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.

43

Angel and Louis followed the trail through the dust, the interior lit only by a single lamp that flickered in a corner. The room smelled of long-withered herbs, the scent of them infused in the grain of the wood and the peeling paint on the walls, but underpinning it was a medicinal odor that grew stronger as they approached the drapes concealing the back room.

And there was another smell again beneath them all: it was the unmistakable reek of rotting flesh.

Louis had replaced his gun in its holster, and now Angel did the same. Slowly Louis reached out and pulled aside the drapes, revealing the room beyond, and a man seated at a desk lit only by a banker’s lamp. The angle of the lamp meant that the man was hidden in shadow, but even in the darkness Angel could see that he was yet more misshapen than when last they’d met. He raised his head with difficulty as they entered, and his words were slurred as he spoke.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands.’

His twisted right hand reached for the lamp, its fingers so deformed that they appeared to have been lost entirely, the digits reduced to twin stumps at the end of the arm. Angel and Louis did not react, except for the merest flicker of compassion that briefly caused Angel’s eyes to close. It was beyond Angel’s capacities not to feel some sympathy, even for one such as this. His response did not go unnoticed.