George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

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.

We stopped by Garth's apartment to pack overnight bags, picked up the three New York Times we wanted from a pile in the basement, then took off. It was a drizzling winter dusk, and I read by the faint illumination of the car's dome light while Garth plowed through rush hour traffic and watched in the rearview mirror for anyone who might be trying to follow us. I started with the newspaper dated the day after Veil disappeared, since it would be the one to carry a report of anything significant that had happened on the day in question.