The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  The NYPD duly arrived, and discovered that Don Julio was staying in a Manhattan hotel. When the cops went to his room, they found maps, notes, and a great deal of material related to military aviation. The FBI were called in, and as they dug deeper into the mystery of the dead Spaniard, they discovered that he was actually one Ulrich von der Osten, a captain in Nazi military intelligence, and he was the brains behind the main German spy network in the United States. The man who had fled the scene of the accident was Kurt Frederick Ludwig, von der Osten’s assistant, and together the two men had managed to recruit eight accomplices who were passing details of military strength, shipping schedules, and industrial production back to Berlin, including the departure and arrival times of ships using New York Harbor and the numbers of Flying Fortresses being sent to England. The reports were written in invisible ink and mailed to pseudonymous recipients at fictitious foreign addresses. Letters to one “Manuel Alonzo,” for example, were meant for Heinrich Himmler himself. Ludwig was subsequently arrested, he and his associates were tried in federal court in Manhattan, and they each received a sentence of up to twenty years for their troubles. Sam Lichtman, with one surge of gas, had managed to cripple the Nazis’ entire intelligence network in the United States.

  My father told me Lichtman’s story when I was a boy, and I never forgot it. I guessed that Lichtman was a Jewish name, and it seemed somehow apt that it should have been a Jew who knocked down a Nazi on Seventh Avenue in 1941, when so many of his fellows were already on cattle trains heading east. It was a small blow for his people, inadvertently struck by a man who then faded into folk memory.

  Louis hadn’t heard the story of Sam Lichtman, and he didn’t appear very impressed with it when I told it to him. He listened without comment while I went through the events of the last couple of days, culminating in the visit from the two monks and the encounter with Brightwell on the road. When I mentioned the fat man, and Reid’s interpretation of the words he had spoken to me on the road, something changed in Louis’s demeanor. He seemed almost to retreat from me, withdrawing further into himself, and he avoided looking at me directly.

  “And you think this might be the same guy who was watching us when we took G-Mack?” said Angel. He was aware of the tension between Louis and me, and let me know with a slight movement of his eyes in his partner’s direction that we could talk about it in private later.

  “The feelings he aroused were the same,” I said. “I can’t explain it any other way.”

  “He sounds like one of the men who came looking for Sereta,” said Angel. “Octavio didn’t have a name for him, but there can’t be too many guys like that walking the streets.”

  I thought of the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop and the pictures and photographs that Reid and Bartek had shown me at the Great Lost Bear. I arranged the images in my mind in order of antiquity, progressing from paint strokes to sepia, then on to the man seated behind Stuckler’s group, before finally recalling the figure of Brightwell himself, somehow reaching for me without moving, his nails cutting me without a hand being laid upon me. Each time he got a little older, his flesh a little more corrupted, that terrible, painful extrusion on his neck a little larger and more obvious. No, there could not be many such men on this earth. There could not ever have been many such men.

  “So what now?” said Angel. “Sekula’s dropped off the planet, and he was our best lead.”

  Angel and Louis had paid a visit to Sekula’s building earlier in the week and had gone through his apartment and his office. They had found virtually nothing in the office: insignificant files relating to a number of properties in the tristate area, some fairly straightforward corporate material, and a folder marked with the name Ambassade Realty that contained just a single letter, dated two years earlier, acknowledging that Ambassade was now responsible for the maintenance and potential leasing of three warehouse buildings, including the one in Williamsburg. The apartment above the office wasn’t much more revealing. There were clothes and toiletries, both male and female, which made it seem more and more likely that Sekula and the improbably named Hope were an item; some suitably anonymous books and magazines that suggested he and his mate bought all of their reading material at airports; and a kitchen filled with drearily healthy foodstuffs, along with a refrigerator entirely devoid of food of any kind at all, apart from long-life milk. According to Angel, it looked like someone had cherry-picked and then removed anything that might have been remotely interesting about Sekula’s life and work in order to create the impression that here was one of the single most boring individuals ever to have passed a bar exam.

  Louis returned the following day and questioned the secretary who had so chirpily answered the phone to me. If she was under the impression that he was a cop when she answered his questions, then that was clearly some kind of misunderstanding on her behalf and nothing to do with any vagueness on Louis’s part. She was just a caretaker, hired from a temp agency and required to do nothing more than answer the phone, read her book, and file her nails. She hadn’t seen Sekula or his secretary since the day she’d been hired, and the only means of communication she had for him was through an answering service. She said that some other policemen had called in to the office, following the discovery of the basement room in Williamsburg, but she could tell them nothing more than she had told Louis. She did believe, though, that someone had visited the office after hours, as she thought that some items might have been moved from the secretary’s desk and the shelves behind it. It was also her final day, because the agency had called to say that she was being transferred to another job and should simply activate the answering machine before she left that evening.

  “We still have Bosworth, and Stuckler,” I said. “Plus, the auction is due to take place this week, and if Reid and Neddo are right, that map fragment is going to make some people break cover.”

  Louis stood abruptly and left the room. I looked to Angel for an explanation.

  “It’s a lot of things,” he said. “He hasn’t slept much, hasn’t eaten. Yesterday they released Alice’s remains for burial, and Martha took her home. He told her that he’d keep looking for the men who killed her, but she said it was too late. She said that if he thought he was doing all this for Alice, then he was lying to himself. She wasn’t about to give him a dispensation to hurt someone just so he could feel better about his life. He blames himself for what happened.”

  “Does he blame me too?”

  Angel shrugged.

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. This guy, Brightwell, he knows something about you. Somehow, there’s a connection between you and the man behind Alice’s death, and Louis doesn’t want to hear that, not now. He just needs time to work it out in his own way, that’s all.”

  Angel took a beer from the cooler. He offered me one. I shook my head.

  “It’s quiet here,” he said. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Briefly.”

  “How are they?”

  “They’re doing okay.”

  “When are they coming back?”

  “After all this is over, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “You heard me.”

  Angel stopped drinking and poured the remainder of his beer down the sink.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard.”

  And then he left me alone in the kitchen.

  Joachim Stuckler lived in a white two-story house on an acre of waterfront property just outside Nahant, down in Essex County. The land was high-walled and protected by an electronic gate. The grounds were neatly tended, and mature shrubs masked the walls on the inside. From the front, the main house looked like an above average dwelling, albeit one that had been decorated by drunken Greeks nostalgic for their homeland—the façade boasted more pillars than the Acropolis—but as I passed through the gate and followed the driveway I caught a glimpse of the back of the house and saw that it had been extended considerably. Large picture windows gleamed smokily in the sunl
ight, and a sleek white cruiser rested at a wooden jetty. The lapse of taste in decoration aside, Stuckler seemed to be doing okay financially.

  The front door was already open when I pulled up in front of the house, and Murnos was waiting for me. I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t one hundred percent behind his boss’s decision to invite me over, but I got that a lot. I’d learned not to take it personally.

  “Are you armed, Mr. Parker?” Murnos asked.

  I tried to look sheepish.

  “Just a bit.”

  “We’ll take care of it for you.”

  I handed over the Smith 10. Murnos then produced a circular wand from a drawer and wiped it over me. It beeped a little at my watch and belt. Murnos checked to make sure I wasn’t concealing anything potentially lethal in either, then led me to a living room, where a short, stocky man in a navy pinstripe suit set off by a raging pink tie stood posed by an ornate sideboard, just a few decades too late for Life magazine’s celebrity photographers to immortalize him in glorious black-and-white. His hair was dark gray, and brushed backward from his forehead. His skin was lightly tanned, and he had very white teeth. The watch on his wrist could have paid my mortgage for a year. The furnishings in the room and the art upon the walls could probably have covered the rest of Scarborough’s mortgages for a year. Well, maybe not out on Prouts Neck, but most of the folk on Prouts Neck didn’t need too much help with their bills.

  He rose and stretched out a hand. It was a very clean hand. I felt kind of bad about shaking it, in case he was just being polite and secretly hoped that I wasn’t going to sully him with any form of contact.

  “Joachim Stuckler,” he said. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. Alexis has told me all about you. His trip to Maine proved quite expensive. I will have to compensate the men who were hurt.”

  “You could have just called.”

  “I have to be—”

  Stuckler paused, poised like a man in an orchard searching for a particularly ripe apple, then plucked the word from the air with a delicate hand gesture.

  “—cautious,” he concluded. “As I’m sure you’re aware by now, there are dangerous men about.”

  I wondered if Stuckler, despite his posturing and vague effeminacy, was one of them. He invited me to take a seat, then offered me tea.

  “You can have coffee, if you prefer. It’s just a habit of mine to take midmorning tea.”

  “Tea is fine.”

  Murnos picked up the receiver of an old black telephone and dialed an extension. Seconds later a flunky arrived carrying a tray. He carefully set out a big china pot and two matching cups, along with a sugar bowl, milk, and a small plate of lemon slices. A second plate contained a selection of pastries. They looked crumbly and hard to eat. The cups were very delicate and lined with gold. Stuckler poured a little tea into a cup, then allowed it to flow more freely once he was content with the color. When both cups were filled, he asked me how I preferred to take my tea.

  “Black is fine,” I said.

  Stuckler winced slightly, but otherwise he hid his displeasure manfully.

  We sipped our tea. It was all very pleasant. We just needed some dim bulb called Algy to wander in wearing tennis whites and carrying a racket and we could have been in a drawing room comedy, except that Stuckler was considerably more interesting than he appeared. Another call to Ross, this time answered a little more quickly than before, had given me some background on the neat, grinning man before me. According to Ross’s contact in the IWG—the Interagency Working Group, created in 1998 to delve into, among other things, the records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes in order to assess evidence of cooperation between U.S. organizations and individuals of questionable background from the former regimes—Stuckler’s mother, Maria, had traveled to the United States with her only son shortly after the end of the war. The INS tried to have a great many of these people deported, but the preference in the CIA and, in particular, in Hoover’s FBI, was to keep them in the States so they could report back on Communist sympathizers within their own communities. The U.S. government wasn’t too particular about whom it welcomed in those days: five associates of Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had played a part in the “Final Solution,” worked for the CIA, and efforts were made to recruit at least a further two dozen war criminals and collaborators.

  Maria Stuckler bargained her way to the States with the promise of documents relating to German Communists secured by her husband during his dealings with Himmler. She was a clever woman, delivering enough material to keep the Americans keen and, with each disclosure, getting a little closer to her ultimate goal of U.S. citizenship for her son and herself. Her citizenship application was personally approved by Hoover after she handed over the last of her store of documents, which related to various left-wing Jews who had fled Germany before the start of the war and had since found gainful employment in the United States. The IWG concluded that some of Maria Stuckler’s information proved crucial in the early days of the McCarthy hearings, which made her something of a heroine in Hoover’s eyes. Her “favored person” status enabled her to set up the antiques business that her son subsequently inherited, and to import objects of interest from Europe with little or no interference from U.S. Customs. The old woman was still alive, apparently. She lived in a big house in Newport, Rhode Island, and all of her faculties were fully intact at the age of eighty-five.

  Now here I was, taking tea with her son in a room furnished and paid for with the spoils of war, if Reid was right in his assessment of Stuckler’s private collection, and secured by an ambitious woman’s slow process of betrayal over more than a decade. I wondered if it ever bothered Stuckler. Ross’s contact had said that Stuckler was a generous contributor to a great many good causes, including a number of Jewish charities, although some had declined his largesse once the identity of the prospective donor became known. It might have been genuine pangs of conscience that led to his donations. It might also merely have been good public relations, a means of deflecting attention away from his business and his collections.

  I realized that I had developed a sudden, deep-seated dislike for Stuckler, and I didn’t even know him.

  “I’m grateful to you for taking the time to come here,” he said. He had no trace of an accent, German or otherwise. His tone was entirely neutral, contributing to the sense of an image that had been carefully cultivated to give away as little as possible about the origins and true nature of the man who lay behind it.

  “With respect,” I said, “I came here because your employee indicated that you might have some information. I can take tea at home.”

  Despite the calculated insult, Stuckler continued to radiate goodwill, as though he took great pleasure in the suspicion that everyone who came to his house secretly disliked him, and their jibes were merely honey on his bread.

  “Of course, of course. I think perhaps I can help you. Before we begin, though, I am curious about the death of Mr. Garcia, in which I understand you played a significant role. I should like to know what you saw in his apartment.”

  I didn’t know where this was leading, but I understood that Stuckler was used to bargaining. He had probably learned the skill from his mother, and applied it every day in his business dealings. I wasn’t going to get anything out of him unless I gave him at least as much in return.

  “There were bone sculptures, ornate candlesticks made from human remains, some other half-completed efforts, and a representation of a Mexican deity, Santa Muerte, made from a female skull.”

  Stuckler didn’t seem interested in Santa Muerte. Instead he made me elaborate on what I had seen, questioning me about small details of construction and presentation. He then gestured to Murnos, who took a book from a side table and brought it to his employer. It was a black coffee table volume, with the words Memento Mori in red along the spine. On the cover was a photograph of a piece that might have come from Garcia’s apartment: a skull resting upon a curved bone that jutted out
like a white tongue from beneath the ruined jaw, which was missing five or six of its front teeth. Below the skull was a column of five or six similar curved bones.

  Stuckler saw me looking.

  “Each is a human sacrum,” he said. “One can tell from the five fused vertebrae.”

  He flicked through fifty or sixty pages of text in a number of languages, including German and English, until he came to a series of photographs. He handed the volume to me.

  “Please, take a look at these photographs and tell me if anything is familiar.”

  I leafed through them. All were in black-and-white, with a faint sepia tint. The first depicted a church of some kind, with three spires set in a triangular pattern. It was surrounded by bare trees, and an old stone wall separated at regular intervals by columns topped with carved skulls. The rest of the pictures showed ornate arrangements of skulls and bones beneath vaulted ceilings: great pyramids and crosses; garlands of bones and white chain; candlesticks and candelabras; and finally, another view of the church, this time taken from the rear, and in daylight. The surrounding walls were thick with ivy, but the monochrome textures of the photograph gave it the appearance of a swarm of insects, as though bees were massing along the walls.

  “What is this place?” I said. Once again, there was something obscene about the photographs, about this reduction of human beings to a series of adornments to a church. “Is this Sedlec?”

  “First you have to answer my question,” said Stuckler. He wagged a finger at me in reproach. I considered breaking it. I looked at Murnos. He didn’t need telepathy to know what I was thinking. From the expression on his face, I imagined that a lot of people, maybe Murnos included, had thought about hurting Joachim Stuckler.

  I ignored the finger and pointed instead to one small photograph of an anchor-shaped arrangement of bones set in an alcove beside a cracked wall. Seven humerus bones formed a stellate pattern with a skull at their center, supported in turn by what might have been portions of sternum or scapula, then a vertical column of more humerus bones, which met at last a semicircle of vertebrae curving upward on either side and ending in a pair of skulls.