Angel Face Read online

  Carter watches the cab until it reaches 14th Street and turns right, on its way via New York’s system of antiquated highways to John F. Kennedy Airport. Most of what Angel Tamanaka still owns – her clothing, along with a few photographs, a knick-knack or two, a battered teddy bear named Slippy – has gone ahead of her, packed into a pair of antiqued steamer trunks. Every other possession has been sold or given away.

  But not to Carter, who’s retained no personal items, not even a hazy photo on his cellphone, the single exception being Angel’s Ruger revolver. Its firing pin restored, the weapon now rests in a trunk in Carter’s Bronx storage room, too fine an instrument of death to be summarily tossed.

  With no particular destination in mind, Carter heads west along 9th Street. The moist June air is warm enough to evoke the oncoming summer, but Carter doesn’t mind. He’s got a couple of hours to kill before heading over to the gym and the city sidewalks have long been a place of refuge. Carter’s feeling a familiar sensation, a sort of clutching around the heart, born not of love, but of the fear that seized him when the state took control of his life. At the same time, and he admits this to himself, he’s relieved. Carter’s had three acknowledged loves in his life, his mother and Janie, both dead, and the military, where he learned to kill without remorse. Each had abandoned him, leaving him to fight on his own. Or so he’s come to believe.

  And Angel? Yeah, he’ll miss Angel, definitely. Even thinking her name produces a familiar warming in his crotch.

  Carter laughs softly, catching the attention of a young woman coming from the other direction. The woman moves several feet to her right as they pass, an acknowledgement, Carter thinks, of just how many psychotic human beings roam through the city. Careful, careful, you never know, keep your distance.

  What Carter can’t escape, though, relieved or not, is emptiness. There have been times in his life when he’s felt as cold and isolated as an asteroid traveling between planets, and this is one of them. What will he do? Where will he go? At present, Carter has more than seven hundred thousand dollars in three bank accounts. He can, if he chooses, live on his savings for many years. There’s no compelling reason for him to resume his gangster-killing career, or any other career.

  Carter pauses for the light at Second Avenue, coming up behind two women, one of them pushing a stroller. He watches the traffic flow past, the cars, the trucks and all the busses – school busses, city busses, double-decker tourist busses. In the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Yemen, there was always a moment just before dawn when the world seemed to pause in its turning, the silence so deep you could hear the beating of your own heart. Not so in New York, the ultimate 24/7 city. No matter what the hour, somebody’s on the way to somewhere else. But Carter doesn’t have to stay in New York. He can go anywhere he wants, if he can only make himself want to go somewhere.

  On the other side of the avenue, a woman sits on a square of cardboard with her back to a sunny brick wall. She’s somewhere in her twenties, dressed in a black sweatshirt, black cotton pants and black sneakers. Utterly forlorn, she stares down at the gray sidewalk, her little-match-girl expression firmly in place. A black dog, gray at the muzzle, its fur dull and dusty, lies beside her with its head between its paws.

  A cardboard sign, hand-lettered, explains her situation: HOMELESS/ HELPLESS/HUNGRY. Just in case you haven’t gotten the point.

  Carter’s run into this woman and her dog many times in the last few years. The mournful posture, the all-black costume, the wilting dog, the faded sign, the coffee container with a few pennies in the bottom – as performance art, her act is unforgettable. Carter takes a five dollar bill from his wallet and holds it over the coffee container.

  ‘Tell me where you go in the winter.’

  The woman’s unhesitating response is as succinct as her sign. ‘Fuck off, asshole.’

  Carter drops the five into the cup and heeds her advice. He continues west, to Broadway, then heads north to the farmer’s market in Union Square. Here the vendors face each other across a broad corridor on the western and northern edges of the Square, competing for the attentions of the shoppers who stroll between them. Carter passes vendors selling ostrich meat, bamboo flower honey, wheatgrass and lavender eye pillows. Two elderly women staff a long table stacked with fancy preserves. A bearded, one-eyed man pushes grass-fed Angus beef at thirty dollars a pound. The Fungus King displays thirty varieties of mushroom.

  In no hurry, Carter shuffles along with the crowd. He’s visited markets on three continents, and always found them enticing, an exercise in mutual self-interest, buyers and sellers equally engaged. There’s a twist, though, when it comes to Union Square. The vendors post their prices and the customers don’t haggle. In Sierra Leone, buyers and sellers debated the value of every bean.

  As he nears the eastern end of the market, Carter stops to buy a container of wild mint tea and a cranberry scone. He carries them past buckets filled with enough lilac blossoms to perfume even New York City’s carbon-soaked air, and into the park.

  Union Square Park will never be confused with an English garden, but it’s reasonably well-tended and there’s always something in bloom, spring through fall. Just now, in early June, the tea roses have come into their own. Carter finds a bench near a blooming rose bush and takes a seat. There’s an elderly woman sitting at the other end of the bench. She’s cooing to a tiny chihuahua nearly hidden inside the handbag on her lap. When Carter unwraps the scone and the dog’s attention wanders, the woman gathers her bag and her dog and departs.

  Left to himself, Carter’s own attention wanders back to Angel as he eats and drinks. He wonders where her plane is right now, but then glances at his watch. In fact, her plane’s still at the gate and won’t take off for another hour. How long, he wonders, before she fades? Perhaps he’ll always carry her with him, as he carries the boy soldiers, but that’s not what he thinks. His sister’s death punched a hole in his life, a hole Angel temporarily filled. Now the hole is back. Still, it’s a beautiful day and the park is crowded with workers in search of a quick lunch and a breath of fresh air.

  Carter’s always been a people watcher, not to mention a paranoid death merchant who habitually monitors his back, his front and both sides. Nobody sneaks up on him, especially not Merwyn Thoma with his pronounced limp, his floppy bow tie and his ivory-handled walking stick.

  Carter last saw Thoma six years ago, on the Afghan-Pakistan border. A spook who worked for some unidentified agency, he’d outlined the rules of engagement for a mission into the tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-west Frontier Province. Carter remembers listening with interest, but not because the rules applied to him or his comrades. It was Thoma’s earnestness that intrigued him. Did he really believe they’d offer their target an opportunity to surrender? On the one hand, there was nothing in Thoma’s manner that suggested otherwise. On the other, he wasn’t coming along to make sure the men whose lives were at risk complied with his instructions.

  Merwyn’s only in his forties, but his hair is snow-white and so fine that strands float in the air even on this windless day. His face is criss-crossed with fine wrinkles, his eyelids folded at the corners, his mouth a firm, disapproving line. Though careful to maintain a respectful distance, he fixes Carter with a patented stare when he finally sits down.

  Repressing a smile, Carter returns the stare for a moment, then says, ‘If you don’t get the fuck off this bench, I’ll cut your throat from one ear to the other.’

  The threat is wasted, as Carter knew it would be. The psychological training for spooks is every bit as demanding as the physical training Carter endured on his path through the ranks to Delta Force. Still, he feels a little better as he watches Thoma dismiss the bluff with a shake of his head.

  ‘You should never have left us,’ he says. ‘You were among the very best of the very best.’

  ‘Maybe I got tired of killing.’

  ‘I doubt that very much, but I haven’t come to discuss your business. No,
I’ve come to make two things clear.’ Thoma raises his walking stick and taps Carter’s knee. ‘Your country needs you, Carter.’

  ‘That’s one thing, Merwyn. What’s the other?’

  ‘You will answer the call of duty.’

  Carter laughs as he hasn’t laughed in years, startling a flock of pigeons feeding on a dropped sandwich nearby. They rise a few feet into the air, their cooing distinctly accusatory, but quickly settle down as Carter shifts the cane away from his knee. Carter’s thinking that Merwyn’s probably right. Whatever the spooks have on him will be enough to secure his cooperation. Which, he supposes, leaves a single issue to be discussed.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ he asks.