Angel Face

by Stephen Solomita

  Carter had carried box and daggers to a room cleared of furniture at the back of the apartment, then put on a show that was half-dance, half-meditation. He’d covered the entire room, a dagger in either hand, his movements fast, then slow, then fast again, now smooth and fluid, now as stylized as a Maori war dance. Later, after the daggers and the box were stowed in the back of a closet, he explained that his workout, culled from a number of fighting traditions, was as practical as it was unique, every movement designed to ward off an attacker.

  The physical end – the grace, speed, precision, agility – came as no surprise to Angel. But there was a level of creative sophistication to Leonard Carter that she’d never suspected. The daggers were Burmese and very old – they had to be worth many thousands of dollars. (Carter had only been willing to admit they were paid for in blood.) They were also beautiful, an actual treasure that might have been on display at the Asia Society. And the elaborate dance he’d performed with them, derived or not, was his own creation.

  Angel had briefly studied Zen Buddhism at a storefront temple, back when she was a newly arrived immigrant. After only a few weeks, she came to realize that the religion demanded a commitment she wasn’t prepared to make, whereupon she dropped out. Now, as she crosses Eleventh Street, she remembers her instructor, a Japanese monk who wasn’t above making a pass at her, causally mentioning that Zen’s most ardent practitioners in pre-modern Japan were Samurai warriors. Raised a Christian, Angel embraced a gentle-Christ view of religion that didn’t include a warrior caste vicious enough to behead peasants for daring to look at them. Carter, apparently, was beyond such delusions, beauty and death playing equal parts in his performance.

  Angel’s musings are interrupted when five skateboarders in torn jeans and ratty Tshirts fly out of Tompkins Square Park. They tear across the sidewalk and into the street where they play chicken with the traffic on Avenue A. Bemused, Angel watches them for a moment. The Lower East Side is all about diversity, a mix of types that includes Latinos from the housing projects along Avenue D, chess hustlers who dominate the park’s south-east corner, ex-patriot Brits who gravitate to faux-pubs like The Clerkenwell. Something for everyone, a new adventure every night. There’s even a bar-restaurant, Bondi Road, that caters to Australians.

  A few minutes later, Angel walks into Prime Numbers, a dance club on Sixth Street. Barry Martin, the club’s owner, stands near a door leading to the basement. Always suspicious, he’s supervising a Latino busboy engaged in restocking the bar. The air is filled with techno music piped down from the second-story dance floor.

  ‘Angel, where you been, girl? Me long time no see.’ A Jamaican, Barry’s voice runs up and down the octaves, his accent far too thick for the Princeton graduate he is. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm’s heartfelt. Attractive women are the lifeblood of bars catering to the young.

  ‘Been here and there, Barry. Have you seen Milek?’

  ‘What you want with that boy, Angel? He’s no good for nobody.’

  ‘Then why do you let him in the club?’

  A good question. Later on, a bouncer will stand guard at the club’s entrance, the better to maintain the joint’s exclusive image. But Angel doesn’t need an answer. Milek Ostrovsky is Prime Numbers’ resident coke and ecstasy dealer, tolerated because dance club patrons drink more booze and dance more dances when they’re stoned out of their minds.

  ‘Milek’s playin’ billiards, same as always.’

  Angel heads for a large alcove in the back of the club. A full-sized pool table covered in red felt occupies most of the space, with just enough room on the sides to wield a cue stick. Milek is doing exactly that, but he stops when he sees Angel. They’d hooked up once upon a time, a weekend affair that temporarily satisfied Angel’s bad-boy propensities. Now she instinctively compares Milek to Carter and sees him for what he really is: a rapidly aging man in his mid-thirties, his hair thinning, his paunch growing, a threat only in his own mind.

  ‘Hey, baby, what’s up?’

  ‘Need to talk, Milek.’

  ‘Sure.’ Milek hands his cue to his sidekick, a bulked-up Latino kid so taciturn he might be a mute. ‘Finish the game for me, Carlos.’ He winks at Angel. ‘I’ll be back when I’m back.’

  Angel follows Milek out the door, on to the sidewalk, then west toward First Avenue. ‘You’re looking bummed-out this evening,’ Milek observes. Angel has yet to crack a smile. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I need a gun, Milek. Two, actually, a big one and a small one.’

  A short skinny kid walks toward them. His purple hair is moussed into a stiff Mohawk and his bare arms are covered with tattoos. An unleashed pit bull lopes beside him, its pink tongue hanging nearly to the ground. The pit bull outweighs the kid by twenty pounds.

  Milek and Angel observe a brief silence as they give the dog a wide berth. Then Milek asks, ‘Why are you coming to me?’

  ‘Because you once told me you could get anything.’ Angel smiles sweetly, but the challenge is plain enough.

  ‘You’re asking me to get you a weapon without knowing what you’re going to do with it. If you go home and shoot your boyfriend, I’ll be a co-conspirator.’

  ‘If I was going to shoot my boyfriend, I wouldn’t be asking for two guns,’ Angel says. ‘But here’s the deal, Milek. I have a thousand dollars in my purse. If you don’t want it, I’ll find someone who does.’

  ‘Whoa.’ Milek shakes his head. ‘What happened to you, Angel? You used to be sweet.’

  The sweet part was never sincere, but Angel doesn’t avoid the underlying truth. She has, indeed, changed, and Leonard Carter’s the agent of that change. This is not a matter she intends to share with Milek Ostrovsky.

  ‘Two guns, a thousand dollars,’ she says. ‘Yes or no.’

  Three hours later, Angel’s back in Carter’s Woodhaven apartment. Carter’s not home yet, which is all to the good. She carries her purchases into the bedroom where she lays them out on the dresser, a .45 caliber Ruger revolver and a .32 caliber Bersa automatic, a sub-compact with a seven-round magazine. Compared to the massive Ruger, the Bersa is nearly weightless.

  Angel had examined the weapons in Milek’s battered Honda. The workings were simple enough. According to Milek the revolver had no safety. You point and pull the trigger, that’s it. The Bersa did have a safety, but all you had to do was flick it up with your thumb. At which point you were good to go.

  ‘One thing, Angel. The .32 probably won’t stop a man with a single round unless you shoot him in the head, so I hope you’re a good shot.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Then point it at the middle of his chest – or her chest, for that matter – and keep pulling the trigger until the gun’s empty.’

  Angel has no specific plans for either weapon. But she’s watched Carter over the last few days, watched him head out to practice his marksmanship or his fighting skills, and she doesn’t want to be unarmed if Carter should decide to rip her off. She knows she’s not his match, but there’s always the element of surprise. Angel’s good at deception.

  Angel hides the revolver beneath a stack of her panties in a bureau against the wall opposite the bed. The little automatic, the sub-compact Bersa, goes into the toe of an insulated winter boot lying in the back of the closet. As it’s the middle of May, the boot won’t be used again for many months.

  Satisfied, Angel raids the refrigerator, piling a scoop of cottage cheese and a handful of blueberries on to a plate. She carries the plate into the living room where she pours herself a glass of Chardonnay and inserts a Ted Allen DVD into Carter’s player: Uncorked: Wine Made Simple. As Angel understands the trophy wife bargain, she’s obliged, or will be, to properly maintain her spouse’s household. Meat, potatoes and a bottle of beer just won’t do for the elegant dinner parties she intends to throw. Thus, she studies, perfecting her craft as Carter perfects his. Angel is majoring in Art History at Brooklyn College, reads every upscale fashion magazine she can find, attends weekend seminars on an
tique American furniture and French wines. When the time comes, she intends to be prepared. She will strike while the iron is hot. She will seize the day. She will laugh all the way to the bank.

  Or she would, if her attention didn’t keep wandering to Leonard Carter. That business with the knives? By the time Carter finished, his body was as chiseled as the daggers he so carefully wiped off. The glistening sweat didn’t hurt either. Now she wonders when he’s coming home. What’s it been? Six hours? It feels like forever.

  FOURTEEN

  Carter’s been sitting on Lieutenant Solly Epstein’s house all evening, scrunched into the van’s back seat, munching on bag of a Granny Smith apples, drinking cans of Red Bull to stay alert, peeing into an empty bottle when necessary. Carter and Epstein have a history, a past in which Epstein twice attempted to take Carter’s life. Epstein hadn’t been up to the job, not even close, but Carter let the man live, a favor that now has to be repaid. There are no freebies in Carter’s world.

  Epstein finally drives up to his small home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at eight o’clock. He parks his Taurus against the curb, shuts the engine and gets out of the car. Before he can lock up, the screen door on his house opens and a little boy, a toddler, runs out to stumble across the grass and into his father’s arms.

  ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy.’

  Carter’s touched, no doubt, and not a little jealous. He will never have this for himself, this simple pleasure. Lo Phet would have laughed if he’d even raised the subject.

  ‘No daddies in Hell World. Only sires.’

  Carter watches father and son disappear into the house. If there are no moms and dads in Lo Phet’s universe, he thinks, there are definitely men and women. He’s smitten and he knows it, his mind instantly calling up the rise and fall of Angel’s breasts, the hiss of her drawn breath, an image and a sound, so clear she might as well be in the van. And they’d done that, too, in the cargo area by the rear doors. The windows had fogged over long before they finished.

  All of which is not to say that Carter trusts Angel Tamanaka. No, Carter doesn’t trust Angel because he doesn’t trust anyone. Trust, as Angel might put it, is not Carter’s thing. It’s not what he does.

  Carter settles a little deeper into the seat. There are folks about, dog walkers, a jogger or two, and he doesn’t want to be noticed. The address he had for Epstein, now four years old, is still good. That’s enough for now.

  Carter needs intelligence and Epstein’s long-standing assignment to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau makes him the perfect candidate to supply it. Epstein’s sold information in the past. There’s no reason to suppose he won’t go that route again. The trick is to get him alone, the woman and child being, of course, innocent civilians.

  The lights in the upstairs bedrooms, as they’re turned on and off, mark the family’s progress. First in a room at the east side of the house. The curtains in the room’s single window are open, the shade drawn up, and Carter assumes he’s looking at the boy’s room, that Solly’s putting his child to sleep. In any event, the light goes out twenty minutes later.

  Another hour passes, with the lights on the lower floor, in the living room and the kitchen, remaining lit. Then the lights go out, the kitchen light first, as lights come on, in an upstairs bedroom and in the bathroom, more or less simultaneously. Carter’s thinking he might leave at this point. Tomorrow’s another day and there’s Angel back in Woodhaven. Hopefully.

  But Carter doesn’t move, and his patience is finally rewarded at eleven o’clock when the bedroom goes dark as a light comes on downstairs. Epstein emerges a moment later. He ambles to his car, jingling his keys, whistling to himself. Then he’s off and running, with Carter following shortly behind.

  The trip isn’t very long, only a few blocks to a pedestrian bridge crossing Shore Parkway. New York’s upper bay is just a hundred yards distant and Carter’s nostrils fill with the odor of the sea, though the harbor is screened by trees and bushes. When Epstein pulls to the curb near the overpass, Carter passes by and drives another block before sliding the van into a parking space. By the time he gets out, Epstein has crossed the bridge and disappeared.

  Carter jogs to the overpass and takes the steps two at a time. Epstein’s nowhere in sight when he reaches the top, and he crosses the bridge quickly, the traffic zinging along beneath him. Carter intends to pursue Epstein, to run him down – this is Carter’s big chance to engage the cop in a long, pointed conversation – but the scene before him is too compelling and he stops for a moment. To his right, the towers of lower Manhattan rise like the phalanx of some great advancing army. Lady Liberty, alone on her island and lit from top to bottom, holds her torch aloft as if leading the charge. Across the harbor on Staten Island, single-family homes run in parallel lines across low shadowy hills. To his left, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, with its lit cables and towers, unites Staten Island with Brooklyn. The Verrazano is the most slender and graceful of the city’s suspension bridges, at least in Carter’s opinion, despite it being the longest by far.

  Carter has been here before, to walk the promenade running between the highway and the water on a bright fall afternoon. When he spots Epstein sitting on a bench nearby, the faint glow of a cigarette in his right hand, he knows exactly why the man has come to this spot. The view is stunning.

  Carter drops on to the bench next to Epstein a moment later, but Epstein doesn’t flinch. ‘I was hoping you were dead,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  Epstein tugs on his cigarette. He’s a short man, barely five-eight, and bald on top, with a barrel chest and heavily muscled shoulders. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he says, ‘Maybe I’m dense. But I don’t think I’m in your debt. I think we had a deal and I kept my end.’

  Carter had exacted a price when he allowed Epstein to survive the second attempt on his life. Yes, I’ll let you live. But only if you put a gun to your partner’s head and pull the trigger. With his wife about to give birth any minute, Epstein had complied.

  ‘Benedetti,’ Carter says. ‘Bobby and Ricky, the Ditto brothers.’

  ‘Like I said, Carter, I don’t owe you a thing.’

  The cop rises, grinds his cigarette into the pavement and begins to walk south, toward the bridge. Carter follows, not yet ready to pull out the big guns. He will, though, if it comes to that. From their right, the pulsating roar of high-speed traffic assaults their ears, reducing the splash of the waves against the boulders protecting the shoreline to an insinuating murmur.

  ‘How have you been, Solly?’ Carter asks.

  Epstein laughs. ‘I got a kid now, a boy, and another on the way, and then Mr Death shows up. That would be you, in case you’re interested. So, how good can I be?’ Epstein hesitates, then lowers his voice. ‘I know you hit Ricky Ditto. The way it happened, inside the house, the alarms defeated, no sign of forced entry, one shot through the forehead? It had to be you.’ Epstein stops suddenly, but doesn’t meet Carter’s gaze. ‘And there were others. A Polish gangster shot through the head from three hundred yards away. A Russian dead from a single knife wound just below his sternum. You already used that one, Carter, in Macy’s a few days before Christmas. I thought you were more creative.’

  Carter thinks he’s now supposed to ask the cop if he, Carter, is a suspect in any of these cases, if his name has come to the attention of the authorities. He doesn’t.

  ‘I’m gonna have to invoke my constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination,’ he says. ‘Mum’s the word.’

  ‘Yeah, well I wouldn’t sweat it. The FBI and the NYPD are places where nobody knows your name.’

  Carter stares for a moment at a line of oil tankers and container ships anchored in the harbor. He wonders if they’re waiting to unload, or if they’re off to some faraway port with the turn of the tide. ‘I’ve been sitting in the van for the last eight hours. You mind if we keep walking?’

  They continue on for several minutes, Carter watching headlights flicker in the superstr
ucture joining the bridge’s upper and lower decks. Epstein needs time to adjust and Carter’s a patient man. He will not be the first to speak.

  ‘Are you married?’ Epstein finally asks. ‘You got any kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, you’re completely on your own? Nobody to report to at the end of the day?’

  Carter smiles to himself. Only a few days before, he would have responded without hesitation. Now there’s Angel Tamanaka.

  ‘What’s your point, Solly?’

  ‘I can’t make ends meet. That’s the point. I can’t make the numbers add up, no matter what I do.’ He ticks the points off on the middle finger of his left hand. ‘The job’s cut back on overtime, so I have to make due on my base pay. Sofia’s been working for the last year, but child care eats up most of her salary. Now she’s pregnant again and she’ll be gainfully unemployed for a year, even if she works into her ninth month.’

  Epstein glances at Carter, who’s staring at the bridge. ‘I work in a gas station on my off-days,’ he continues. ‘I’m the monkey in the booth you have to pay if you don’t have a credit card. I make twelve dollars an hour, but only because I carry a gun. The other monkeys get eight.’ He shrugs. ‘Between the house payments and the car payments – we need two cars now – and the payments for the loan I took out with the credit union … Let’s just say I’m in over my head, Carter. Let’s just say that when Sofia quits her job, me and my little family are gonna sink beneath the waves. Glug, glug, glug.’

  Epstein’s complaint reminds Carter of Angel’s cautionary tale about her father’s doomed attempt to save his lumber yard. Hideki Tamanaka had given his all to the struggle, but the forces arrayed against him were too powerful to resist. He’d found a way out, though, by firing a bullet into his head. Epstein, or so it seems to Carter, has other plans.

  They walk past a couple, teenagers by the look of them, making out on a bench. Lost in lust, the young lovers appear not to notice the intrusion. Epstein smiles and nudges Carter with an elbow. ‘You remember when you were that young?’ he asks. ‘There was no such thing as enough.’