The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  She kept running, even though her feet were cut by stones and her clothing torn by briars and thorns. She did not stop until the pain in her side was so great that she felt as though she were being ripped in half. She lay against a tree and thought that she heard, distantly, the sounds of men. She knew the face of the man at the door. He was one of those who had taken Pria the night before. She did not know why he had returned, or what had led him to do what he did. All that she knew was that she had to get away from this place, for they knew who she was. They had seen her, and they would find her. Alice called her mother from a phone at a gas station, the pumps locked and the station closed, for it was still early on Sunday morning. Her mother came with clothing, and what money she had, and Alice left that afternoon and did not ever return to the state in which she was born. She called in the years that followed, mostly with requests for money. She called twice each week, and sometimes more often than that. It was Alice’s one unfailing concession to her mother, and even at her lowest she always tried to keep the older woman from worrying more than she already did. There were other small kindnesses too: birthday gifts that arrived early, or more often late, but arrived nonetheless; cards at Christmas, a little cash included in the early years, but later only a signature and a scrawled greeting; and, very occasionally, a letter, the quality of the script and the color of the ink varying in accordance with the lengthy process of the missive’s completion. Her mother cherished them all, but mostly she was grateful for the calls. They let her know that her daughter was still alive.

  Then the calls ceased.

  Martha sat on the couch in my office, Louis standing to one side of her, Angel seated quietly in my chair. I was by the fireplace. Rachel had looked in on us briefly, then left.

  “You should have looked out for her,” Martha again told Louis.

  “I tried,” he said. He looked old and tired. “She didn’t want help, not the kind I could offer her.”

  Martha’s eyes ignited.

  “How can you say that? She was lost. She was a lost soul. She needed someone to bring her back. That should have been you.”

  This time, Louis said nothing.

  “You went to Hunts Point?” I asked.

  “Last time we spoke, she said that was where she was at, so that was where I went.”

  “Is that where you got hurt?”

  She lowered her head.

  “A man hit me.”

  “What was his name?” asked Louis.

  “Why?” she said. “You gonna do for him like you done for others? You think that will find your cousin? You just want to feel like a big man, now it’s too late to do what a good man would have done. Well, that don’t wash with me.”

  I intervened. The recriminations would get us nowhere.

  “Why did you go to him?”

  “Because Alice done told me she was working for him now. The other one, the one she was with before, he died. She said this new one was gonna take care of her, that he was going to find wealthy men for her. Wealthy men! What man would want her after all she’d done? What man…?”

  She started to cry again.

  I went to her and handed her a clean tissue, then slowly knelt before her.

  “We’ll need his name if we’re to start looking for her,” I said quietly.

  “G-Mack,” she said at last. “He calls himself G-Mack. There was a young white girl too. She said she remembered Alice, but she was calling herself LaShan on the street. She didn’t know where she’d gone to.”

  “G-Mack,” said Louis.

  “Ring any bells?”

  “No. Last I heard she was with a pimp called Free Billy.”

  “Looks like things changed.”

  Louis stood and helped Martha from her chair.

  “We need to get you something to eat. You need to rest up now.”

  She took his hand and gripped it tightly in her own.

  “You find her for me. She’s in trouble. I can feel it. You find her, and bring her back to me”

  The fat man stood at the lip of the bathtub. His name was Brightwell, and he was very, very old, far older than he seemed. Sometimes he acted like a man who had recently woken from a deep sleep, but the Mexican, whose name was Garcia, knew better than to question him about his origins. He recognized only that Brightwell was a thing to be obeyed, and to be feared. He had seen what the man had done to the woman, had watched through the glass as Brightwell’s mouth closed on hers. It had seemed to him that some grave knowledge had shown itself in the woman’s eyes at that moment, even as she weakened and died, as though she realized what was about to occur as her body failed her at last. How many others had he taken in this way? Garcia wondered, his lips against theirs as he waited for their essence to pass from them. And even if what Garcia suspected of Brightwell was not true, what kind of man would believe such a thing of himself?

  The stench was terrible as the chemicals worked on the remains, but Brightwell made no attempt to cover his face. The Mexican stood behind him, the lower half of his face concealed by a white mask.

  “What will you do now?” said Garcia.

  Brightwell spit into the tub, then turned his back on the disintegrating body. “I will find the other one, and I will kill her.”

  “Before she died, this one spoke of a man. She thought he might come for her.”

  “I know. I heard her call his name.”

  “She was supposed to be alone. Nobody cared.”

  “We were misinformed, but perhaps nobody cares anyway.”

  Brightwell swept by him, leaving him with the decaying body of the girl. Garcia did not follow him. Brightwell was wrong, but Garcia did not have the courage to confront him further on the issue. No woman, as death approached, would cry out over and over again a name that meant nothing to her.

  Someone did care.

  And he would come.

  II

  He that hath wife and children,

  hath given hostages to fortune…

  —Francis Bacon, Essays (1625)

  CHAPTER THREE

  The celebration of Sam’s christening continued around us. I could hear people laughing, and the startled hiss of bottles opening. Somewhere a voice began singing a song. It sounded like Rachel’s father, who tended to sing when he was in his cups. Frank was a lawyer, one of those hearty, hail-fellow-well-met types who liked to be the center of attention wherever he went, the kind who thought that he brightened up people’s lives by being loud and unintentionally intimidating. I had watched him in action at a wedding, forcing shy women to dance on the grounds that he was trying to take them out of their shells, even as they trembled awkwardly across the dance floor like newborn giraffes, casting longing glances back at their chairs. I supposed it could be said of him that he had a good heart, but unfortunately he didn’t have a sensitivity toward others to go with it. Aside from any concerns he might have had about his daughter, Frank seemed to regard my presence at such convivial events as a personal affront, as though at any moment I were going to burst into tears, or beat someone up, or otherwise rain on the parade that Frank was trying so hard to organize. We tried not to be alone together. To be honest, it wasn’t too difficult, as we both put our hearts into the effort.

  Joan was the strong one in the marriage, and a soft word from her could usually make Frank take things down a notch. She was a kindergarten teacher, and an old-style liberal Democrat who took very personally the way the country had changed in recent years under both Republicans and Democrats. Unlike Frank, she rarely spoke about her worries for her daughter directly, at least not to me. Only occasionally, usually when we were leaving them at the end of another sometimes awkward, sometimes mildly pleasant visit, would she take me lightly by the hand, and whisper, “Look after her, won’t you?”

  And I would assure her that I would take care of her daughter, even as I looked into her eyes and saw her desire to believe me collide with her fear that I would be unable to fulfill that promise. I wondered if, like the mi
ssing Alice, there was a taint upon me, a wound left by the past that would somehow always find a way to infect the present and the future. I had tried, in recent months, to discover a means of neutralizing the threat, mainly by declining offers of work that sounded like they could involve any serious form of risk, my recent evening with Jackie Garner being the honorable exception. The trouble was that any job that was worth doing necessitated risk of some kind, and so I was spending time on cases that were progressively sapping my will to live. I had tried to walk this path before, but I was not living with Rachel when I followed it, and I did not last long upon it before I found the lure of the dark woods impossible to ignore.

  Now a woman had come to my door, and she had brought with her her own pain, and the misery of another. It was possible that a simple explanation would arise for her daughter’s disappearance. There was little merit in ignoring the realities of Alice’s existence: her life at the Point was dangerous in the extreme, and her habit made her more vulnerable still. The women who worked those streets disappeared regularly. Some were fleeing their pimps or other violent men. Some tried to leave the life before it consumed them entirely, sick of robbery and rape, but few of those women succeeded, and most trudged back to the alleys and the parking lots with their hopes of escape entirely gone. The women tried to look out for one another, and the pimps monitored their movements too, if only to protect their investments, but these were gestures and little more. If someone was determined to hurt one of these women, then he would succeed.

  We brought Louis’s aunt into the kitchen and entrusted her to the care of one of Rachel’s relatives. Soon she was eating chicken and pasta and sipping lemonade in a comfortable chair in the living room. When Louis went to check on her a little later, he found her asleep, exhausted by all that she had tried to achieve for her daughter.

  Walter Cole joined us. He knew something of Louis’s past and suspected more. He was more knowledgeable about Angel, as Angel had the kind of criminal record that merited a sizable file all to itself, although its details pertained to the relatively distant past. I had asked Louis if we could involve Walter, and he acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Louis wasn’t the trusting kind, and he most certainly did not like involving the police in his affairs. Nevertheless, Walter, although retired, had connections with the NYPD that I no longer had, and was on better terms with serving officers than I was. Admittedly, that wasn’t difficult. There were those in the department who suspected that I had blood on my hands and would dearly have liked to call me to account for it. Cops on the street were less problematical for me, but Walter still had the respect of those higher up who might be in a position to offer assistance if it was needed.

  “You’ll go back to the city tonight?” I asked Louis.

  He nodded. “I want to find me that G-Mack.”

  I hesitated before I spoke.

  “I think you should wait.”

  Louis’s head tilted slightly, and his right hand slapped lightly against the arm of his chair. He was a man of few unnecessary movements, and this pretty much qualified as an explosion of emotion.

  “Why would you think that?” he said evenly.

  “This is what I do,” I reminded him. “You go in there all fired up with your guns blazing, and everybody with even a passing concern for their own personal safety will disappear, whether they know you or not. If he gets away from you, we’ll need to tear the city apart to find him, and we’ll waste valuable time doing it. We know nothing about this guy. We need to change that before we go after him. You’re thinking about revenge for what he did to the woman in there. That can come later. What concerns us is her daughter. I want you to hold off.”

  There was a risk involved in doing this. G-Mack now knew that someone was asking questions about Alice. Assuming that Martha was right, and something bad had befallen her, then the pimp had two options: he could sit tight, plead ignorance, and tell the women under him to do the same; or he could run. I just hoped that his nerve held until we got to him. My guess was that it would: he was new, since Louis knew nothing of him, and young; which meant that he was probably arrogant enough to consider himself a “playa” on the street. He had managed to establish some kind of operation at the Point. He would be reluctant to abandon it until it became absolutely necessary to do so.

  There was a long silence as Louis considered his options.

  “How long?” he said.

  I looked to Walter.

  “Twenty-four hours,” he said. “By then, I should have what you need.”

  “Then we’ll move on him tomorrow night,” I said.

  “We?” asked Louis.

  “We,” I said.

  He locked eyes with me.

  “This is personal,” he said.

  “I understand.”

  “We need to be clear on that. You got your way of doing things, and I respect that, but your conscience got no part to play in this. You start doubting, I want you to walk away. That goes for everyone.”

  His eyes flicked momentarily toward Walter. I could sense that Walter was about to respond, so I reached out and touched his arm, and he relaxed slightly. Walter would not involve himself in anything that violated his own strict moral code. Even without the badge, Walter was still a cop, and a good one. He had no need to justify himself to Louis.

  Nothing more was said. We were done. I told Walter to use the office phone, and he began making some calls. Louis went to wake Martha so that he could bring her back to New York with him. Angel joined me at the front door.

  “Does she know about you two?” I asked.

  “I’ve never met her before,” said Angel. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t even sure that the family existed. I figured someone bred him in a cage, then released him into the wild. But I think she’s smart. If she doesn’t know now, she’ll guess soon enough. Then we’ll see.”

  We watched as Rachel walked two of her friends to their car. She was beautiful. I loved the way that she carried herself, her poise, her grace. I felt something tear inside me, like a weakness in a wall that slowly begins to expand, threatening the strength and stability of the whole.

  “She won’t like it,” said Angel.

  “I owe Louis,” I replied.

  Angel almost laughed. “You got no debt to him, or to me. Maybe you feel like you do, but we don’t see it that way. You have a family now. You have a woman who loves you, and a daughter who depends on you. Don’t screw it up.”

  “I don’t intend to. I know what I have.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  What could I tell him? That I wanted to do this, that I needed to do this? It was part of the reason, I knew. Maybe also, in some low, hidden part of myself, I wanted to force them away, to hasten what I saw as an inevitable end.

  But there was one more element, one that I could not explain to Angel, or to Rachel, or even to myself. I felt it as soon as I saw the cab moving along the road, drawing slowly closer and closer to the house. I felt it as I watched the woman step onto the gravel in our drive. I felt it as she told her story, trying to hold back the tears but desperate not to show weakness in front of strangers.

  She was gone. Alice was gone, and wherever she now was she would never walk through this world as she once did. I couldn’t say how I knew it, any more than Martha could explain her sense that her daughter was at risk to begin with. This woman, filled with courage and love, was brought here for a reason. There was a connection, and it would not be denied. I had learned this from bitter experience. The troubles of others that found their way to my door were meant for my intervention and could not be ignored.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just know that it has to be done.”

  Gradually, most of the guests slipped away. They seemed to take with them whatever gaiety they had brought, leaving none behind in our house. Rachel’s parents, as well as her sister, were staying the night with us. Walter and Lee were due to spend a couple of days with us too, but Martha’s visit had caused th
e abandonment of that plan, and they were already on their way home so that Walter could talk to cops in person if necessary.

  I was clearing up outside when Frank Wolfe cornered me. He was taller than I, and bulkier. He’d played football in high school, and there were colleges sufficiently impressed by him to consider offering him a scholarship, but Vietnam intervened. Frank didn’t even wait for the draft. He was a man who believed in duty and responsibility. Joan was already pregnant when he left, although neither of them knew it at the time. His son, Curtis, was born while he was “in country,” and a daughter followed two years later. Frank won some medals, but he never spoke about how he came by them. When Curtis, who had become a deputy with the county sheriff ’s office, was killed during a bank raid, he didn’t disintegrate or descend into self-pity the way some men might have done but instead held his family close to him, binding them to him so that they would have him to lean upon, so that they would not fall. There was much that was admirable about Frank Wolfe, but we were too dissimilar ever to manage more than a few civil words to each other.