Angel Face (6 page)

That's all bullshit, of course, at least in Carter's opinion. Half the patrons of Boone's gym are serious knuckleheads far more likely to be the attacker than the attacked. But the system, with its kicks, strikes and throws, works as well as any other. You practice the moves, over and over and over, until each and every opening draws the appropriate counter-attack, until you see and strike before you're conscious of what you're going to do next. Then, if you're Carter, you run away. Carter has no criminal record and the last thing he wants to do is draw the attention of the police.

Most of the regulars at Sweat & Strain outweigh Carter, especially the ones who juice with steroids. But Carter's not only fast, he's also fearless, and he's acquired a bit of a reputation. He's not surprised when a pro named Johnny ‘The Crusher' Carpenter asks him to work out. They go at it for an hour, until Carpenter breaks it off and heads for the showers. Carter would like nothing more than to follow – he's gotten much the worse of the exchanges – but he has one additional task ahead, one he absolutely hates, skipping rope. Which is why he forces himself to do it.

Six hours later, at four o'clock in the afternoon, Carter approaches the front door of a house on a tree-lined street in Astoria, Queens. The single-story house isn't much to look at – brick walls, shingled roof, a picture window in the living room – but it rests on a generous lot surrounded by a thick hedge in the back. Carter hesitates only for a moment before ringing the bell.

The man who opens the door is about Carter's age, but that's the only resemblance between the two. He's fifty pounds heavier than Carter, with a serious gut and jowls befitting a man twice his age.

‘Can I help you?' he asks.

‘I'm here to see Paulie Marginella.' Carter knows this must be Paulie's son, Freddy, who was in prison the last time Carter and Paulie met. ‘Does he still live here?'

‘And who are you?'

‘My name's Carter.'

Freddy's double take proves one thing: Paulie's got a big mouth. Carter smiles. ‘I know I'm not expected, but I heard that Paulie's not feeing well . . .'

‘My dad's in the backyard, catching a few rays.' Freddy steps aside to let Carter into a small foyer. ‘This is about what exactly . . .'

‘It's about me paying my respects to a sick friend.'

Although Freddy fixes Carter with a hard stare, he's not his father's son. Carter's not intimidated and he simply returns the stare, his eyes blank.

‘All right, hang out here for a minute. I'll ask if he wants to see you.'

Freddy's back two minutes later. He nods and leads Carter through the living room to a sliding glass door. The door's open and he points through it to a man sitting in a wheelchair positioned on a small patch of sunlit grass. There's a second chair next to him, a folding lawn chair with plastic webbing stretched across a tarnished aluminum frame.

‘Lemme know when you're ready to leave,' Freddy says. ‘Dad wants to talk to you alone.'

Paulie Margarine's backyard is nicely sculpted. A small bed of yellow tulips, a cluster of intertwined birch trees, a Japanese maple, its spider-thin leaves barely opened, that might have been lifted from a Bonsai pot. Against the side of the house, an enormous lilac, more a tree than a bush, perfumes the warm May air.

Carter acknowledges the contrast as he crosses the lawn. Every living thing in Paulie's yard has dedicated itself to renewal, except for Paulie Margarine. Paulie's as thin as a rail and his skin is a shade of yellow that no tulip will ever reproduce. Emblazoned with the logo of the New York Mets, a thick blanket wraps his body from his neck to his feet. The hand that emerges from beneath the blanket is bony enough to be the claw of a diving raptor.

‘Hey, Carter, check this out.' With great effort, Paulie manages to pull up the blanket to reveal a black boot. ‘I'm ready,' he announces.

‘To die with your boots on?'

‘I gotta.' Paulie's grin reveals gums the color of bone. ‘It's part of the culture. It's our thing, our
cosa nostra
.'

Carter's laugh is genuine. He's always liked Paulie, a man true to himself, a genuine tough guy. ‘So, what's up, what do you have?'

‘Hepatitis C, which is destroyin' my liver. I'm on the list for a transplant.' Paulie's hand disappears beneath the blanket. ‘But it's not lookin' good. I turned down the last round of chemo. Whatever time I got, I don't wanna spend it leanin' over a toilet, which in fact I can't even do any more. I gotta throw up in a bedpan.'

Carter lets that pass and they sit quietly for a few minutes, until Paulie asks, ‘So, whatta ya gonna do? Now that you're outta work?'

‘I'm thinking you were right, Paulie, it's time to move on. I don't know to what exactly, but I've got money put away, so I'm not all that worried.'

‘I'm not worried, either. I know exactly what I'm gonna be doin' six months from now and that's breathin' dirt. But my kid has big ideas. He's gettin' out of all the old businesses. The way it is now, with the Feds, you make a wrong move and they put you in jail for a thousand years. The money's in computer crime and that's where Freddy's goin'. We'll be done with our other businesses, including the business you and me had together, within a few months.'

Behind Paulie, a truck rattles up the block, its gears grinding when the driver shifts. ‘Hey, Carter, you wanna hear somethin' funny?'

‘Anything.'

Paulie chuckles. ‘My hearing, it's gotten better somehow. At night, I can't sleep for the traffic on Ditmars Boulevard and that's three blocks away. The planes at LaGuardia? They hit my ears like a toothache.'

‘You should try earplugs, or one of those machines that make white noise.'

‘I thought about that, but these days I'm not too crazy about sleepin'.'

Again, Carter doesn't know what to say and they observe a second silence, this one prolonged. The afternoon warmth is seductive, in any event, a perfect spring evening. Carter's eyes move to the bed of late-blooming daffodils, the tips of their feathered petals a smoky orange, and to a trellis covered by a climbing rose, its buds as green as peas this early in the year.

Carter's always been comfortable with silence, a quality that served him well as a sniper. There's an art to remaining both immobile and alert that begins with resisting the allure of your own thoughts. But this time Carter's quiet because he's remembering a Nepalese merc named Lo Phet. Lo Phet practiced Tibetan Buddhism and his belief in reincarnation approached the absolute.

‘Can go up or down,' he'd explained. They were on their way from Kirkuk to Baghdad, their mission to ferry a suitcase filled with American dollars from one warlord to another. ‘Can have rebirth as bug. How you like that? To come back as flea on elephant's ass? Or can go to world of Gods, or go down to world of hungry ghosts. Hungry ghost have big fat belly and tiny mouth. Can never get enough food.'

‘Is that the bottom?' Carter had asked as they slowed to a stop at the end of a line of vehicles awaiting inspection at a checkpoint. ‘The world of hungry ghosts?'

‘No, bottom is Hell World. We in Hell World now.'

Carter had thought it over for a moment, then said, ‘You're claiming that we died somewhere along the way and were reborn.'

‘Yes, die and go to Hell World.'

Lo Phet had moved on three weeks later when an improvised explosive device cut him in two. At the time, Carter had wondered if he'd be reborn into the Hell World, if he'd have to do it all over again. Carter now wonders the same thing about Paulie Margarine.

‘Paulie,' Carter finally says, ‘any chance you'd be willing to give up your computer? Or the hard drive at least?'

‘Is that what you came for?'

‘I came for two reasons. To have a look around and to visit my partner, who told me that he was sick. I have to tell you, though, I wasn't too happy when your boy recognized my name.'

‘So whatta ya gonna do, shoot me? He's my kid. We got no secrets between us.'

In fact, Carter's not carrying a gun. But he does have a combat knife strapped to the inside of his left calf. ‘You can't blame me for tying up loose ends. Freddy can talk his head off and it won't matter. With you gone, there's no proof, except for the emails in that computer.'

‘I thought you said everything in the computer was encrypted?'

‘And you just told me your son's going into the computer business.' Carter's voice drops. ‘Do you really want me sitting around worried that my back isn't covered?'

Paulie sighs. When it really mattered, Carter had out-maneuvered him at every turn. What chance would Freddy have? Better they – meaning the Marginella family and Mr Carter – be quits forever.

‘All right, take it. But I should charge you. Now I gotta replace the computer.'

‘Tell you what, Paulie. I'll get a new computer delivered to the house by the middle of next week. Something faster, with a hi-def screen.'

‘Don't bother. The porno I watch ain't gonna be improved by high definition.'

A robin drops on to the lawn, catching Paul Margarine's attention. He watches its head swivel, watches the bird turn its eyes this way and that. There are lots of creatures that eat robins, creatures that slither and stalk and drop down out of the sky.

‘Hey, Carter, you wanna hear a funny story?'

‘Another one?'

‘This one's better. The guy you whacked, Ricky Ditto? He's got a brother named Bobby. What I heard, Bobby Ditto's talkin' revenge and he's talkin' it loud, which means he has to do something or look like an asshole. Anyhow, Bobby found out that Ricky had a date with a whore that afternoon and now he's goin' after the whore. Me, I wouldn't wanna be in the whore's shoes when Bobby Ditto comes callin'. The guy's a complete jerk. But it's good for you, right? There's no way to get from the whore to you. The whore's a dead end.'

SEVEN

C
arter knows damn well that he's supposed to let Angel Tamanaka swing. Whatever ethical debt he owed the universe at large was amply paid when he let her go in the first place. Paulie was right. Angel can't lead Ricky Ditto's brother to him. She doesn't even know his name.

Carter's van is in the CASH lane at the toll plaza on the Triborough Bridge connecting Queens to Manhattan and the Bronx. He's in the CASH lane, despite the heavy back-up, because the E-ZPASS system links every use of an E-ZPASS device to a specific time, place and vehicle. Carter routinely leaves as few traces of his movements as possible.

But Carter's not in a hurry. When he gets home, he'll nap until eight or nine o'clock, have dinner at a local coffee shop and then set out to find the woman, if not of his dreams, at least of his weekend. That was, and still is, Carter's only plan. Or so he tells himself as he watches a gigantic SUV, a Mercedes, try to cut into the CASH lane. A chorus of horns blends with the steady thump, thump, thump of the speakers in the SUV, a challenge to a challenge.

Carter doesn't lean on his own horn. As far as he's concerned, the man driving the Mercedes is just another knucklehead. Now he's forcing the SUV between two cars, his message clear enough. I'm going ahead of you because I'm bigger and more powerful than you are, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. He's right, too. Aside from a few face-saving curses, and the horns, of course, nobody attempts to prevent this affront to common civility.

Carter's big on civility, as he's big on dignity and honor. He associates civility with cooperation, and cooperation with the ultimate survival of the species. This was a lesson repeated in the course of every firefight, a lesson held so close that many soldiers confuse mutual dependency with love.

When his turn comes, Carter hands the toll collector a ten dollar bill, pockets the change and heads south to the apartment he's subletting on the Lower East Side. The idea is to put Angel in his rear-view mirror, but it's not working. Paulie's words rise up, rise again, despite Carter's best efforts:
I wouldn't wanna be in the whore's shoes when Bobby Ditto comes callin'.

So what? Carter's viewed the innocent dead stacked like firewood, and more than once. Sierra Leone, Congo, the Ivory Coast. Piles of arms and legs hacked off by the boy soldiers, women raped until they bled to death. The victims were always the most vulnerable, farmers without the means to fight back, small tribes hunting monkeys with primitive bows.

What entitles Angel Tamanaka to special consideration? Besides her beauty? Why should he take the slightest risk to protect her? Much less the very substantial risk of going to her apartment? For all he knows, Angel went to the cops first thing. For all he knows, the cops are with her right now, working on an artist's likeness. What he should do is get out of New York, maybe take a trip to Panama so he can be near his money. What he should have done, when he had the chance, was memorize her phone number. As it is, if he wants to warn her, he'll have to knock on her door.

Carter's thoughts turn to Janie as he backs the van into a parking space on Tenth Street off First Avenue. Janie's religious convictions were as unshakeable as Lo Phet's and she'd done her absolute best to guide him along the path of righteousness. Yet, somehow, and for the longest time, he'd confused virtue with obedience. He did whatever Janie asked him to do, with no complaints. If she'd told him to jump out the window, he probably would have done that, too.