The Charlie Parker Collection 1

  Carter Paragon’s house was quiet as we drove past. We parked our cars off the road, in the shadows cast by a stand of pine trees, and followed the boundary wall of the property around to a barred security gate at the back of the house. There were no video cameras visible, although there was an intercom on the gatepost, just as there was at the main entrance to the house. We climbed over the wall, Angel and I going first, Louis joining us after what seemed like a very reluctant pause. When he hit the soft lawn, he looked in dismay at the marks left by the white wall on his black jeans but said nothing.

  We skirted the house, staying within the cover of the trees. A single light burned in a curtained room on the upper floor at the western side. The same battered blue car was parked in the drive, but its hood was cool. It hadn’t been driven that evening. The Explorer was nowhere to be seen. The curtains on the window were drawn tight, so it was impossible to see inside.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Ring the doorbell,’ I replied.

  ‘I thought we were going to burgle him,’ hissed Angel, ‘not try to sell him the Watchtower.’

  I rang the bell anyway and Angel went quiet. Nobody answered, even when I rang it again for a good ten seconds. Angel left us and disappeared around the back of the house. A couple of minutes later he returned.

  ‘I think you need to take a look at this,’ he said.

  We followed him to the rear of the house and entered through the open back door into a small, cheaply furnished kitchen. There was broken glass on the floor where someone had smashed a pane to get at the lock.

  ‘I take it that isn’t your handiwork?’ I asked Angel.

  ‘I won’t even dignify that with an answer.’

  Louis had already drawn his gun, and I followed his lead. I looked into a couple of the rooms as we passed but they were all virtually empty; there was hardly any furniture – no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor. One room had a TV and VCR, faced by a pair of old armchairs and a rickety coffee table, but most of the house appeared to be unoccupied. The front room was the only one that held anything significant: hundreds and hundreds of books and pamphlets recently packed into boxes, ready to be taken away. There were American underground training manuals and improvised weapon guides; instructions for the creation of homemade munitions, timers, and detonators; catalogs of military suppliers; and any number of books on covert surveillance. In the box nearest the door lay a stack of photocopied, crudely bound volumes; stenciled on the cover of each were the words Army of God.

  The name Army of God had first cropped up in 1982, when the abortion doctor Hector Zevallos and his wife were kidnapped in Illinois and their kidnappers used the name in their dealings with the FBI. Since then, Army of God calling cards had been left at the scene of clinic bombings, and the anonymously published manual I was holding in my hand had become synonymous with a particular brand of religious extremism. It was a kind of Anarchist Cookbook for religious nuts, a guide to blowing up property and, if necessary, people for the greater glory of the Lord.

  Louis was holding a thick photocopied list in his hand, one of a number piled on the floor. ‘Abortion clinics, AIDS clinics, home addresses for doctors, license plate numbers for civil rights activists, feminists. Guy here on page three, Gordon Eastman, he a gay rights activist in Wisconsin.’

  ‘There’s a job you don’t want,’ whispered Angel. ‘Like selling dildos in Alabama.’

  I tossed the Army of God manual back in the box. ‘These people are exporting low-level chaos to every cracker with a grudge and a mailbox.’

  ‘So where are they?’ asked Angel.

  In unison, the three of us glanced at the ceiling and the second floor of the house. Angel groaned softly.

  ‘I had to ask.’

  We climbed the stairs quietly, Louis in the lead, Angel behind him, while I brought up the rear. The room with the light was at the very end of the hallway, at the front of the house. Louis paused at the first doorway we reached and checked quickly to make sure it was empty. It contained only a bare iron bedstead and a suitcase half full of men’s clothing, while the adjoining rooms had been stripped bare of whatever furniture had been there to begin with.

  ‘Maybe he had a yard sale,’ suggested Louis.

  ‘He did, then someone wasn’t happy with his merchandise,’ responded Angel solemnly. He was standing close to the doorway of the single illuminated room, his gun by his side.

  Inside was a bed, an electric heater, and a set of Home Depot shelves filled with paperback books and topped by a potted plant. There was a small closet containing some of Carter Paragon’s suits, more of which lay on the bed. A wooden chair, one of a pair, stood beside a dressing table. A portable TV sat silent and dark on a cheap unit.

  Carter Paragon sat in the second wooden chair, blood on the carpet around him. His arms had been pulled behind him and secured with cuffs. He had been badly beaten; one eye had been reduced to pulp by a punch and his face was swollen and bruised. His feet were bare and two of the toes on his right foot were broken.

  ‘Take a look here,’ said Angel, pointing to the back of the chair.

  I looked, and winced. Four of his fingernails had been torn out. I tried for a pulse. There was nothing, but the body was still warm to the touch.

  Carter Paragon’s head was inclined backward, his face to the ceiling. His mouth hung open, and amid the blood lay something small and brown. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, then reached in and removed the object, holding it up to the light. A string of bloody saliva dripped from it and fell to the floor.

  It was a shard of clay.

  Chapter Twenty

  We drove back to Scarborough that night, Angel and Louis going on ahead while I stopped briefly in Augusta. From a public phone I called the office of the Portland Press Herald, asked to be put through to the news desk, and told the woman who answered that there was a body in the house of Carter Paragon in Waterville but that the police didn’t know about it yet. Then I hung up. At the very least, the Herald would check with the cops, who would in turn head out to knock on Paragon’s door. In the meantime, I had avoided the possibility of enhanced 911, which would have pinpointed my location and raised the possibility of being intercepted by the nearest patrol car, or of my voice being recorded using RACAL or any similar procedure. Then I drove on in silence, thinking of Carter Paragon and the clay that had been deposited in his mouth as a message for whoever found him.

  Angel and Louis were already making themselves at home by the time I got back to the Scarborough house. I could hear Angel in the bathroom, making the place untidy. I banged on the door.

  ‘Don’t make a mess,’ I warned him. ‘Rachel’s coming up, and I just cleaned it specially.’

  Rachel didn’t like untidiness. She was one of those people who got a kind of satisfaction out of scrubbing away dust and dirt, even other people’s. Whenever she stayed with me in Scarborough, I would be sure to find her advancing on the bathroom or kitchen in rubber gloves with a determined look on her face.

  ‘She cleans your bathroom?’ Angel once asked, as if I had told him that she regularly sacrificed goats or played women’s golf. ‘I don’t even clean my bathroom, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna clean no stranger’s bathroom.’

  ‘I’m not a stranger, Angel,’ I explained.

  ‘Hey,’ he replied, ‘when it comes to bathroom stuff, everybody’s a stranger.’

  In the kitchen, Louis was squatting in front of the fridge, discarding items on the floor. He checked the expiry date on some cold cuts.

  ‘Damn, you buy all this food at auction?’

  I wondered, as I called out for a pizza delivery, if agreeing to let them inside my door had been such a good idea after all.

  ‘Who is this guy?’ asked Louis. We were sitting at my kitchen table, discussing the shard of clay left by Paragon’s killer while we waited for our food to arrive.

  ‘Al Z told me he calls himself the Golem, and Epstein’s fa
ther confirmed it. That’s all I know. You ever hear of him?’

  He shook his head. ‘Means he’s very good, or an amateur. Still, cool name.’

  ‘Yeah, why can’t you have a cool name like that?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Hey, Louis is a cool name.’

  ‘Only if you’re the king of France. You think he got much out of Paragon?’

  ‘You saw what he did to him,’ I replied. ‘Paragon probably told him everything he could remember since grade school.’

  ‘So this Golem knows more than us?’

  ‘Everybody knows more than us.’

  There came the sound of a car pulling up at the front of the house.

  ‘Pizza boy,’ I said.

  Nobody else at the table made a sudden move for his wallet. ‘Guess dinner’s on me, then.’

  I went to the door and took the two pizza boxes from the kid. As I gave him the cash, he spoke quietly to me.

  ‘I don’t want to worry you, man, but you got a guy over there watching your house.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘Over my right shoulder, in the trees.’

  ‘Don’t look at him,’ I said. ‘Just drive away.’

  I tipped him an extra ten, then glanced casually to my left as his car pulled away. Among the trees, something pale hung unmoving in the darkness: a man’s face. I stepped back into the hallway, drew my gun, and called back quietly: ‘Boys, we’ve got company.’

  I walked out to the porch, the gun at my side. Angel was behind me, his Glock in his hand. Louis was nowhere to be seen, but I guessed that he was already moving around the back of the house. I stepped slowly from the porch and moved forward, the gun held low, until I got a clearer view of the watcher. I saw his hairless scalp and face, his pale skin, his thin mouth and dark eyes. His hands were held slightly out from his sides, so that I could see they were empty. He wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie under a long black overcoat. In every respect, he resembled the man who had taken out Lester Bargus and probably Carter Paragon as well.

  ‘Who is he?’ hissed Angel.

  ‘I’m guessing he’s the guy with the cool name.’

  I leaned down, placed my gun on the ground, and walked toward him.

  ‘Bird,’ said Angel, a note of warning in his voice.

  ‘He’s on my property,’ I said, ‘and he knows it’s mine. Whatever he has to say, he’s here to say it to my face.’

  ‘Then keep to the right,’ he said. ‘He makes a move, maybe I can take him out before he kills you.’

  ‘Thanks. I feel safer already.’ But I kept to the right as I had been told.

  When I was within a few feet of him he raised one white hand. ‘That’s close enough, Mr. Parker.’ The accent was unusual, with odd, European inflections. ‘I suggest that your friend also halt his advance through the woods. I’m not going to harm anyone here.’

  I paused, then called out. ‘Louis, it’s okay.’

  From about fifteen feet to my left, a dark figure separated itself from the trees, his gun held steadily in front of him. Louis didn’t lower the gun, but he didn’t make any further move either.

  Up close, the man was startlingly white, with no color to his lips or his cheeks and only the faintest of dark smudges beneath his eyes. They were a washed-out blue, almost lifeless. Combined with the absence of hair on his face, they made him appear like a wax model that had been left incomplete. His scalp was deeply scarred, as were the places where his eyebrows should have been. I noticed one other thing about him: his face was dry and flaking in places, like a reptile discarding its skin.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you know who I am.’

  ‘Golem,’ I said.

  I expected him to nod, maybe even to smile, but he did neither. Instead he said: ‘The Golem is a myth, Mr. Parker. Do you believe in myths?’

  ‘I used to discount them, but I’ve been proved wrong in the past. Now I try to keep an open mind. Why did you kill Carter Paragon?’

  ‘The question is really, why did I hurt Carter Paragon? For the same reason that you broke into his house an hour later: to find out what he knew. His death was a consequence, not an intention.’

  ‘You killed Lester Bargus too.’

  ‘Mr. Bargus supplied weapons to evil men,’ he responded simply. ‘But no longer.’

  ‘He was unarmed.’

  ‘So was the rabbi.’ He pronounced it ‘raebbee.’

  ‘An eye for an eye,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps. I know something of you too, Mr. Parker. I don’t believe you are in a position to pass judgment on me.’

  ‘I’m not judging you. Lester Bargus was a lowlife and nobody will miss him, but I’ve found in the past that people willing to strike at unarmed men tend not to be too particular about whom they kill. That concerns me.’

  ‘Once again, I do not plan to harm you or your friends. The man I want calls himself Pudd. You know of him, I think.’

  ‘I’ve encountered him.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  For the first time, a note of eagerness crept into his voice. I guessed that either Paragon had died before he could tell all, or, more interestingly, that he had been unable to tell his killer where Pudd had his lair because he didn’t know.

  ‘Not yet. I intend to find out, though.’

  ‘Your intentions and mine may conflict, then.’

  ‘Maybe we both have similar aims,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, we do not. Yours is a moral crusade. Those who engaged me for this task have a more specific purpose.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘I do only what is required of me,’ he said. ‘No more.’ His voice was deep and the words seemed to echo inside him, as if he were a hollow man without substance, only form. ‘I came to give you a message. Do not come between me and this man. If you do, I will be forced to take action against you.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat.’

  I didn’t even see him move. One moment he was in front of me, his hands empty, the next he was close by my side and a small center-fire derringer was at my throat, the twin barrels pointing upward to my brain. From out of the darkness, the Beamshot laser sight on Louis’s gun projected its light as he tried to find a clear shot, but my body and the darkness of the Golem’s clothes shielded him from both Louis and Angel.

  ‘Tell them to back off, Mr. Parker,’ he whispered, his head behind mine. ‘I want you to walk me to my car. You have two seconds.’

  I shouted out the warning immediately, and Louis killed the beam. The Golem pulled me back through the trees, guiding my footsteps. The sleeve of his overcoat had rolled up on his arm and I could see the first of the small blue numbers etched on his skin. He was a concentration camp survivor. I also saw that he had no fingerprints. Instead, the skin and flesh appeared to have collapsed inward, creating a puckered, indented scar at the tip of each finger. Fire, I thought. It was fire that did this to him; fire that scarred his head, fire that took away his fingerprints,

  How do you create a clay demon?

  You bake it in an oven.

  When we reached his car, he made me stand in front of the driver’s door, the gun at my spine, as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Remember, Mr. Parker,’ he said to my back. ‘Do not interfere with my work.’

  Then, his head low, he sped away.

  Louis and Angel appeared from the trees. I was shaking as I reached up and felt the twin marks where the derringer had been pushed into my flesh.

  ‘You think you could have hit him before he killed me?’ I asked, as his lights faded away.

  Louis thought for a moment. ‘Probably not. You think he’d have bled?’

  ‘No. I think he’d just have cracked.’

  ‘What now?’ said Angel.

  ‘We eat.’ Although I wasn’t sure how steady my stomach was. We began to walk back to the house.

  ‘You sure pick colorful people to fall out with,’ said Louis a
s he fell in beside me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess I do.’

  All three of us heard the car approaching from behind at the same time. It turned into the yard at speed and we were frozen in its headlights, our guns raised and our eyes wide. Instantly, the driver killed the beams, and still blinking, we scattered left and right. There was silence for a moment, then the driver’s door opened and Rachel Wolfe’s voice said:

  ‘Okay, no more coffee for you guys. Ever.’

  After we had eaten, Rachel went off to take a shower. While Angel sipped his beer by the window, Louis sat at my table finishing a bottle of wine. It was Flagstone sauvignon blanc, from some new winery in Cape Town, South Africa. Louis had two mixed cases imported especially twice yearly and had brought two bottles with him in the trunk of his car. He and Rachel had spent so long cooing over it that I thought one of them must have given birth to the bottle.

  ‘If you’re a private eye,’ asked Angel at last, ‘how come you ain’t got no office?’

  ‘I can’t afford an office. If I had an office, I’d have to sell the house and sleep on my desk.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be such a big stretch. You got next to nothing in this old house anyway. You ever worry about burglars?’

  ‘Burglars in general, or just the one who happens to be standing in my kitchen right now?’

  He scowled. ‘In general.’

  ‘I don’t have anything worth stealing.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You ever think of the effect a big empty place like this is going to have on some guy who goes to the trouble of breaking into it. You better hope he ain’t agoraphobic, else you’re gonna have a lawsuit on your hands.’

  ‘What are you, some kind of organizer for Burglars’ Local three-oh-two?’

  ‘No, just a fly on the wall. One of many, judging by the state of your kitchen.’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘What am I always implying? You need some company.’

  ‘I was thinking of getting a dog.’