Last Angel Read online

  Reaching inside his coat to fish out another brown-skinned cigarette he found himself remembering her face, but when he saw her it was like looking at a jigsaw with a piece missing and the more he tried to focus on that missing something the more he started to lose. Gabriel rolled the thin cigarette between his fingers and stuck it between his lips. He lit up, the lambent glow of the flame casting wraithlike shadowdancers across his face, then capped the lighter and slipped it back into his pocket. She was going.

  Soon, she’ll be gone altogether and who’ll be crying for her then?

  He knelt, taking a rose from inside the raincoat, and laid it in front of the sullen headstone.

  “I might forget what you look like, Celine… Charlotte, but I won’t forget to put roses on your grave. I promise. I won’t forget that.”

  Gabriel stood and walked slowly away, haunted by the music of the rain and the excited laughter of a three year old boy. “I can hear you, Sammy… I can hear you.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Another gravestone. The empty space was heart-piercingly cold, the first snows of Christmas falling from the sky. In those clouds Gabriel saw the faces of yesterday, his dead looking down on him from on high.

  He knelt, took a small metal dumper truck from his pocket and laid it at the foot of his son’s grave, beside a plastic Indian, dead boy’s curls of paint flaking away from the shaft of the Black Foot’s tomahawk.

  “I miss you, you know, kiddo. I miss you so much.” He felt arms that weren’t there wrapping around his shoulders, drawing him into a gentle embrace. “It’s not fair, Frankie, it’s not fair…”

  No, it never is.

  “Why though, what did he do?” Gabriel swallowed, wiping his eyes with the back of a trembling hand. “Why didn’t I die? Why? When you died, why didn’t I die? I didn’t want to be left behind…”

  The wind carried the lullaby of her breaking voice: Hush little baby, don’t say a word… The commitment in her imagined voice was a haunting reminder of a midnight promise gone sour. The perfect, unkeepable promise of love everlasting.

  Wiping a hand across his broken face, Gabriel stood shakily. “God, why do I miss you so very, very much?”

  For that one the wind had no answer he wanted to hear.

  Without looking up from his feet he walked back to the Studebaker.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  He drove with the window cranked open, letting the steady feed of iced air onto his face keep him awake; letting it keep the ghosts away.

  Leaning down, Gabriel hunted either end of the dial for something worth listening to, settling for the loud backslash of freeform Jazz piano over the dull threnody of Declan Shea’s scratchy voice.

  He had nowhere to go, but some days nowhere wasn’t such a bad place to be, so he just drove, through the stretching Babel’s of concrete and glass scraping through the thickening flakes of snow; and on every snowflake a ghost of the past came riding down. Places they’d shared. Every building had its ghost, every street corner its memory.

  The Studebaker was bleeding a fine tail of oil behind itself, like a snail in the early morning.

  Satellite dishes and antenna broke out like acne on the face of the city.

  In his head, or in the passenger seat, Francesca cradled their son in her arms, her long fingers tangling in the boy’s mop of dark hair, soothing Sam into a second pair of arms and the embrace of sleep. She was singing: Hush little baby, don’t say a word, daddy’s gonna buy you a mocking bird, and if that mocking bird won’t sing, daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…

  Tears in his eyes, Gabriel had to stop the car. Cars went past on the outside, their horns braying, inside his heart was breaking.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The colours danced with a secret life all of their own.

  Secret.

  Magic and beauty.

  A house of mirrors, where everything was all there was.

  Truths whispered out of the mouths of babes; white rabbits plucked from the conjuror’s hat; sticky gossamer strands tailored by the spider of life; dreams left undreamed. Truths whispered from the mouths that swallowed from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags, smoked other peoples discarded dog-ends and talked to garbage cans claiming to hear the voice of God coming from within.

  Secrets secret.

  Green the colour of the grass ran into yellow and into orange, blurring with a lack of distinction around the fringes where emotions frayed and crossed; blue into indigo, indigo into purple into red into black. Into decay.

  And that was where he lived.

  Where the Colours danced.

  The lone spectator of the Colour Dance, over the last days he had often found himself wondering: Why me? Why am I blessed with this curse? But he knew the answer, because he was a Dancer and of all the Colours he was Red.

  Red was his colour as much as he was its; Red for hate, for anger, hurt and pride. Red for lust and avarice and degradation. Red for pain, for greed; of pain, of hate, of anger, of lust, of want, of need, of hate… of pain…

  But most of all, of people.

  If only they knew…

  Yes, he was The Trinity, yes, he was Red. A few more days, a few more miracles and they would know his name. The need would be satisfied and he could walk into Black. The no-colour. Black where death could undo his immortal soul, free him from this hell of his own making.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Trinity Killer sat on the edge of Prospect Park Lake, his bare feet trailing in the cool blue.

  Thinking.

  His thoughts composed a single colourful dream: Visions of composing the ultimate lullaby, leading his fellow Dancers through the bloody streets, ribbons of hate streaming in his wake, the spider’s web of death dancing around his feet as he span and swirled though the wilderness of glass.

  On the grass, the Village Voice’s bold headline was a noose around his neck, tightening: the Pontiac, it had been a mistake, his first, leaving it like that. He hadn’t been thinking.

  He looked up again at the fountain-like plume of scintillating glass reaching out of the glass-frozen lake, it’s eddying twists and minute enclaves of sky-catching crystal attracting and absorbing the failing light. Beyond the reach of the supplicating edifice, the surface of Prospect Park Lake, edge to distant edge had crusted over with a film of red glass flimsy enough to ripple with the caress of the choked inner-city breeze.

  He rocked slightly on his buttocks, arms around his knees, just rocking, rocking, and drawing comfort from the simple movement.

  The world of glass in the failing light, sight and image diffused around the column of angry redness beneath the glass skin of reality, which it somehow reflected back into the gathering twilight, its body a thousand thousand angry fireflies hovering under the influence of a single malevolent mind. Manhattan’s tower of hate. Every city had one, its angry manhood eager to fuck with all the pretty pretties…

  This was the coming of the time between times, between day and night, night and day, when the Guardians of The Dance could tread the streets in certain safety, quietly choreographing the moves needed to make up the next unearthly scene.

  The Trinity Killer, an angel bathed in red, folded the newspaper and stood up, a film of crack-iced glass freezing the grass under his bare feet and spreading out from the pivot toward the line of thick trunked oak and spruce less than a hundred metres from his lakeside seat. In seconds, the crucified scarecrows behind which the failing sun was slowly melting into a languid twilight were nothing more than bones of coruscating glass, skeletal arms clawing at the sky, sparkling against the halo of the dying sun, catching and reflecting the whole spectrum of colours whilst somehow radiating only a sickly red tinge.

  Around him ghostly slivers of red dazzled, catching and replicating the reflections thrown down on the mirror trees by the darkening sky.

  The screams of his dead, desperate shrieking, pitches rising and falling in the single voice of terror rang out across the twilight p
ark, as impossible as the dancer’s walking corpse. Pulses of red light came in waves, radiating off the central fountain-like plume of glass out in the centre of the lake, spreading outwards in tight ripples, each pulse accompanied by the lament of a tortured soul, a scream from dead lips.

  Almost exactly as the voices finally fell quiet the crimson light within the glass pillar snuffed out, leaving behind a single, curiously iridescent, vapour that curled away from the base of the shaft.

  What they could find out about a man three years dead, he failed to see. Carlos Lamenzo, the whispered Trinity, stared down at his bloody hands, as dead now as he had been that summer night three years ago when the Angel stepped down from its perch among the Cherubim around the crucifixion display nailed by its glass heart to the wall above the votive candles in St. Malachi’s, and poured its twisted soul into his empty husk, breathed life where before there was nothing except the black of death.

  That was the Secret of The Dance, and that was his secret as much as it was the Colour’s. His and his Angel’s, now that they were one and the same. That was why the Angel of Red had wound its cord so far, through the maze of twists and turns of the Otherworldly City, so far from the safety of the crystal tree to be beside, inside, its dancer.

  He could feel the stirrings, the sympathetic pangs of need clawing at his stomach walls. Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this… Pain…

  Wiping his hands off on his jeans, Lamenzo reached into his back pocket for the folded scrap of newspaper, the last grizzly souvenir of life before. It said little, a few lines in memoriam of a family cut down brutally. Multiple homicide. He knew the truth behind the words like no one else possibly could. After all, it was his story.

  A woman, wreathed in a veil of pineapple yellow and jade green jogged by, ponytail bouncing lightly as her feet danced across the span of the wooden bridge, ignorant of the miracles flowering all around her.

  The Trinity Killer watched her pass with eyes of fire, burning hot and so achingly cold, watched her pass…

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Manny Bossman’s small, family delicatessen cupped the corner of a southern Bronx street, its plate windows wearing the neatly hand-painted logo ‘The Boss Man’s Deli’ faced north and east, onto the jungle.

  That street corner sat on the edge of Crack Alley, one of the worst neighbourhoods in the Bronx; by night it belonged to the winos, bag ladies, junkies and crazies who dragged themselves out of their holes with the setting of the sun.

  It cultivated its own stink, too, like so many other street corners abandoned by night to the lowlife; the odour of forest green garbage sacks split by grubbing claws; the odour of boxes, bottles and cans strung out through the gaping holes; the odour of piss and puke.

  It was a bad place to live, even before his beloved Thelma had been taken up to Jehovah. Only nostalgia and guilt kept the street corner store open during the darkest days; memories of Thelma, of their two children, Jesse and Katarina, and now the grandchildren, Rosie and Stephen. In both, Manny saw the familiar spirit of his wife. Her ghost, it seemed, refused to rest; and guilt that he had fallen asleep and somehow allowed his neighbourhood to slip so low.

  In the last hour of daylight, before closing up for the night, Manny Bossman shuffled about the gas-lit store, sliced salami, pastrami and liverwurst for tomorrow, wiped down spotless counters and stainless slicers, and polished the long strip mirror that ran the length of the back wall.

  Three streets away, in St. Malachi’s, Carlos Lamenzo made his excuses to Father Joseph D’Angelo, flimsy as they were, and made to leave.

  As always, he paused between the Narthex and the Nave, dipped two fingers into the font, his reflection shimmering in the cool blue of the marble basin, crossed himself hurriedly with holy water and bowed his head before the flickering flames of the half dozen votive candles and spotlight illuminated crucifix above the alter.

  He dashed out into the smells of Hart Street, his own heart racing as he skirted the litter-strewn edge of Castle Hill Park and ducked back into the mire of Castle Hill Avenue.

  Barbis and the others were waiting for him outside the entrance to the subway. The gravolent attar of Henry Barbis’ cheap cologne hung heavily in the July air. The boarded-up houses along this particular stretch of slum-land all looked similarly dreary. The streetlamp outside the station was off, the bulb shattered and not replaced. The curtains of the houses on either side of the station were drawn. It was that time, when people stopped peering out between the drapes to check on the aimlessly milling kids. A couple of doors down a dog growled, but the four men ignored it, waiting for Barbis’ lead.

  As if to some silent signal, he began walking unhurriedly toward the darkened alley traversing Cicero and Caesar, the big man’s abnormally crooked gait trailing his two-tone spats across the concrete sidewalk. The others moved cautiously behind him.

  “What’s he up to?” Lamenzo whispered to the Bantam-sized Latino at his side, meaning their self-elected leader.

  Jimmy Ortega looked at him, his usually playful eyes unreadable in the gloom, and shrugged his butterfly shoulders. “Prick reckons he’s got himself a line into Rodriguez,” his voice, coated with a Spanish accent, whispered back. Ortega smiled crookedly. “Seems like he’s willing to put some bigger business our way if we do okay tonight. No fuck ups and maybe he’ll even let us in on a crack house run.”

  “Yeah? You’re not shittin’ me, are ya?”

  “Why the fuck would I, man?”

  “Shit, he’s gotta be out of his fuckin’ head mixing up with a motherfucker like Tony Rodriguez.”

  “Too fuckin’ right, my man. But he reckons the shit’s worth it.”

  “How ‘bout you?”

  “Me?” Ortega seemed genuinely amused by the thought. “What the fuck’s it matter what I think? You think ol’ Henry’d listen to what I think?” The young Chicano sneered and spat into the gutter.

  “Where we goin’ then?”

  “Gotta put the squeeze on some old Jewboy, seems like he’s not coughin’ up the insurance on time and Rodriguez is gettin’ real pissed with him.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, no shit… Just like the fuckin’ movies huh?”

  “Just like the fuckin’ movies,” Lamenzo agreed.

  Barbis had slipped out of the alley, drawing the others with him like flies. The houses along this side of Caesar all looked the same, terraced and semi-detached row houses, unremarkable houses lived in by unremarkable people.

  People like Manny Bossman.

  The old man’s street corner delicatessen stood in darkness, the only light the spectral black and white glow of the television set coming through the glass of one of the small upper windows.

  Barbis stopped, tilting his head upwards until the television’s glow touched his scowling features. The knife he drew from his belt was about eight inches long, serrated along a single edge, and wickedly sharp.

  Lamenzo didn’t hurry to catch up; instead he loitered around the entrance onto the street, kicking unconsciously at the forest of municipal garbage sacks lining the gutter, spilling chicken bones and potato peel with his feet.

  Eddie Morreno and Jimmy Ortega moved up to stand side by side at Barbis’ shoulder, their eyes echoing his, lifting to join his in a curb side vigil.

  “Time for work, boys.” Barbis purred, a coarse crack from his bruised knuckles punctuating each short word.

  Morreno took his cue. Edging past the still grinning Barbis, he tried the main door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. “S’locked,” he grumbled, needlessly stating the obvious as he stepped back from the door.

  Barbis’ pencil thin lips twisted into a wry smile as he nodded to Ortega. “Around the side, Jimmy.”

  “No problem,” Ortega agreed, squatting down and pulling a knife of his own from a hidden boot-sheath. The little Chicano disappeared around the side of the building.

  Lamenzo walked forward, careful not to make a sound, until he drew leve
l with Barbis and Morreno. “What’re we gonna do to the old guy?”

  “Just rough him up a bit, Carlos. You know the deal. Rodriguez wants him frightened and we’re frightening.” Barbis answered softly.

  “There’s not gonna be no blood is there, Henry? I’ve got to be back to help Father Joe with the evening service, remember.”

  “No blood, I promise you, Carlos,” Barbis breathed in his ear. “No blood.”

  Hidden until the last moment by shadow, Jimmy Ortega made his way back to the others. “There’s a metal fire escape around the back,” he whispered, breathing hard. “Only goes as far as the second floor, but there’s a fly-window up there that shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Lamenzo asked dryly.

  The four men moved cautiously along the narrow walkway until Ortega gestured for them to stop. “This is it,” he whispered, pointing at the peeling face of an oddly colourless gate. “Just watch the step, ‘kay?”

  If before they were quiet, crossing the killing ground between the colourless gate and the fire escape at the rear of The Boss Man’s Deli, they were church mice.

  A rusted garbage bin stood close by, under the swinging legs of the escape’s ladder, at least eight feet above. Eddie Morreno pushed it aside with his foot, ignoring the protesting screech of metal as it grated against the chipped concrete of the yard. He smiled broadly and squatted down, clasping his hands together to form a stirrup.

  “Would you be so kind as to do the honours?” Barbis whispered to Ortega, nodding down at the kneeling shadow of Eddie Morreno.

  “My pleasure.” Jimmy Ortega put his foot on the helping hands and allowed himself to be boosted up until his questing fingers snagged on the first rung of the metal ladder, then pulled himself up until his swinging feet caught the base of that first precious rung. He danced up the remaining rungs until he emerged on the narrow, rusting platform, from where he could reach the small fly-window he had talked about. Without waiting to be told, Ortega slid the thin blade of his knife into the frame of the window, working the point up and down carefully until the window latch finally came loose. He nudged it gently with the side of his clenched fist, popping it open.