The Wolf in Winter (25 page)

CHAPTER

XLI

A day passed. Night fell. All was changed, yet unchanged. The dead remained dead, and waited for the dying to join their number.

On the outskirts of Prosperous, a massive 4WD pulled up by the side of the road, disgorging one of its occupants before quickly turning back east. Ronald Straydeer hoisted a pack onto his back and headed for the woods, making his way toward the ruins of the church.

CHAPTER

XLII

The two-story redbrick premises advertised itself as
BLACKTHORN, APOTHECARY
, although it had been many years since the store sold anything, and old Blackthorn himself was now long dead. It had, for much of its history, been the only business on Hunts Lane, a Brooklyn mews originally designed to stable the horses of the wealthy on nearby Remsen and Joralemon Streets.

The exterior wood surround was black, the lettering on and above the window gold, and its front door was permanently closed. The upstairs windows were shuttered, while the main window on the first floor was protected by a dense wire grille. The jumbled display behind it was a historical artifact, a collection of boxes and bottles bearing the names, where legible at all, of companies that no longer existed, and products with more than a hint of snake oil about them: Dalley’s Magical Pain Extractor, Dr. Ham’s Aromatic Invigorator, Dr. Miles’s Nervine.

Perhaps, at some point in the past, an ancestor of the last Blackthorn had seen fit to offer such elixirs to his customers, along with remedies stranger still. A glass case inside the door contained packets of Potter’s Asthma Smoking Mixture (“may be smoked in a pipe either with or without ordinary tobacco”) and Potter’s Asthma Care Cigarettes from the nineteenth century, along with Espic and Legras powders, the latter beloved of the French writer Marcel Proust, who
used it to tackle his asthma and his hay fever. In addition to stramonium, a derivative of the common thorn apple,
Datura stramonium
, which was regarded as an effective remedy for respiratory problems, such products contained, variously, potash and arsenic. Now, long fallen from favor, they were memorialized in the gloom of Blackthorn, Apothecary, alongside malt beverages for nursing mothers, empty bottles of cocaine-based coca wine and heroin hydrochloride, and assorted preparations of morphine and opium for coughs, colds, and children’s teething difficulties.

By the time the final Blackthorn was entering his twilight years—in a store that, most aptly, eschewed sunlight through the judicious use of heavy drapes and a sparing attitude toward electricity—the business that bore his family name sold only herbal medicines, and the musty interior still contained the evidence of Blackthorn’s faith in the efficacy of natural solutions. The mahogany shelves were lined with glass jars containing moldering and desiccated herbs, although the various oils appeared to have survived the years with little change. A series of ornate lettered boards between the shelves detailed a litany of ailments and the herbs available to counteract their symptoms, from bad breath (parsley) and gas (fennel and dill) to cankers (goldenseal), cancer (bilberry, maitake mushroom, pomegranate, raspberry) and congestive heart failure (hawthorn). All was dust and dead insects, except on the floor, where regular footfalls had cleared a narrow path through the detritus of decades. This led from a side entrance beside the main door, through a hallway adorned with photographs of the dead, and amateur landscapes that bespoke a morbid fascination with the work of the more depressive German Romantics, and into the store itself by way of a door with panels decorated by graphically rendered scenes from the Passion of Christ. The path’s final destination was obscured by a pair of black velvet drapes that closed off what had once been old Blackthorn’s back room, in which the apothecary had created his tinctures and powders.

Now, as a chill rain fell on the streets, specks of light showed through the moth holes in the drapes, and they glittered like stars as unseen figures moved in the room behind. Evening had descended, and Hunts Lane was empty, apart from the two men who stood beneath the awning of an old stable, watching the storefront on the other side of the alley, and the vague signs of life from within.

Two days had passed since the shooting.

“He gives me the creeps,” said Angel.

“Man gives everyone the creeps,” said Louis. “There’s dead folk would move out if they found themselves buried next to him.”

“Why here?”

“Why not?”

“I guess. How long has he been holed up in that place?”

“Couple of weeks, if what I hear is true.”

The location had cost Louis a considerable amount of money, along with one favor that he could never call in again. He didn’t mind. This was personal.

“It’s homely,” said Angel. “In a Dickensian way—it’s kind of appropriate. Any idea where he’s been all these years?”

“No. He did have a habit of moving around.”

“Not much choice. Probably doesn’t make many friends in his line of work.”

“Probably not.”

“After all, you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Except me.”

“Yeah. About that . . .”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“That would be the other option.”

Angel stared at the building, and the building seemed to stare back.

“Strange that he should turn up now.”

“Yes.”

“You know what he was doing while he was gone?”

“What he’s always been doing—causing pain.”

“Maybe he thinks it’ll take away some of his own.”

Louis glanced at his partner.

“You know, you get real philosophical at unexpected moments.”

“I was born philosophical. I just don’t always care to share my thoughts with others, that’s all. I think I might be a Stoic, if I understood what that meant. Either way, I like the sound of it.”

“On your earlier point, he enjoyed inflicting pain, and watching others inflict it, even when he wasn’t suffering himself.”

“If you believed in a god, you might say it was divine retribution.”

“Karma.”

“Yeah, that too.”

The rain continued to fall.

“You know,” said Angel, “there’s a hole in this awning.”

“Yes.”

“It’s, like, a metaphor or something.”

“Or just a hole.”

“You got no poetry in your heart.”

“No.”

“You think he knows we’re out here?”

“He knows.”

“So?”

“You want to knock, be my guest.”

“What’ll happen?”

“You’ll be dead.”

“I figured it would be something like that. So we wait.”

“Yes.”

“Until?”

“Until he opens the door.”

“And?”

“If he tries to kill us, we know he’s involved.”

“And if he doesn’t try to kill us, then he’s not involved?”

“No, then maybe he’s just smarter than I thought.”

“You said he was as smart as any man you’d ever known.”

“That’s right.”

“Doesn’t bode well for us.”

“No.”

There was a noise from across the alley: the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a bolt being pulled. Angel moved to the right, his gun already in his hand. Louis went left, and was absorbed by the darkness. A light bloomed slowly in the hallway, visible through the hemisphere of cracked glass above the smaller of the two doors. The door opened slowly, revealing a huge man. He remained very still, his hands slightly held out from his sides. Had Angel and Louis wanted to kill him, this would have been the perfect opportunity. But the ­message seemed clear: the one they had come to see wanted to talk. There would be no killing.

Not yet.

There was no further movement for a time. Angel’s gaze alternated between the shuttered windows on the second floor of the apothecary and the entrance to Hunts Lane from Henry Street. Hunts Lane was a dead end. If this was a trap, there would be no escape. He had questioned Louis about their approach, wondering aloud if it might not be better for one of them to remain on the street while the other entered the alley, but Louis had demurred.

“He knows that we’re coming. He’s the last one.”

“Which means?”

“That if it’s a trap he’d spring it long before the alley. We’d be dead as soon as we set foot in Brooklyn. We just wouldn’t know it until the blade fell.”

None of this did Angel find reassuring. He had met this man only once before, when he sought to recruit Louis—and, by extension, Angel—for his own ends. The memory of that meeting had never
faded. Angel had felt poisoned by it afterward, as though by breathing the same air as the man he had forever tainted his system.

Louis appeared again. He had his gun raised, aimed directly at the figure in the doorway. The giant stepped forward, and a motion-activated light went on above his head. He was truly enormous, his head like a grave monument on his shoulders, his chest and arms impossibly massive. Angel didn’t recognize the face, and he would surely have remembered if he had seen such a monster before. His skull was bald, his scalp crisscrossed with scars, and his eyes were very clear and round, like boiled eggs pressed into his face. He was extraordinarily unhandsome, as though God had created the ugliest human being possible and then punched him in the face.

Most striking of all was the yellow suit that he wore. It gave him a strange air of feigned jollity, the product, perhaps, of an erroneous belief that he might somehow appear less threatening if he just wore brighter colors. He watched Louis approach, and it struck Angel that he hadn’t yet seen the sentinel in the doorway blink once. His eyes were so huge that any blinks would have been obvious, like the flapping of wings.

Louis lowered his gun, and simultaneously the man at the door raised his right hand. He showed Louis the small plastic bottle that he held and then, without waiting for Louis to respond, tilted his head back and added drops to his eyes. When he was done, he stepped into the rain and silently indicated that Angel and Louis should enter the apothecary’s store, his right hand now extended like that of the greeter at the world’s worst nightclub.

Reluctantly, Angel came forward. He followed Louis into the darkness of the hallway, but he entered backward, keeping his eyes, and his gun, on the unblinking giant at the door. But the giant didn’t follow them inside. Instead, he remained standing in the rain, his face raised to the heavens, and the water flowed down his cheeks like tears.

CHAPTER

XLIII

Angel and Louis followed the trail through the dust, the interior lit only by a single lamp that flickered in a corner. The room smelled of long-withered herbs, the scent of them infused in the grain of the wood and the peeling paint on the walls, but underpinning it was a medicinal odor that grew stronger as they approached the drapes concealing the back room.

And there was another smell again beneath them all: it was the unmistakable reek of rotting flesh.

Louis had replaced his gun in its holster, and now Angel did the same. Slowly Louis reached out and pulled aside the drapes, revealing the room beyond, and a man seated at a desk lit only by a banker’s lamp. The angle of the lamp meant that the man was hidden in shadow, but even in the darkness Angel could see that he was yet more misshapen than when they’d last met. As they entered he raised his head with difficulty, and his words were slurred as he spoke.

“Welcome,” he said. “You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands.”

His twisted right hand reached for the lamp, its fingers so deformed that they appeared to have been lost entirely, the digits reduced to twin stumps at the end of the arm. Angel and Louis didn’t react, except for the merest flicker of compassion that briefly caused Angel’s
eyes to close. It was beyond Angel’s capacity not to feel some sympathy, even for one such as this. His response didn’t go unnoticed.

“Spare me,” said the man. “If it were possible to rid myself of this disease by visiting it instead on you, I would do so in an instant.”

He gurgled, and it took Angel a moment to realize that he was laughing.

“In fact,” he added, “I would visit it upon you anyway, were it possible, if only for the pleasure of sharing.”

“Mr. Cambion,” said Louis. “You have not changed.”

With a flick of his wrist, Cambion moved the lamp so that its light now fell upon his ravaged face.

“Oh,” he said, “but I have.”

ITS OFFICIAL NAME WAS
Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who, in 1873, identified the bacterium that was its causative agent, but for more than four thousand years humankind had known it simply as leprosy. Multidrug therapies had now rendered curable what had once been regarded as beyond treatment, with rifampicin as the base drug used to tackle both types of leprosy, multibacillary and paucibacillary, but Cambion was one of the exceptional cases, the small unfortunate few who showed no clinical or bacteriological improvement with MDT. The reasons for this were unclear, but those who whispered of him said that, during the earliest manifestations of the disease, he had been treated unethically with rifampicin as a monotherapy, instead of in conjunction with dapsone and clofazimine, and this had created in him a resistance to the base drug. The unfortunate physician responsible had subsequently disappeared, although he was not forgotten by his immediate family, helped by the fact that pieces of the doctor continued to be delivered to them at regular intervals. In fact, it wasn’t even clear if the doctor was dead, since the body parts that arrived appeared remarkably
fresh, even allowing for the preservative compounds in which they were packed.

But truth, when it came to Cambion, was in short supply. Even his name was an invention. In medieval times, a cambion was the mutated offspring of a human and a demon. Caliban, Prospero’s antagonist in
The Tempest
, was a cambion—“not honour’d with a human shape.” All that could be known of Cambion for sure, confirmed by his presence in the old apothecary, was that his condition was deteriorating rapidly. One might even have said that it was degenerating, but then Cambion had always been degenerate by nature, and his physical ailment could have been taken as an outward manifestation of his inner corruption. Cambion was wealthy, and without morals. Cambion had killed—men, women, children—but as the disease had rotted his flesh, limiting his power of movement and depriving him of sensation at his extremities, he had moved from the act of killing to the facilitation of it. It had always been a lucrative sideline for him, for his reputation drew men and women who were at least as debased as he, but now it was his principal activity. Cambion was the main point of contact for those who liked to combine murder with rape and torture, and those who devoutly wished that their enemies might suffer before they died. It was said that, when possible, Cambion liked to watch. Cambion’s people—if people they even were, as their capacity for evil called into question their very humanity—took on jobs that others refused to countenance, whether for reasons of morality or personal safety. Their sadism was their weakness, though. This was why Cambion’s services remained so specialized, and why he and his beasts hid themselves in the shadows. Their acts had been met with promises of retribution that were at least their equal.

When Angel had last seen Cambion, more than a decade earlier, his features were already displaying signs of ulceration and lesions, and certain nerves had begun to enlarge, including the great auricular nerve beneath the ears and the supraorbital on the skull. Now the rav
ages of the disease had rendered him almost unrecognizable. His left eye was barely visible as a slit in the flesh of his face, while the right eye was wide but cloudy. His lower lip had swollen immensely, causing his mouth to droop open. His nasal cartilage had dissolved, leaving two holes separated by a strip of bone. Any remaining visible skin was covered with bumps that looked as hard as stone.

“What do you think?” said Cambion, and spittle sprayed from his lips. Angel was glad that he hadn’t chosen to stand closer to the desk. After that first, and last, encounter with Cambion, he had taken the time to read up on leprosy. Most of what he knew, or thought he knew of the disease, turned out to be myths, including that it was transmitted by touch. Routes of transmission were still being researched, but it appeared to be spread primarily through nasal secretions. Angel watched the droplets of spittle on Cambion’s desk and realized that he was holding his breath.

“Don’t look like you’re getting no better,” said Louis.

“I think that’s a safe conjecture,” said Cambion.

“Maybe you ought to try—” Louis clicked his fingers and turned to Angel for help. “What’s that shit you use? You know, for your scabies.”

“Hydrocortisone. And it’s not scabies. It’s heat rash.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Louis. He returned his attention to Cambion. “Hydrocortisone. Clear that shit right up.”

“Thank you for the advice. I’ll bear it in mind.”

“My pleasure,” said Louis. “You give what ails you to SpongeBob SquarePants outside too?”

Cambion managed to smile.

“I’ll let Edmund know what you called him. I’m sure he’ll find it amusing.”

“I don’t much care either way,” said Louis.

“No, I don’t imagine you would. As for what troubles him, he has a condition known as lagophthalmos—a form of facial paralysis that affects the seventh cranial nerve, which controls the orbicularis oculi,
the closing muscle of the eyelid. It leaves him unable to properly lubricate his eyes.”

“Man,” said Louis, “you quite the pair.”

“I like to think that Edmund’s exposure to me enables him to put his own problems into some kind of perspective.”

“It would, if you hired a bodyguard who can see right.”

“Edmund’s not just my bodyguard. He’s my nurse, and my confidant. In fact”—Cambion waved his right arm, displaying the stumps—“you could say that he’s my right-hand man. My left, though, continues to have its uses.”

He displayed his left hand for the first time. It still had three fingers and a thumb. They were currently wrapped around a modified pistol with an oversized trigger. The muzzle of the gun pointed loosely at Louis.

“We was going to kill you, we’d have done it already,” said Louis.

“Likewise.”

“You were hard to find.”

“Yet here you are. I knew you’d get to me eventually, once you’d exhausted all other avenues of inquiry. You’ve been tearing quite a swath through the city, you and your boyfriend. There can’t be a stone left unturned.”

It was true. Within hours of the shooting, Angel and Louis had begun asking questions, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. There had been quiet conversations over cups of coffee in upscale restaurants, and over beers in the back rooms of dive bars. There were phone calls and denials, threats and warnings. Every middleman, every fixer, every facilitator who had knowledge of those who killed for money was contacted directly or received word: Louis wanted names. He desired to know who had pulled the trigger, and who had made the call.

The difficulty was that Louis suspected the shooter—or shooters, for Louis believed that the combination of shotgun and pistol used pointed to a team—hadn’t been sourced through the usual channels. He had
no doubt that they were pros, or, at least, he had started off with that assumption. It didn’t smell like amateur hour to him, not where Parker was concerned, and the likelihood of two gunmen reinforced that belief. If he was wrong, and it turned out that some enraged loner was responsible, then it would be a matter for the cops and their investigation. Louis might get to the shooter first if the information leaked, but that wasn’t his world. In Louis’s world, people were paid to kill.

But the detective’s connections to Louis were well known, and nobody of Louis’s acquaintance would have accepted the contract, either as the agent or as the trigger man. Nevertheless, it had been necessary to check, just to be sure.

There was also the distinct possibility that the hit was related to Parker’s movements through darker realms, and with that in mind Louis had already made contact with Epstein, the old rabbi in New York. Louis had made it clear to him that, if Epstein discovered something relating to the hit and chose not to share it, Louis would be seriously displeased. In the meantime, Epstein had sent his own pet bodyguard, Liat, up to Maine. She was, thought Louis, a little late to the party. They all were.

A third line of investigation pointed to the Collector, but Louis had dismissed that possibility almost immediately. A shotgun wasn’t the Collector’s style, and he’d probably have come after Angel and Louis first. Louis suspected that the Collector wanted Parker alive unless there was no other option, although he still didn’t understand why, despite Parker’s efforts to explain the situation to him. If he ever did manage to corner the Collector, Louis planned to ask him to clarify it, just before he shot him in the head.

Finally, there was the case on which Parker had been working before the hit: a missing girl, a dead man in a basement, and a town called Prosperous, but that was all Louis knew. If someone in Prosperous had hired a killer, then it brought the hunt back to Louis. He would find the shooters and make them talk.

Which was why he and Angel were now standing before Cambion, because Cambion didn’t care about Louis, or Parker, or anyone or anything else, and he dealt, in turn, with those who were too vicious and depraved to care either. Even if Cambion hadn’t been involved—and that had yet to be established—his contacts extended into corners of which even Louis was not aware. The creatures that hid there had claws and fangs, and were filled with poison.

“Quite the place you have here,” said Louis. His eyes were growing used to the dimness. He could see the modern medicines on the shelves behind Cambion, and a doorway beyond that, presumably, led to where Cambion lived and slept. He could not visualize this man making it up a flight of stairs. A wheelchair stood folded in one corner. Beside it was a plastic bowl, a spoon, and a napkin. A china bowl and a silver soup spoon sat on the desk beside Cambion, and Louis spotted a similar bowl and spoon on a side table to his right.

Curious, thought Louis: two people, but three bowls.

“I was growing fond of my new home,” said Cambion. “But now, I think, I shall have to move again. A pity—such upheavals drain my strength, and it’s difficult to find suitable premises with such a gracious atmosphere.”

“Don’t go running off on my account,” said Louis. He didn’t even bother to comment on the ambience. The apothecary’s old premises felt to him only a step away from an embalmer’s chambers.

“Why, are you telling me that I can rely on your discretion—that you won’t breathe a word of where I am?” said Cambion. “There’s a price on my head. The only reason you’ve got this close is because I know that you declined the contract on me. I still don’t understand why.”

“Because I thought a day like this might come,” said Louis.

“When you needed me?”

“When I’d have to look in your eyes to see if you were lying.”

“Ask it.”

“Were you involved?”

“No.”

Louis remained very still as he stared at the decaying man. Finally, he nodded.

“Who was?”

“No one in my circle.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Although it was only the slightest of movements, Angel saw Louis’s shoulders slump. Cambion was the last of the middlemen. The hunt would now become much more difficult.

“I have heard a rumor, though. . . .”

Louis tensed. Here was the game. There was always a game where Cambion was concerned.

“Which is?”

“What can you offer me in return?”

“What do you want?”

“To die in peace.”

“Looking at you, that don’t seem like an option.”

“I want the contract nullified.”

“I can’t do that.”

Cambion placed the gun, which had remained in his hand throughout, on the desk and opened a drawer. From it he produced an envelope, which he slid toward Louis.

“Talking tires me,” he said. “This should suffice.”

“What is it?”

“A list of names—the worst of men and women.”

“The ones you’ve used.”

“Yes, along with the crimes for which they’re responsible. I want to buy the contract back with their blood. I’m tired of being pursued. I need to rest.”

Louis stared at the envelope, making the calculations. Finally, he took it and placed it in his jacket pocket.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Those names will be enough.”