John Connolly - The Lovers

“He should have picked his friends more carefully.”

“I guess so. You were his friend.”

Eddie laughed softly. It sounded like air being forced from a corpse, and smelled just as bad. It brought on a fit of coughing, and he gestured for the covered plastic cup on the bedside locker, the kind that little children used with a raised, perforated lip from which to drink. I held it for him as he sucked from it. One of his hands touched mine, and I was surprised by how cold it was.

“I was his friend,” said Eddie. “Then he had to tell your father and me about himself, and after that I cut him loose. He was a faggot, barely a man. He disgusted me.”

“So you cut him off?”

“I’d have cut his balls off if I could. I’d have told everyone what he was. He shouldn’t have been allowed to wear that uniform.”

“So why didn’t you?” I asked.

“Because they didn’t want me to.”

“Who didn’t?”

“Anmael, and Semjaza, although that wasn’t what they called themselves, not the first time they came to me. I never found out the woman’s name. She never said much. The man was called Peter, but later I found out his true name. He did most of the talking.”

“How did they find you?”

“I had weaknesses. Not like Jimmy’s. I had a man’s weaknesses. I liked them young.”

He smiled again. His lips were cracked, and his remaining teeth were rotting in their gums.

“Girls, not boys,” he continued. “Never boys. They found out. That’s what they do: they find your weaknesses, and they use them against you. A carrot and a stick: they threatened Zp>

“Anmael wanted to know where she was. I didn’t ask why. I found out where Will had stashed her on the Upper East Side. Then Anmael died, and the woman disappeared. They kept moving Caroline Carr around after that, your father and Jimmy, but they did it quietly. I told Semjaza to follow Jimmy, because your father trusted him more than anyone else. I thought that they just wanted to follow her, maybe steal the child. I was as surprised as anyone when they killed her.”

It was strange, but I believed him. He had no reason to lie, not now, and he was not seeking absolution. He spoke of it as if it were an event that he had witnessed, but in which he had played no direct part.

“When Will came back from Maine with a baby boy, I was suspicious. I knew all about his wife’s medical history, about the problems she’d had conceiving, and carrying, a child. It was all too neat. But by then I’d fallen out with Jimmy. I was still on good terms with your old man, or I thought I was, but something changed between us. I suppose Jimmy must have spoken to him, and he chose Jimmy over me. I didn’t care. Fuck him. Fuck ’em both.

“I heard nothing for maybe fifteen years. I didn’t expect anything else. After all, they were dead, Anmael and the woman, and I’d found ways to keep myself satisfied without them.

“Then a boy and a girl showed up at my place. They sat outside in a car, watching the house. I was bowling, and my wife called me, told me she was worried. I came home, and I swear I knew it was them. I knew before they even showed me the marks on their arms, before they started talking about things that must have happened before they were born, conversations that I’d had with Anmael and the woman before they died. I mean, it was them, in another form. I didn’t doubt it. I could see it in their eyes. I told them what I believed about the boy Will and his wife were raising, but they already seemed to have their own suspicions. That was what had brought them back. They knew that the boy was still alive, that you were still alive.

“So I helped them again, and still you wouldn’t die.”

His eyes closed. I thought he might have drifted off to sleep, but then he spoke, his eyes still shut.

“I cried when your old man killed himself,” he said. “I liked him, even if he did cut me loose. Why couldn’t you just have died back in that clinic? If you had, then it would all have ended there and then. You just won’t die.”

His eyes opened again.

“But this time it’s different. They’re not kids hunting you, and they’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about them: they remember . Each time, they’ve come a little bit closer to succeeding, but it’s urgent now. They want you dead.”

“Why?”

He stared at me, his eyebrows raised. He looked amused. “I don’t think they know Zloshei,” he said. “You might as well ask why a white blood cell attacks an infection. It’s what it’s programmed to do: to fight a threat, and neutralize it. Not mine, though. Mine are screwed.”

“Where are they?”

“I’ve only seen him. The other, the woman, she wasn’t there. He was waiting for her, willing her to come to him. That’s the way they are. They live for each other.”

“Who is he? What’s he calling himself?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“He came here?”

“No, it was while I was still in the hospital, but not so long ago. He brought me candy. It was like meeting an old friend.”

“Did you feed Jimmy to him?”

“No, I didn’t have to. They knew all about Jimmy from way back.”

“Because of you.”

“What does it matter now?”

“It mattered to Jimmy. Do you know how much he suffered before he died?”

Eddie waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal, but he would not meet my eyes.

“Describe him to me.”

He indicated once again that he needed water, and I gave it to him. His voice had grown hoarser and hoarser as he spoke. Now it was barely a whisper.

“No,” he said. “I won’t tell you. And, anyway, do you really think any of this will help you? I wouldn’t tell you anything if I thought it would. I don’t care about you, or about what happened to Jimmy. I’m almost done with this life. I’ve been promised my reward for what I’ve done.”

He lifted his head from the pillow, as though to confide some great secret. “Their master is good and kind,” he said, almost to himself, then sank back on the bed, exhausted. His breathing grew shallower, and he drifted off to sleep.

Amanda was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Her lips were set so firmly that there were wrinkles around her mouth.

“Did you get what you wanted from him?”

“Yes. Confirmation.”

“He’s an old man. Whatever he did in the past, he’s paid more than enough for it in suffering.”

“You know, Amanda, I don’t believe that’s true.”

Her face flushed red.

“Get out of here. The best thing you ever did was leave this town.”

And that much, at least, was true.

T HE WOMAN WH [2">¤ [1]‡O WASnow Emily Kindler in name only arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal two days after Jimmy Gallagher was killed. After leaving the bar, she had spent an entire day alone in her little apartment, ignoring the ringing of the telephone, her date with Chad now forgotten, Chad himself reduced to nothing more than a fleeting memory from another life. Once, the doorbell rang downstairs, but she did not answer it. Instead, she reconstructed past lives, and thought about the man whom she had seen on the TV screen in the bar, and she knew that when she found him, then so too would she find her beloved.

Using a poker, she carefully burned her flesh. She knew the exact place upon which to work, for she could almost see the pattern hiding beneath her skin. When she was done, she bore the old mark.

In time, she left for the city.

At the bus station, it took her almost an hour of looking lost before she was approached. While she was freshening up for the third time in the women’s restroom, a young woman not much older than she was approached her and asked if she was okay. The woman’s name was Carole Coemer, but everyone called her Cassie. She was blond and pretty and clean, and looked nineteen even though she was actually twenty-seven. Her job was to scout the bus station for new female arrivals, particularly those who looked lost or alone, and befriend them. She would tell them that she was new in town herself, and offer to buy them a cup of coffee, or something to eat. Cassie always carried a backpack, even though it was filled with newspapers topped off with a pair of jeans and some underwear and T-shirts, just in case she had to open it to convince the more skeptical of the waifs and strays.