The Scarlet Gospels

  New York wasn’t the only city in the world that had magic in its blood. All the great cities of Europe and of the Far East kept their own secrets as well—many more ancient than anything New York could boast—but there was nowhere in the world that had such a concentration of supernatural activity as Manhattan. For those like Harry who’d trained themselves to look past the glorious distractions the city offered, evidence could be seen just about anywhere that the island was a battlefield where the better angels of human nature perpetually warred with the forces of discord and despair. And nobody was immune.

  Had Harry been born under a star less kind, he might well have ended up among the city’s nomadic visionaries, his days taken up with begging for enough money to buy some liquid oblivion, his nights spent trying to find a place where he could not hear the adversaries singing as they went about their labors of the dark. They had only ever sung one song within earshot of Harry, and that was “Danny Boy,” that hymn to death and maudlin sentiment that Harry had heard so often that he knew the words by heart.

  On his way to Norma’s, he stopped in at Rueffert’s deli and bought the same breakfast he’d bought there whenever he was in the city every day for the better part of twenty-five years. Jim Rueffert always had Harry’s coffee poured, sugared, and hit with just a dash of cream by the time he’d get to the counter.

  “Harry, my friend,” Jim said, “we ain’t seen you in a week, at least. My wife says, ‘He’s dead,’ and I say, ‘Not Harry. No way. Harry doesn’t die. He goes on forever.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “Sure feels that way sometimes, Jim.”

  Harry left some money in the tip jar—more than he could afford, as usual—and headed out the door. As he exited the shop, he collided with a man who seemed to be in a hurry, even if he didn’t appear to know where he was headed. The man grunted, “Not here,” and surreptitiously slipped a scrap of paper into the palm of Harry’s hand. Then the man wove around Harry and continued on down the street.

  Harry took the stranger’s advice and walked on, curiosity speeding his step. He turned a corner onto a quieter street, not planning a particular route, just wondering where he was being watched from, and who by, that the messenger should warn him the way he had. Harry checked the reflections in the windows on the opposite side of the street to see if anyone had followed him, but he saw no one. He kept walking, the paper crumpled up in his left fist.

  About two-thirds of the way down the block was a florist’s store called Eden & Co. He went in, taking the opportunity to glance back down the street. If he was being followed it was not, his ink and his instinct told him, by any of the half-dozen people who were walking in his direction.

  The air in the flower store was cool, moist and heavy with the mingled perfumes of dozens of blossoms. A middle-aged man with an immaculately trimmed moustache that followed the line of his mouth like a third lip appeared from the back of the store and asked Harry if he was looking for anything in particular.

  “Just browsing,” Harry said. “I, uh, love flowers.”

  “Well, let me know if you decide on anything.”

  “You bet.”

  The man with the perfect moustache stepped through a beaded curtain at the back of the shop and immediately started up a conversation in Portuguese, which Harry’s arrival had apparently disrupted. No sooner had the man begun than a woman came back at him speaking twice as fast and in an obvious rage.

  While their heated conversation went on, Harry wandered around the store, looking up now and again to see if there was anyone watching from the street. Finally, having convinced himself that he was not being spied upon, he opened his fist and smoothed out the piece of paper. Before he read a single word, he knew it was from Norma:

  Don’t go to my apartment. It’s bad. I’m in the old place. Come at 3 a.m. If you itch, walk away.

  “A message?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Harry looked up. He barely had time to bite back the Christ! he almost muttered at the sight of her. Three-fourths of the woman’s face was a rigid mass of smeared and indented scar tissue. The remaining quarter—her beautiful left eye and brow above it (plus the elaborately coiffed wig, which was a mass of curls)—only seemed to make the erasure of the rest of her face seem even crueler. Her nose was reduced to two round holes; her right eye and mouth were shorn of lashes and lips. Harry fixed his attention on her left eye and stumbled over his reply, which was simply a repeating of her question.

  “Message?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing down at the scrap of paper in his hand. “You want this with the flowers?”

  “Oh,” Harry said, breathing a sigh of relief. “No, thank you.”

  He quickly pocketed the message, nodded, and left the flower shop and its bad omens behind him.

  Harry took the note and his puzzlement over its contents, along with a fierce hunger, to Cherrington’s Pub, a dark, quiet watering hole that he’d found the first day he’d come to New York. It served old-fashioned food with a minimum of fuss, and they knew him so well that he only had to slide into his corner and give a little nod to a waitress named Phyllis and there’d be a large bourbon—no ice—on his table within sixty seconds, sometimes less. Having a routine that bordered on stagnancy had its benefits.

  “You’re looking good, Phyllis,” Harry said as she brought him his drink in record time.

  “I’m retiring.”

  “What? When?”

  “End of next week. I’m going to have a little party on Friday evening, just for the staff and a few regulars. You in town?”

  “If I am, I’ll be here.”

  Harry studied her. She was probably in her mid-sixties, which meant she’d been edging toward forty when Harry first found the place. Forty-something to sixty-something was a lot of life, a lot of chances come, gone, and never coming round again.

  “You gonna be okay?” Harry said.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m not planning on dying or nothing. I just can’t take this place anymore. I don’t sleep nights. I’m tired, Harry.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Aren’t guys like you supposed to be good liars?” she said as she headed away from the table, saving Harry from fumbling for a reply.

  Harry settled back into the corner of the booth and pulled out the note again. It wasn’t like Norma to be scared. She lived in what was unequivocally the most haunted apartment in the city. She’d held advice sessions for the dead for more than three decades—hearing stories of violent deaths by those who’d experienced them firsthand, murder victims, suicides, people killed crossing the street or stopped in their tracks by something dropped from a window. If anyone could have honestly claimed to have heard it all before, it was Norma. So what was it that had made her leave her ghosts, and her televisions, and her kitchen where she knew the location of everything down to the last teaspoon?

  He looked at the clock above the bar. It was six thirty-two. He had eight hours to go. He couldn’t wait that long.

  “Fuck this three in the morning crap,” Harry said. He downed his bourbon and called over to Phyllis, “Time to close out the tab, Phyllis!”

  “Where’s the fire?” she said, sauntering back to Harry’s booth.

  “I’ve got to get someplace faster than I thought.”

  He tucked a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You,” Harry said, already turning toward the door. “In case I don’t make it to your party.”

  13

  Harry stepped out of the cab on the corner of 13th and Ninth. The intersection was not Harry’s true destination. A few blocks farther down in what had been a well-kept building that had once housed lawyers and doctors, including psychiatrists. It was in the waiting room of one of the latter, a psychiatrist by the name of Ben Krackomberger, M.D., that Harry had first met Norma Paine.

  After the events of Scummy’s death, Harry had been taken off active duty. Harry’s version of the events that led t
o that night his partner lost his life proved to be a bigger bite than the department could chew, so they sent him to Krackomberger, who in a courteous but insistent fashion kept pressing Harry on the details of what he “imagined” he’d seen.

  Harry would go through it all again and again, moment by moment, foiling Krackomberger’s attempt to catch Harry out with some inconsistency from telling to telling. Finally the doctor said, “It comes down to this, Harry. In the end, your version of what happened that day is preposterous. In less serious circumstances I’d call it laughable.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’ve been pouring my fucking heart out to you—”

  “Calm down, Mister D’Amour.”

  Harry rose to his feet. “Don’t interrupt me. You’re telling me that all this time, you’ve made me go over and over it, and you were laughing inside?”

  “I didn’t say— Please, Mister D’Amour, sit down, or I’ll be obliged to have you forcibly—”

  “I’m sitting. Okay? Is that okay?” Harry said, taking a seat on the table that rested between the good doctor and his therapy couch.

  “Yes, but if you feel the need to get up again, then I suggest you leave.”

  “And if I do, what will you put on my papers?”

  “That you are unfit for service due to extreme delusional states, almost certainly brought on by the trauma of the incident. Nobody is calling you crazy, Mister D’Amour. I just need to give your superiors an honest assessment of your condition.”

  “Extreme delusional states…” Harry said softly.

  “People respond to the kind of pressure you’ve had to endure in very different ways. You seem to have created a kind of personal mythology to contain the whole terrible experience, to make sense of it—”

  He was interrupted by a series of crashes from the next room, where Krackomberger’s secretary sat.

  “It’s not me!” a woman’s voice—not that of the secretary—said.

  The doctor got up, making a mumbled apology to Harry, and opened the door. As Krackomberger did so, several magazines sailed past him and landed on the Persian carpet in the doctor’s office. Suddenly the hairs on the back of Harry’s neck stood on end. Whatever was wrong next door, it wasn’t just an irate patient, Harry’s UI told him. This was something altogether stranger.

  He took a deep breath, got up, and followed Krackomberger through to the waiting room. As Harry did so, the doctor retreated, stumbling over his own feet in his haste.

  “What the hell’s going on in here?” Harry said.

  Krackomberger looked at him, his face drained of blood, his expression crazed.

  “Did you do this?” he said to Harry. “Is it some kind of practical joke?”

  “No,” said the woman in the waiting room.

  Harry followed the woman’s voice and saw her. She had the high cheekbones and the lavish mouth of a woman who had once been a classic beauty. But life had marked her deeply, etching her black skin with frown marks and grooves around her downturned mouth. Her eyes were milky white. It was obvious that she couldn’t see Harry, but regardless, he felt her gaze upon him, like the softest of winds blowing against his face. All the while something in the room was having a fine time of it, overturning chairs, sweeping half the contents of the secretary’s desk onto the floor.

  “It isn’t his fault,” the woman said to Krackomberger. “And it isn’t mine either.” She clutched her walking stick and took a step in their direction. “My name is Norma Paine,” the blind woman said.

  Krackomberger stood frozen in a daze. Harry took it upon himself to speak for the doctor.

  “He’s Ben Krackomberger. And I’m Harry. Harry D’Amour.”

  “Not the same D’Amour who was involved in that mess with the dead cop?”

  “The very same.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mister D’Amour. Let me offer you a bit of advice,” she said to Harry as she pointed a finger at Krackomberger. “Whatever this man tries to tell you about what you did or didn’t see, just agree with him.”

  “What? Why would I do that?”

  “Because people like him have a vested interest in silencing people like us. We rock the boat, you see?”

  “Is that what you’re doing right now?” Harry said, nodding to the framed pictures that were coming off the walls, one by one. Not simply falling but being lifted off by their hooks, as if by invisible hands, then thrown down so violently the glass shattered.

  “As I said before, I’m not doing this,” Norma said. “One of my clients is here with me—”

  “Clients?”

  “I talk to the dead, Mister D’Amour. And this particular client doesn’t feel as though I’m paying enough attention. Doctor Krackomberger. Say hello to your brother.”

  Krackomberger’s chin quivered. “Im-impossible,” he muttered.

  “Warren, yes?” Norma said.

  “No. Warren is dead.”

  “Well, of course he’s dead!” Norma snapped. “That’s why I’m here.”

  The doctor looked utterly bewildered by this piece of logic.

  “She talks to the dead is what she’s saying, Doc,” Harry put in.

  “I’m not speaking Swahili,” Norma said to Harry. “I don’t need an interpreter.”

  “I don’t know,” Harry said, looking at Dr. Krackomberger. “He looks pretty confused.”

  “Try and pay attention, Doctor,” Norma offered. “Your brother told me to call you Shelly, because that’s your middle name and not many people know that. Is it true?”

  “… you could have found that out any number of ways.”

  “All right. Forget it,” Norma said, turning her back on the doctor. “I need a brandy. Mister D’Amour, would you like to join me in a little toast to the idiocy of psychiatrists?”

  “I would happily drink to that, Miss Paine.”

  “Warren,” Norma said, “let’s go. We’re frightening innocent people.”

  She was speaking, Harry supposed, of the receptionist who had taken refuge under the desk when the pictures started to drop and hadn’t emerged since.

  “Wait,” Krackomberger said as they headed for the door. “You’re blind, aren’t you?”

  “And you’re perceptive,” Norma said.

  “Then … how can you possibly see my brother?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I only know I can. The world is invisible to me but perfectly clear to you. The dead are invisible to you and perfectly clear to me.”

  “You’re telling me you can see my brother? Right now?”

  Norma turned back and stared into the office. “Yes, he’s lying on your couch.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I asked you, didn’t I?”

  “He’s masturbating.”

  “Jesus. It’s him.”

  From that chance encounter the friendship of Harry and Norma sprang. And like much that happens by chance, this collision of souls could not have been more essential for both. Harry had been doubting his sanity in those recent weeks—the fuel for that fire supplied by Dr. Krackomberger—and suddenly there was Norma, talking to the supernatural as if it was the most natural thing in the world, something that was happening across the city every moment of every day.

  It was she who had first said—when Harry unburdened himself of what he’d seen the day of his partner’s death—that she believed every word of it and that she knew men and women around the city who could tell stories of their own that were evidence of the same Otherness, present in the daily life of the city.

  As Harry drew within sight of the old building, he was surprised to find just how much it had changed over the years. The windows were either boarded up or broken and there’d apparently been a fire at some point in the building’s history, which had gutted at least a third of the place, scorch marks blackening the façade above the burned-out windows. It was a sad sight, but more significantly,
it was a troubling one. Why would Norma leave the comfort of her apartment for this godforsaken corner of nowhere?

  All the doors were severely locked and bolted, but it wasn’t a problem for Harry, whose solution to such a setback was always old-fashioned brute strength. He chose one of the boarded-up doors and pulled off several of the wood planks. It was a noisy, messy business, and if there’d been any kind of security patrolmen guarding the building, as several prominently placed signs announced there were, they would have certainly come running. But as he suspected, the signs were bullshit, and he was left to his own devices without interruption. Within five minutes of beginning his labor he had denuded the door of its boards and picked the lock that lay behind them.

  “Nice work, kid,” he said to himself as he stepped inside.

  Harry took out a mini flashlight and shone it into the room. He saw that everything that had distinguished the modestly elegant lobby in which Harry now stood—the deco sweep of the design on the mirrors, the etchings in the tile underfoot, and the shape of the lighting fixtures—had been destroyed. Whether the destruction was the result of a crude attempt to take up the tiles for resale and bring down the mirror and light fixtures intact for the same purpose or the place simply had been smashed by drugged-up vandals with nothing better to do, the result was the same: chaos and debris in place of order and purpose.

  He walked through the litter of glass and tile shards until he reached the stairs; then he began to ascend. Apparently there were easier ways into the building than prying open one of the doors as he had, because the sharp smell of human urine and the duller stink of feces grew stronger as he climbed. People used this place, as a toilet, yes, but probably to sleep in as well.

  He eased his hand around the revolver tucked snugly in its holster, just in case he found himself discussing real estate law with any bad-tempered tenants. The good news was how very inactive his tattoos were. Not an itch, not a spasm. Apparently Norma had made a smart choice for a bolt-hole. Not the most salubrious of surroundings, but if it kept her safely hidden from the adversary and its agents, then Harry had no qualms.