Walter Mosley - Known to Evil

There was another picture that caught my attention. She was all in black, at a funeral, crying. She stood next to a fair-sized headstone that read IRIS LINDSAY. True sorrow is hard to gauge, but I believed her pain.

The young woman, however, was less interesting than the fact of the photographs. Someone had followed Angelique and taken many dozens of pictures-these being only a few. And if those two shots were representative of the whole roll, or memory card, then the surveillance wasn't about who she was with but the woman herself. Someone seemed to be studying her.

Was that Rinaldo? Had he hired a private detective to take pictures of her on the street, at work… in the shower? Was he her protector or her stalker?

She had an undergraduate degree from Hunter College and an MBA from NYU. The latter diploma would have cost a hundred thousand dollars, minimum. There was no credit report on her. Was that left out on purpose or didn't it matter? I could get a credit report on my own, of course, but I wanted to tread softly around Tara until I knew why Wanda got half her face shot off.

Tara had been recently hired as a "fellow," whatever that meant, at Laughton and Price, an advertising firm on Lexington, not Madison. Her mother lived, at least at the time of the report, in Alphabet City proper, east of the East Village. Her brother, named Donald Thompson, was only a name with no address, or even an age.

Under the neatly typed pages was a layer of cash wrapped into bundles. Twenties, fifties, and hundreds that stacked up to thirty thousand dollars-money for my expenses. This told me that Mr. Rinaldo would spare no resource in finding the woman with whom he claimed to have no relationship.

I went through the pages again. There was no criminal record included.

It wasn't much but it was enough to go on.

When the buzzer sounded I was no longer surprised.

"Yes, Mardi?"

"A Miss Aura Ullman?"

"Uh… send her in." I wanted to stay focused, to keep my mind in the world of Tara Lear, but just the mention of Aura's name and I was at sea, in a fog, with no sense of direction.

"Aura." I managed to get some lightness into my greeting.

She frowned a bit. Every other time she had come into the office I stood up and, if we were alone, kissed her.

Now, however, those lips would have tasted of George Toller.

Aura was a woman of the New World. Golden-brown skin, natural and wavy dark-blond hair, and pale eyes that Nazi scientists tried to create in what they called the inferior races. She was forty and beautiful to me; of African and European lineage, she was completely American.

Aura lowered into the closest chair, giving a wan smile.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Thankfully busy," I said.

"A case?"

"A whole shipload."

She smiled. Aura liked my jokes.

"Who's that at the front desk?"

"Mardi Bitterman."

"The child who was raped by her father?"

"Yes." In the days when we were passionate lovers, and then platonic lovers, I told Aura everything.

"I thought she moved to Ireland with her sister."

"Where there's heat," I said, "there's motion."

"I came to see how you're doing."

"I'm fine."

"You didn't look fine yesterday when I, I told you."

"Listen, honey," I said. "You're a gorgeous woman and you deserve to have real love in your life."

"I wanted you."

I tried to start counting my breaths but got lost after one.

"Leonid."

"Yes?"

"Will you forget me now?"

"No."

"Will you ever talk to me again?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"You can give me a week, right?" I asked, once again managing a jaunty attitude.

She looked into my eyes and, after a moment or two, nodded. Then she stood up and went out the door.

If my father had been there I would have asked him how that particular moment was a product of the Economic Infrastructure unfurling through history.

I COULD SWITCH OFF the pain of Aura's departure by turning back to Angelique. She was a mystery and missing, the object of attention of a man who was as dangerous as any terrorist or government- trained assassin.

I honestly believed that Alphonse Rinaldo could bring down a president if he set his mind to it.

And now he had set his sights on this young woman. Whether he meant her harm or not was a question for later. Right then I had no choice but to follow my nose.

I decided that I was going to do my best to save Angelique. After all, she was the one in trouble. I'd call her Angie and believe in her innocence until proven otherwise. She was my client, and Rinaldo was the devil I had to deal with.

History guides all men's hands, my father's voice whispered from any of a dozen possible graves.

"Bullshit," I said aloud in my seventy-second-floor office.

And then the office phone rang.

Instead of answering I remembered reading a line in an article where a man somewhere in Africa had said, "In the lowlands, where I make my home, it never rains, but the floods come annually."

After two rings the phone went silent. Soon after that the intercom sounded.

"Yes, Mardi?"

"It's a Mr. Breland Lewis on the phone for you."

"Tell him to hold on. I'll be on the line in a minute."

I don't like getting calls from lawyers. Just hearing Lewis's name, I shuddered and shrank.

And this is in response to my own attorney. If somebody asked me for a list of a dozen friends, Breland would have been on it. But still, he was representative of the law, and law, regardless of its mandate to protect the people, is no friend to man.

"Breland," I said into the mouthpiece.

"How are you, Leonid?"

"You tell me."

"It's Ron Sharkey again."

Ron Sharkey was the metaphor for well over twenty years of criminal activity on my part. I had torn down the lives of well over a hundred men and women in the years I was a fixer for the mob. Most of those that I destroyed were criminals themselves and so I could console myself saying that I was just another means of retribution for what was right and good in the world.

But I had taken down innocents along the way, too. Ron Sharkey was one of these. He lost everything because of my machinations, and he never heard my name or saw my face.

After Sharkey was released from prison I had Breland keep tabs on him. Years in stir had bent the once honest businessman. On the outside again, he had become a drug addict and petty thief. The police arrested him on a dozen different occasions, and every time Breland was there with bail money and representation before the court.

"What's he into now?" I asked.

"It's kind of complex. Maybe we better sit down and talk."

"Yeah," I said, "okay. Listen, I got a lot on my plate right now. Can you give me a day or so?"

"Sure. It'll hold for a day or two. But it can't wait a week."

BRELAND LEWIS'S PHONE CALL was the beginning of one long headache. It blossomed behind my left eye, a bright-red rose of pain. It wasn't Sharkey in particular, or even my oblivious client, Angie. It was more like everything, all at once.

"When you hit your fifties life starts comin' up on ya fast," Gordo Tallman said to me on the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday. "Before that time life is pretty much a straight climb. Wife looks up to you and the young kids are small enough, and the older kids smart enough, not to weigh you down. But then, just when you start puttin' on the pounds an' losin' your wind, the kids're expectin' you to fulfill your promises and the wife all of a sudden sees every single one of your flaws. Your parents, if you still got any, are gettin' old and turnin' back into kids themselves. For the first time you realize that the sky does have a limit. You comin' to a rise, but when you hit the top there's another life up ahead of you and here you are-just about spent."