The Charlie Parker Collection 1

  ‘Parker,’ he nodded. ‘Didn’t think we’d see you back here.’

  ‘Captain Emerson,’ I replied. ‘How are things in Infernal Affairs? Being kept busy, I imagine.’

  ‘Always time for one more, Parker,’ he said, but he didn’t smile. He raised a hand to Walter and walked towards the gates, his back straight, his spine held together by the cords of righteousness.

  Walter looked at his feet, his hands in his pockets, then raised his eyes to me. Retirement didn’t seem to be doing him much good. He looked uncomfortable and pale, and there were burn marks and cuts where he had shaved that morning. I guessed that he was missing the force, and occasions like this just made him miss it more.

  ‘Like the man said,’ Walter muttered at last, ‘I didn’t think we’d see you back here.’

  ‘I wanted to pay my respects to Grunfeld. He was a good man. How’s Lee?’

  ‘She’s good.’

  ‘And the kids.’

  ‘They’re good.’ Walter and Emerson were proving to be tough crowds to play one after the other. ‘Where are you now?’ he asked, although his tone said he was only inquiring out of awkwardness.

  ‘I’m back in Maine. It’s peaceful. I haven’t killed anyone in weeks.’

  Walter’s eyes remained cold. ‘You should stay up there. You get itchy, you can shoot a squirrel. I’ve got to go now.’

  I nodded. ‘Sure. Thanks for your time.’

  He didn’t reply and, as I watched him walk away, I felt a deep, humiliating grief, and I thought: they were right. I should not have come back, not even for a day.

  I took the subway to Queensboro Plaza, where I changed onto the N train for Manhattan. As I sat opposite a man reading a Bible tract, the sound of the subway and the smell in the train set off a chain of memories, and I recalled something that had happened seven months before, in early May, just as the heat of the summer was beginning to tell. They had been dead for almost five months.

  It was late, very late one Tuesday night. I was taking the subway from é Con Leche at 8ist and Amsterdam back to my apartment in the East Village. I must have dozed off for a time, because when I awoke the car was empty, and the light in the next car down was flickering on and off, black to yellow to black again.

  There was a woman sitting in the next car, looking down at her hands, her hair obscuring her face. She wore dark pants and a red blouse. Her arms were spread, her palms raised upward, as if she were reading a newspaper, except that her hands were empty.

  Her feet were bare and there was blood on the floor beneath them.

  I stood and moved down the car until I came to the connecting door. I had no idea where we were, or what the next stop might be. I opened the door, felt the rush of heat from the tunnel, the taste of filth and smog in my mouth as I stepped across the gap and into the darkness of the next car.

  The lights flickered on again, but the woman was gone, and there was no blood on the floor where she had been sitting only moments before. There were three other people in the car: an elderly black woman clutching four oversized plastic bags; a slim, neatly dressed white male wearing glasses, a briefcase on his knees; and a drunk with a ragged beard who lay across four seats, snoring. I was about to turn to the businessman when, ahead of me, I saw a shape in black and red briefly illuminated. It was the same woman, sitting in the same position – arms spread, palms up – as she had been when I first saw her. She was even occupying more or less the same seat, except one car farther down.

  And I noticed that the flickering light seemed to have moved down with her, so that once again she was a figure briefly frozen by the faulty lighting. Beside me, the old woman looked up and smiled; and the executive with the briefcase gazed at me unblinking; and the drunk shifted on his seat and awoke, and his eyes were bright and knowing as he watched me.

  I moved down the car, closer and closer to the door. Something about the woman was familiar, something in the way she held herself, something in the style of her hair. She did not move, did not look up, and I felt my gut tighten. Around her, the lights flickered, and then were gone. I stepped into the car, the last car before the driver, and I could smell the blood on the floor. I took one step, then another, and another, until my feet slid on something wet and I knew then who she was.

  ‘Susan?’ I whispered, but the darkness was silent, a silence broken only by the rushing of the wind in the subway, the rattle of the wheels on the tracks. As the tunnel lights flashed by, I saw her silhouetted against the far door, head down, her arms raised. The light flickered for a second, and I realised that she was not wearing a red blouse. She was not wearing anything. There was only blood: thick, dark blood. The light shone dimly through the skin that had been pulled back from her breasts and arrayed like a cloak over her outstretched arms. She lifted her head, and I saw a deep-red blur where her face had been, and the sockets of her eyes were empty and ruined.

  And the brakes shrieked and the car rocked as the train approached the station. All light left the world and there was only a void until we burst into Houston Street, unnatural illumination flooding the car. The smell of blood and perfume lingered in the air, but she was gone.

  That was the first time.

  The waitress brought us dessert menus. I smiled at her. She smiled back. What’s seldom is wonderful.

  ‘She’s got a fat ass,’ remarked Angel, as she walked away. He was dressed in the traditional Angel garb of faded denims and wrinkled check shirt over a black T, and sneakers that were now a filthy mockery of their original white. A black leather jacket hung on the back of his chair.

  ‘I wasn’t looking at her ass,’ I replied. ‘She has a pretty face.’

  ‘Then she’s the acceptable face of fat-assed women.’

  ‘Yeah,’ chipped in Louis. ‘She like the spokeswoman for the lard-asses, the one they wheel out when they want to look good on TV. Folks look at her and say, “Hey, maybe them lard-asses ain’t so bad after all.”’

  As always, Louis looked as if he had been constructed as a deliberate riposte to his lover. He wore a black, single-breasted Armani suit and a snow-white dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned, the virgin white of the shirt in stark contrast to his own dark features and his shaven, ebony head.

  We were sitting in J. G. Melon’s at the corner of Third and 74th. I had not seen them in over two months, but these men, this diminutive, white ex-burglar and his enigmatic, soft-spoken boyfriend, were now the closest things to friends I had left. They had stood by me when Jennifer and Susan died and they had been with me in those last, terrible days in Louisiana as we drew nearer to a final confrontation with the Travelling Man. They were outsiders – perhaps that was one of the reasons for our closeness – and Louis in particular was a dangerous man, a hired killer now enjoying a murky, indefinite form of semi-retirement, but they were on the side of the angels, even if the angels were not entirely sure that this was a positive development.

  Angel laughed loudly ‘Spokeswoman for the lard-asses,’ he repeated to himself – and scanned the menu. I tossed a discarded French fry at him.

  ‘Hey, Slim,’ I said. ‘Looks like you could skip a couple of sundaes every now and again. You tried to burgle somewhere now, you’d get stuck in the door. The only places you could break into would be ones with big windows.’

  ‘Yeah, Angel,’ said Louis, stone-faced. ‘Maybe you could specialise in cathedrals, or the Met.’

  ‘I can afford to fill out,’ replied Angel, throwing him a glare.

  ‘Man, you fill out any more, you be twins.’

  ‘Funny, Louis,’ shrugged Angel. ‘She’s still two tokens on the subway, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘What does it matter to you anyway?’ I said. ‘You don’t have any right to pass comments about the opposite sex. You’re gay. You don’t have an opposite sex.’

  ‘That’s just prejudice, Bird.’

  ‘Angel, it’s not prejudice when someone points out that you’re gay. It’s just a statement of fact. It’s prejudic
e when you start baiting the wider members of society.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that if you’re looking for company, maybe we can help.’

  I stared at him, and raised an eyebrow. ‘I think that’s unlikely. I get that desperate, I’ll blow my head off.’

  He smiled. ‘Well, you know, you got that look. I hear that website, “Womenbehindbars.com”, is worth a visit.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I replied. His smile widened so much you could have slotted toasting bread into it.

  ‘Lot of women out there looking for a guy like you.’ He turned his right hand into a little gun and fired his index finger at me with a movement of his thumb. It made him look like the cabaret act from gay hell.

  ‘What exactly is “Womenbehindbars.com”?’ I asked. I knew I was being baited, but I sensed something more from both Angel and Louis. You’re up there alone, Bird, they seemed to say. You don’t have too many people you can fall back on, and we can’t look out for you from New York City. Sometimes, maybe even before you think you’re really ready to do so, you have to reach out and find something that you can rely on. You have to try to find a foothold, otherwise you’re going to fall and you’re going to keep falling until it all goes dark.

  Angel shrugged. ‘Y’know, it’s one of those internet dating services. Some places have more lonely women than others: San Francisco, New York, state prisons . . .’

  ‘You’re telling me there’s a dating service for women in jail?’

  He raised his hands wide. ‘Sure there is. You know, cons have needs too. You just log on, take a look at the pictures, and pick your woman.’

  ‘They’re in jail, Angel,’ I reminded him. ‘It’s not as if I can invite them out for dinner and a movie without committing a felony. Plus, I might have put them in jail. I’m not going to try to date anyone I jailed. It’d be too weird.’

  ‘So date out of state,’ said Angel. ‘You declare anywhere from Yonkers to Lake Champlain a no-go zone, and the rest of the Union’s your oyster.’ He toasted me with his glass, then he and Louis exchanged a look, and I envied them that intimacy.

  ‘Anyway, what are these women in for?’ I asked, resigned by now to playing the role of straight man.

  ‘The site don’t say,’ replied Angel. ‘All it says is their ages, what they’re looking for in a guy, and then it gives you a picture. One without numbers underneath it,’ he added. ‘Oh, and it tells you whether or not they’re willing to relocate, although the answer’s pretty obvious. I mean, they are in jail. Relocation’s probably top of their list of priorities.’

  ‘So what does it matter why they’re in there?’ asked Louis. I noticed that his eyes were watering. I was glad I was providing amusement for him. ‘The ladies do the crime, do the time, then their debt to society is paid. Long as they ain’t cut off a guy’s dick and tied it to a helium balloon, you’re home free.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Angel. ‘You just set some ground rules, and then dip your toes in the pool. Suppose she was a thief. Would you date a thief?’

  ‘She’d steal from me.’

  ‘A hooker?’

  ‘Couldn’t trust her.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘Sorry. Maybe you could start a campaign.’

  Angel shook his head in mock sorrow, then brightened. ‘How about an assault case? Broken bottle, maybe a kitchen knife. Nothing too serious.’

  ‘A kitchen knife and it’s nothing too serious? What planet do you live on, Angel? Plastic cutlery world?’

  ‘Okay then, a murderer.’

  ‘Depends who she killed.’

  ‘Her old man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The fuck do I know why? You think I was wearing a wire? Do you date her or not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit, Bird, if you’re going to be fussy you’re never going to meet anyone.’

  The waitress returned. ‘Would you gentlemen like to order dessert?’

  We all declined, Angel adding: ‘Nah, I’m sweet enough as it is.’

  ‘Cheesy enough, too,’ said the waitress, and flashed me another grin. Angel reddened and Louis’s mouth twitched in an approximation of a smile.

  ‘Three coffees,’ I said, and grinned back at her. ‘You just earned yourself a substantial tip.’

  After the meal, we took a walk in Central Park, stopping to rest by the statue of Alice on the mushroom by the model boat pond. There were no kids sailing their boats on the pond, although one or two couples sat huddled together by the bank, watched impassively by Louis. Angel hoisted himself up onto the mushroom, his legs dangling beside me, Alice in turn watching over him.

  ‘How old are you?’ I said.

  ‘Young enough to appreciate this,’ he replied. ‘So how you doin’?’

  ‘I’m surviving. I have good days and bad days.’

  ‘How do you tell them apart?’

  ‘On the good days, it doesn’t rain.’

  He smiled sympathetically. ‘Thanksgiving must have been a blast.’

  ‘I gave thanks that it didn’t rain.’

  ‘The house coming along?’ I was completing the renovations on my grandfather’s old house in Scarborough. I had already moved in, although there were some repairs still needed.

  ‘Nearly finished. Roof just needs fixing, that’s all.’

  He stayed quiet for a time. ‘We were only yanking your chain back in the restaurant,’ he said at last. ‘We know this is maybe not such a good time for you. It’ll be the first anniversary soon, won’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, December twelfth.’

  ‘You okay with that?’

  ‘I’ll visit the grave, have a mass said. I don’t know how difficult it will be.’ In truth, I was dreading the day. For some reason, it was important to me that the house be finished by then, that I be firmly established there. I wanted its stability, its links to a past that I remembered with happiness. I wanted a place that I could call home, and in which I could try to rebuild my life.

  ‘Let us know the details. We’ll come up.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  He nodded. ‘Until then, you need to look out for yourself, you know what I mean? You spend too much time alone, you’re likely to go crazy. You hear from Rachel?’

  ‘No.’ Rachel Wolfe and I had been lovers, for a time. She had come down to Louisiana to assist in the hunt for the Travelling Man, bringing with her a background in psychology and a love for me that I did not understand and that I was unable to fully return, not then. She had been hurt that summer, physically and emotionally. We had not spoken since the hospital, but I knew she was in Boston. I had even watched her cross the campus one day, her red hair glowing in the late morning light, but I could not bring myself to intrude upon her solitude, or her pain.

  Angel stretched and changed the subject. ‘Meet anyone interesting at the funeral?’

  ‘Emerson.’

  ‘The Internal Affairs schmuck? That must have been a joy.’

  ‘Always a pleasure meeting Emerson. Guy just stopped short of measuring me up for a set of manacles and a suit with arrows on it. Walter Cole was there too.’

  ‘He have anything to say to you?’

  ‘Nothing good.’

  ‘He’s a righteous man, and they’re the worst kind. Speaking of Emerson, you hear two-forty-seven Mulberry is coming up for sale? Louis and I are thinking of buying it, opening up a museum of law enforcement.’

  Two-forty-seven Mulberry was the former site of the Ravenite Social Club, headquarters of John Gotti Sr before Sammy the Bull’s testimony ensured that Gotti’s business was transferred to a prison cell. His son John Junior had taken over the Gambino crime family, in the process earning himself an arrest and a reputation as the most inept godfather in mob history.

  ‘John Junior, man,’ said Angel, shaking his head. ‘Just goes to show, the father’s genes don’t automatically pass intact to the eldest son.’

  ‘I guess not,’ I said. I glanc
ed at my watch. ‘I’ve got to go. I have a flight to catch.’

  Louis turned and strolled back to us, the muscles on his slim, six-six frame obvious even beneath the suit and overcoat. ‘Angel,’ he said, ‘I found you on a mushroom, I’d burn the crop. You makin’ Alice look ill.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Alice saw you coming for her, she’d figure she was going to be mugged. The White Rabbit you ain’t.’ I watched as Angel eased himself down, using his hands to arrest his slide. Then he raised them, the palms now lightly coated with grime, and approached Louis’s immaculate form.

  ‘Angel, you touch me, man, you be wavin’ goodbye with a stump. I’m warnin’ you . . .’

  I walked past them and looked out over the park and the stillness of the pond. I had a growing feeling of unease for which I could find no cause, a sense that, while I was in New York, there were events happening elsewhere that somehow affected me.

  And in the water of the pond, dark clouds gathered, forming and reforming, and birds flew through the shallows as if to drown. In the dimness of this reflected world, the bare trees sent searching branches down into the depths, like fingers digging deeper and deeper into a half-remembered past.

  Chapter Three

  For me, the first sign that winter is coming has always been the change in the coloration of the paper birches. Their trunks, usually white or grey, turn yellow-green in the fall, blending into the riot of chimney red, burning gold and dying amber as the trees turn. I look at the birches and know that winter is on its way.