The Wrath of Angels (22 page)

‘It’s healing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances,’ he told her. ‘How does your eye feel?’

‘Like there are needles sticking in it,’ she replied.

‘You’re keeping it lubricated? That’s important.’

‘Will my sight—?’ Her throat felt very dry, and she had trouble enunciating her words. She thought for a moment that there might have been some damage to her tongue, or her vocal cords, until she realized that she had hardly spoken more than a few words in days. When she tried again, speech came more easily. ‘Will my sight be restored?’

‘I expect so, in time, although I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever have perfect vision in that eye.’ She resisted the urge to lash out at him, so casual was his tone. ‘The cornea is also likely to grow opaque in the long term. We could, of course, examine the possibility of a corneal transplant. It’s a relatively commonplace procedure now, generally done on an outpatient basis. The main issue is securing a suitable cornea from a recently deceased individual.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ she said.

He smiled indulgently. ‘I didn’t mean that we should do it right now.’

‘Neither did I.’

His smile faded, and she noticed a slight tremor creep into his fingers.

‘I haven’t looked at myself,’ she said. ‘There are no mirrors in the room, and my son has kept the ones in the bathroom covered.’

‘Those were my instructions,’ said the doctor.

‘Why? Am I so terrible now?’

He was good, she gave him that. He did not look away, and he did not betray his true feelings about her.

‘It’s too early. The burns are still raw. Once they begin to heal, we’ll have options. Sometimes, patients will look at themselves in the immediate aftermath of an . . .
accident
like yours, and they will despair. That’s true of any serious injury or illness. The early days and weeks are always the hardest. Patients feel that they can’t go on, or don’t want to go on. In your case, time will heal your wounds, and, as I’ve told you, what time can’t heal, surgeons can. We’ve come a long way in our ability to treat burn victims.’

He patted her on the arm, a gesture of comfort and assurance that he had probably made to his patients a thousand times before, and she hated him for it, hated him for his lies, and his blank visage, and for even thinking he could get away with patronizing her. He sensed that he had overstepped some mark, so he turned his back on her and began putting away his equipment and dressings. Still, her obvious antagonism seemed to have goaded him, and he could not resist attempting to assert his superiority over her.

‘You should have gone to a hospital, though,’ he said. ‘I warned you at the beginning: had you submitted to proper care, I might be more optimistic about any possible outcomes. Now we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.’

The boy appeared beside him. The doctor had not even heard him enter the room, and so it seemed to the older man that he had somehow materialized out of the shadows, drawing black atoms from the ether to reconstitute himself in the gloomy room. In his hand the boy held a photograph of a girl aged sixteen, perhaps a little younger. Her hairstyle and mode of dress indicated that the picture had not been taken recently. He turned the photograph so that it faced the doctor, like a conjuror displaying the crucial card in a sleight-of-hand trick. The doctor paled visibly.

‘Remember your manners, Doctor,’ said Darina. ‘Don’t forget who disposed of the evidence of your last botched procedure. Use that tone with me again, and we’ll bury you next to that girl and her fetus.’

The doctor said nothing more, and left the room without looking back.

Now here she was, out of bed for the first time since that bitch had scarred her. She wore a loose, open-necked shirt over a pair of sweat pants, and her feet were bare. It was hardly elegant, but wearing a buttoned shirt meant that she did not have to pull anything on over her head, and the sweats were comfortable and nothing more. The boy had brought her a glass of brandy at her request. She sipped it through a straw in order to avoid stinging her damaged lips with liquor. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mix alcohol and painkillers, but it was only a small glass, and she had been thirsting for a proper drink for days.

The boy began playing with his toy soldiers in their big wooden fort. They were knights on foot and on horseback, made from tin and carefully painted. She had bought them for him at a booth in Prague’s Old Town Square. The artisan who sold them also made imitation medieval weapons, and heavy gauntlets and helms, but it was the soldiers that had caught her eye. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of them: sixty or seventy in total. The boy was only a year old then. She had left him in the care of a nanny in Boston, the first time she had been separated from him since his birth, and had traveled to the Czech Republic to retrace his steps. All she knew was that this was the country to which he had departed in his final days, the last place in which he had drawn breath before that stage of his existence was ended, and a new one begun. He had no memory of it, and so could not recall the trauma of his dying. It would come as he grew older, but she had hoped to unearth some clue as to what had occurred there. She found nothing: those responsible had covered their tracks too well.

But she was patient, and the boy would have his revenge.

It surprised her how the old and the new could co-exist inside him. He was so like a regular child now, lost in games of war, but this was the same boy who had helped her to torture Barbara Kelly to death. At times like that his older nature took over, and he seemed almost surprised at the damage that his hands could wreak.

She checked email on her laptop, and began listening to the messages that had been left on her various phones. There was nothing of consequence on the main numbers, and it was with some surprise that she found a message waiting for her at one of the oldest of the numbers, the one that had been earmarked for a very particular cause, and on which she had almost given up by now.

The message began haltingly, the voice slightly slurred. Alcohol, and more: a little toke, possibly, to take the edge off.

‘Uh, hey, this is a message for, um, Darina Flores. You don’t know me, but a while back you came to Falls End, Maine asking about a plane . . .’

She put down the glass while she listened to the rest of the message. No name left, only a number, but unless the caller had acquired a throwaway phone for the express purpose of calling her, his identity would be easy to establish. She played the message again, concentrating on every word, registering hesitations, emphases, intonation. There had been a lot of pointless calls in the early days, a lot of frustrated men with fantasies of getting her in the sack, and a couple of drunken, anonymous calls from women expressing the opinion that she was a bitch and a slut, and worse. She had responded to none, but recalled them all. She had an extraordinary memory for voices, but she could not remember ever having heard this one on the system before.

And there were details in this message, fragments of knowledge and description, that told her this was worth pursuing, that this would not be a wasted journey. There was
truth
here, small details that could only have come from someone who had actually seen the plane, and one in particular that made her gasp.

A passenger: the caller mentioned a passenger.

She rose and headed for the bathroom. A small nightlight burned in the outlet by the toilet, far from the big mirror which the boy had covered with a towel, but Darina turned on the main bathroom light as she entered. She reached for the towel, and felt the boy’s hand on her arm. She looked down at him, and was touched by the expression of concern on his face.

Touched, and unnerved.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’

He let his hand fall. She removed the towel. Even through the dressings, the appalling damage to her face was clear.

Darina Flores began to cry.

W
alter Cole sat in his armchair, a beer in his hand and a dog at his feet. He had put on some weight, and there was more white in his hair than I remembered, but he was still recognizably the man who had been my first partner when I made detective, and whose family had consoled me when my own was taken from me. His wife, Lee, had greeted me with a kiss when she answered the door, and an embrace that reminded me there would always be a place for me in their home. Years before, I had found their daughter when, like a child in a fairytale, she got lost in the woods and was taken by an ogre. I think Lee viewed it as a debt that could never be repaid. I looked upon it as some small return for keeping a light in the darkness for a man who had once been forced to look upon the butchered bodies of his wife and daughter. Now it was just Walter and me, and a yawning dog that smelled faintly of popcorn.

I had not spoken to him of Epstein, not yet. Instead I had eaten a late supper of leftover meat loaf and a baked potato. Walter had joined me even though he had already eaten, which probably went some way toward explaining why he was now more than the man I remembered. I had helped him clean up when we were done, and we had taken our coffee into the living room.

‘So, you want to tell me about it?’ he said.

‘Not really.’

‘You’re sitting there glowering at the rug like it just tried to steal your shoes. Somebody lit your fuse.’

‘I misjudged an old acquaintance, or he misjudged me. I’m not sure which. Maybe both.’

‘He still alive to tell the tale?’

‘Yep.’

‘Then he should be grateful.’

‘
Et tu, Brute?
’

‘It wasn’t a judgment, just a statement of fact. I’ve saved your clippings, but I don’t want to know the unofficial details. That way, I can plead ignorance if someone comes knocking. I’ve reached an accommodation with what you are, even if you haven’t.’

‘What I am, not what I do?’

‘I don’t think there’s a separation where you’re concerned. Come on, Charlie, we’ve known each other too long. You’re like a son to me now. I judged you in the past, and maybe I found you wanting, but I was wrong. I’m on your side here, no questions asked.’

I sipped my coffee. Walter had also opened a beer for himself, but I had declined one. He was singlehandedly keeping the Brooklyn Brewing Company in business. There had barely been room in the refrigerator for food.

So I began talking. I told Walter of Marielle Vetters, and the story of the plane. I told him of Liat, and Epstein, and the second confrontation in the restaurant. I told him more of Brightwell, because Walter had been there when a woman came to my house asking for help in finding her lost daughter, a request that had led, in turn, to Brightwell and his Believers.

‘I ever tell you that you keep some strange company?’ he said, when I was done.

‘Thanks for pointing that out. What would I do without you?’

‘Spend money on expensive hotel rooms in New York. You sure you don’t want a beer?’

‘No, coffee’s fine.’

‘Something stronger?’

‘Not my bag any more.’

He nodded.

‘You’re going to go back to Epstein, aren’t you? You’re curious about this list, and the plane. More than that, you’re interested in Brightwell. He got under your skin.’

‘Yes.’

‘Doesn’t mean that what Brightwell thought about you was true or right. If you’re an angel, fallen or any other kind, then I’m Cleopatra. That stuff is okay if you’re Shirley MacLaine, otherwise it starts to sound flaky. But if you want some company dealing with the Chosen People, let me know.’

‘I thought you’d signed up for “don’t ask, don’t tell”?’

‘I’m an old man. I forget what I’ve said as soon as I’ve said it. Anyway, it’ll be an excuse to leave the house that doesn’t involve doctors, or a trip to the mall.’

‘You know, you’re quite the ad for active retirement.’

‘I’m going to be a centerfold for the AARP magazine. They promised. It’ll be like that Burt Reynolds pic from
Playgirl
, but with more class, and maybe more gray hair. Come on, I’ll show you to your bed. If you’re not going to drink beer, then you’re no good to me awake.’

Epstein called my cell phone before I went to sleep. Somewhere in our brief exchange there was an apology of sorts, perhaps from each of us.

I slept soundly.

I did not dream.

I
met Epstein late the following afternoon at Nicola’s Italian grocery and delicatessen at 54th and First. This part of town was known as Sutton Place, and for much of its history the rich and the poor had lived side by side here, tenements coexisting alongside the homes of socialites, the noise from factories, breweries and wharves providing the soundtrack while artists such as Max Ernst and Ernest Fiene worked in their studios. In the late 1930s, construction began on what was then known as the East River Drive, and subsequently became the FDR. The tenements and wharves began to disappear, and slowly high-rises started to take the place of many of the more civilized, characterful buildings. Still, some of those with long memories remembered a time when the apartments of Sutton Place were occupied mostly by actors and directors, when it was a haven for theatrical folk and, by extension, the gay community. It was said that eighty percent of the population of this small area was gay. Rock Hudson, among others, had an apartment in the 405 building across the street from Nicola’s. In those days, if you told a cab driver to take you to ‘Four out of Five’, he would bring you straight to its door.

The choice of Nicola’s as the venue for the meeting was mine. Nick, who owned the store along with his brother Freddy, was ex-military, having served his time in Vietnam. His genius there lay in sourcing whatever was necessary – food, equipment, booze – in order to ensure the continued smooth running of the US military endeavor in Southeast Asia, but particularly that element of the endeavor which affected the comfort and care of his unit. Whole camps had been sustained thanks to Nick’s abilities to scavenge and procure. Given another thousand men like him, the US might even have won the war. Now he had settled comfortably into the role of a store owner in New York, where his undoubted skills in negotiating and appropriating continued to serve him well.