Two Songs This Archangel Sings

12

When I came marching into Garth's station house an hour later, a lot of heads turned in my direction. I knew a number of the detectives and uniformed officers, but no one said a word to me; they just stared.

"Well, well, well," Garth said in a dry tone that failed to hide the relief he obviously felt at seeing me alive. His flesh was pale under its greenish pallor, and there were dark rings of weariness and worry-and possibly sickness-under his eyes. His shirt was stained with perspiration. "It seems you're not at the bottom of the Husdon River after all. A minor errand?"

"Ah, you've heard," I said, going directly to the coffeepot on a warmer standing in a corner of his office. I poured myself a cup of the brackish-looking brew, grimaced when I tasted it.

"The NYPD has heard a lot of things, and we're trying to sort out what it means. About three hours ago we got a call from some guy on the street claiming that a dwarf, of all people, wearing a brown parka just like yours, of all things, had just stolen a Con Ed van from in front of the apartment building where you and I currently reside, of all places. How about that?"

"Will wonders never cease? Listen, if that van is really registered to Con Ed, I pledge to personally paddle my way to the bottom of the river and bring it back up." I took a slip of paper out of my pocket, tossed it on the desk. "Here's the plate number."

"What happened to your coat, Mongo? That looks like a knife cut."

"Something like that. While you're checking the registration, see if you can find out which city official or agency issued the work permit for that location; ask for a copy of the papers."

Garth gave a curt nod, picked up his telephone. While my brother spoke with Motor Vehicles, I sipped at my coffee and stared at the front page of the newspaper on Garth's desk. The photograph of Liu Sakh Po, head askew, stared back at me. Again, I had the haunting feeling that there was something important in the picture that I was missing.

"There's no such registration," Garth said as he hung up the phone and tossed the slip of paper into the wastebasket. "Not for Con Ed, or any other vehicle. It doesn't surprise me. I called Con Ed right after we got the report of a stolen van, and they told me all their vehicles were accounted for. Also, there's no record of a work permit being issued for that site."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"In the beginning, before we heard about the van going off the Palisades, a few of the cops around here thought it might be a hoax."

"You knew damn well there was no hoax."

"Sure," Garth said, lowering his voice as he rose, walked around the desk, and closed his door on the staring faces outside his office.

"I just wasn't sure what to do about it. Whatever you were doing, you seemed to have the situation under control." He paused, smiled wryly as he sat back down behind his desk. "You were in the driver's seat, so to speak, and nobody called to report their van stolen. Then the report came in of the van going into the river. I'll admit that caused just a tad of concern."

"When they bring the van up, they'll find two bodies in the box."

"Nice, Mongo."

"I guarantee they're not Con Ed workers."

"Tell me what happened."

"You want to get a stenographer in here to take my statement?"

Garth thought about it as he stared at me with narrowed lids. "No," he said at last. "I'm not feeling too trusting any more about what outsiders may have access to my written reports, and we already have enough complications. Until somebody steps up to officially report a missing vehicle with a Con Ed logo, we'll keep this between ourselves."

"What about your captain and the rest of the cops around here?"

Garth shrugged. "You see me investigating, don't you? I'll make up a report and put it away someplace. If it looks like the shit is going to hit the fan, I'll produce the report and claim that I misplaced it."

"Whatever you say; that's your department." I took the Seecamp out of my pocket, gripping it by the end of the barrel, placed it on Garth's desk. "In the meantime, you might try to get some prints besides mine off this gun. Also, let's get a police artist in here. I want to see if we can't come up with a name."

"Whose name?"

"A very big fish that got away. He's a man with the best sleeper-move since Mr. Spock, and he's also the man who says he's going to off you unless I keep truckin' along to his satisfaction."

I told my brother what had happened. Garth listened in silence, without taking notes.

Garth dusted the butt of the Seecamp himself, came up with two partial prints that weren't mine. An hour later a police artist, under the impression that Garth was looking for a mugger who'd slashed my coat, turned my description into a pretty good rendering of the big man. Garth took the sketch to be copied and the prints to be checked. I sat down in his chair, found myself once again staring at the New York Post photograph of the broken Po. Then, suddenly, I knew what was wrong with the picture.

It was the newspaper in Po's hands.

Po, probably at the moment of his death, had crumpled the paper up toward his chest, and the back page was partially exposed. Even though the Post reproduction was grainy, I could tell that the paper Po had been reading was a New York Times, not a local Albany paper. That, in itself, wasn't unusual. What was strange was the ad on the back page which, even partially obscured and stained with blood, I recognized as one for Vogue.

A news addict, I read the New York Times every day with something approaching religious passion, every page front to back, including the advertisements. For the past week the back page of the first section-the one Po held in his hands-had been taken up with ads for Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, and a complaint by the Scientologists that the I.R.S. was harassing them.

The morning newspaper Colonel Po had been reading in the middle of the night when his head had been squashed was at least a week old-maybe more, since I couldn't remember what day or days the ad had run.

I picked up Garth's phone and called the advertising department of the Times. Five minutes later I had the information I needed.

The Vogue ad had run for three days, the second day being the one when somebody had taken a shot at Veil, the third, the day of the night when I'd almost been burned to death.

Garth must have seen something on my face when he came back into the room. "What's the matter, Mongo?" he asked as he closed the door behind him.

I got out of Garth's chair, leaned against the edge of the desk. "I was just trying to figure out what Po was doing in the middle of the night reading a newspaper that was almost two weeks old."

Garth raised his eyebrows slightly. "Is that what he was doing?"

"Yep." I pointed to the newspaper in the photo. "I recognized this ad and checked with the Times. Guess what?"

"The day Kendry was shot at?" Garth said tightly.

"That day, the day before and after. A perfect bracket."

"Damn," Garth said, growing excitement in his voice. "There had to be something in that issue that was keeping Po up nights-even two weeks after it happened. You talk about a worried man!"

"And it has to be connected with Veil's disappearance," I said, pushing off the desk and heading for the door. "I'm going to the library."

Garth moved into the doorway, filling it. "Relax, brother, and finish your coffee. You've run enough minor errands for one day, and I think it's better if you stay off the streets until we see how this latest wrinkle smooths out. The super in our building keeps all the papers for the Boy Scouts, and they're not due to be picked up until next month; we'll find the issues we need down in the basement. According to your own words, somebody could decide to step on you at any- time-as if we didn't already know that. From here on out, yon don't leave my sight except to go to the bathroom."

"Okay," I said, moving back to lean against the desk.

Garth looked puzzled. "What do you mean, 'okay'?"

"Okay means okay."

"You said okay once before to taking it easy, and the next day you hijacked a van, killed two men, and almost got killed yourself."

"This is a serious okay. I must be getting old. Can you get any kind of make on the big guy with the spooky eyes?"

"I've got people working on it. Don't hold your breath."

"Hey, Garth, self-defense or not, I still killed two men. You sure you don't want to call in someone to take my statement, just to cover your ass?"

"I'm sure," Garth said curtly as he sat back down behind his desk. He opened the top drawer, took out a black felt-tip marker and a yellow legal pad.

"I still don't understand what you're going to tell all the people who are going to be asking you questions."

"You want a lot of cops and reporters asking you questions and following you around?"

"No, I can't say that I do."

"Then fuck them," Garth said as he drew a thick, black circle around the newspaper in Po's hands. "It's not their brother who's being watched and hunted."

I didn't like the sound of Garth's voice and words any more than I liked his ghostly pallor. His duties as a police officer had always been something he'd taken very seriously, and he was probably the most honest cop in New York City. Now he seemed to be shrugging off those duties in an almost casual manner, and in a way that could come back to hurt him very badly. But there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it-and I had been the one who first raised suspicion in his mind about possible collusion between the NYPD and our trackers.

"The name of the man who's hunting Veil is in there," I said, pointing to the newspaper Po held.

"Maybe," Garth replied distantly.

"I'm damn sure of it. The guy who did the sleeper number on my spine wouldn't give me the man's name, but he was downright chatty. He may have revealed more than he meant to-or maybe he did it intentionally, and was just covering his own ass, which he didn't have to plop down in the snow for fifteen minutes to do unless he was interested in trying to tell me a few things. This guy's no dummy, and it's hard to tell what he was really up to. He was hired through a series of blinds, but he was certain whom he was really working for, and he ended up drawing me a kind of profile of the man. First, the big guy had worked for this man before."

"Long-term relationship with professional killer," Garth said, and wrote it down on the legal pad.

"Top-rank professional," I added. "But a free-lancer. I think he was brought in after the two men who tried to kill me messed up. He made it clear that he was a professional, private contractor-and a very expensive one."

"A very powerful man with unusual connections," Garth intoned as he wrote on his pad. "Access to extensive funds, and possibly has high-class killers on his payroll."

"The big guy was totally contemptuous of this man-kept calling him a cretin. He described him to me as a night alley fighter who wasn't any good in the light, or the open. It has to mean that our man used to fight in the dark, and in secret."

Garth nodded, wrote some more.

"Veil Kendry was involved with this alley fighter a long time ago," I continued. "I was told our man's trying to be cute now by attempting to mask his identity."

"Possibly a public figure," Garth said in a very low voice.

"A murderer, and almost certainly a psychopath-to date, he's responsible for the deaths of twelve people, five of them young people or kids, and an old Hmong grandmother. He's obviously influential, wealthy himself or with access to almost unlimited funds, and by all indications we might very well recognize his name if we knew it. That's who wants Veil Kendry dead, and that's who we're looking for."

"Shit," Garth said quietly as he drew heavy lines through all the notes he had written.

There was a knock, and a uniformed officer I didn't recognize opened the door and stuck his head into the office. "Lieutenant? May I speak to you for a moment?"

Garth nodded, rose, and walked out of the office, closing the door behind him. He came back in fifteen minutes later looking shaken. He slumped down in his chair, tossed a thin yellow folio onto the desk top.

"Bad news?" I asked.

"You could say so."

"Mind if I look at it?"

"Don't bother; there isn't that much to look at."

"But obviously enough to shake you up."

"It's a telex copy of the files Interpol and the F.B.I, have on a man whose real name is probably Henry Kitten-although they're not even sure of that. The information in the file is, as they say, highly speculative."

"Henry Kitten?"

"Hey, what can I tell you? Complain to the woman who married his father."

I flipped open the folio, studied the charcoal sketch stapled to the cover page of the file. The man in the sketch did have a vaguely triangular face, but that was just about the only similarity. "Hey, I know this is only a sketch, but I'm not sure this is the guy I tangled with."

"Kitten's a master of disguise, among other things."

"He didn't look disguised to me," I said as I looked at the second page. There was a myriad of dates, times, and places around the world associated with important assassinations Henry Kitten was strongly suspected of having carried out.

"That's why he's a master of disguise," Garth said dryly. "Then again, he may have been using his real face just for you. Apparently, you never can tell with Kitten. It wasn't your physical description or the partial prints that made the computer spit this out; it was your description of his MO-popping up on street corners and out of vans, incredible speed, blows that can paralyze, and so on. Interpol and the F.B.I, say it's Henry Kitten, and they're very much going to want to talk to you and me when they see the file card I had to fill out in order to gain access to their computer files. It won't be long."

"They can wait."

Garth leaned back in his chair and laughed without humor. "Maybe I'll tell them we're out of the country for an indeterminate length of time like our dear friend Mr. Lippitt."

"Why keep harping on Lippitt? What good does it do?"

"He pisses me off. He'd be dead if it weren't for you."

"We'd be dead if it weren't for him. As far as I'm concerned, everything's even. What's the bottom line on this Henry Kitten?"

"The bottom line, brother, is that he's a serious bad-ass."

"American?"

"Nobody knows. There's some thinking that he may have a little Japanese in him. If you read the whole report, the word ninja keeps popping up. The thinking is that he certainly spent a lot of time in Japan, because he's obviously had access to the kind of special training you don't pick up in your friendly neighborhood karate school around here. That's the man you were messing around with up in Fort Lee."

"He did a whole hell of a lot more messing with me than I did with him. How does one go about hiring this Henry Kitten?"

Garth shrugged. "Nobody in law enforcement knows; if Interpol knew that, they'd have trapped him a long time ago. I guess you just have to travel in the wrong circles." Garth paused, tapped his fingertips impatiently on his desk top. "Having that son-of-a-bitch around really complicates matters."

"Why? If he's to be believed, I'd be dead right now if not for him. He certainly could have killed me in the park, and he didn't."

"But he could turn on you. I used to think Kendry was the worst bad-ass I'd ever met or heard of. That was before I read that file on Kitten."

"I'll still put my money on Veil in any mano a mano fight. In any case, why worry about it? Veil has to know this guy's on his case, so I don't even feel the need to try and warn him. All you and I have to do is stay alive and on the move."

"Oh, really? Is that all we have to do? I'm thinking maybe it's time you resigned your commission and left it to the cops and the F.B.I. We'll put you in protective custody, keep you on ice until this thing is resolved one way or another."

"No," I said simply. "I don't believe anybody can protect me against Kitten if he wants to get at me, and you're the only cop I trust at the moment. Besides, it's you Henry Kitten will kill if I don't keep going. He was very clear on that point, and I don't think for a moment that he was bluffing. Besides, I have no intention of crawling into a hole. I still have a client, remember?" I gestured toward the door. "Let's split."

"Where are we going?"

"The only place left to go; the last bread crumb. Colletville."

Garth nodded, put on his coat, and followed me out the door.