Ronald took from his jacket a sheaf of photocopied pages and laid them before Angel and Louis. The images upon them were undated, but they depicted the carved heads that could be seen both inside and outside the Chapel of the Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam. He had found the pictures buried in the archives of the Center for Maine History, and then, unbeknownst to himself, had followed a similar research path to the detective, staring at images of the foliate heads to be found on the churches and cathedrals of Western Europe. The English had called it the Green Man, but it predated that name by more than a millennium, and its spirit was older yet. When the first men came it was waiting for them among the trees, and in their minds it formed itself in their image: a human face rendered in wood and leaf.
‘It may be that it looks like this,’ said Ronald.
Angel picked up one of the pictures. It was the face of winter, the bleakest and most hostile of the visages from the Prosperous church. He thought of what Ross had said to them back in Brooklyn. It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.
‘You talked of roots,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Ronald. ‘I think roots drew the girl down.’
‘Roots and branches,’ said Angel. ‘Wood.’
‘And what does wood do?’ said Louis.
Angel smiled as he replied.
‘It burns.’
The killings in Asheville had not gone unremarked in Boston, for Garrison Pryor’s people had been following trails similar to Angel and Louis, albeit a little more discreetly. The deaths of William and Zilla Daund simply confirmed what Pryor had begun to suspect: that the attack on the detective had been ordered from the town of Prosperous. This indicated that the decision to leave the Believers’ mark at the scene had also been taken there, which meant, finally, that all of Pryor’s current troubles could be laid at the town’s door.
Prosperous had rarely troubled Pryor until now. It was a community unto itself, and he saw no reason to interfere with it as long as it was discreet in its activities. Now the town’s very insularity – its refusal to recognize its relationship to the larger world and the possible impact of its decisions upon those beyond the town’s boundaries – and the commitment of its protectors to its preservation, at any cost, had disturbed this state of equilibrium.
Prosperous, by its actions, had made retribution inevitable.
The call came through to Angel’s cell phone, its ID hidden. Louis felt that he should have been more surprised when Angel handed the phone to him and he heard the Collector’s voice.
‘Very impressive,’ said the Collector. ‘To be honest, I had wondered if Cambion might not have been right to bet everything on them, but clearly they weren’t quite as accomplished as he believed them to be.’
‘I think killing homeless men had blunted their edge,’ said Louis.
‘Oh, they’ve killed more than homeless men, but I won’t disagree. They swam in a small pool.’
‘How did you know about them?’
‘A process of elimination. I asked questions and found out that Parker had been nosing around in Prosperous’s business. It was possible that Prosperous might not have been involved, but Cambion sealed it for me. He’s long been interested in the town’s pet husband-and-wife killers.’
‘You could just have told us. You could just have given us the name of the town.’
‘But where would be the sport in that? And I know you, Louis, perhaps better than you know yourself. You’re meticulous. You want to fill in the blanks. What did the Daunds give you? Prosperous, or more? Wait, names: they gave you names. You wouldn’t have left without them. Am I correct?’
Louis put down his glass of orange juice. He’d just been settling into the business pages of the Times, but now he recognized that any interest he might have had in the newspaper or, indeed, the orange juice had largely dissipated.
‘A name,’ he conceded. ‘The woman gave me a name.’
‘Hayley Conyer.’
‘Shit.’
‘Oh, she wouldn’t like to hear you swear like that. She’s a god-fearing woman. That’s “god” with a small “g”, incidentally.’
‘You interested in her? Looking for a date?’
‘She’s very old.’
‘Begging your pardon, but I don’t believe you can afford to be particular.’
‘Don’t be facetious. She’s an interesting woman, and Prosperous is a fascinating town. You’ll like it.’
‘Is she on your list?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So why haven’t you taken her?’
‘Because it’s not just her, but the whole town. And generations of it. To do the sins of Prosperous justice, I’d have to dig up centuries of bones and burn them on a pyre. The whole town would have to be put to the torch, and that’s beyond my capabilities.’
Louis understood.
‘But not beyond ours.’
‘No.’
‘Why should we destroy an entire town?’
‘Because it colluded in what happened to the detective, and if you don’t wipe it from the earth it will continue its traditions into future generations, and those traditions are very, very nasty. Prosperous is a hungry town.’
‘So you want us to do your dirty work for you? Fuck you.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said the Collector. ‘You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee it. Oh, and pay special attention to that church of theirs. Flames won’t be enough. You’ll have to dig much deeper, and tear it apart with something far stronger.’
Louis sensed that the conversation was coming to a close.
‘Hey, since we’re being all civil and all, you find your friend Cambion?’
The Collector was standing in the premises of Blackthorn, Apothecary. He held a blade in his hands. Upon it was just a hint of blood.
‘I’m afraid he seems to have made his excuses and left before we could become better acquainted.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’
And he meant it.
‘Yes, it is,’ said the Collector, and he meant it too.
Seconds passed.
‘You told me that he lived here with someone else,’ said the Collector.
‘Yeah, big man. Dressed in yellow. Hard to miss.’
‘And no other?’
‘Not that I was aware of.’
‘Hmmm.’
The Collector stared at the tattered, partial wreckage of a human being that lay on a gurney before him. The man had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue. Most of his fingers and toes were also missing. Stitches marked the site of his emasculation. The Collector had killed him as an act of mercy.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I believe I may have discovered Mr Cambion’s missing physician. Be sure to send me a postcard from Prosperous.’
The Collector hung up. Angel looked up at Louis from over the Portland Press Herald.
‘Are you two, like, all buddies now?’
Louis sighed.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wish I’d never heard the name Charlie Parker …’
Garrison Pryor was sitting in a quiet corner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He could see into the next public room, so he knew that he was not being overheard or observed. Since the FBI’s visit to his offices, Pryor had grown concerned about surveillance to the point of paranoia. He no longer made or received delicate calls outside or on the office phones, especially not when he was dealing with the Principal Backer. The most important of the Backers now exchanged numbers for clean cell phones each day but otherwise they had fallen back on a primitive but virtually untraceable means of communicating sensitive information like cell phone numbers, a simple code based around the print edition of the Wall Street Journal: page, column, paragraph, line. Many of the older Backers found the routine almost reassuring, and Pryor thought that some might advocate retaining it once the FBI had exhausted itself chasing after imagined breaches of financial regulations.