41
A day passed. Evening descended. All was changed, yet unchanged. The dead remained dead, and waited for the dying to join their number.
On the outskirts of Prosperous a massive 4WD pulled up by the side of the road, disgorging one of its occupants before quickly turning back east. Ronald Straydeer hoisted a pack on to his back and headed for the woods, making his way toward the ruins of the church.
42
The two-story redbrick premises advertised itself as BLACKTHORN, APOTHECARY, although it had been many years since the store had sold anything, and old Blackthorn himself was now long dead. It had, for much of its history, been the only business on Hunts Lane, a Brooklyn mews designed originally to stable the horses of the wealthy on nearby Remsen and Joralemon Streets.
The exterior wood surround was black, the lettering on and above the window gold and its front door was permanently closed. The upstairs windows were shuttered, while the main window on the first floor was protected by a dense wire grill. The jumbled display behind it was a historical artifact, a collection of boxes and bottles bearing the names, where legible at all, of companies that no longer existed, and products with more than a hint of snake oil about them: Dalley’s Magical Pain Extractor, Dr Ham’s Aromatic Invigorator, Dr Miles’ Nervine.
Perhaps, at some point in the past, an ancestor of the last Blackthorn had seen ft to offer such elixirs to his customers, along with remedies stranger still. A display case inside the door contained packets of Potter’s Asthma Smoking Mixture (‘may be smoked in a pipe either with or without ordinary tobacco’) and Potter’s Asthma Care Cigarettes from the nineteenth century, along with Espic and Legras powders, the latter beloved of the French writer Marcel Proust, who used it to tackle his asthma and hay fever. In addition to stramonium, a derivative of the common thornapple, Datura stramonium, which was regarded as an effective remedy for respiratory problems, such products also contained, variously, potash and arsenic. Now long fallen from favor, they were memorialized in the gloom of Blackthorn, Apothecary, alongside malt beverages for nursing mothers, empty bottles of cocaine-based coca wine and heroin hydrochloride, and assorted preparations of morphine and opium for coughs, colds and children’s teething difficulties.
By the time the final Blackthorn was entering his twilight years – in a store that, most aptly, eschewed sunlight through the judicious use of heavy drapes and a sparing attitude toward electric illumination – the business that bore his family name sold only herbal medicines, and the musty interior still contained the evidence of Blackthorn’s faith in the efficacy of natural solutions. The mahogany shelves were lined with glass jars containing moldering and desiccated herbs and various oils that appeared to have survived the years with little change. A series of ornate lettered boards between the shelves detailed a litany of ailments and the herbs available to counteract the symptoms, from bad breath (parsley) and gas (fennel and dill) to cankers (goldenseal), cancer (bilberry, maitake mushroom, pomegranate, raspberry) and congestive heart failure (hawthorn). All was dust and dead insects, except on the floor where regular footfalls had cleared a narrow path through the detritus of decades. This led from a side entrance beside the main door, through a hallway adorned with photographs of the dead, and amateur landscapes that bespoke a morbid fascination with the work of the more depressive German Romantics bordering on mental illness, and into the store itself by way of a door with panels decorated by graphically rendered scenes from the Passion of Christ. The path’s final destination was obscured by a pair of black velvet drapes that closed off what had once been old Blackthorn’s back room, in which the apothecary had created his tinctures and powders.
Now, as a chill rain fell on the streets, specks of light showed through the moth holes in the drapes, and they glittered like stars as unseen figures moved in the room behind. Evening had descended, and Hunts Lane was empty, apart from the two men who stood beneath the awning of an old stable, watching the storefront on the other side of the alley, and the vague signs of life from within.
Two days had passed since the shooting.
‘He gives me the creeps,’ said Angel.
‘Man gives everyone the creeps,’ said Louis. ‘There’s dead folk would move out if they found themselves buried next to him.’
‘Why here?’
‘Why not?’
‘I guess. How long has he been holed up in that place?’
‘Couple of weeks, what I hear is true.’
The location had cost Louis a considerable amount of money, along with one favor that he could never call in again. He didn’t mind. This was personal.
‘It’s homely,’ said Angel, ‘in a Dickensian way. It’s kind of appropriate. Any idea where he’s been all these years?’
‘No. He did have a habit of moving around.’
‘Not much choice. Probably doesn’t make many friends in his line of work.’
‘Probably not.’
‘After all, you didn’t.’
‘No.’
‘Except me.’
‘Yeah. About that …’
‘Go fuck yourself.’
‘That would be the other option.’
Angel stared at the building, and the building seemed to stare back.
‘Strange that he should turn up now.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what he was doing while he was gone?’
‘What he’s always been doing: causing pain.’
‘Maybe he thinks that it will take away some of his own.’
Louis glanced at his partner.
‘You know, you get real philosophical at unexpected moments.’
‘I was born philosophical. I just don’t always care to share my thoughts with others, that’s all. I think I might be a Stoic, if I understood what that meant. Either way, I like the sound of it.’
‘On your earlier point, he enjoyed inflicting pain, and watching others inflict it, even when he wasn’t suffering himself.’
‘If you believed in a god, you might say it was divine retribution.’
‘Karma.’
‘Yeah, that too.’
The rain continued to fall.
‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘there’s a hole in this awning.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s, like, a metaphor or something.’
‘Or just a hole.’
‘You got no poetry in your heart.’
‘No.’
‘You think he knows we’re out here?’
‘He knows.’
‘So?’
‘You want to knock, be my guest.’
‘What’ll happen?’
‘You’ll be dead.’
‘I figured it would be something like that. So we wait.’
‘Yes.’
‘Until?’
‘Until he opens the door.’
‘And?’
‘If he tries to kill us, we know he’s involved.’
‘And if he doesn’t try to kill us, then he’s not involved?’
‘No, then maybe he’s just smarter than I thought.’
‘You said he was as smart as any man you’d ever known.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Doesn’t bode well for us.’
‘No.’
There was a noise from across the alley: the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a bolt being pulled. Angel moved to the right, his gun already in his hand. Louis went left, and was absorbed by the darkness. A light bloomed slowly in the hallway, visible through the hemisphere of cracked glass above the smaller of the two doors. The door opened slowly, revealing a huge man standing in the entrance. He remained very still, his hands slightly out from his sides. Had Angel and Louis wanted to kill him, then this would have been the perfect opportunity. The message seemed clear: the one they had come to see wanted to talk. There would be no killing.
Not yet.
Angel’s gaze alternated between the shuttered windows on the second floor of the apothecary, and the entrance to Hunts Lane from Henry Street. Hunts Lane was a dead end. If this was a trap, then there would be no escape. He had questioned Louis about their approach, wondering aloud if it might not be better for one of them to remain on the street while the other entered the alley, but Louis had demurred.
‘He knows that we’re coming. He’s the last one.’
‘Which means?’
‘That if it’s a trap, he’ll spring it long before the alley. We’ll be dead as soon as we set foot in Brooklyn. We just won’t know it until the blade falls.’
None of this Angel found reassuring. He had met this man only once before, when he sought to recruit Louis – and, by extension, Angel – for his own ends. The memory of that meeting had never faded. Angel had felt poisoned by it after, as though by breathing the same air as the man, he had forever tainted his system.
Louis appeared again. He had his gun raised, aimed directly at the figure in the doorway. The man stepped forward, and a motion-activated light went on above his head. He was truly enormous, his head like a grave monument on his shoulders, his chest and arms impossibly massive. Angel did not recognize his face, and he would surely have remembered if he had seen such a monster before. His skull was bald, his scalp crisscrossed with scars, and his eyes were very clear and round, like boiled eggs pressed into his face. He was extraordinarily unhandsome, as though God had created the ugliest human being possible and then punched him in the face.
Most striking of all was the bright yellow suit that he wore. It gave him a strange air of feigned jollity, the product, perhaps, of an erroneous belief that he might somehow appear less threatening if he just wore brighter colors. He watched Louis approach, and it struck Angel that he had not seen the sentinel in the doorway blink once. His eyes were so huge that any blinks would have been obvious, like the fapping of wings.
Louis lowered his gun, and simultaneously the man at the door raised his right hand. He showed Louis the small plastic bottle that he held and then, without waiting for Louis to respond, tilted his head back and added drops to his eyes. When he was done, he stepped into the rain, and silently indicated that Angel and Louis should enter the apothecary’s store, his right hand now extended like that of the greeter at the world’s worst nightclub.
Reluctantly, Angel came forward. He followed Louis into the darkness of the hallway, but he entered backward, keeping his eyes, and his gun, on the unblinking giant at the door. But the giant did not follow them inside. Instead he remained standing in the rain, his face raised to the heavens, and the water flowed down his cheeks like tears.