deliberately long and sharp in order to do maximum damage to the eyes, and thus he had blinded two men with his bare hands. He kept a switchblade beneath the band of his watch, the band just tight enough to keep the knife in place but loose enough to allow it to be released into Alderman’s hand with a flick of his wrist. He preferred small guns, .22s mostly, because they were easier to conceal and lethally effective up close, and Alderman liked to do his killing where he could feel the breath of the dying upon him.
Alderman was respectful to women. He had been married once, but the woman had died and he had not taken another wife. He did not use prostitutes or dally with women of low character, and he disapproved of others who did so. For that reason, he had only barely tolerated Deber, who had been a sexual sadist and a serial exploiter of women. But Deber had a way of insinuating himself into situations that provided opportunities for enrichment, like a snake or a rat squeezing itself through cracks and holes in order to reach the juiciest prey. The money that came Alderman’s way as a result enabled him to indulge his sole true vice, which was gambling. Alderman had no control over it. It consumed him, and that was how a clever man who occasionally pulled off some low-to medium-sized jobs came to own only two stained suits that were once the property of other men.
Griggs, by contrast, was not intelligent, or not unusually so, but he was loyal and dependable and possessed of an unusual degree of strength and personal courage. He wasn’t much taller than Alderman, but he had fifty pounds on him. His head was almost perfectly round, the ears tiny and set fast against his skull, and his skin was black with a hint of red to it in the right light. Deber had been his second cousin, and the two men would trawl for women in the towns and cities through which they passed. Deber had charm, even if it didn’t run deep enough to drown a bug, and Griggs was handsome in a meaty way, so they did okay together, and Griggs’s adoration of his cousin had blinded him to the more unsavory aspects of Deber’s dealings with women: the blood, the bruising, and, on the night that he had killed the woman with whom he was living, the sight of a body lying broken in the alleyway behind a liquor store, her skirt boisted up around her waist, her lower body naked, violated by Deber even as she was dying. The final fight was just about to start when Griggs arrived at the old potato shed that housed the pit. It was August, almost at the end of the season, and the birds that had survived bore traces of their earlier fights. There were no white faces to be seen. The interior of the shed was so warm that most of the men present had dispensed with their shirts entirely, and were drinking cheap beers from buckets filled to overflowing with ice in an effort to cool themselves down. It smelled of sweat and urine, of excrement and the cock blood spattered around the inside of the pit and soaking into its dirt base. Only Alderman appeared untroubled by the heat. He was seated on a barrel, a thin roll of bills in his left hand, his attention fixed on the pit below. Two men finished sharpening the gaffs on their birds’ legs and entered the pit. Instantly, the pitch and volume of the spectators’ voices altered as they sought some final betting action before the fight began, exchanging hand signals and shouts, seeking confirmation that their wagers had been recorded. Alderman did not join them. He had already placed his bet. Alderman left nothing until the last minute.
The breeders crouched at either side of the pit, their roosters pecking at the air, sensing that combat was imminent. The birds were introduced to each other, their hackles rising in instinctive hatred, and then they were released. Griggs worked his way through the crowd as the birds fought, catching occasional glimpses of flashing spikes, of blood spatter landing on arms, chests, faces. He saw a man instinctively lick the warm blood from his lips with the tip of his tongue, his eyes never moving from the combat below. One of the birds, a yellow-hackled rooster, got spiked in the neck and began to flag. The breeder withdrew it temporarily, blowing on its head to revive it, then sucking the blood from its beak before returning it to the fray, but it was clear that the rooster had had enough. It went cold, refusing to respond to the attacks of its opponent. It was counted out, and the fight declared over. The losing breeder picked up the distressed bird in his arms, looked at it sadly, then wrung its neck.
Alderman had not moved from his barrel, and Griggs could tell that the night had not gone well for him.
“Bullshit, man,” said Alderman, his voice like that of a mourner whispering prayers for the dead, or a soft brush sweeping ashes from a stone floor. “That was all bullshit.”
Griggs leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in part to get some of the smell of the pit out of his nostrils. Griggs had never been much for cockfighting. He wasn’t a gambler, and he had grown up in the city. This wasn’t his place.
“Got some news for you,” he said, “something might ought to cheer you up.”
“Uh-huh,” said Alderman. He did not look at Griggs, but began counting and recounting his money, as though hoping that the act of moving it through his fingers might multiply it, or reveal a previously unseen twenty among the fives and ones.
“The boy that done Deber. Could be I know where he’s at.”
Alderman finished counting and slipped the bills into a scuffed brown leather wallet, then placed the wallet carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket and closed the button. They had been searching for the boy for ten weeks now. They had tried intimidating the women at the cabin, pulling up outside it in their big old, beaten-up Ford, all false smiles and implied threats, but the boy’s grandmother had fronted them right there on her porch, and then three men had appeared from the trees, locals looking out for their own, and he and Griggs had moved on. Alderman figured that even if they did know where he was, the women wouldn’t tell them, not even if they took a knife to one of them. He could see it in the matriarch’s eyes as she stood there before her open door, her hands on her hips as she cussed them softly for what they were trying to do. Like Chief Wooster, Alderman knew something of the woman’s reputation. They weren’t ordinary cuss words she was using against them. It made no nevermind to Alderman, who didn’t believe in God or the devil, but he admired the woman’s demeanor, and was respectful of her even as he tried to communicate to her the level of damage he and Atlas were prepared to inflict in order to find the boy.
“So where he at?” he asked Griggs.
“San Diego.”
“Boy’s a long way from home. How’d you come by it?”
“Friend told a friend. Met a man in a bar, they got talking, you know how it is. Man heard we was looking for a young nigger, heard there might be money in it. Said a boy like ours showed up in San Diego looking for work about two months back. Got him a job as a kitchen boy in a diner.”
“This man have a name?”
“White guy, didn’t give no name. Heard about the boy from some redneck owns a bar in the boy’s hometown. But I made some calls, got someone out there to take a look at the boy at his place of work. It’s him, sounds like.”
“Long way to go to be wrong.”
“Got Del Mar out there. Not far to Tijuana neither. It’s him, though. I know it.”
Alderman got up from the barrel and stretched. There wasn’t much to keep them here, and he did owe that boy: Deber had been close to setting up a score, and his death had fucked that up royally. Without Deber, he and Atlas had been struggling. They needed to hook up with someone new, someone with juice, but the rumors about what the boy maybe had done to Deber had spread, and now he and Atlas weren’t getting the respect that they ought to have. They needed to fix things with the boy before they could start making money again. That night, they hit a mom and pop store and netted seventy-five dollars from the register and the safe. When Griggs put a knife to the woman’s throat, her husband had come up with $120 more from a box in the storeroom. They left them tied up in the back of the store and turned the lights out, tearing the telephone from the wall before they departed. Alderman had been wearing an old gray overcoat over his suit and both he and Griggs had cloth sacks over their heads to hide their faces. He had made sure that they parked out of sight of the store before they went in, so their car couldn’t be identified. It had been an easy takedown, not like some of the ones they’d done with Deber back in the day. Deber would have raped the woman at the store out of spite, right in front of her husband.
They stopped near Abilene at a bar owned by an old acquaintance of Griggs’s, and where a man named Poorbridge Danticat, who knew of Alderman and Griggs and Deber, made a joke about Deber losing his head. Alderman and Griggs had waited for him in the parking lot afterward, and Griggs had beaten Poorbridge so badly that his jaw was re moved almost entirely from his skull and one ear hung crookedly from a flap of skin. It would serve as a message. People needed to learn some respect.
All this because of Deber, thought Alderman, as they drove west. I never even liked him, and now we have to travel for days to kill a boy just cause Deber couldn’t control himself with his woman. Well, they’d make the boy pay, make an example of him so that folk would know that he and Atlas took these things seriously. There was no other way. Business, after all, was business.
The diner stood on National Boulevard, not far from the X-rated Pussycat house. The Pussycat had started life as the Bush Theater in 1928, then became, at various stages in its history, the National, the Aboline, and the Paris, before finally joining the porn mainstream in the 1960s. When Louis arrived for work each morning shortly after five, the Pussycat was silent and sleeping, like an old harlot after a hard night’s whoring, but by the time he left, twelve hours later, a steady stream of men had already begun to make use of the Pussycat’s facilities, although, as Mr. Vasich, the Yugoslav owner of the diner, would often remark, “Ain’t none of them staying longer than a cartoon.”
Louis’s job at Vasich’s Number One Eatery, as a pink and yellow neon sign announced it, was to do whatever was required to keep the place functioning, short of actually cooking the food himself or taking money from its patrons. He washed, shucked, peeled, and polished. He helped carry in deliveries and carry out garbage. He made sure that the restrooms were clean and there was paper in the stalls. For this he was paid the minimum wage of $1.40 an hour, from which Mr. Vasich deducted twenty cents an hour for room and board. He worked sixty hours each week, with Sundays off, although he could, if he chose, come in and work off the books for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, for which Mr. Vasich paid him a flat five dollars, no questions asked. Louis took the extra hours. He spent little of the money that he earned, apart from treating himself to an occasional movie on a Sunday afternoon, since Mr. Vasich fed him well at the eatery and gave him a room on the second floor with a bathroom across the hall. There was no access to the diner itself from where Louis stayed, and the rest of the rooms were given over to file storage and a collection of mismatched and broken furniture, only some of it connected to the business below.
After two weeks had gone by, he took the bus down to Tijuana and, having walked the streets for two hours, eventually bought a Smith & Wesson Airweight alloy .38 and two boxes of ammunition from a store close to Sanchez Taboda. The man who sold it to him showed him, using a combination of broken English and simple, hands-on demonstration, how to release the cylinder and push back on the ejector rod to access the central ejector plate. The gun smelled clean, and the man gave Louis a brush and some oil to keep the weapon that way. When he was done, Louis tried to get a sandwich but all the bakeries and bread stores had been closed, apparently because a pesticide had been stored alongside the ingredients for making bread in a government warehouse in Mexicali, resulting in the deaths of a number of children, so he settled for half a chicken on a bed of wilted lettuce before returning to the United States. He found an old bicycle in one of Mr. Vasich’s storerooms and paid to have the tires repaired and the chain replaced. The following Sunday, he filled a bag with a bottle of water, a sandwich from the diner, a doughnut, some empty soda bottles, and the .38, and biked west until he had left the city behind. He stowed his bike in some bushes and walked away from the road until he came to a hollow filled with rock and scree. There he spent an hour firing at bottles, replacing them with rocks when only broken shards were left. It was the first time that he had held and fired a revolver, but he quickly got used to its weight and the sound that it made. Mostly, he fired from a range of not more than fifteen feet from his targets, figuring that, when it came down to it, he would probably be using the gun up close. Once he was satisfied with himself and his knowledge of the weapon, he buried the pieces of broken glass, carefully collected the spent cartridges, and biked back to the city.
The waiting came to an end on a warm, still August night. He woke to the sound of boards creaking outside his room. It was still dark outside, and he did not feel as though he had slept for long. He did not know how they had managed to get so close without being heard. The secondfloor rooms were reached by way of rickety wooden stairs to the right of the building, and Louis always kept the main door locked at Mr. Vasich’s insistence. Yet he was not surprised that they had found him at last. Gabriel had told him it would happen, and he had known it himself to be true. He slipped from beneath the sheets, wearing only his boxers, and reached for the .38 just as his bedroom door was kicked in and a fat man with a round head appeared in the doorway. Behind him, Louis could see another, smaller man hovering.
The big man had a long-barreled pistol in his hand, but it was not pointed at the boy, not yet. Louis raised his own weapon. His hands shook, not from fear but from the sudden rush of adrenaline into his system. Still, the man at the door misunderstood.
“That’s right, boy,” said Griggs. “You got a gun, but it’s hard to kill a man up close. It’s real—”
Louis’s gun spoke, and a hole blew dark blood from Griggs’s chest. Louis walked forward, his finger pulling the trigger again, and the second shot hit Griggs in the side of the neck as he fell backward, almost taking Alderman Rector with him. Alderman fired the little .22, but the shot went wild and took out the windowpane to the right of Louis. The gun in Louis’s hand was no longer shaking, and the next three shots impacted in a tight circle no bigger than a man’s closed fist in the center of Alderman’s torso. Alderman dropped his gun and turned, his right hand clutching at the wounds in his body as he tried to support himself against the wall. He managed a couple of steps before his legs crumpled and he fell flat on his stomach. He moaned at the pressure on the wounds, then started to crawl along the floor, pulling himself with his hands, pushing with his feet against Griggs’s corpse. He heard footsteps behind him. Louis fired the last bullet into Alderman’s back, and he stopped moving.
Louis stared at the gun in his hand. He was breathing fast, and his heart was beating so hard that it hurt. He went back to his room, dressed, and packed his bag. It didn’t take him long, for he had never really unpacked it, understanding that the time would come when, if he survived, he would have to move again. He reloaded the .38, just in case these men had not come alone, then stepped over the two bodies and walked to the end of the hall. He opened the door and listened, then cast an eye over the yard below. There was no movement. A beat-up Ford was parked below, both of its front doors open, but there was nobody inside.
Louis ran down the stairs and turned the corner, just in time to catch a man’s fist across his left temple. He collapsed to the ground, blinded by the pain. Even as he fell he tried to raise the .38, but a boot connected with his hand and forced it to the ground, stamping on his fingers until he was forced to release his grip. Hands grabbed hold of his shirtfront and hauled him to his feet, then pushed him around the corner until he felt the first step against the back of his calves. He sat down and saw clearly, for the first time, the man who had attacked him. He was six feet tall and white, his hair cut short like that of a cop, or a soldier. He wore a dark suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. Some of Louis’s blood had landed on the material, staining it. Behind him stood Gabriel.
Louis’s eyes were watering, but he did not want the men to think that he was crying.
“They’re dead,” he said.
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Of course they are.”
“You followed them here.”
“I learned that they were on their way.”
“And you didn’t stop them.”
“I had faith in you. I was right. You didn’t need anyone else. You could take care of them yourself.”
Louis heard sirens calling in the distance, drawing closer.
“How long do you think you will be able to evade the police?” asked Gabriel. “One day? Two?”
Louis did not reply.
“My offer still stands,” said Gabriel. “In fact, more so than before, after tonight’s little demonstration of your abilities. What do you say? The gas chamber at San Quentin, or me?
Quickly, now. Time is wasting.”
Louis watched Gabriel carefully, wondering how he had come to be here at just the right time, understanding that tonight had been a test but not certain how much of it Gabriel had orchestrated. Someone must have told those men where he was. Someone had betrayed him to them. Then again, it could have been a coincidence.
But Gabriel was here. He had known those men were coming, and he had waited to see what would transpire. Now he was offering help, and Louis did not know if he could trust him. And Gabriel stared back at him, and knew his thoughts.
Louis stood. He nodded at Gabriel, picked up his bag, and followed him to the car. The driver picked up the .38, and Louis never saw it again. By the time the police arrived they were already heading north, and the boy who had worked at the eatery, the one who had left two men dead on Mr Vasich’s floor, ceased to be, except in some small, hidden corner of his own soul.