The Black Angel

For the first time in many days, Angel allowed himself a smile, albeit a small one, and very short-lived. Since Martha’s appearance at the house, Louis had barely eaten or slept. Angel would awake in the darkness to find their shared bed empty, the pillows and sheets long cold on his partner’s side. On the first night, when they had brought Martha back to the city and transferred her to her new lodgings, he had padded softly to the bedroom door and watched in silence as Louis sat at a window, staring out over the city, scrutinizing every passing face in the hope that he might find Alice’s among them. Guilt emanated from his pores, so that the room seemed almost to smell of something bitter and old. Angel knew all about Alice. He had accompanied his partner on his searches for her, initially along Eighth Avenue, when they first learned that she had arrived in the city, and later at the Point, when Giuliani’s reforms really started to bite and Vice Enforcement began hitting the streets of Manhattan on a regular basis, NYPD “ghosts” mingling with the crowds below Forty-fourth, and monitoring teams waiting to pounce from unmarked vans. The Point was a little easier in the begi

It was into this sucking hole that Alice was descending, and their interventions counted for nothing. In fact, Angel could see that the woman sometimes seemed almost to take a strange pleasure in taunting Louis with her immersion in the life, even as it inexorably led to her degradation and, ultimately, to her death. In the end, all Louis could do was make sure that whatever pimp was feeding off her knew the consequences if anything happened to her, and paid her fines to ensure that she didn’t do jail time. Finally, he could no longer bring himself to witness her decay, and it was perhaps unsurprising that she slipped through the net when Free Billy died, and came instead under the control of G-Mack.

And so Angel watched him that first night, not speaking for some time, until at last he said: “You tried.”

“Not hard enough.”

“She may still be out there, somewhere.”

Louis gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

“No. She’s gone. I can feel it.”

“Listen to-”

“Go back to bed.”

And he did, because there was nothing more that could be said. There was no point in trying to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that people made their own choices, that you couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, didn’t matter how hard you tried. Louis would not, or could not, believe those things. This was his guilt, and Alice’s path was not entirely of her own choosing. The actions of others had set her upon it, and his were among them.

But there was more that Angel could not have guessed at, small, private moments between Louis and Alice that perhaps only Martha might have understood, for they found an echo in the phone calls and the occasional cards that she herself received. Louis could remember Alice as a child, how she would play at his feet or fall asleep curled up beside him, bathed in the glow of their first TV. She cried when he left home, although she was barely old enough to comprehend what was happening, and in the years that followed, as his visits grew fewer and fewer, she was always the first to greet him. Slowly, she recognized the changes that were coming over him, as the boy who had killed her father, believing him guilty of the murder of his own mother, matured into a man capable of taking the lives of others without exploring questions of i

“Momma says you’re leaving today,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“The way she said it, it’s like you ain’t ever coming back.”

“Things change. People change. This ain’t no place for me now.”

She pursed her lips, then raised her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes as she stared into the redness of the sun.

“I seen the way people look at you.”

“What way is that?”

“Like they’s scared of you. Even Momma, she looks like that, sometimes.”

“She’s got no call to be scared of me. You neither.”

“Why are they scared?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard stories.”

Louis stood and tried to pass her by, but she blocked his way, her hands splayed against his midriff.

“No,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me that the stories ain’t true.”

“I got no time for stories.”

He gripped her wrists and turned her, slipping by her and heading toward the house.

“They say my daddy was a bad man. They say he got what he deserved.”

She was shouting now. He heard her ru

“They say you know what happened to him. Tell me! Tell me!”

And she struck him from behind with such force that he stumbled and fell to his knees. He tried to rise, and she slapped him. He saw that she was weeping.

“Tell me,” she said again, but this time her voice was soft, barely a whisper. “Tell me that it isn’t true.”

But he could not answer her, and he walked away and left them all. Only once, in the years of her descent, did Alice again bring up the subject of her father. It was fourteen months before her disappearance, when Louis still believed that she might yet be saved. She called him from the private clinic in Phoenicia, in the midst of the Catskills, and he drove up to see her that afternoon. He had placed her there after Jackie O called him and told him that Alice was with him, that a john had hurt her badly, and she had nearly overdosed in an effort to dull the pain. She was bruised and bleeding, her eyes slivers of white beneath heavy lids, her mouth agape. Louis took her to Phoenicia the following morning, once she was straight enough to understand what was happening. The beating had shocked her, and she appeared more willing than ever before to consider intervention. She spent six weeks isolated in Phoenicia, then the call came.