“Why don’t you just let the kid go? It’s me you want.”
“You overestimate your appeal, D’Amour. Why would I want a fucked-up soul like yours when I could have this pure little thing?”
“Then why did you bring me here?”
“I didn’t. Sure, Sabina may have planted the thought in your head. But you came of your own accord.”
“Sabina’s a friend of yours?”
“She’d probably prefer mistress. Did you fuck her?”
“No.”
“Ah, D’Amour!” the Nomad said, exasperated. “After all the trouble I went to getting her wet. You’re not turning queer on me, are you? No. You’re too straight for your own good. You’re boring, D’Amour. Boring, boring—”
“Well maybe I should just piss off home,” Harry said, turning back to the door.
There was a rush of motion behind him; he heard the bedsprings creak, and Stevie let out a little moan. “Wait,” the Nomad hissed. “Don’t you ever turn your back on me.”
He glanced over his shoulder. The creature had shimmied up onto the bed and now had its bone and muck body poised over its victim. It was the color of the filth on the lamp, but wet, its too-naked anatomy full of peristaltic motions.
“Why’s it always shit?” Harry said.
The Nomad cocked its head. Whatever features were upon it all resembled wounds. “Because shit’s all we have, Harry, until we’re returned to glory. It’s all God allows us to play with. Maybe a little fire, once in a while, as long as He isn’t looking. Speaking of fire, I saw Father Hess the other day, burning in his cell. I told him I might see you—”
Harry shook his head. “It doesn’t work, Nomad,” he said.
“What doesn’t work?”
“The fallen angel routine. I don’t believe it any more.” He started towards the bed. “You know why? I saw some of your relatives in Oregon. In fact, I almost got crucified by a couple of them. Brutish little fucks like you, except they didn’t have any of your pretensions. They were just in it for the blood and the shit.” He kept approaching the bed as he talked, far from certain what the creature would do. It had disemboweled Hess with a few short strokes and he had no reason to believe it had lost the knack. But, stripped of its phoney autobiography, what was it? A thug with a few days’ training in an abattoir.
“Stop right there,” the creature said when Harry was a yard from the bed. It was shuddering from head to foot. “If you come any closer, I’ll kill Little Stevie. And I’ll throw him down the stairs, just like Hess.”
Harry raised his hands in mock-surrender. “Okay,” he said, “this is as close as I get. I just wanted to check the family resemblance. You know, it’s uncanny.”
The Nomad shook his head. “I was an angel, D’Amour,” it said, its voice troubled. “I remember Heaven. I do. As though it were yesterday. Clouds and light and—”
“And the sea?”
“The sea?”
“Quiddity.”
“No!” it yelled. “I was in Heaven. I remember God’s heart, beating, beating, all the time—”
“Maybe you were born on a beach.”
“I’ve warned you once,” the creature said. “I’ll kill the boy.”
“And what will that prove? That you’re a fallen angel? Or that you’re the little bully I say you are?”
The Nomad raised its hands to its wretched face. “Ohh, you’re clever, D’Amour,” it sighed. “You’re very clever. But so was Hess.” The creature parted its fingers, exhaling its sewer breath. “And look what happened to him.”
“Hess wasn’t clever,” Harry said softly. “I loved him and I respected him, but he was deluded. You’re pretty much alike, now that I think about it.” He leaned an inch or two closer to the entity. “You think you fell from Heaven. He thought he was serving it. You believed the same things, in the end. It was stupid to kill him, Nomad. It’s not left you with very much.”
“I’ve still got you,” the creature replied. “I could fuck with your head until the Crack of Doom.”
“Nah,” Harry said, standing upright. “I’m not afraid of you any longer. I don’t need prayers—”
“Oh don’t you?” it growled.
“I don’t need a crucifix. I just need the eyes in my head. And what I see—what I see is an anorexic little shit-eater.”
At this, it launched itself at him, shrieking, all the wounds in its head wide. Harry retreated across the filthy floor, avoiding its whining talons by inches, until his back was flat against the wall. Then it closed on him, flinging its arms up at his head. He raised his hands to protect his eyes, but the creature didn’t want them, at least not yet. Instead it dug its fingers into the flesh at the back of his neck, driving its spiked feet into the wall to either side of his body.
“Now again, D’Amour—” the creature said. Harry felt the blood pour down his spine. Heard his vertebrae crack. “Am I an angel?” Its face was inches from Harry’s, its voice issuing from all the holes at once. “I want an answer, D’Amour. It’s very important to me. I was in Heaven once, wasn’t I? Admit it.”
Very, very slowly, Harry shook his throbbing head.
The creature sighed. “Oh, D’Amour,” it said, uprooting one of its hands from the back of Harry’s neck and bringing it round to stroke his larynx. The growl had gone from its voice. It was no longer the Nomad; it was Lazy Susan. “I’ll miss you,” it said, its fingers breaking the skin of Harry’s throat. “There hasn’t been a night when I haven’t thought of us”—its tone was sultry now—“here, in the dark together.”
On the bed behind the creature, the boy moaned.
“Hush . . . ” Lazy Susan said.
But Stevie was beyond being silenced. He wanted the comfort of a prayer. “Hail Mary, full of grace—” he began.
The creature glanced round at him, the Nomad surfacing again to shriek for the boy to shut the fuck up. As it did so, Harry caught hold of the hand at his neck, lacing his fingers with the talons. Then he threw his weight forward. The Nomad’s feet were loosed from the wall and the two bodies, locked together, stumbled into the middle of the room.
Instantly, the creature drove its fingers deeper into Harry’s nape. Blinded by pain, he swung around, determined that wherever they fell it wouldn’t be on top of the boy. They reeled wildly, round and round, until Harry lost his balance and fell forward, carrying the Nomad ahead of him.
Its body struck the charred door, which splintered under the combined weight of their bodies. Through his tear-filled eyes Harry glimpsed the misbegotten face in front of him, its hands slack with shock. Then they were out onto the landing. It was bright after the murk of the bedroom. For the Nomad, painfully so. It convulsed in Harry’s embrace, hot phlegm spurting from its maws. He seized the moment to wrest its talons from his neck, then their momentum carried them against the banisters, which cracked but did not break, and over they went.
It was a fall of perhaps ten feet, the Nomad under Harry, shrieking still. They hit the stairs, and rolled and rolled, finally coming to rest a few steps from the bottom.
The first thing Harry thought was: God, it’s quiet. Then he opened his eyes. He was cheek to cheek with the creature, its sweat stinging his skin. Reaching out for the spattered banister he started to haul himself to his feet, his left arm, shoulder, ribs and neck all paining him, but none so badly he could not enjoy the spectacle at his feet.
The Nomad was in extremis, its body—which was even more pitiful and repulsive by the light of day than in the room above—a mass of degenerating tissue.
“Are . . . you . . . there?” the creature said.
It had lost its growl and its silkiness too, as though the selves it had pretended had flickered out along with its sight.
“I’m here,” Harry replied.
It tried to raise one of its hands, but failed. “Are you . . . dying?” it wanted to know.
“Not today,” Harry said softly.
“That’s not right,” the creature sa
id. “We have to go together. I . . . am . . . you . . . ”
“You haven’t got much time,” Harry told it. “Don’t waste what you’ve got with that crap.”
“But it’s true,” the thing went on. “I am . . . I am you and . . . you are love . . . ”
Harry thought of Ted’s painting; of the snake beneath his heel. Clinging to the banister, he raised his foot.
“Be quiet,” he said.
The creature ignored him. “You are love . . . ” it said again. “And love is . . . ”
Harry laid his heel upon its head. “I’m warning you,” he said.
“Love is what . . . ”
He didn’t warn it again, but ground his foot down into its suppurating face as hard as his weary body would allow. It was hard enough. He felt its muck cave in beneath his heel, layers of wafer-bone and ooze dividing under his weight. Small spasms ran out along the creature’s limbs to its bloodied fingertips. Then, quite suddenly, it ceased, its schtick unfinished.
In the hallway below, Loretta was murmuring the prayer her brother had begun above.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women—”
It sounded pretty to Harry’s ears, after the shrieks and the threats.
“And blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus—”
It would not turn death away, of course. It would not save the innocent from suffering. But prettiness was no insignificant quality, not in this troubled world.
While he listened he pulled his heel out of the Nomad’s face. The creature’s matter, stripped of the will that had shaped it, was already losing distinction and running off down the stairs.
Five steps to the bottom, Harry saw. Just like Hess.
The victory had taken its toll. In addition to his lacerated neck and punctured throat Harry had a broken collarbone, four cracked ribs, a fractured right arm, and mild concussion. As for Stevie, who had been the Nomad’s hostage for three days, his traumas were more psychological than physical. They would take some time to heal, if they ever did, but the first step on that journey was made the day after the creature’s death. The family moved out of the house on Wyckoff Street, leaving it to the mercy of gossip. This time there would be no attempt to redeem the house. Untenanted, it would fall into disrepair through the winter months, at what some thought an uncanny speed. Nobody would ever occupy it again.
One mystery remained unsolved. Why had the creature plotted to bring him back to Wyckoff Street in the first place? Had it begun to doubt its own mythology and arranged a rematch with an old enemy to confirm its sense of itself? Or had it simply been bored one September day and taken it into its head to play the old game of temptation and slaughter for the sheer hell of it?
The answer to those questions would, Harry assumed, join the long list of things he would never know.
As for Ted’s magnum opus, after a few days of indecision Harry elected to hang it in the living room. Given that he was presently one-handed, this took him the better part of two hours to accomplish, but once it was up—the canvas nailed directly to the wall—it looked better than it had in the gallery. Unbounded by a frame, Ted’s vision seemed to bleed out across the wall.
Of the lovely Sabina, who had presumably been obeying the Nomad’s instructions when she’d delivered the painting, there was no further sign. But Harry had two new deadbolts put on the front door anyway, just in case.
A little less than a fortnight after the endgame in Wyckoff Street, he got a call out of the blue from a fretful Raul.
“I need you to get on a plane, Harry. Whatever you’re doing—”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Omaha. I came looking for Tesla.”
“And?”
“I found her. But . . . not quite the way I thought I would.”
“Is she okay?” Harry said. There was a silence down the line. “Raul?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I don’t know whether she’s okay or not. You have to see for yourself.”
“Is she at Grillo’s place?”
“Yeah. I tracked her from L.A. She told her neighbors she was heading out to Nebraska. That’s proof of insanity in Hollywood. How soon can you get out here?”
“I’ll catch a flight today, if I can find one. Will you pick me up at the airport? I’m not in the best of shape.”
“What happened?”
“I trod in some shit. But it’s dead now.”
FOUR
I
Phoebe didn’t tell Jarrieffa that she knew the identity of their visitor. It was too painful, for one thing, and for another she was afraid the result would be to scare the woman and her children out of the house. She certainly didn’t want that; not just for their sakes, but for her own. She had become used to their mess and their ruckus, and it would make the recognition of what she’d done all the more unbearable if she was left alone in the O’Connell mansion as a consequence.
Jarrieffa had a lot of questions, of course, and she was less than satisfied with some of the answers Phoebe furnished. But as time slipped by, and the children’s nightmares and spontaneous bursts of tears diminished in frequency, the house returned to its former rhythm, and whatever doubts Jarrieffa still had she kept to herself.
Phoebe, meanwhile, had begun a systematic search of the city, looking for some clue as to Joe’s whereabouts. Assuming he had not simply evaporated upon departing the house (this she doubted; rudimentary he’d been, but still solid), his escape through the streets could not, she reasoned, have gone completely unnoticed. Even in this city, the streets of which boasted more strange forms and physiognomies with every new vessel that dropped anchor, Joe’s appearance had been to say the least noteworthy. Somebody must have seen something.
She soon came to regret that she’d been so tardy warming up relations with her neighbors. Though most of them were reasonably polite to her when she came asking questions, they were all wary of her. As far as they were concerned she remained an outsider, and she feared that even if they had answers to her questions they would not be forthcoming. Several days in a row she returned to the O’Connell house frustrated and exhausted, having traipsed from door to door (on some streets from construction site to construction site) asking for information, the parameters of her search steadily expanding, along with her sense of desperation. She lost her appetite and her sense of humor. Some days, having skipped two consecutive meals, she’d wander the streets lightheaded and close to tears, calling Joe’s name like a crazy woman. Once, finding herself at the end of the day lost and too weary to discover a way home, she slept in the street. On another occasion, wandering into the middle of some territorial dispute between two families, she almost had her throat cut. But she continued to journey out every day, hoping for some clue that would eventually lead her to him.
As it turned out, the sliver of information she’d been searching for came from a source close to hand. Preparing to step into her bath one day, having walked the city for twelve hours or more, there was a knock on her bedroom door, and upon her invitation Enko entered, asking to speak to her for a few moments. He had always been the least friendly member of Jarrieffa’s brood; a gangly boy, even by adolescent standards, his face human but for the symmetrical patches of mottling upon his brow and neck, and the vestigial gills that ran from the middle of his cheeks down to his neck.
“I’ve got a friend,” he explained. “His name’s Vip Luemu. He lives down the street two blocks. The house with the boarded up windows?”
“I know it,” Phoebe said.
“He told me you’d been round asking about . . . you know, that thing that was here.”
“Yes I was.”
“Well . . . Yip knew something about it, but his mother told him not to speak to you.”
“That was neighborly,” Phoebe remarked.
“It’s not you,” Enko replied. “Well . . . it is and it isn’t. It’s mainly what happened here, you know, in the old days, and with the ships coming back in agai
n, they think you’re going to start up business like Miss O’Connell.”
“Business?” said Phoebe.
“Yes. You know. The women.”
“I’m not following this, Enko.”
“The whores,” the boy said, the mottling on his face darkening.
“Whores?” said Phoebe. “Are you telling me this house . . . used to be a brothel?”
“The best. That’s what Vip’s father says. People came from all over.”
Phoebe pictured Maeve, sitting in regal splendor amid her pillows and her billet-doux, opining on the imbecility of love. And no wonder. The woman had been a madam. Love wasn’t good for business.
“You could do me a great service,” Phoebe said, “if you’d tell Vip to spread the word that I have no intention of reopening this house for business any time soon.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Now . . . you said he knew something?”
Enko nodded. “He heard his father talking about a misamee that was seen down at the harbor.”
“Misamee?”
“Oh, that’s a word the sailors use. It means something they find out at sea that’s not really made yet.”
Half-dreamed, she thought. Like my Joe; my misamee Joe.
“Enko, thank you.”
“No trouble,” the boy replied, turning to go. Hand on the door, he glanced back. “You know, Musnakaff wasn’t my father.”
“Yes, I had heard.”
“He was my father’s cousin. Anyway, he told all about how he used to go out and find women for Miss O’Connell.”
“I can imagine,” Phoebe said.
“He explained everything. Where to go. What to say. So—”
Enko halted and stared at his shoes.
“So if I ever go back into business—” Phoebe said.
The boy beamed.
“I’ll bear you in mind.”
She let the bathwater go cold, and began to get dressed again, putting on several layers of clothing against the wind, which had been bitter the last couple of days and was always keener close to the water. Then she went to the kitchen, filled up one of Maeve’s silver liquor flasks with mourningberry juice, and headed down to the harbor, thinking as she went that if she failed to find Joe after a year or so, she’d reopen the brothel just to spite the neighbors who’d given her so little help, and like Maeve grow old and sour in luxury, profiting from lovelessness.