John Connolly - The Reapers

“Unless you knew he had your name on his list.”

“I don’t believe he sends out notifications.”

“No, I guess not.”

Angel tossed back half of his brandy, and began to cough.

“You sip it, man,” said Louis. “It ain’t Alka-Seltzer.”

“A beer would have been better.”

“You have no class.”

“Only by association.”

Louis considered for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “there is that…”

The apartment shared by the two men was not as those who knew the couple only casually might have imagined it to be, given their disparate dress codes, attitudes to life, and general demeanor. It occupied the top two floors of a three-story over-basement building on the farthest reaches of the Upper West Side, where the gap between rich and poor began to narrow significantly. The apartment was scrupulously tidy. Although they shared a bedroom, each had his own room in which to retire and in which to pursue his particular interests, and while Angel’s room bore the unmistakable signs of one whose skill lay in the picking of locks and the undermining of security systems-shelves of manuals, assorted tools, a workbench covered with both electrical and mechanical components-there was an order to it that would have been apparent to any craftsman. Louis’s room was starker. There was a laptop computer, a desk, and a chair. The shelves were lined with music and books, the music leaning, perhaps surprisingly, toward country, with an entire section for black artists: Dwight Quick, Vicki Vann, Carl Ray, and Cowboy Troy Coleman from the moderns, DeFord Bailey and Stoney Edwards from the earlier period, along with a little Charlie Pride, Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western, some Bobby Womack, and From Where I Stand, a boxed set detailing the black experience in country music. Louis found it hard to understand why so many others of his race failed to connect with this music: it spoke of rural poverty, of love, of despair, of faithfulness and infidelity, and these were experiences known to all men, black as well as white. Just as poor black people had more in common with poor whites than with wealthy blacks, so too this music offered a means of expression to those who had endured all of the trauma and sadness with which it dealt, regardless of color. Nevertheless, he had resigned himself to being in a minority as far as this belief was concerned, and although he had almost managed to convince his partner of the merits of some things at which he might previously have scoffed, including regular haircuts and clothing stores that did not specialize in end-of-line sales, black country music-in fact, any country music-remained one of Angel’s many enduring blind spots.

The apartment consisted of a modern kitchen, rarely used, that led into a large living room cum dining room, and Angel’s workshop, all on the lower floor. On the upper floor, there was a luxurious bathroom that Louis had appropriated for himself, leaving the en-suite shower room to his partner; Louis’s office; a smaller guest bedroom, with a small shower room, neither of which had ever been used; and the main bedroom, which was lined with closet space and, apart from the odd book, remained, by mutual effort and consent, in a state of interior design catalog neatness. There was a gun safe behind the mirror in the guest shower room. Whenever they were in the apartment, the safe remained open. At night, they each kept a weapon close at hand in the main bedroom. When the apartment was empty, the gun safe was kept locked and the mirror carefully put back in its original position using a hinge-and-lock mechanism operated by a small click switch a finger’s length behind the glass. They took care of the cleaning and maintenance of the apartment themselves. No strangers were ever admitted, nor friends or acquaintances, of which there were few in any case.

They hid in plain sight, these men. They used prepaid cell-phones, switching them regularly, but they never paid for the devices themselves: instead, homeless men and women were given money to make the purchases in stores scattered over four states, and a middleman was used to collect and pass on the phones. Even then, the cells were used only when absolutely necessary. Most of their calls were made from pay phones.

There was no internet connection in their apartment. A computer was kept in an office rented by one of Louis’s many shell companies, which they used on occasion for more delicate searches, but often a cyber café was sufficient for their needs. They avoided email, although when required they employed Hushmail to send encrypted messages, or embedded codes in seemingly innocuous communications.

Wherever possible, they used cash, not credit cards. They were part of no loyalty programs, and they bought Metrocards for the subway as they needed them, disposing of them when they were exhausted and replacing them with new ones instead of recharging the originals. Utilities were paid for through a lawyer’s office. They had learned the best routes to take on foot and by car to avoid security cameras, and the lights that illuminated the license plates on the vehicles they used all contained infrared bulbs designed to flood video cameras operating at near infrared frequency.

There were also other, more unusual, protections in place. The basement and first floor of their building were rented by an elderly lady named Mrs. Evelyn Bondarchuk, who kept Pomeranians and appeared to have cornered the market in chintz and bone china. There had once been a Mr. Bondarchuk, but he was taken from his young bride at a tragically early age, a consequence of a misunderstanding between Mr. Bondarchuk and a passing train, Mr. Bondarchuk being drunk at the time and having mistaken the track for a public urinal. Mrs. Bondarchuk had never married again, in part because no one could ever have taken the place of her much-loved, if dissolute, husband, but also because anyone who did would, by definition, have been equally or significantly more dissolute than his predecessor, and Mrs. Bondarchuk did not need such aggravation in her life. Thus a corner of her living room remained a slightly dusty shrine to the memory of her departed husband, and Mrs. Bondarchuk lavished her affection instead on generations of Pomeranians, who are not generally considered to be dissolute animals.

Mrs. Bondarchuk’s apartment was rent controlled. She paid a laughably small monthly sum to a company called Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., that appeared to be little more than a box number in Lower Manhattan. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had bought the building in the early eighties, and Mrs. Bondarchuk had feared for a time that her tenancy might be affected by the sale, but instead she was assured, by letter, that all would remain as it had been and she was welcome to see out her days, surrounded by Pomeranians, in the apartment in which she had dwelt for the best part of thirty years. In fact, she was even permitted to expand her fiefdom into the basement below as well, which had been unoccupied since its previous tenant died some years earlier. Such things were unheard of in the city, Mrs. Bondarchuk knew, and she did her best to ensure that, as far as she was concerned, they remained so. She did not tell anyone of her good fortune, apart from her good friend Mrs. Naughtie, and then only after swearing her to silence. Mrs. Bondarchuk was a clever woman. She understood that something unusual was happening in her building, but as it did not appear to be hampering her existence and was instead improving it significantly, she behaved sensibly and allowed matters to take their course.

The only significant change occurred when the couple upstairs, who were both accountants, eventually retired and moved to a house in Vermont, and their place was taken by a quiet, beautifully dressed black man and a smaller, noticeably less well-dressed individual who looked like he might have come to steal her jewelry, which, had fate not introduced him to his current partner, might well have been the case. Still, they were very polite gentlemen. Mrs. Bondarchuk suspected that they were gay. It gave her quite a frisson for, by the standards of the city, she led a very sheltered life.