Dark Hollow

by John Connolly

  "Uh-huh." My grandfather had used it as rat bait, until its sale was restricted. It was a metallic element, similar to lead or mercury, but far more poisonous. Its salts were soluble in water, almost tasteless and produced symptoms similar to influenza, meningitis or encephalitis. A lethal dose of thallium sulfate, maybe eight hundred milligrams or more, could kill in anything from twenty-four to forty hours.

  "So what sort of work did this Leo Voss do?" I asked.

  "Fairly straightforward stuff, mainly corporate, although what he did must have been pretty lucrative. He had a house in Beacon Hill, a summer place in the Vineyard, and still had some money in the bank, probably because he was single and there was no one putting fur coats on his credit card."

  Doreen, I thought. If Ellis could have afforded it, he'd have pasted pictures of her outside churches as a warning to bridegrooms.

  "They're still going through his files, but he seems to have been squeaky clean," concluded Ellis.

  "Which probably means that he wasn't."

  Ellis tut-tutted. "Such cynicism in one so young. Now I've got something for you: I hear you were talking to Willeford."

  "That's right. Is that a problem?"

  "Could be. He's gone, and I'm starting to resent arriving in places to find that you've already been there. It's making me feel inadequate, and I get enough of that at home."

  I felt my grip tighten on the phone. "Last I saw of him, he was sitting in the Sail Loft nursing a drink."

  "Willeford never nursed a drink in his life. They don't survive in the glass long enough to be nursed. He give any indication that he might be planning to go away somewhere?"

  "No, nothing." I recalled Tony's Celli's interest in Willeford and felt my mouth go dry.

  "What did you two talk about?"

  I paused before I spoke. "He did some work for Billy Purdue: tracing of birth parents."

  "That it?"

  "That's it."

  "He have any luck?"

  "I don't think so."

  Ellis went quiet, then said distinctly: "Don't hold back on me, Bird. I don't like it."

  "I'm not." It wasn't quite a lie, but I'm not sure that it qualified as the truth either. I waited for Ellis to say something more, but he didn't push the issue.

  "Stay out of trouble, Bird," was all he said, before he hung up.

  I had just finished cleaning off the table and was in my bedroom slipping on my boots when I heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Through the gap in the drapes I could see the rear of a gold Mercury Sable parked near the side of the house. I took my Smith & Wesson, wrapped it in a towel and walked onto the porch. And as I stepped into the cold morning sunlight, I heard a voice that I knew say:

  "Why would anybody plant so many trees? I mean, who has that kind of time? I can't even find time to get my laundry done."

  Angel stood with his back to me, staring out at the trees at the edge of my property. He wore a Timberland fleece top, a pair of brown corduroy pants and tan work boots. At his feet was a hard plastic suitcase which was so pitted and battered that it looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. A piece of blue climbing rope and the whim of fortune held it closed.

  Angel breathed in deeply then bent over as his body was racked by a fit of coughing. He spat something large and unpleasant on to the ground before him.

  "That's the clean air getting the shit out of your lungs," said a deep, drawling voice. From behind the raised trunk door of the car Louis appeared holding a matching Delsey case and suit carrier. He wore a black Boss overcoat beneath which a gray double-breasted suit shimmered. A black shirt was buttoned to the neck and his shaved head gleamed. In the open trunk, I could see a long, metal storage case. Louis never went anywhere without his toys.

  "I think that was my lung," said Angel, using the tip of his boot to poke with interest at whatever piece of matter had expelled itself from his body. As I looked at them both, my spirits lifted. I wasn't sure why they were here instead of back in New York, but, whatever the reason, I was glad. Louis glanced at me and nodded, which was usually as close as Louis ever came to looking pleased about anything.

  "You know, Angel," I said, "you make nature look untidy just by standing there."

  Angel turned and raised an arm in a sweeping gesture.

  "Trees," he said, shaking his head in bafflement and smiling. "So many trees. I ain't seen this many trees since I got thrown out of the Indian Scouts."

  "You know, I don't think I even want to know why," I said.

  Angel picked up his case. "Bastards. And I was just about to get my explorer's badge too."

  "Didn't think they had badges for the shit you was exploring," said Louis, from behind. "Badge like that could get a man thrown in jail in Georgia."

  "Funny," barked Angel. "It's just a myth that you can't be gay and do macho things."

  "Uh-huh. Just like it's a myth that all homosexuals wear nice clothes and take care of their skin."

  "That better not be aimed at me."

  It was nice to see that some things hadn't changed.

  "How you doin' today?" said Angel, as he pushed past me. "And lose the gun. We're staying, like it or not. You look like shit, by the way."

  "Nice suit," I remarked to Louis, as he followed Angel.

  "Thanks," he replied. "Never forget: no such thing as a brother with no taste, just a brother with no money."

  I stood on the porch for a moment, feeling a little stupid holding the towel-wrapped gun. Then, figuring that the matter had obviously been decided long before they got to Maine, I followed them into the house.

  I showed them to the spare bedroom, where the furniture consisted only of a mattress on the floor and an old closet.

  "Jesus," said Angel. "It's the Hanoi Hilton. If we knock on the pipes, someone better answer."

  "You gonna supply sheets, or we have to roll some drunks and steal their coats?" asked Louis.

  "I can't sleep here," said Angel, with an air of finality. "If the rats want to feed on me, fuckers should at least have to go to the trouble of climbing up a bedframe."

  He brushed past me again, and seconds later, I heard his voice call:

  "Hey, this one's much nicer. We'll take this."

  There came the unmistakable sound of someone bouncing up and down on my bed. Louis looked at me.

  "Might need that gun after all," he said. Then he shrugged and followed the sound of the springs.

  When I eventually got them out of my bedroom and had arranged to have some extra furniture, including a bed, taken out of the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road and delivered to the house, we sat around the kitchen table and I waited for them to tell me why they were here. It had begun to rain: hard, cold drops that spoke of the coming of snow.

  "We're your guardian angels," said Angel.

  "Why doesn't that fill me with a sense of blessing?" I replied.

  "Or maybe we just heard that this is the place to be," continued Angel. "Anybody who's anybody is here right now. You got your Tony Celli, you got your feds, you got your local shit-kickers, you got your dead Asians. Shit, this place is like the UN with guns."

  "What do you know?" I asked.

  "We know that you've been pissing people off already," he replied. "What happened to your face?"

  "Guy with a harelip tried to educate me with a cattle prod, then rearranged my hairline with his shoe."

  "That's Mifflin," said Louis. "He have another guy with him, looked like someone dropped a safe on his head and the safe lost?"

  "Yeah," I said. "He didn't kick me, though."

  "That's 'cause the message probably got halfway from his brain to his foot then forgot where it was going. His name's Berendt. He's so dumb he makes dodos look smart. Tony Clean was with them?" While he spoke, he balanced one of my carving knives on the tip of his index finger and amused himself by tossing it in the air and catching it by the handle. It was a pretty neat trick. If the circus came to town, he was a shoo-in.

  "They were
staying at the Regency," I said. "I got to visit Tony's room."

  "Was it nice?" asked Angel, pointedly running a hand along the underside of the table and examining the accumulated dust on the tips of his fingers.

  "Yeah, pretty nice, apart from the kicks in the head and the electric shocks."

  "Fuck him. We should make him stay here. The squalor would put him back in touch with his roots."

  "You criticize my house again, you can sleep in the yard."

  "Probably be cleaner," he muttered. "And warmer."

  Louis tapped a long, slim finger gently on the tabletop. "Hear there's a lot of money got misdirected around these parts. A lot of money."

  "Yeah, so I gather."

  "Any idea where it is?"

  "Maybe. I think it's with a guy called Billy Purdue."

  "That's what I hear too."

  "From Tony Celli's end?"

  "Disaffected employees. They figure this Billy Purdue's so dead, someone should name a cemetery after him."

  I told them about the deaths of Rita and Donald. I noticed Angel and Louis exchange a glance and I knew that there was more to come.

  "Billy Purdue take out Tony's men?" asked Angel.

  "Two of them, at least. Assuming he's the one who took the money, and that's what Tony Celli and the law have assumed."

  Louis stood and carefully washed his mug. "Tony's in trouble," he said at last. "Got involved in some deal on Wall Street that fell through." I had heard stories that the Italians had moved into Wall Street, establishing paper companies and getting crooked brokers to float them and rip off investors. There was a lot of money to be made if it was done right.

  "Tony screwed up," continued Louis, "and now you got a guy whose days are numbered in single figures."

  "How bad is it?"

  Louis placed the mug upside down to drain, then leaned against the sink. "You know what PERLS is?"

  "PERLS are," I corrected him, incorrectly as it turned out. "Something found in an oyster?"

  "Easy to know you never had no money to invest," said Louis. "PERLS stands for Principal Exchange Rate Linked Security. It's a structured note, a kind of bond sold by investment banks. It's packaged to look safe, except it's risky as sex with a shark. Basically, the buyer bets a certain amount of money and the return is based on the changes in the exchange rate of a number of different currencies. It's a formula, and if things go right, you can make a killing."

  I always found it fascinating that Louis could drop the monosyllabic black gunman shtick if the subject required it, but I didn't point it out to him.

  "So Tony Celli thinks he's a financial wizard, and some people in Boston believe him," he went on. "He takes care of laundering, passes a lot of money through offshore banks and paper companies, until it finds its way back into the right accounts. He deals with the accountants, but he's also the first point of contact for any cash. He's like the thinnest part of an hourglass: everything has to go through him to get to somewhere else. And sometimes, Tony makes investments on the side using other people's money, or makes a little on currency exchanges, and keeps what he makes. No one cares, long as he doesn't get too greedy."

  "Let me guess," I interrupted. "Tony got too greedy."

  Louis nodded. "Tony's tired of being an Indian and now he wants to be a chief. He figures he needs money to do that, more than he's got. So he gets talking to some derivatives salesman who doesn't have a fucking clue who Tony is beyond the fact that hea wop in a striped shirt with money to spend, because Tony is trying to keep his dealings as low-key as possible. He convinces Tony to buy a variation on these PERLS, linked to the difference between the value of some Southeast Asian currencies and a basket of other currencies-dollars, Swiss francs, German marks, I heard-and pockets the commission. The thing is so dangerous it should be ticking, but Tony buys in for one and a half million dollars, most of which isn't his own money, because there are midwestern insurance companies and pension funds in on the deal too and Tony figures wrongly that they're too conservative to bet on a risky hand. It's purely a short-term investment, and Tony figures he'll have his money made before anybody notices he's holding onto the cash for longer than usual."

  "So what happened?"

  "You read the papers. The yen plummets, banks fail, the whole economy of Southeast Asia starts to come unstuck.

  The value of Tony's bonds falls by 95 percent in forty-eight hours, and his life expectancy falls by roughly the same amount. Tony sends some people to look for the salesman and they find him in Zip City down on 18th Street, laughing about how he ripped some guy's face off. That's what these salesmen call it when they sell someone an exploding bond."

  And with those words, according to Louis, the salesman had signed his own death warrant. He was taken when he went to the bathroom, brought to a basement in Queens and tied to a chair. Then Tony came in, stuck his fingers in the soft flesh beneath the guychin, and started to pull. It took him less than two minutes to tear the guy's face apart, then they put him in a car and beat him to death in some woods upstate.

  Louis picked up the knife again, gave it a couple of extra spins for good luck, then put it back in its wooden block. There was no blood on his fingertip, despite the pressure of the knifepoint. "So Tony's in the hole for the cash, and some people higher up start getting concerned about the length of time it's taking for their money to reach them. Then Tony gets lucky: a mook in Toronto, who owes Tony big time, tells him about this old Cambodian guy living the quiet life in Hamilton, south of the city. It seems the old man was Khmer Rouge, used to be a deputy director in the Tuol Seng camp in Phnom Penh."

  I had heard of Tuol Seng. It had once been a school in the Cambodian capital, but was converted into a place of torture and execution by the Khmer Rouge when they took over the country. Tuol Seng had been run by the big-eared camp director known as Comrade Deuch, who had used whips, chains, poisonous reptiles and water to torture and kill maybe sixteen thousand people, including Westerners who strayed too close to the Cambodian coast.

  "Seems like this old man had friends in Thailand, and made a lot of money on the side by acting as a conduit for heroin smuggling," said Louis. "When the Vietnamese invaded, he disappeared and reinvented himself as a restaurateur in Toronto. His daughter had just started school in Boston, so Tony targeted her, took her and sent her old man a ransom demand to cover his debts, and then some. The old man couldn't go to the cops because of his past, and Tony gave him seventy-two hours to comply, though his daughter was already dead by then. The old man comes up with the money, sends his men down to Maine for the drop and-bam!-it all goes haywire."

  That explained the presence of the Toronto cop, Eldritch. I mentioned him to Louis and he raised a slim finger. "One more thing: at the same time that the killings were going down here, the old man's house in Hamilton burned to the ground, with him, the rest of his family and his personal guards still in it. Seven people, all told. Tony wanted it to be clean, because he's a clean kind of guy."

  "So Tony's got a price on his head and then Billy Purdue takes his get-out-of-jail-free card," I remarked. "Now, you want to tell me what that look that passed between you and Angel was about?" When Louis had finished talking, Angel had once again glanced at him in a way that told me that there was something more to hear, and it wasn't good.

  Louis watched as the rain speckled the window.

  "You got more problems than Tony and the law," he said quietly. His face was serious, his expression mirrored by the usually ebullient Angel.

  "How bad?"

  "Don't think it gets any worse. You ever hear of Abel and Stritch?"

  "No. What do they do, make soap?"

  "They kill people."

  "With all due respect, that hardly makes them unique in the present company."

  "They enjoy it."

  And for the next half hour, Louis traced the path of the two men known only as Abel and Stritch, a trail marked by torture, burnings, gassings, casual sexual homicide, paid and unpaid assas
sinations. They broke bones and spilled blood; they electrocuted and asphyxiated. Their trail wound its way around the world like a coil of barbed wire, stretching from Asia and South Africa to South and Central America, through every trouble spot where people might pay to have their enemies, real or imagined, terrorized and killed.

  Louis told me of an incident in Chile, when a family suspected of harboring Mapuche Indians was targeted by agents of Pinochet's National Intelligence Directorate. The family's three sons, all in their early twenties, were taken to the basement of an abandoned office building, gagged and tied to the concrete supports of the building. Their mother and sisters were led in and forced at gunpoint to sit facing the men. Nobody spoke.

  Then a figure had appeared from the darkness at the back of the room, a squat, pale man with a bald head and dead eyes. Another man remained in the shadows, but they could see his cigarette flare occasionally and could smell the smoke he exhaled.

  In his right hand, the pale man held a large, five-hundred-watt soldering iron, adapted so that its glowing tip was almost half an inch long and burned at two or three hundred degrees. He walked to the youngest son, pulled back his shirt and applied the tip to his breast, just below the sternum. The iron hissed as it entered the flesh, and the smell of burning pork filled the room. The young man struggled as the iron went deeper and deeper, and muffled noises of panic and pain came from his mouth. His tormentor's eyes had changed now, had become bright and alive, and his breathing came in short, excited gasps. With his free hand, he fumbled at the zipper of the man's pants, and he reached in and held him as the iron moved upward toward his heart. As it pierced the wall of muscle, the pale man's grip tightened and he smiled as his victim shook and died.

  The women told them what they knew, which was little, and the other men died quickly, as much because the pale man had spent himself as because of what had been revealed.

  Now these two killers had come north, north as far as Maine.

  "Why are they here?" I said at last.

  "They want the money," said Louis. "Men like them, they make enemies. If they're good at what they do, most of those enemies don't live long enough to do them any harm. But the longer they keep working, the more the chances of someone slipping through the net increase. These two have been killing for decades. The clock is ticking on them now. That money would help to provide a pretty cool retirement fund, maybe help them escape the net that's closing in on them. I got a feeling they may be calling on you, which is why we're here."