Authors: John Connolly
‘Old men and women are trawling through records as we speak,’ said Walsh.
‘Concentrate on Earl Steiger.’
‘Why?’
‘It was the one he was using when he came here, but I’ll also bet you a dollar that he relied on the Steiger identity more than any other. No matter how many false identities a man has, he’ll be drawn to one in particular, because even a ghost needs some kind of anchor. Also, if you keep alternating identities you get confused, and you’re likely to make a mistake. Finally, it leaves you with nothing to fall back on if you need to disappear.’
‘You strike me as worryingly well-informed,’ said Walsh.
‘You didn’t ask me here because I’m pretty.’
‘I didn’t ask you here at all.’
The suggestion that Angel and Louis should be contacted about Ruth Winter’s killer had come from Special Agent Ross of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ross was a man who took a special interest in matters relating to Charlie Parker, for reasons that even Ross himself might not have been in a position to explain fully.
‘You’ll find that the replacement birth certificate for Earl Steiger was issued within a year of his death – two years at most.’
‘And why do you figure that?’
‘Because Earl Steiger was the oldest when he died, which means that his was probably the first identity acquired for our friend here. His potential would have been spotted early, but not before he was fifteen or sixteen.’
‘You know who he really is,’ said Walsh.
‘No, and by the time he died I don’t think even he knew who he really was either,’ said Louis. ‘But the southern children, the ages – that is familiar to me.’
He gripped the edge of the plastic sheet and pulled it over the face of the dead man.
‘You need to call your friend Agent Ross,’ he said. ‘Tell him that it might be one of Cambion’s people who died out here.’
40
T
he woman stank of cats and cookies, of piss and mothballs, but Cambion, whose sensory abilities his disease had long ruined, and who had grown used to the reek of his own decay, barely noticed it. It was enough that she cooked for him and helped him to get in and out of chairs, and beds, and baths. Edmund could do all that too, of course, but he lacked her delicacy. He was compassionate, but not gentle, and as Cambion entered the last stages of his life he appreciated tenderness, even that which was offered out of instinct, not inclination.
Cambion was once a torturer and killer, a sadist and despoiler of flesh, until Hansen’s Disease took hold of him, and he became known as Cambion the Leper, Cambion the Outcast. As the illness destroyed his body, rendering him unable to function in his preferred role, he became a middleman, a point of contact between the most vicious of clients and those men and women base enough to do their bidding. It had made Cambion wealthy, but now most of that money was gone. He had squandered it in his early years – for his tastes were no less depraved than those of whom he represented, and such vices are expensive to maintain – and then, following his diagnosis, doled it out as carefully as he could, in an effort to counter the disease. Cambion was a hunted man – one does not spend one’s life arranging torments and tortures without question and not build up an impressive roster of enemies – and so conventional medical intervention was not open to him: he would not have survived for an hour once news of his presence in a hospital became known. He was also cursed early in the leprosy’s progress by treatment with incorrect medicines, a consequence of his need to use backroom doctors. He spent years punishing the practitioner responsible by holding him captive and carving pieces from his body on a regular basis, but it provided small consolation.
Only a handful of Cambion’s old associates had remained willing to work with him, and see that he got his cut. The rest had abandoned him long ago, which was why Cambion, in turn, had fed their names to his hunters in the hope that, by betraying others, he might be allowed to die in peace. It had not worked; they still circled him. He was reduced to living in near squalor, tended by a woman who had once occupied his bed but was now little more than a walking corpse herself, but whose need for money was even greater than his own.
He rang the bell over his bed by tugging on a length of rope. The bedpan was out of reach, and he needed it. He could not feel the rope against his skin, for he no longer had sensation in his hands or feet. His muscles had grown weaker, even in the last few months, and the extent of his disfigurement caused him to shun all reflective surfaces. His kidney functions were also becoming impaired due to renal amyloidosis, for which hemodialysis was the standard recommended treatment, but Cambion could not show himself to receive it. It was possible that the treatment might be arranged privately, but it would require funds to pay for both the surgery and the silence after, funds he did not possess. His sight was failing: he could still see the television screen close by his bed, and read words as long as they were magnified for him on a screen, but everything at a distance was a blur. It was fortunate in the case of the room in which he lay. It meant that he could no longer see the filthy carpet, or the paper peeling from the walls, or the damp stains on the ceiling which, at his worst moments, had assumed the patterns of demonic faces, or seemed to spread like blood from a recent wound, the Rorschach blots of his own guilt.
The woman did not answer his summons, and instead Edmund appeared. The giant owned only two suits, both of them a vile yellow. While one was being cleaned at some cut-price laundry, he would wear the other. The color on both had faded over the years, although not enough to render their appearance any less painful to the eye, and they had accumulated stains that even the most assiduous of attention could not remove, including food, wine, and various bodily fluids, Cambion’s own among them.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Cambion, for the giant had been gone since early that afternoon, and night had since fallen.
Edmund handed Cambion a number of newspapers, all open at the same story. Cambion could only read the headlines, but they were enough to reveal to him the murder of Ruth Winter, and the death, in turn, of the man responsible for killing her. Cambion let out a small moan of grief. Cambion had found Steiger, nurtured him, molded him since boyhood. He was the last of them, and one of the few Cambion had not betrayed in an effort to save himself. At least, thought Cambion, they had banked a portion of the fee before Steiger died, and he had completed his assigned task before succumbing to the sands, so further funds would be forthcoming.
Edmund accessed the stories on a laptop so that the print could be magnified. While he worked, Cambion recalled his final conversation with Steiger, the one in which Steiger had notified him of the presence of the private investigator Charlie Parker near the Winter woman’s house. How peculiar it was that Cambion’s fate and Parker’s should once again intersect. Steiger had wanted to know if there was a price on Parker’s head, if there were those in the shadows who might be willing to pay to have it served to them on a platter, but Cambion had dissuaded him from moving against the detective. Those who had come closest to killing him barely months before were now all dead, and a town had been put to the torch as a further act of retribution. If the whispers were true, those who might have wanted Parker dead had chosen not to act against him for reasons to which Cambion was not privy, and they were the only ones he could think of who might reasonably have been expected to pay for his murder by another.
Yet it appeared from reading between the lines of the newspaper reports that some confrontation had occurred between Parker and Steiger in the moments before the latter’s death. The result was that Steiger had been buried alive. An accident, the newspapers said. Dune collapses were not uncommon, although nobody could recall any previous such incident at Green Heron Bay. If Cambion had believed in God – which, for many years, he had not, although his position on that subject was modifying rapidly – he might have assumed that the deity was watching over Charlie Parker.
Cambion was a foul man, and a hateful one, but he was not entirely without humanity, even if it was tied up almost entirely with his own sufferings. As his death inexorably approached, he found himself persecuted by memories of his own wickedness. He wondered sometimes if God had punished him by visiting his disease upon him. If so, God was then partly to blame for its consequences, for Cambion’s pain had only fed his natural sadism. God had created Cambion, just as Cambion had created Steiger. Each, it could be said, was an instrument of a superior being’s will.
But now Cambion found himself turning to Pascal and his infamous wager: all humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not. The wager is not a matter of choice. By the act of living, we place the bet. A rational person, according to Pascal, lives as though God exists, for if He does exist then the rewards are infinite, and if He does not exist then the sacrifices made in life based on erroneous belief are finite. While Cambion had read extensively of the arguments against Pascal, he had, as death cast its shadow upon him, become more and more convinced of the reality of a world beyond this one, and of a Supreme Being beyond his understanding. He felt it as a corollary of his own evil and corruption, as an awareness of cold might bring with it an acknowledgement of the existence of that which was not cold.
Yes, had Cambion inquired more deeply, there might possibly have been someone else willing to pay for Parker’s death – although the private detective’s surviving enemies were few – but what would the money have bought him? Just painful surgery, catheters, and a few extra months, or a year, added to an already cursed life. No, he had no need for any of it. He should have refused even to accept the contract on the Winter woman, but once the instruction had been given, and payment made, Steiger could not be recalled. That was the rule, and the money was welcome.
Perhaps, too, he was afraid: Steiger was only part of the equation, and there were others involved who were beyond Cambion’s control, and for whom the death of Ruth Winter was of hugely personal concern. Cambion had provided Steiger for them in the past, and he had no illusions about the source of the cash that paid for his services. Even as a creator of monsters, Cambion was wary of those who had hired Steiger.
Cambion finished reading the reports in silence. He gestured for the bedpan, and Edmund assisted him by placing it in position. Cambion thought that the big man was more careful than usual, and appeared troubled by the obvious pain that the act of urination caused his employer. The bedpan was removed, the sheets rearranged, the pillows adjusted to make him comfortable.
‘We are almost done,’ he told Edmund, but he did not know if he was understood or not.
Edmund departed, and in the darkness of his death room Cambion’s lips moved in something like prayer.
41
A
ngel and Louis followed Walsh to the Gin Mill on Water Street when they were done at the ME’s office. While he drove, Walsh called Ross in New York and told him what Louis had said about Cambion.
‘That guy just won’t die,’ said Ross. ‘He’s like some kind of virus.’
‘You know the name?’
‘Oh yeah: Cambion the Leper. He’s a middleman for murderers, now that he can’t torture and kill for himself because of his ailment.’
‘You telling me he’s a real leper?’
‘Full-blown. He gives the disease a bad name. He didn’t contract it – it contracted him. Are they still with you?’
‘I’m taking them to dinner.’
There was a noticeable pause.
‘Are you that lonely?’ said Ross.
‘Hey, I figured I might learn something more.’
‘You’ll learn not to do it again.’
‘Can I bill you for it?’ asked Walsh.
Ross was still laughing as he hung up the phone.
Both Angel and Louis went to the men’s room to freshen up. For all of their experience in unpleasant matters – and Walsh was under no illusion about what these men were capable of – the smell of the autopsy room had gotten to them. It didn’t bother Walsh, though, which worried him only slightly.
He was shown to a table, from which he ordered an Allagash Black. He leaned back against the cool brick wall and called his wife. Both she and his younger son were nursing colds, and she’d kept the boy home from school that morning. They seemed to be on the mend, though. His son was apparently curled up on the couch with hot chocolate, one of those god awful Transformers movies on the TV, which Walsh thought were like watching someone moving around the contents of a silverware drawer, and his wife certainly sounded better than she had earlier. When he’d first heard her in the morning dark, he felt like he’d woken up next to that kid from
The Exorcist
. He listened to her bitch about the neighbors for a while, then said goodnight. He wasn’t sure what time he’d be home, he told her. He just knew that he would be.
Walsh loved his wife a lot. He loved his kids. He was happy with his life. He wasn’t particularly troubled or haunted by his work, not like those cops in movies or mystery novels. You couldn’t do the job if you took it home with you the way they did. You couldn’t have a family and a normal life. Walsh had learned that early on from Miro, his first sergeant. Get yourself a wife, Miro told him. Have kids. When you’re done with your day, go home to them. There will be times when you’ll want a drink after what you’ve gone through, but maybe those are the times, more than any other, when you should just head back to your family. If you need to, take a walk alone before dinner, or bring your dog along for company. It’ll help. Then again, Miro didn’t drink. He didn’t begrudge anyone else a drink, and when he did go out he’d buy his round without complaint, but he still had a point. Walsh figured that if he couldn’t talk about stuff with his wife, then with whom could he talk? He didn’t tell her everything, but he told her enough. The rest he kept inside, because some sights and sounds just had to stay there.