Every Dead Thing

The second and probably more compelling reason for Tommy Q’s fear was that Angel’s boyfriend was a man known only as Louis. Like Angel, Louis had no visible means of support, although it was widely known that Angel, now semiretired at the age of forty, was one of the best thieves in the business, capable of stealing the fluff from the president’s navel if the money was good enough.

Less widely known was the fact that Louis, tall, black, and sophisticated in his dress sense, was a hit man almost without equal, a killer who had been reformed somewhat by his relationship with Angel and who now chose his rare targets with what might be termed a social conscience.

Rumor had it that the killing of a German computer expert named Gunther Bloch in Chicago the previous year had been the work of Louis. Bloch was a serial rapist and torturer who preyed on young, sometimes very young, women in the sex resorts of Southeast Asia, where much of his business was transacted. Money usually covered all ills, money paid to pimps, to parents, to police, to politicians.

Unfortunately for Bloch, someone in the upper reaches of the government in one of his nations of choice couldn’t be bought, especially after Bloch strangled an eleven-year-old girl and dumped her body in a trash bin. Bloch fled the country, money was redirected to a “special project,” and Louis drowned Gunther Bloch in the bathroom of a thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suite in Chicago.

Or, like I said, so rumor had it. Whatever the truth of the matter, Louis was regarded as very bad news and Tommy Q wanted in future to be able to take a bath, however rarely, without fear of drowning.

“Nice story, Tommy,” said Angel.

“It’s just a story, Angel. I didn’t mean nothing by it. No offense meant.”

“None taken,” said Angel. “At least, not by me.”

Behind him there was a movement in the darkness, and Louis appeared. His bald head gleamed in the dim light, his muscular neck emerging from a black silk shirt within an immaculately cut gray suit. He towered over Angel by more than a foot, and as he did so, he eyed Tommy Q intently for a moment.

“Fruit,” he said. “That’s a… quaint term, Mr. Q. To what does it refer, exactly?”

The blood had drained from Tommy Q’s face and it seemed to take him a very long time to find enough saliva to enable him to gulp. When he did eventually manage, it sounded like he was swallowing a golf ball. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, so he closed it again and looked at the floor in the vain hope that it would open up and swallow him.

“It’s okay, Mr. Q, it was a good story,” said Louis in a voice as silky as his shirt. “Just be careful how you tell it.” Then he smiled a bright smile at Tommy Q, the sort of smile a cat might give a mouse to take to the grave with it. A drop of sweat ran down Tommy Q’s nose, hung from the tip for a moment, and then exploded on the floor. By then, Louis had gone.

“Don’t forget my car, Willie,” I said, then followed Angel from the garage.

10

WE WALKED a block or two to a late-night bar and diner Angel knew. Louis strolled a few yards ahead of us, the late evening crowds parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. Once or twice women glanced at him with interest. The men mostly kept their eyes on the ground, or found something suddenly interesting in the boarded-up storefronts or the night sky.

From inside the bar came the sound of a vaguely folky singer performing open-guitar surgery on Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” It didn’t sound like the song was going to pull through.

“He plays like he hates Neil Young,” said Angel as we entered.

Ahead of us, Louis shrugged. “Neil Young heard that shit, he’d probably hate himself.”

We took a booth. The owner, a fat, dyspeptic man named Ernest, shambled over to take our order. Usually the waitresses in Ernest’s took the orders, but Angel and Louis commanded a degree of respect, even here.

“Hey, Ernest,” said Angel, “how’s business?”

“If I was an undertaker, people’d stop dying,” replied Ernest. “And before you ask, my old lady’s still ugly.” It was a long-established exchange.

“Shit, you been married forty years,” said Angel. “She ain’t go

Angel and Louis ordered club sandwiches and Ernest wandered away. “I was a kid and looked like him, I’d cut my dick off and make money singin’ castrato, ’cause it ain’t go

“Bein’ ugly ain’t done you no harm,” said Louis.

“I don’t know.” Angel gri

They stopped bickering and we waited for the singer to put Neil Young out of his misery. It was strange meeting these two, now that I was no longer a cop. When we had encountered one another before-in Willie’s garage, or over coffee, or in Central Park if Angel had some useful information to impart, or if he simply wanted to meet to talk, to ask after Susan and Je

On this occasion, that tension was no longer present. Instead, I felt for the first time the strength of the bond of friendship that had somehow grown between Angel and me. More than that, from both of them I felt a sense of concern, of regret, of humanity, of trust. They would not be here, I knew, if they felt otherwise.

But maybe there was something more, something I had only begun to perceive. I was a cop’s nightmare. Cops, their families, their wives and children, are untouchables. You have to be crazy to go after a cop, crazier still to take out his loved ones. These are the assumptions we live by, the belief that after a day spent looking at the dead, questioning thieves and rapists, pushers and pimps, we can return to our own lives, knowing that our families are somehow apart from all this, and that through them we can remain apart from it too.

But that belief system had been shaken by the deaths of Je

And yet what had taken place had somehow brought me closer to both Angel and Louis. They had no illusions about the world in which they lived, no philosophical constructions that allowed them to be at once a part of, and apart from, that world. Louis was a killer: he couldn’t afford delusions of that kind. Because of the closeness of the bond that existed between them, Angel couldn’t afford those delusions either. Now they had also been taken away from me, like scales falling from my eyes, leaving me to reestablish myself, to find a new place in the world.

Angel picked up an abandoned paper from the booth next door and glanced at the headline. “You see this?” I looked and nodded. A guy had tried to pull some heroic stunt during a bank raid in Flushing earlier in the day and ended up with both barrels of a sawed-off emptied into him. The papers and news bulletins were full of it.

“Here’s some guys out doin’ a job,” began Angel. “They don’t want to hurt nobody, they just want to go in, take the money-which is insured anyway, so what does the bank care?-and get out again. They only got the guns ’cause no one’s go