Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “I never said there was nothing to it!” Garth snapped, wheeling back to face me. “I’m not a fool! If you tell me he’s carting around a submachine gun, then he almost certainly is. What I said is that it’s none of your business. Wherever he’s gone, it’s fine with me. I just don’t want you sucked away with him. Veil Kendry stinks of madness and death.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Garth?” I asked softly. “You talk like a stranger. Just because you don’t like—”

  “How long have you known Kendry, wise-ass?!”

  Taken aback by the anger in his voice, I blinked in surprise. “About eleven years,” I answered warily. “I met him when I bought one of his paintings at—”

  “I know how you met him,” Garth said curtly. “What do you suppose Kendry was doing before he started all this painting bullshit?”

  “Bullshit?”

  “What’s his background?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you ‘don’t know,’ wise-ass? I thought this guy was a great friend of yours. After all, you felt close enough to him to walk into his place uninvited and spend the night. You felt close enough to him to walk out with one of his paintings and ten grand in cash.”

  The effect of Garth’s scornful sarcasm was to make me feel more distant from him than I could ever remember feeling in my life. “Why don’t you get to the point?” I said coldly. “That’s assuming you have one.”

  “The point is that I’ve known Kendry longer than you have, and he had a police record longer than both our arms put together before you met him.”

  Ah.

  “The reason the cops keep such close tabs on him,” Garth continued in a much softer tone, “is because, unlike some criminologists and other professorial types, we don’t believe any man can change as completely as Kendry appears to have changed. The rot’s still there, just waiting to eat its way back up to the surface. That’s what I think probably happened.”

  “What rot?”

  “According to his police record, Kendry blew into New York about four years before you met him, probably in the summer of ’seventy-three.”

  “Where’d he come from?”

  “Military stockades—first in Saigon, then in Leavenworth. Needless to say, he’d been dishonorably discharged.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Garth shrugged. “A quick call to connections in the military justice system. Standard operating procedure. Anyway, at that time he was living in a series of flea traps on the Bowery, along with the other bums. He was a drunk and a junkie himself. He’d work as a bouncer in some of New York’s less glamorous night spots until he had some cash in his pocket, then he’d quit.”

  “What was he busted for?”

  “Drunk and disorderly.”

  “That doesn’t sound very serious to me.”

  “It is when it keeps happening, and it’s even more serious when it keeps happening and you bust up some police officers resisting arrest.”

  “Okay, agreed. But—”

  “He was a brawler.”

  “Did he ever kill anyone in any of these brawls?”

  “No. He just kept making good business for the hospitals. The only reason he never did any serious time was because most of the people he brawled with had longer records of violent behavior than he did.”

  “He could have, you know.”

  “Could have what?”

  “Killed somebody. I’m betting he could have killed anyone he went up against.”

  “You’re missing the point. The man was committed to Bellevue for observation twice; for some reason, the shrinks there let him out both times. When I say he’s crazy, Mongo, I’m not exaggerating. He was a man bent on self-destruction, and that’s the rot I was referring to.”

  Garth’s description of Veil upset me, as my brother had known it would, and I took some time to think about it. There was no doubt in my mind that what Garth had said was true, but I could not make the description of a drunk and a junkie and a bar brawler match the strong-willed and controlled man I had known for over eleven years. “People do change,” was all I could think of to say. “Veil Kendry did.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? That was more than eleven years ago. For Christ’s sake, Garth, give the man a break.”

  “I grant you that he cleaned up his act for eleven years, but now he’s wandering around with martial arts weapons, handguns, and a submachine gun. It’s also possible that for all that time he was nothing more than a time bomb waiting to go off. You interpret the lights and the open loft as the actions of a rational man trying to send you some kind of signal. Judging from his past record, I say it’s possible he wasn’t thinking of you at all; he wasn’t thinking of anything. He just went off, and when he did there wasn’t a rational thought left in his head.”

  “Which explains why you’ve been trying to downplay everything I’ve been telling you.”

  “Right. You’re incredibly loyal to your friends, and you can get a bit myopic where they’re concerned. When a friend is involved, you walk into a wide open loft with burning lights and missing guns and smell a mystery. I smell a potential mass murderer. If that’s true, there’s no reason for you to be in his line of fire when he goes nova. The fact that he had that kind of armory squirreled away in the first place indicates that he’s been thinking some very heavy thoughts for a long time.”

  “Maybe he was thinking of defending himself.”

  “Against what? A fucking army?”

  “Against whoever it was who winged a shot at him.”

  “You can’t be certain that’s what happened. If he did go buggy, and that’s what I think happened, he could have put that bullet hole in the window himself, as a kind of warm-up. If you go looking for him, you may not find what you think you will; it’s even conceivable that you could trigger him into killing you, and a lot of other people. You let us handle Veil Kendry. He’s a loony.”

  “What about the painting and the cash?”

  “It could be that he expects to die, and that he wanted to leave something for you. He didn’t expect you, or anyone else, to find it so soon.”

  “All of this occurred to you even before I mentioned the weapons, didn’t it?”

  Garth nodded. “It occurred to me during our second telephone conversation.”

  “You should have told me about his background then.”

  “You had an important lecture to deliver, and you already had enough things on your mind. There wasn’t time to go into gory detail, and I was hoping I could talk some sense into you.” He paused, smiled thinly. “That’s still my hope.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Veil before?”

  “Because he’d been clean for almost a year at the time you met him. Under those circumstances, I would have considered it an abuse of my authority to discuss his record with you, or anyone else, who didn’t have an official need to know. I’m a police officer, not a gossip, and Kendry’s record was strictly police business. In any case, you’d have accused me of gratuitously badmouthing one of your friends—and you’d have been right.”

  “That was very honorable of you, Garth,” I said simply. “It’s exactly what I would expect.”

  “Now it’s a different situation, because you’ve been toying with the idea of becoming involved in a search for a very dangerous man who isn’t playing with a full deck.”

  “Thanks, Garth,” I said as I picked up the painting and my gym bag. “I appreciate it. And don’t worry; I’m not going to do anything foolish.”

  “You already have.”

  4.

  After leaving Garth I walked across campus to my office, where I typed up a letter to Veil explaining in detail everything I had done and planned to do, and giving my reasons. I made two copies of the original, then, after locking up the painting and gym bag in the office, walked the four blocks to my bank, where I opened a new savings account in Veil’s name and mine and deposited the t
en thousand in it. I added the account number to the letters, then went next door to the post office. I sent the original, by certified mail with no signature required, to Veil’s address. The two copies I sent by registered mail to Garth and myself.

  I debated going back to my apartment to clean up, decided that it would just be a waste of time. I still had a load of examination papers to grade, so after picking up a couple of sandwiches and some coffee from a deli, I went back to my campus office. After turning Veil’s painting to the wall so as not to be distracted, I tuned my small desk radio to an all-news station and proceeded to attack the mountain of papers piled all over my desk.

  Grading papers kept me busy until seven thirty in the evening. I went home, soaked myself under a hot shower, put on pajamas and a light robe. I poured myself a liberal Scotch over ice, then proceeded once again with my telephone ritual—Veil’s loft, my answering service, the hospital emergency rooms. Nothing. The first Scotch felt warm and pleasantly heavy on my stomach, so I poured myself another. I put a TV dinner in the oven, made myself a salad, then went and sat down in the leather reclining chair in my den to study Veil’s painting, which I had propped up on my desk, beneath a small spotlight.

  A sulphurous, gun-toting angel—a lone American—draped in a strange robe and hovering over a jungle filled with soldiers in a country that might or might not be Viet Nam, but was almost certainly in Southeast Asia.

  A close examination with a magnifying glass revealed no hidden messages or symbols, at least none that I could detect, and when I scraped paint from one corner I found nothing beneath but canvas. Garth could be right about an insane Veil Kendry going over the edge and falling into some black abyss in his admittedly complex and problematical mind, but I didn’t think so. Wherever he was, I was still convinced he’d been pushed there and that, with time, the painting would tell me where and why. The problem was that I didn’t know how much time I had.

  The smell of burning TV dinner sent me padding into the kitchen. I managed to salvage most of my meal, ate it in front of the television set while I watched the Cable News Network. I’d hoped to pick up some news item that I could possibly link to Veil’s disappearance, but the vast majority of the coverage was given over to background reports on, and interviews with, Kevin Shannon’s cabinet nominees, which didn’t interest me at all. My time with the people involved in the Valhalla Project had convinced me that nations were neither moral nor immoral; only individuals could make those kinds of choices, and only time, not television appearances, would determine in which camp Kevin Shannon and his new crew on the Potomac belonged.

  When I began to doze, I turned off the TV, threw away the rest of my dinner, worked up enough energy to brush my teeth, then fell into bed, exhausted. I fell asleep almost immediately.

  I exploded awake, jackknifing forward in bed as the air exploded from my lungs. Then, writhing and rocking back and forth helplessly, I imploded into a small, airless world of throbbing agony centered in the pit of my stomach. Doubled up in a fetal position tighter than a clenched fist, I kept gasping—but air wouldn’t come, and the veins and arteries in my neck and head felt about to burst from the pressure of effort and need. Gasping in my universe of pain, I vaguely realized that the lights in my bedroom were on. Two men in business suits were standing at the left side of the bed, staring impassively down at me. Just before I got my head over the edge of the bed and threw up on their polished surfaces, I found myself looking down on two pairs of expensive, wing-tipped shoes, one brown and one black.

  I was just managing to drag some air into my lungs when two sets of hands with strong fingers gripped my arms and legs and pushed me back on the bed. Ropes were quickly looped around my wrists and ankles, pulled taut, and secured to the four corners of the bedframe. Thus spread-eagled, the joints in my shoulders, arms, and legs immediately began to ache. I was still unable to breathe right, much less scream for help, and so I concentrated on getting air into my lungs while I studied my uninvited guests and fought against rising panic.

  The brown-suited night visitor standing at the foot of the bed looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He was clean-cut, with short brown hair that matched his cold eyes, and a neatly trimmed mustache. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, he, like his partner, appeared to be freshly shaven and smelled of cologne. He could have been an up-and-coming stockbroker, except that instead of an attaché case he held the blackjack that had served as my alarm clock in his right hand. In his left hand he held Veil’s painting.

  The second man wore a charcoal-striped suit. He was middle-aged, with thinning gray hair and thick eyeglass lenses. Standing to my left, he suddenly bent down, and when he straightened up I could see that he was holding one of my bath towels, which was sopping wet.

  They were top-of-the-line professionals, I thought, tough-minded and cold-blooded. They were also obviously well equipped, since by breaking into my apartment without a sound they had managed to bypass not only a most suspicious concierge in the lobby, but my own alarm system and a double lock as well. I was impressed. It occurred to me to ask what they wanted, but I was fairly certain they’d get around to that in time, and I wanted to conserve what little breath and energy I had.

  “I’m sorry for your discomfort, Dr. Frederickson,” the older man said in a soft voice that was just above a whisper. There were no chairs in the small room, and so he eased himself down on the edge of the bed, a foot or so from my head, and casually crossed one leg over the other. Then he snaked the wet towel out across the floor, like a whip. “I hope we won’t have to hurt you again. Experience has taught us that it is often best to begin with an intense, sudden burst of great pain, so as to save a person even greater agony over a prolonged period of time.” He paused, gently rubbed my diaphragm, helping me to breathe. “See? I think you’re feeling better already, no? Please answer all our questions fully, without raising your voice. We certainly don’t want to wake up any of your neighbors, and everyone knows that even the best buildings in New York have walls that are notoriously thin.”

  I most certainly did want to wake any and all of my neighbors, whether those on either side of me or those across the hall. I sucked in a deep breath and was just about to let loose with what I hoped would be a blood-curdling scream when the thick, wet towel snapped through the air and slapped across my face. A fraction of a second later the blackjack thudded into the bare sole of my left foot. A pain with a quality quite unlike anything I’d experienced before shot up through my left leg, slammed into my groin and belly, then traveled in a shock wave up my spine into my skull, where it seemed to expand to the point where it felt as if my eyeballs were being pushed from my head. It got a blood-curdling scream out of me all right, but, with the wet towel over my face, I was the only one who heard it.

  No sooner had the shock waves from the first blow begun to subside—gradually, like water sloshing in a pail—than the blackjack slammed into the sole of my right foot, starting the process all over again. Another smothered scream.

  Just as it seemed I would pass out from pain or lack of air, or both, the towel was removed from by face. Sucking air, my chest and stomach heaving, I turned my head as far as I was able and vomited again. When I was finished, the man with the thick glasses used a corner of the wet towel to wipe my face clean, then heaved a deep sigh and slowly shook his head. With a flick of his wrist, the towel was snaked back into snapping position.

  The younger man at the foot of the bed who had hit me held up Veil’s painting.

  “Please, Dr. Frederickson,” the man sitting on the side of my bed said in the same, soft voice. “Save yourself needless suffering; no more nonsense. Tell us about the painting.”

  “What the hell do you want to know that you don’t already know?” I sobbed, gasping for breath. My joints felt locked, welded together with pain. “You wouldn’t even know about me or be here unless you’d had Kendry’s phone tapped. You’ve already heard everything there is for me to tell.”


  “Who else have you discussed this matter with besides your brother?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you sure? We don’t want to have to hurt you again.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “We wish to know every place you’ve been since leaving Mr. Kendry’s loft this morning.”

  “If you know when I left the loft, then you must know where I went. Weren’t you following me?”

  The younger man let his right hand drop, and the cold black leather cover of the sap brushed my sole. I cringed and closed my eyes, but no blow came. When I opened my eyes, I found my interrogator looking at the younger man with a distinct air of disapproval. “You were just a bit too quick for us in the subway,” he said, turning his thick lenses back on me. “I’m afraid that lapse on our part is what necessitates this conversation. We have quite a few lost hours to account for.”

  “In that case, you can pick up Blackjack Barney down there and go home. From the time I left the loft, I didn’t have time for anything but business. I ran in the subway because I was late. Unless you’ve got wax in your ears, you heard my brother and me discussing the lecture I was sup—”

  “Did you give the lecture?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the kind of response we like. Don’t concern yourself with what you think we must have heard. Just answer the questions.”

  “How did you know who I was, and where I live?”

  “You’re much too modest, Dr. Frederickson. How many noted criminology professors of your stature, so to speak, are nicknamed ‘Mongo’? As a result of some of your past exploits, you enjoy a measure of fame.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “And, of course, you’re listed in the directory. Where did you go after your lecture?”

  “To my office.”

  “Which office? You have two.”

  “My campus office. When I said I was involved in business all that time, I meant university business. I didn’t do any investigating. I had examination papers to grade. I finished up around a half past seven and came home. Who do you guys work for?”