‘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. ‘Things found in oysters?’
‘Not unless an oyster can take you for one-point-five mil. Easy to know you never had no money to invest.’
‘I live an ascetic existence, like Father Damien without the lepers.’
‘PERLS,’ said Louis, ‘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 a few 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 he’s a 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 south-east 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 south-east Asia starts to come unstuck. The value of Tony’s bonds falls by ninety-five per cent 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, ‘cause 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 guy’s chin, 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: some 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 Peng.’
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, the rape and violent abuse of women and children, paid and unpaid assassinations. 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 terrorised and killed, whether those enemies were guerillas, agents of the government, peasants, priests, nuns or children.
Louis told me of an incident in Chile, when a family suspected of harbouring Mapuche Indians was targeted by agents of Pinochet’s National Intelligence Directorate. The family’s three sons, aged seventeen, eighteen and twenty, 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 the boy’s 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 boy 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 boy’s pants, and he reached in and held him as the iron moved upward towards the boy’s heart. As it pierced the wall of muscle, the pale man’s grip tightened and he smiled as the boy shook and died.
The women told them what they knew, which was little, and the other boys died quickly, as much because the pale man had spent himself as because of what had been revealed.
Now these men 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. I got a feeling they may be calling on you, which is why we’re here.’
‘What do they look like?’ I asked, but I already had my suspicions.
‘That’s the problem. Nothing on Abel, ‘cept he’s tall with silver, almost white, hair. But Stritch, the torturer . . . The guy is a fucking freak-show: small, with a wide, bald head, a mouth like an open wound. Looks like Uncle Fester but without the good nature.’
I thought of the strange, goblinlike man outside the inn, the same man who had later turned up at Java Joe’s ostensibly proselytising for the Lord, with his crudely-drawn picture of a mother and child and his soft, implicit threats.
‘I’ve seen him,’ I said.
Louis wiped his hand across his mouth. I had never before found him so concerned about the threat posed by anyone. In my mind, I still had an image of the darkness coming alive in an old warehouse back in Queens and one of the city’s most feared killers rising up on his toes, his mouth wide, as Louis’s blade entered the base of his skull. Louis didn’t frighten easily. I told him about the car and the encounter in the coffee shop, and the lawyer named Leo Voss.
‘My guess is that Voss was their point of contact, the guy people came to if they wanted to hire Abel and Stritch,’ said Louis. ‘If he’s dead, then they killed him. They’re closing down the operation, and they don’t want no loose ends. If Stritch is here, then so is Abel. They don’t work separately. He make any other move?’
‘No. I got the feeling he just wanted to make his presence felt.’
‘Takes a special guy to drive around in a dead man’s Caddy,’ said Angel. ‘Kind of guy who wants to draw attention to himself.’
‘Or away from someone else,’ I said.
‘He’s watching,’ said Louis. ‘So is his partner, somewhere. They’re waiting to see if you can lead them to Billy Purdue.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The woman and the boy, were they tortured?’
I shook my head. ‘The woman was strangled. No sign of other injuries or sexual assault. The boy died because he got in the way.’ I recalled the sight of Rita Ferris’s mouth as the cops turned her over. ‘There was one thing: the killer sewed the woman’s mouth shut with black thread after she died.’
Angel screwed up his face. ‘Makes no sense.’
‘Makes no sense if it’s Abel and Stritch,’ agreed Louis. ‘They’d have ripped her fingers off and hurt the boy to find out what she knew about the money. Doesn’t sound like their work.’
‘Or Tony Celli’s,’ added Angel.
‘The cops think Billy may have killed them,’ I said. ‘It’s possible, but there’s still no reason for him to mutilate the mouth.’
We were silent then as we balanced and weighed what we knew. I think we all moved towards the same conclusion, but it was left to Louis to voice it:
‘There’s someone else.’
Outside, the rain fell hard, hammering on the tiles and raking at the windowpanes. I felt a coldness at my shoulder, or perhaps it was just the memory of a touch, and the voice of the rain seemed to whisper to me in a language that I could not comprehend.
A couple of hours later, a truck arrived with some of my furniture and we set up a bed in the spare room, added some throw rugs and generally made the place look like a home away from home, as long as the original home was nothing too fancy. Then, when we had all freshened up, we drove into Portland, past the blue-and-white lights of the Christmas tree at Congress Square and the second, larger tree at Monument Square. We parked the car, then strolled down to the Stone Coast Brewing Company on York Street, where Angel and Louis drank microbrew beer while we decided where to eat.
‘You got a sushi bar around here?’ asked Louis.
‘I don’t eat seafood,’ I said.
‘You don’t eat seafood?’ Louis’s voice rose an octave. ‘The fuck you mean, you don’t eat seafood? You live in Maine. Lobsters practically hand you a knife and fork and invite you to chew on their ass.’
‘You know I don’t eat seafood,’ I replied patiently. ‘It’s just a thing.’
‘It’s not just a thing, man, it’s a phobia.’
Beside me, Angel smiled. It was good to be out like this, to be acting in this way, after what we had spoken of earlier.
‘Sorry,’ I continued, ‘but I draw the line at anything with more than four legs, or no legs at all. I bet you even eat the lungs out of crabs.’
‘Lungs, the crab juice . . .’
‘That’s not juice, Louis, it’s the contents of their digestive system. Why do you think it’s yellow?’
He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ain’t no crab shit in sushi anyways.’
Angel drained the last of his beer. ‘Well I’m with Bird on this one,’ he said. ‘Last time I was in LA I ate in a sushi bar. Pretty much ate them out of anything that had gills. Went outside, took one last look in the window, and the place had a “C” grading from the health department. A fucking “C”! I might eat in a burger joint with a “C” grade, worst you could expect would be a dose of Ronald McDonald’s Revenge, but C-graded sushi . . . Man, that stuff 11 kill you. Damn fish was so bad, it almost pulled a gun and tried to steal my wallet.’
Louis put his head in his hands and prayed to whomever it was that people like Louis prayed to – Smith & Wesson, probably.
We ate in Tony’s Thai Taste on Wharf Street, down in the Old Port. As it happened, sitting three tables away from us were Samson and Doyle, the two feds I had seen at Rita Ferris’s apartment, and the Toronto policeman, Eldritch. They gave us interested but unfriendly looks, then went back to their red curries.
‘Friends of yours?’ said Angel.
‘The federal boys, plus their cousin from north of the border.’
‘Feds got no reason to like you, Bird. Not that they need a reason not to like anyone.’
Our own food came: one Paradise Chicken for Louis and two chefs favourites for Angel and me, made up of beef with peppers, pineapple and green peas, spiced with lemon grass and a garlic and chili sauce. Louis caught the smell of the garlic and wrinkled his nose. I figured no one would be kissing either of us good night tonight.
We ate in silence. The feds and Eldritch left in the course of our meal. I got the feeling that I’d be hearing from them again. When they were gone, Louis dabbed his lips carefully with a napkin and drained the last of his Tsing-Tsao beer. ‘You got a plan of campaign on the Billy Purdue thing?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve asked around, but he’s gone to earth. Part of me says that he’s here, but another part tells me that he may be heading north. If he’s in trouble, my guess is that he may look for someone who’s been sympathetic to him in the past, and those people are precious few. There’s a guy up by Moosehead Lake in a place called Dark Hollow, acted as Billy Purdue’s foster parent for a time. It may be that he knows something, or has heard from him.’
I told them about my conversation in the ba
r with Willeford and his subsequent disappearance. ‘I’m also going to pay a call on Cheryl Lansing, see if she can add anything to what she told Willeford.’
‘Sounds like your curiosity’s been sparked,’ remarked Angel.
‘Maybe, but . . .’
‘But?’
I didn’t want to tell him about my experience the night before, no matter how much I trusted him. That was the stuff of madness. ‘But I owe something to Rita and her son. And, anyhow, it seems like other people have decided to involve me whether I like it or not.’
‘Ain’t that always the way?’
‘Yeah.’ I reached into my wallet, took out the bill from the furniture removal firm and waved it pointedly at Angel. ‘Ain’t that always the way?’ I echoed.
He smiled. ‘Take that attitude and we might never leave.’
‘Don’t even go there, Angel,’ I warned. ‘And pick up the check. It’s the least you can do.’
Chapter Ten
I woke late and refreshed for the trip to Bangor. Angel and Louis were still in bed, so I drove to Oak Hill, intending to stop off at the bank to withdraw some cash for the trip north. But when I had finished, I headed on down Old County Road, then onto Black Point Road and past the White Caps Sandwich Shop until I reached Ferry Road. To my left was the golf course, to my right the summer homes, and ahead of me was the parking lot where the men had died. The rain had washed away the evidence, but lengths of tattered crime scene tape still fluttered on one of the barriers as the wind howled in off the sea.
As I stood, taking in the scene, a car pulled up behind me, a cruiser driven by one of the Neck cops.
‘You okay, sir?’ he asked, as he stepped from the car.
‘Yeah, just looking,’ I replied. ‘I live up on Spring Street.’
He sized me up, then nodded. ‘I recognise you now. Sorry, sir, but after what happened here, we have to be careful.’
I waved a hand at him, but he seemed to be in the mood for conversation. He was young, certainly younger than I was, with straw-coloured hair and soft, serious eyes. ‘Strange business,’ he said. ‘It’s usually pretty quiet and peaceful here.’
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