Usually, he would be fascinated by the equipment he had disassembled, like an anatomist given an opportunity to examine the internal organs of a particularly fine specimen, but on this occasion his mind was elsewhere. The attack on the apartment building had unnerved him, and the evening’s developments at Hoyle’s apartment had done nothing to set his mind at ease. In the aftermath of the attacks, he and Louis had discussed the possibility of lying low for a time, but had quickly discounted it. To begin with, there was Mrs. Bondarchuk, who refused to move, arguing that it would disturb her Pomeranians. She also pointed out that her grandfather had refused to flee from the Communists in Russia, fighting on with the Whites, and that her father had fought the Nazis at Stalingrad. They had not run, and neither would she. The fact that both her grandfather and father had died in the course of their respective stands against the enemy did not affect her argument in any way.
Louis, in turn, did not believe that their enemies would attack them again at the apartment. Between that incident, and the encounter at the auto shop, three men had been lost. At the very least, they would be licking their wounds. A little time had been bought, and it could best be used at their home, not at some makeshift safe house, or in a vulnerable hotel. Angel had acquiesced, but there was something in the way Louis spoke that had disturbed him.
He wants them to come, he thought. He wants this to continue. He likes it.
Angel had never told a soul that Louis sometimes frightened him. He had not even told Louis, although he wondered if Louis might not have guessed that fact for himself. It was not that he feared Louis might turn on him. While his partner could charitably be described as “acid-tongued” on occasion, none of the violence of which he was capable had ever been directed at Angel. No, what frightened Angel was Louis’s need for that violence. There was a hunger inside him that could only be fed by it, and Angel did not fully understand the source of that hunger. Oh, he knew a great deal about Louis’s past. Not everything, though: there were parts of it that remained hidden, even from him, but then it was also true that Angel had not told Louis everything about himself either. After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
But the details of Louis’s past were not enough to explain the man that he had become, not for Angel. When faced with a threat to his own safety and that of the women with whom he lived, the young Louis had acted immediately to remove that threat. He had set out, quite cold-bloodedly, to kill the man named Deber whom he suspected of murdering his mother, and who had now returned to the house that she had occupied with her own mother, her sisters, and her young son, to replace her with another. Louis had smelt his mother’s blood upon him, and Deber in turn, his senses attuned to potential threats, had seen the desire for vengeance bubbling beneath the placid surface of the boy. Their small world could not contain both of them, and Deber had felt certain that, when the time came for the boy to act, he would do so in the way of a hot-headed young man. It would be direct: a blade, or a cheap gun acquired for the purpose. Deber would see him coming. The boy would want to look into Deber’s eyes as he died, for that was the kind of revenge that a child sought. There could be no gratification at a distance, Deber believed.
But the boy was not like that. From his earliest years, there was something inside him that could not be touched, an old soul living in a young body. Deber was cunning and cruel, but the boy was clever and dispassionate. Deber did not die from a bullet wound, or a knife to the chest or belly. He did not see death coming for him, for death arrived camouflaged. It came in the guise of a cheap metal whistle, an item of which Deber was inordinately fond. He used it to summon the boy for meals, to get the attention of his woman, to organize the gangs of men whose work he oversaw. When he raised it to his mouth on that fateful morning, he might just have had enough time to wonder why it did not emit its usual shrill call before the small ball of homemade explosive blew his face and part of his skull away. The boy’s last memory of Deber was of a small, dapper man leaving the house to drive to work, the whistle hanging on a chain around his neck. He did not need to see the whistle being raised, to witness the burst of red and black that came with the explosion, to stare down upon the ruined human being dying in a pauper’s bed, in order to achieve satisfaction.
Deber’s murder had come naturally to Louis, so it would not be true to say that his first fatal act of violence had set him on the path to becoming what he now was. He had always had that capacity within him, and the catalyst for its eruption into the world had been largely unimportant. But once it was unleashed, it flowed through his veins as naturally as blood.
Angel, too, had killed, but the reasons behind the killings had been less complicated than those that motivated Louis. Angel had killed, variously, because he had to; because had he not done so he himself would have died; and because, most of all, it had seemed like the thing to do at the time. He was not haunted or tormented by those whom he had killed. He wondered, on occasion, if that meant there was something wrong with him. He suspected that it did. But Angel had no urge to kill. He did not seek out violent men in order to confront them, or to test himself against them. Had someone informed him that, from this day forth, he would never have to hold a gun again and would live out his days doing nothing more challenging than breaking locks and eating fried food, he would have been content to do so, as long as Louis was by his side. But therein lay the problem: a life like that was beyond Louis, and to embrace such an existence would have meant sacrificing his partner. Angel’s violence was born out of circumstance; Louis’s was elemental.
That was, in part, why they had remained close to Charlie Parker over the years. Angel owed a debt to the private detective, who had done his best, as a cop, to protect Angel from those who would have harmed him while he was in prison. Angel had never fully understood why Parker had chosen to do that. Angel had helped him with information from time to time, as long as it didn’t involve naming too many names, and he was sure, although they had never spoken of it, that Parker knew something of Angel’s past, of the abuse that he had endured as a child. But there were a lot of criminals out there who could point to troubled childhoods, some of them even worse than Angel’s; pity or empathy were not enough to explain why Parker had chosen to help and, ultimately, befriend him. It was almost, thought Angel, as though Parker had known what was to come. No, not known. That wasn’t it. There were things about Parker that were unusual, even downright spooky, but he wasn’t a seer. Perhaps it was just something as simple as meeting another human being and understanding, immediately and deeply, that this was an individual who belonged in one’s life, for reasons readily apparent or yet to be revealed.
Louis had found difficulty in understanding that, at least at the start. Louis did not want cops or ex-cops in his life. Yet he knew what Parker had done for Angel, knew that Angel would not be alive were it not for the strange, troubled private detective who seemed about to break under the weight of his grief and loss, yet somehow refused to do so. In time, Louis had seen something of himself in the other man. They began by respecting each other, and that had developed into a kind of friendship, albeit one that had been tested on more than one occasion.