The Wrath of Angels (27 page)

What happened after that Tate didn’t know, and didn’t care, but he had photographs of Keys and the woman together. He then shared what he knew with his listeners, and made sure the photographs were disseminated to every newspaper in the state, and for an outlay of five hundred dollars he did his part in setting back union activism in the state of Texas. Keys denied everything, and Tate later learned from the waitress-cum-whore that all he’d done back at his place was to play her some jazz that she didn’t like, talk about his dying mother, and then start crying before calling her a cab. Afterward, Kelly had contacted him personally to say that the Backers were pleased, and he’d received a substantial bonus in cash through Becky. The waitress-whore was shipped back to Mexico on some trumped-up immigration charge, and there she quietly vanished into the sands somewhere around Ciudad Juarez, or so Becky had hinted when she was drunk one evening and he was almost considering making a pass at her, until she told him about what probably happened to the girl in Mexico, and how the Backers had contacts down there. She grinned as she said it, and any desire for Becky on Tate’s part had vanished there and then and had never returned.

Unfortunately, there were other individuals who weren’t so pleased with what Tate had done, and he hadn’t yet learned to be clever enough to protect himself from his own vices. Tate wasn’t above doing a little banging of his own. He wasn’t married, but he did have a weakness for colored girls, and particularly the colored whores over at Dicky’s on Dolorosa, a hangover from the days when San Antonio’s red light district was one of the largest in the state, and the least racially segregated. Anyway, on those nights when a colored whore wasn’t available Tate wasn’t above dipping in some dark Mexican, and one thing led to another, and somehow it became known that Davis Tate frequented Dicky’s, and when he emerged one evening smelling of the disinfectant soap that Dicky’s provided for the hygiene needs of its customers he was photographed by a white man in a car, and when he objected, the car doors opened and three Mexicans piled out, and Davis Tate got the beating of his life. But he remembered the number plate of the car, oh yes, and he made the call while he was still waiting for treatment at San Antonio Community Hospital. Barbara Kelly had assured him that the matter would be taken care of, and it was.

The car was registered to one Francis ‘Frankie’ Russell, a cousin of George Keys who did a little PI work on the side: marital stuff, mostly. Twenty-four hours later, the body of Frankie Russell was found at the eastern edge of Government Canyon. He had been castrated, and it was suggested that he shared some of the weaknesses of his cousin, and the story of the union organizer who liked screwing immigrant women, illegal and otherwise, was dragged up again. No connection was made between Russell’s murder and the discovery a week later of the remains of three Mexican chicken farm workers dumped in Calaveras Lake. After all, they had not been castrated, simply shot.

It was, said those who knew about such matters, probably a gang affair.

But Davis Tate knew better, and he was very, very frightened. He hadn’t signed up to murder. All he wanted was for one beating to be avenged with another. On the night that the bodies were pulled from Calaveras Lake he got shitfaced drunk and made a call to Barbara Kelly, in the course of which he complained that he had not wanted the men who attacked him to be killed, merely taught a lesson, and Kelly had replied that they
had
been taught a lesson, and Tate had begun shouting, and making threats, and talking about his conscience. He’d hung up, and opened another bottle, and somehow he must have fallen asleep on the floor because he wasn’t sure that he was even awake when he opened his eyes and saw the beautiful, dark-haired woman looking down at him.

‘My name is Darina Flores,’ she said. ‘Barbara Kelly sent me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to warn you about the importance of remaining faithful to the cause. I want to make sure that you understand the seriousness of the document that you signed.’

She knelt beside him and clutched his hair in her left hand, while her right fixed itself on his throat. She was very, very strong.

‘And I want to tell you about the Backers, and more.’

She whispered in his ear, and her words became images, and something inside Davis Tate died that night.

That memory came back to him now as Becky spoke. She wasn’t on his side. He’d guessed that a long time ago. She represented the interests of the Backers, and those who used them in turn.

‘What should I do?’ he said. ‘How do I get these ratings back up?’

‘It has been suggested that you’re too subtle, that you’re not being radical enough. You need to stir up some controversy.’

‘How?’

‘Tomorrow you’re going to hear about the disappearance of a teenage girl from upstate New York. Her name is Penny Moss, and she’s fifteen years old. You’ll be given an exclusive: when Penny Moss’s remains are discovered, you’ll be supplied with proof that her killer is a Muslim convert who decided to make an example of her for wearing inappropriate dress. Even the cops won’t know before you do. The material will be sent to you anonymously. We’ll have speakers ready to comment. You’re about to become the eye of the storm.’

Tate almost vomited up his beer. He didn’t mind tearing meat from the bones of liberals because, say what you liked about liberals – and Tate did, more than most – they didn’t tend to voice their objections by pointing a gun at someone, just as they didn’t blow up federal buildings in Oklahoma. Muslims were another matter: he was happy to bait them from the safety of his radio station as long as he was just one voice among many, but he didn’t want to become a figurehead for anti-Islamic feeling. He owned a nice apartment in Murray Hill, and parts of Marray Hill were becoming like Karachi or Kabul. He preferred being able to walk the streets there without endangering his life, and he certainly didn’t want to have to move because of a radio show.

‘But how do I know that it’s true?’

‘Because we’ll make it true.’

All of his taste for beer had left him. If this went down the way Becky was suggesting it would, he was going to need a clear head. Only one further detail bothered him.

‘This girl, this Penny Moss, I haven’t heard anything about her. When did she go missing?’

Later, just as he was about to die, he would realize that he had known the answer already, had guessed it before Becky even opened her lips and began to speak, and he could almost have mouthed the words along with her if he chose.

‘Tonight,’ said Becky. ‘She goes missing tonight.’

B
ack at Nicola’s, Epstein had resigned himself to the absence of his bodyguards, not that he had a whole lot of choice in the matter. Nick’s office was warm and smelled faintly of fresh baked bread, and his coffee was very good. At first I felt that I was being more hospitable to Epstein than he probably deserved given the nature of our previous encounter, but it didn’t take me long to realize something about the confrontation that my anger had caused me to underestimate at the time: the extent to which Epstein had been frightened, and frightened of me. Even now he remained uneasy, and it wasn’t due only to the absence of his protectors. Despite all of my protestations, and Liat’s nod of salvation, I was still a troubling figure for the old man. The presence of Louis in the room probably wasn’t making him feel any better about the situation. Louis could make the dead nervous.

‘Your hand is shaking,’ I said, as I watched him sip from his cup.

‘It’s strong coffee.’

‘Really? I could have walked on the surface of that Arab stuff you served me last night if the cup had been big enough, and Nick’s coffee is too strong for you?’

He shrugged. ‘
Chacun à son goût
.’

Louis tapped me on the shoulder

‘That’s French,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘It means,’ said Louis very carefully, as if explaining something to a small, slow child, ‘“Everyone to his own taste.”’

‘You done?’ Sometimes I wondered if Angel didn’t act as some kind of stabilizing influence on Louis. It was a possibility that I found worrying.

‘Just helping,’ said Louis. He looked at Walter Cole as if to say, ‘What’s a man to do?’

‘I didn’t know it was French,’ said Walter.

‘See?’ said Louis to me. ‘He didn’t know.’

‘He’s never been further east than Cape May,’ I said. ‘The closest he’s been to France is patting a poodle.’

‘What does it mean?’ resumed Walter. ‘What he said?’

‘I just explained what it meant,’ said Louis. ‘Everyone to his own taste.’

‘Oh,’ said Walter. ‘It sounded different the other way.’

‘That’s because it was in French,’ said Louis.

‘I guess,’ said Walter. ‘French people got a lot of words for stuff, don’t they?’

At that point, Louis stopped talking to him, and therefore missed the wink that Walter threw my way.

‘So what now?’ asked Epstein.

‘You speak German, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I speak German.’

‘Jesus,’ said Walter, ‘it’s like Ellis Island in here.’

‘Do you know what
Seitensprung
is?’ I continued.

‘Yes,’ said Epstein. ‘It is the act of changing partners while one is dancing.’

Walter shifted in his seat and tapped Louis on the arm.

‘The Germans got a lot of words for stuff too, don’t they?’ he said.

‘You’re fucking with me, man, I know it.’

‘No, it’s like a whole other language . . .’

I tried to ignore them and concentrated on Epstein. ‘I don’t know why or how I ended up on that list, but you have no reason to believe that I’d harm you. That’s why I brought you here, and that’s why you’re without your bodyguards. If I’d wanted you dead, then you’d be dead, and these two men wouldn’t be here to witness it.’ I caught Louis’s eye. ‘Well, one of them wouldn’t be.’

‘My fear, as I explained to you last night, is that there may be a presence within you that has not yet revealed itself,’ said Epstein.

‘And I told you that, if I was like them, whatever was sleeping inside me would have awakened by now. There were so many times when, if I was a host for something foul lying dormant in me, it could have shrugged off its torpor and intervened to save those like it, but it didn’t. It didn’t because it isn’t there.’

Epstein’s shoulders slumped. He looked old, older even than he was.

‘There is so much at stake,’ he said.

‘I know that.’

‘If we were wrong about you—’

– ‘then you’d all be dead, every one of you. There would be no percentage in not killing you.’

Epstein did not answer. He closed his eyes. I thought he might be praying. When he opened them again, he appeared to have reached a decision.

‘
Seitensprung
,’ he said, and nodded. ‘We don’t change partners during the dance.’

‘No.’

‘So what now?’

‘What do you think?’

‘We need to find that plane,’ said Epstein.

‘Why?’ asked Louis.

‘Because there’s another version of the list on it,’ I said. ‘Barbara Kelly was killed because the people she worked for found out that she was trying to repent, to save herself by revealing what she knew. Her list is gone, but that list in the forest remains. It’s probably older than Kelly’s, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still worth securing.’

‘But we don’t know where the plane is,’ said Walter.

‘You could call your friend, Special Agent Ross, at the FBI,’ I said to Epstein. ‘He could look at satellite images, try to track changes in the forest that might reveal the path of a fallen airplane.’

‘No,’ said Epstein.

‘Don’t you trust him?’

‘I trust him implicitly, but as I told you yesterday, we don’t know who else is on that list. It may be that even the FBI is infected. The risk of alerting them to what we’re trying to do is too high.’ He leaned forward on the table, clasping his hands together. ‘Are you sure that the Vetters woman doesn’t know the location of the plane?’

‘She told me that her father didn’t say.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘Her father and his buddy were lost when they came across it. It may be that he gave some more specific indication of the area to her before he died, although if he did then she didn’t share it with me.’

‘You have to go back to her and discover everything that she knows. Everything. Meanwhile, we’ll try to trace the movements of Barbara Kelly and find out all that we can about her. It may be that she secreted away a copy of the list before she died.’

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. Epstein might have been right about Kelly making a second copy of the list and storing it away from her house, but if she did I was pretty certain that she gave up its location under torture.

‘Marielle Vetters,’ I said.

Epstein looked confused.

‘What?’ he said.

‘That’s the name of the woman who gave me that list. Her father’s name was Harlan, and his friend’s name was Paul Scollay. They come from a town called Falls End, at the edge of the Great North Woods.’

Epstein’s face cleared.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, although I think he already knew the answer to the question.

‘Because
I
trust
you
.’

‘Even after what happened last night?’

‘Maybe especially after what happened last night. I didn’t like it at the time, and I don’t want a repeat of it, but I understand why you reacted the way that you did. We’re on the same side, rabbi.’

‘The side of light,’ he said.

‘Lightish,’ I corrected him. ‘I’ll talk to Marielle, and to Ernie Scollay, just in case his brother might have let something slip over the years. You’ll keep your people away from them, though.’

‘Only Liat will know their names.’

‘And Liat doesn’t tell, right?’

‘No, Mr Parker, Liat doesn’t tell. She is very good at keeping secrets.’

He glanced at Louis and Walter. There was more than he wanted to say about this.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of them.’