Lenny knew that wasn’t true – men who planned to let other men live didn’t point guns at them without first concealing their faces – yet he found himself obeying. The man reached into his pocket again. This time his hand emerged holding a pair of cuffs. He tossed them to Lenny and instructed him to attach one to his right wrist, then put his hands close together behind his back and place them on the bar. If he tried to run away, or pull a fast one, he was assured that he would be shot in the back. Once more, Lenny did as he was told. When he turned his back and put his hands on the bar, the second cuff was quickly cinched tight around his left wrist.
‘All done,’ said the man. ‘Now come around here and sit on the floor.’
Lenny moved from behind the bar. He thought about running for the door, but knew that he wouldn’t get more than a few feet without being shot. He gazed out into the night, willing a car to appear, but none came. He walked to the spot indicated by the man, and sat down. The TV came on again, blazing into life at the gunman’s touch on the remote. It continued to show images of the camps, of men and women climbing from trains, some of them still wearing ordinary clothing, and others already dressed in the grab of prisoners. There were so many of them, and they outnumbered their captors. As a boy, Lenny would wonder why they didn’t try to overcome the Germans and fight to save themselves. Later he learned that their captors starved them before marching them to their deaths, so they would be too weak to struggle. But now he knew that physical weakness was only part of the explanation. Fear – real terror, intensified by the terror of others – eats away at the will.
The man leaned against the bar, the pistol leveled at Lenny.
‘You asked me who I am,’ he said. ‘You can call me Steiger. It doesn’t matter much. It’s just a name. Might as well have plucked it from the air. I can give you another, if you don’t like that one.’
And again Lenny felt a glimmer of hope warm the coldness of his insides. Perhaps, just perhaps, this night might not end in his death. Could it be that, if he was withholding his true name, this freakish individual planned to return to the hole from which he had emerged and leave Lenny alive? Or was all this a ruse, just one more way to torment a doomed man before the inevitable bullet brought all to an end?
‘You know where these teeth came from?’
‘No.’
‘Your wife. They came from her mouth.’
Steiger grabbed a handful of the teeth from the bar and threw them on the floor before Lenny. One landed in his lap.
For a moment Lenny was unable to move. His vomit reflex activated, and he tasted something awful in his throat. Then he was moving, trying to rise to his feet, but a bullet struck the floor inches from the soles of his shoes, and the noise as much as the sight of the splintered mark upon the floor stilled him.
‘Don’t do that again,’ said Steiger. ‘If you try, the next one will take out a kneecap, or maybe your balls.’
Lenny froze. He stared at the tooth stuck to his jeans. He didn’t want to believe that it had once been his wife’s.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Stegner. ‘Working on your wife’s teeth gave me a renewed admiration for the skill of dentists. I used to believe that they were just like failed doctors, because, I mean, how difficult can it be to work on teeth, all the nerves and stuff apart. I hated going to the dentist as a kid. Still do.
‘Anyway, I always thought extractions would be the easy part. You get a grip, and you yank. But it’s harder to get a good grip on a tooth than you might think, and then you have to twist, and sometimes – if there’s a weakness – the tooth just breaks. You’ll see that some of your wife’s teeth didn’t emerge intact. I like to think that it was a learning experience for both of us.
‘If you doubt me, and are trying to convince yourself that they’re not your wife’s teeth,’ said Steiger, ‘I can tell you that she was wearing jeans and a yellow blouse, with green – no, blue – flowers. It was hard to tell in the dark. She also has a mark here, on her left forearm, like a big freckle. That would bother me, I have to say. She’s a nice-looking woman, but I’d always have been aware of that mark, like a reminder of all that’s wrong inside, because we all have things wrong with us inside. That sound like your wife? Pegi, right? Spelled with an “I”. Short for Margaret. That’s what she said, while she could still speak.
‘No, no, don’t go getting all upset now. You’ll move, or you’ll try to lash out, and this will all get a whole lot worse for you both. Yeah, that’s right: she’s still alive, I swear to you. And – listen to me, now, just listen – there are worse things than losing your teeth. They can do all kinds of miracles with implants now. She could have teeth that are better than her old ones. And if that’s too expensive, or just doesn’t work out because of the damage – because, to remind you, I’m no professional – then there’s always dentures. My mother wore dentures, just like I do, and I thought that they made her look younger, because they were always clean and even. You ever see old people with their own teeth? They look like shit. Nothing you can do about old age. It’s pitiless. It ravages us all.’
He squatted before Lenny, still careful to remain just beyond his reach should Lenny’s anger overcome his fear, but he needn’t have worried. Lenny was weeping.
‘Here’s how it will go,’ said Steiger. ‘If you’re straight with me, and answer my questions, I’ll let her live. She’s all dosed up on painkillers, so she’s not feeling much of anything right now. Before I leave, I’ll call an ambulance for her, and she’ll be looked after. I promise you that.
‘As for you, well, I can’t promise anything other than, if you’re honest, you won’t be aware of your own dying, and you’ll have saved your wife in the process. Are we clear?’
Lenny was now sobbing loudly. Steiger reached out and slapped him hard across the side of the head.
‘I said, “Are we clear?”’
‘Yes,’ said Lenny. ‘We’re clear.’
‘Good. I have only two questions for you. What did the Jew named Perlman tell you, and who else knows?’
When the questions were answered at last, and Lenny Tedesco was dead, Steiger removed from the dishwasher the glasses that he had used and placed them in a bag. He also emptied the register for appearances’ sake. He had been careful to touch as few surfaces as possible, but he went over them once again with some bleach that he found behind the bar. Some traces of his presence would still remain, but they would be useless without a suspect, or a record against which to check them, and Steiger was a ghost. He traced the hard drive for the bar’s security camera, and removed it. He turned off the lights in the Hurricane Hatch before he left and closed the door behind him. Lenny’s car was parked behind the bar, and would not be noticed unless someone came looking for it.
Steiger walked for five minutes to where his car was parked, out of sight of both the bar and the road, then drove to the Tedescos’ small, neat home. He opened the door with Pegi Tedesco’s key and went upstairs to the main bedroom, where he had left her tied to the bed. Beside her were the tools with which he had removed all of her teeth, along with some others for which he had not yet found a use. The painkillers were wearing off, and Pegi was moaning softy against the gag.
Steiger sat down beside her on the bed, and brushed the hair from her face.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘where were we?’
13
Angel and Louis sat at the window of Gritty’s brewpub on Fore Street in Portland, two cask ales before them, the world beyond. They were watching a man arguing with a woman on the street outside. Both were probably in their thirties, at most, but with a lot of city miles on their clocks. The man was wearing sneakers, but in his right hand he held a single tan Timberland boot. He was waving it in the face of the woman until she, tiring of having a boot hanging inches from her nose, wrenched it from his hand and proceeded to beat him across the head with it, yelling something in time to the blows.
‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘there are a lot of fucked-up people in this
town.’
Louis couldn’t disagree. It said something when one could travel north from New York City – a place that, to be straight, was not entirely lacking in fucked-up people of its own – and take the view that, well, yes, given its size and population, Portland, Maine was more than holding its own in the fucked-up stakes.
‘More to the point,’ said Angel, ‘there are some fucked-up tattoos in this town. Did you see that woman’s leg? It looked like she’d been burned in a fire.’
‘I think it was supposed to be a face,’ said Louis.
‘Whose face?’
‘Could be anyone’s. Could be mine and I wouldn’t know it.’
Louis considered the matter, and decided that it was less a reflection on Portland’s tattoo artists than on the kind of people who came to it, possibly hoping to have something done about their fucked-up tattoos.
The couple moved on – or, more correctly, the man moved on quickly, the woman hot on his trail, still yelling, still hitting him with the boot.
‘Lot of fucked-up people,’ said Angel, again.
‘Colorful, though.’
‘It has its charms.’
They had rented an apartment in Portland’s East End, once again in order to be near Charlie Parker. When first they’d done so, he had seemingly been dying in a hospital bed. Now he was recovering in Boreas. They had considered finding somewhere closer to him, maybe even in Boreas itself, but he’d made it clear that he didn’t want them hovering over him like a pair of demented Florence Nightingales. He didn’t mind them coming up to see him, but even then he wasn’t prepared to have them stay under his roof. Two lesser men might have been hurt by this, but Angel and Louis were familiar with pain and suffering, and the various ways in which individuals coped with it. Whatever Parker was enduring as he worked his way back to health, he did not want others to witness it. He would present a face to the world, but he would do so on his own terms.
So Angel and Louis stayed more and more in Portland, and they missed Manhattan less than either of them would admit to the other. Portland was curious and colorful. All right, so an attempt by the American Planning Association to categorize Congress Street as one of the ten greatest streets in the nation took a little time to digest. They had also decided that Portland was growing hotels like mushrooms, without much thought of who might fill those rooms come winter, seeing as how even most of the city’s residents didn’t want to be there come December and January. Any time they raised this question, someone would mention ‘cruise liners,’ although any cruise liner hoping to dock in Portland in the depths of winter might need to hire an icebreaker first, and the last time they checked, the whole point of cruise liners was that you got to sleep on the boat. It wasn’t like the liner dumped you on dry land and then floated away, like some Robinson Crusoe outfit with all the crew laughing their asses off as you signaled for help from the dock. Portland was also playing host to a couple of restaurants that, even in New York, would cause a man to shake the check at the end of the night, just in case a zero might drop off the end.
But all these were objects of bemusement, and no more. Each understood, too, that their fates were now tied up with this place, and with the detective to whom both were bound by bonds of loyalty, affection, and – whisper it, but do not speak it aloud, and certainly not to each other – the inevitability of their own deaths.
They had been out to check on Parker’s house in Scarborough. Its doors remained secured, the alarm system had been upgraded, and they had arranged for his more valuable possessions to be placed in secure storage. His computers and his files had been carefully boxed by Louis’s people, then removed to a warehouse in Queens, and locked away under the name ‘Nemesis, Inc.’ Louis had the utmost confidence in the security of the warehouse, since he owned it (although any lawyer would have trouble proving as much) and stored most of his weapons there (and here, once again, the question of ownership remained nebulous, to say the least).
They had not yet broached the subject with Parker, but they doubted that he would be returning to the house that overlooked the Scarborough marshes. In their opinion, it would be hard for him to resume his life in a home in which he might no longer feel secure. Parker’s defenses had been breached not only physically, but psychologically too. He could never have the same faith as he once had in his home’s capacity to withstand intrusion, perhaps not even in his own ability to defend himself, or so they believed.
On a practical level, the house had appeared on news bulletins and in newspaper reports. The address and location were familiar to many people now. Angel and Louis were under no illusion that the detective’s enemies had not previously known where to find him, should they have wanted to act against him. Even the fact that some of them had, at last, succeeded in wounding him so severely was not, to these men, entirely a surprise. No, what mattered was that the site of his home was now general knowledge. News reports linked to it via Google Maps. If he went back there, what peace would he have, even if he somehow managed to overcome the psychological and emotional difficulties of living in a dwelling in which he had almost met his death – in which he had, in fact, technically died before being resuscitated for the first of three times.
Then there was also the question of what kind of man he would be. He had nerve damage to his left hand. One kidney had been removed. They had dug so many shotgun pellets out of his skull and his back that the surgeons had filled two glass dishes with them. Sometimes, when speaking, he would forget a name, or misidentify an object. Once, over coffee in Boreas, he asked Angel to pass him a ‘bell.’
‘A bell?’ asked Angel.
‘Yes, a bell. A little bell. To add to my coffee.’
And as Angel had grown more confused, so Parker had grown more frustrated, until at last he stood up, walked behind Angel, and grabbed a creamer of skim milk for himself.
‘See?’ he said. ‘Bell!’
Then, moments later, as he read the words on the side of the creamer, he seemed to realize what he had done, and began to apologize, but his voice broke, and all they could do was watch as he tried to hold back tears of rage and shame.
Was this the end of them, Angel wondered? Was this to be the final, undignified conclusion, the grand anticlimax? A broken Parker, living on whatever he could make by selling his house and its surrounding land and moving into a small apartment somewhere, supported – when required, and only if it could be discreetly done – by his friends? Dave Evans, of course, would give him a bartending job at the Great Lost Bear, but what if, like confusing the words – if not the concepts – of milk and bell, he proved unable to function?
And there were moments when Angel and Louis found it hard even to conceive of Parker doing what he once did, hunting the worst of men. They had trusted in his strength, in his knowledge, in his ability to understand situations that seemed only smoke and shadows to them. How could they stand with him if he could not be relied upon to watch their backs, to come to their aid if they were in trouble?
But at other times Angel would look at Parker, and see fires coldly burning behind his eyes, and in that instant he could make himself believe that all was not lost.
‘What will we do about him?’ said Angel, as soft rain began to fall, and Louis did not need to ask to whom he was referring.
‘We’ll wait,’ he replied, ‘and we’ll see.’
14
Cory Bloom arrived at Olesens – and the absence of that damned apostrophe bothered her too – shortly after ten to find Parker already seated at a table by the window at the back of the store. He hadn’t heard her enter, and she saw that he was holding an object in his left hand. It looked like a red rubber ball, the kind office workers used for stress relief, but as she drew closer she saw it had dark loops that hooked around the fingers. She thought that she’d seen something resembling it in a sporting goods store at the Bangor Mall, when she’d gone to look for new sneakers. It was in the climbing section alongside the ropes and crampons and carabiners: a gri
p strengthener. The effort of squeezing it showed on his face. He winced with each compression, but did not stop until he saw her reflected in the glass, at which point he slipped the strengthener into his pocket.
‘Is it working?’ she asked.
‘It hurts, so I have to hope so.’
She took a seat across from him. He already had coffee, alongside a copy of the New York Times, although he didn’t yet appear to have opened the newspaper.
‘Is it to do with what happened?’
‘Shotgun pellets,’ he said. ‘I sustained nerve damage to the hand, and some fracturing of the bones. I’ve had surgery, but it’s about maintaining range of motion and muscle tone. The physio is helping. Massage works too.’
‘Are you asking?’
‘Are you offering?’
‘People might talk.’
‘Not least your husband.’
‘I’m sure he’d understand, if it was for medical reasons.’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t.’
‘You’re probably right.’
Were they flirting? Bloom couldn’t recall the last time she had flirted with anyone. She didn’t even flirt with her husband. There didn’t seem to be much point.
Larraine Olesen came over and took her coffee order. Bloom thought that Larraine might inadvertently have overheard them. She just about managed to keep herself from grinning, but it was a hard-fought battle. Bloom was relieved when she left to make the coffee.
‘Do you mind if I ask how you are otherwise?’ said Bloom.
He looked away.
‘Aches and pains, mostly,’ he said. ‘I had some … discomfort after they removed the kidney, but it went away after a week or two. I get headaches. A lot of headaches. I sustained tissue damage to my back, some shattered ribs, a broken clavicle, a couple of holes where there shouldn’t have been any. They’ve done some skin grafts, which hurt like nothing on earth, and there’ll be more to come, but I’ve had enough of them for now.