Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “I’m sorry, Garth. I thought maybe I had a good reason for keeping my mouth shut. I can see now that I didn’t.”

  “The fire that destroyed that floor started in your apartment, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. It sounds like your memory is improving.”

  I proceeded to tell Garth what had happened, finished by explaining why I had considered keeping the story to myself.

  “Dumb, Mongo,” Garth said, shaking his head in exasperation. However, his face had softened, and the chill was gone from his voice. “I appreciate your concern for me, as misplaced as it was, but don’t really understand what you thought you were going to do next. Did you plan to try to find and take on these two guys by yourself?”

  “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, Garth,” I replied, thoroughly chastened. “I was thinking about it.”

  “Hell, all they did was tie you on your bed and light a fire under you.”

  “True; but they tried to kill me only after they’d asked me a lot of questions, which I think is important to consider. There’s no doubt in my mind that if those guys had thought they already had the answers to the questions, if Veil had left me any kind of message clearly outlining what was going on, I’d have been blown away the moment I stepped out of Veil’s loft onto the sidewalk. The men weren’t certain of what I knew, or what others might know, and so they followed me instead of killing me right away. Now, if they find out I’m alive, they’ll kill me on sight—and I believe they’ll do the same to you if they find out we’ve talked. Doubt in the minds of Veil’s enemies—doubt about what he’s done, and plans to do—is the only reason I’m alive. That’s one of the things I believe I learned from my visitors.”

  “One of the things? I thought you said they didn’t tell you a damn thing.”

  “They didn’t, but I think we know a little more now than we did before they popped in on me. I found the questions they asked and the situation itself instructive.”

  “Instruct me.”

  “We have confirmation that Veil is the guardian of a secret that profoundly threatens a very powerful person or persons unknown. The importance the men attached to the painting confirms that it contained a clue, or clues, to what that secret is; the secret involves events that took place a lot of years ago, sometime during the decade that the United States was involved in the war in Viet Nam.”

  Garth thought about it. “It’s hard to imagine anything about that miserable period of history coming out now that would be worse than the stuff that’s already been exposed.”

  “That’s arguable. In any case, let’s pose the question differently. It may not be a matter of how bad the shit is compared to things that have already been reported, but who this particular pile of shit belongs to. The torturer-assassins who worked me over were top-of-the-line professionals. Talent like that, whether working free-lance or on a salaried basis, doesn’t come cheap. That’s why I smell a lot of money and power behind them. Whatever Veil knows could seriously embarrass that money and power.”

  “You think Kendry may have been blackmailing somebody?”

  “No. Veil isn’t the blackmailing type. But even if I were wrong about his character, I could still point out that he never had the proverbial pissing pot until he started to make it with his art. Yet whatever he knows, he’s known it a long time, and all indications are that he assiduously kept his mouth shut. Christ, he’s still keeping it shut, for all intents and purposes.”

  “Then why come after him now?”

  “An excellent question. Whatever it is Veil knows, he was left in peace for close to two decades—until Wednesday. By the way, what day is it?”

  “Sunday. You’ve been out for a while. Just because Kendry never said anything to you doesn’t mean that he didn’t start whispering in somebody else’s ear.”

  “Granted that’s possible. Whatever Veil did or didn’t do, it now seems almost certain that money and power sent an assassin after him. But the rifleman misses, and now money and power really has a problem. The truce, if that’s the proper word for it, is broken. Not only is a live, hidden Veil Kendry one hell of a formidable opponent, but he no longer has any reason—maybe—to keep quiet. Enter my two visitors with some difficult marching orders—track Veil Kendry; assess any damage Veil may already have done; erase possible trouble spots, like me.”

  “According to you, and I have no doubt you’re right, he’s carrying nunchaku, at least one knife, two handguns, and a submachine gun. That sounds like somebody bent more on killing an enemy that talking about him.”

  “I’m not so sure. Always, we come back to his signals to me—the open loft, the lights, the painting, the money. Why all that business, unless he wants something brought out, and is willing to pay me a lot of money to bring it out? Believe me, if all Veil wanted was to kill somebody, that person would be dead.”

  “Maybe the guy is heavily guarded; money and power usually are.”

  “He’d still be dead. You tend to underestimate Veil’s skills; he’s one hell of a lot more than just a street fighter. No; he wants something brought out. He can’t just come out and say it himself because … because …”

  Garth supplied the answer I was looking for. “Because he wouldn’t be believed,” my brother said distantly. “He’s got a long police record, and God knows what his military file would show.”

  “Thank you, Sherlock. That’s it. He needs proof, some form of corroboration from an outside party, for the story he has to tell. He has a friend who’s a private investigator, but he just couldn’t bring himself to hire a friend to do a job that could get him killed in the blink of an eye, so he—”

  “That’s bullshit,” Garth interrupted, his voice thick with soft, subdued fury. “That fucker set you up.”

  “No. He left it all up to one roll of the dice. You’re the one who pointed out that I practically had to rip up the floorboards to find the painting and the money.”

  Garth dismissed the thought with a gesture of disdain and disgust. “Anyone who knows you would have made you an overwhelming odds-on favorite to do exactly what you did under those circumstances, in that situation. He set you up.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for my own behavior, thank you very much.”

  “If he’d been up front with you from the beginning, you’d at least have known what it was you were getting involved in. You’d have had some kind of warning of the kind of people you were up against and could have taken appropriate steps to defend yourself. His stupid little game almost cost you your life, and now you’re a marked man until this thing is resolved. I may kill the son-of-a-bitch if I find him.”

  “Take it easy, Garth,” I said, and eased myself off the side of the bed onto the floor. Instantly, pain shot up from my heels into my shinbones and knees, and I promptly collapsed.

  “You’re not going anywhere for a while on those feet,” Garth said as he gently lifted me off the floor and deposited me back on the bed. “What’d they use, a blackjack?”

  “Yeah,” I said through clenched teeth as I waited for the pain to subside. “I’ve got to get on the move, Garth. If those guys find out I’m alive, and they probably will, I’ll be a sitting duck here. It won’t take a bloodhound to find me.”

  “That’s why I brought you your two little friends there to keep you company. Also, there’ll be an armed guard outside your door for as long as you’re here.”

  “Who the hell’s paying for that?”

  “The city of New York. You’re a material witness in crimes including arson and murder. In fact, this little chat may be considered an official police interrogation. As for the rest of it, I don’t give a damn what Kendry did or didn’t want you to do. This has become a police matter, and you’re out of it. I greatly appreciate your thoughts, but thinking is all you’re going to be doing from now on. You can talk to me all you want; I happen to be assigned to the case.”

  “You? What happened to the big industrial espionage c
ase you were working on?”

  “I asked to be transferred to this case, and they gave it to me. I have more than a passing interest in finding that prick Kendry, as well as the two men who beat on you and started that fire under your ass.”

  “Garth, isn’t it a bit unusual to assign a case to a cop who has blood in his eye because of a personal interest?”

  “Who cares if it’s unusual? I’ve got it. You wanted the police involved, you’ve got it. A police artist will be around in an hour or so to talk with you and try to develop some sketches.”

  “Garth, you’re not going to find Veil unless he wants to be found.”

  “We’ll see about that. He’s also considered a material witness. You let me worry about him. When you’ve coughed up the rest of the crap in your lungs and can walk, you’re literally going to hole up in my apartment until we crack this thing. I’m going to booby-trap the place so that nobody but the Frederickson brothers can walk through the door and stay in one piece.”

  “I’m not going to ‘hole up’ anywhere, Garth, and you know it. I’ve got things to do.”

  “No, you don’t. You carried close to a double teaching load last semester so you’d be free this semester to talk to some more loonies. So you put off your research for a time. You have to keep a low profile for a while. Make a joke about your naturally low profile, I’ll swat the bottoms of your feet. I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I. You let me take care of my own business, Garth. You don’t know how long solving this is going to take. It was my feet they beat on, and my ass they tried to burn. I take things like that personally, too. Also, Veil is still my friend, and I’d become personally involved even before my visitors came. I’d taken Veil’s money.”

  “You took shit. You just put his money in a safer place, remember? Besides, the painting is gone. You’ve got nothing left to go on.”

  “I’ve got more than you do. I remember the painting, and in particular I remember the symbols on the robe the figure wore.”

  “Maybe they were just put there for decoration.”

  “Nothing in that painting was put there just ‘for decoration.’ They were some kind of symbols, and I’m going to find out what they mean.”

  Garth slowly shook his head. “You’re not thinking clearly, Mongo. You make sketches of whatever markings you remember, and I’ll have them checked out. You don’t exactly blend into the scenery, which means you can’t just go walking around the streets. You want those guys to finish what they started?”

  “Indeed not. But I don’t think I’m alone; I do believe I’ve picked up some heavy protection—a guardian angel, so to speak.”

  “You’ve got smoke on the brain. What are you talking about?”

  “How many cops and firemen were on the scene when you got there?”

  “They were all over the place.”

  “Ambulances?”

  “Two or three. What are you getting at?”

  “You said you found me on the sidewalk, wrapped in wet drapes. Let me tell you something; whoever cut me off that bed and carried me outside was no fireman. When I passed out, I was surrounded by flame and just this side of Barbecue City—a minute, probably less. Now, I never heard any sirens—and believe me, I was listening with keen interest. I would have been ashes by the time firemen pulled up to the front of the building, much less got up to my apartment. No way. Five people died in a fire that started under my bed.”

  Garth considered it, and I could see in his eyes that he was reaching the same conclusion I had. But then he backed away from it. “Fires are tricky things, Mongo. I’m not sure you would have heard sirens over the noise of the fire itself. The firemen could have been a lot closer than you think.”

  “A cop or fireman would have taken me directly to an ambulance, not dropped me on the sidewalk. It had to be Veil who got to me, cut me loose, and carried me out. He’d known what was likely to happen to me if I got involved, and he’d been keeping an eye on me from the time I pushed open his door and went up to his loft. He must have broken through the door of my apartment almost as soon as the two men left. It was probably Veil who turned in the first alarm. After he got me out, he would have gone back up to try and help others; it was too late for five of them.”

  Garth was silent for some time, thinking. “Just for the sake of argument,” he said at last, “let’s assume that you’re right. One question: If it was Kendry who brought you out, and he was that close all the time, why didn’t he make an earlier entrance and blow away those two guys before they started thumping on your feet and toasting your ass?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask him when I find him.”

  Garth reached out, took the Beretta and the Seecamp out of their holsters, and emptied both boxes of cartridges on the bed. He put a bullet in the chamber of each gun, filled both magazines. When he had finished he shoved the Seecamp under my pillow, put the Beretta, the holsters, and the remaining cartridges into a drawer of the stand next to the bed. “If any hospital personnel try to give you a hard time about the guns, you have them call me.”

  “I’ll keep them out of sight.”

  “Just as long as you keep them close at hand.” Garth gave me a smile and a thumbs-up sign before rising from the chair and heading for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob, turned back. His smile had vanished. “I’ll be the one asking Kendry why he sent you out on a paper raft into a sea of sharks,” my brother said in a low voice that carried more than a hint of menace. “As a matter of fact, I have quite a few questions to ask Mr. Kendry, and I plan to have his ass in custody by the time you get out of here.”

  “Garth, you be very careful how you handle Veil Kendry,” I said quickly, but my brother was already gone from the room.

  6.

  My hospital stay lasted three more days, and I was out on Wednesday—the one-week anniversary of Veil’s disappearance. I hadn’t expected Garth and the rest of the NYPD to find Veil, and they hadn’t. Nor had they found my two torturers, although, working from my descriptions, a police artist had come up with excellent sketches. In fact, neither the NYPD nor the F.B.I. could even come up with mug shots, police records, or anything else that matched the faces and the MO of the two men. That, I thought, was what you’d call a low profile.

  Fortunately for my feet, I was able to use the telephone to take care of a lot of business involving insurance coverage, credit cards, and so on—all the pieces of paper and plastic without which you feel really naked after you’ve lost everything but your living room drapes.

  I’d feared I would need crutches to get around, but by the time I checked out of the hospital I was able to hobble along pretty well with only a cane. Carrying the loaded Seecamp strapped to my right ankle and the heftier Beretta in its shoulder holster under a jacket, wearing dark glasses and a broad-brimmed fedora low on my forehead, keeping a very wary eye on everyone who passed within ten yards of me, I spent the morning filing for replacements for the documents I had lost, including my P.I. and driver’s licenses. I bought two skewers of shish kebob and a can of Pepsi from a sidewalk vendor, ate a leisurely lunch on a bench in a small plaza with my back to a stone wall, peering out from under the brim of my fedora to see if I could spot anybody who might be tailing me. Satisfied after a half hour that I wasn’t being followed, I picked up a pad and pen from a stationery store, then took the subway to the 42nd Street library. During the subway ride I copied down as many of the symbols as I could remember that had appeared on the robe Veil had been wearing in the painting.

  With the help of a librarian, I began ordering up from the stacks books on the peoples of Southeast Asia, Asian calligraphy and symbology, and even—on the off chance that the shape and color of the robe itself might be meaningful—a text on the Asian textile industry. Four large tomes and an hour later I found what I was looking for, in an anthropology text. The symbols were of a religious nature and were used by a Southeast Asian people called the Hmong. I canceled the rest of my order, filed a new
one for three books on the Hmong.

  By the time I left the library two and a half hours later, I had learned that the Hmong were a tribal people indigenous to the heavily forested, mountainous regions of Laos. Fiercely independent, the Hmong had fought not only against the Pathet Lao, that country’s Communist guerrillas, but against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars who had used the Laotian jungles as sanctuaries and the trails to move men and supplies into what was then known as South Vietnam. The Hmong had fought for themselves, for their own reasons, but they had also played a crucial role in the C.I.A.’s secret war in that country. The tribespeople had been equipped with American arms, trained in their use, and often led in combat, by American Special Forces personnel, who, often as not, doubled as C.I.A. operatives. When the Americans left and the arms shipments stopped, the Pathet Lao had moved on the Hmong villages and wreaked a terrible vengeance. Thousands of Hmong were murdered, and virtually all of the remaining Hmong forced to flee. With the assistance of various American agencies, many of these Hmong refugees had emigrated to the United States. There was, according to a New York Times article I found on the library’s microfiche machine, a large settlement of Hmong in the Pacific Northwest, particularly around Seattle.

  It almost certainly meant, I thought, that Veil had been Special Forces and had spent time fighting with the Hmong in Laos. Probably, he had also been a C.I.A. operative.

  It was all enough to start making me a bit nervous.

  I had met Viktor Raskolnikov, Veil’s patron, art dealer, and friend, through Veil some years before and had eventually become friends myself with the burly, shrewd, gentle Russian. Viktor owned a gallery on Madison Avenue, on New York’s Upper East Side. Despite the fact that I was beginning to feel very tired and sore, that’s where I headed next, treating myself to a cab ride over a distance I would normally have walked with pleasure.

  The Raskolnikov Gallery occupied a four-story building and more closely resembled a small art museum than a gallery. Viktor had made a fortune anticipating “now” movements and “hot” artists in New York’s volatile art market. His specialty was the avant-garde, but he touched all the bases and his tastes were eclectic, ranging from antique Persian miniatures to performance art, allowing artists to stage and videotape their “pieces” in a small basement theater.