M. Hanover - Darker Angels

The food arrived, a bouillabaisse that smelled rich and oceanic with two side orders of raw oysters for the table. The band took a break between sets, and a recording took their place, muted trumpet and stand-up bass hovering together just under the level of conversation. Karen ate a couple oysters, her eyes focused on nothing in particular, and then, her thoughts gathered, nodded to herself.

“I met Eric in the summer of 2000,” she said. “I was still officially working for the bureau, but I’d taken a leave of absence. I was… I wasn’t well. I don’t know how much you know about my history? Do you know about Davis?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” Karen said. “I have to go back a little farther. After we caught Mfume, I wasn’t the only one looking for the rider. My partner on the case, Michael Davis, also heard everything Mfume said. We were working on the issue together. The year before I met Eric-July 12, 1999, the rider that had been in Mfume killed my partner. It made it look like an accident, but I knew.

“I went to New York. That was where the rider was. I started looking around. Eric’s name kept coming up. Everyone knew him, or knew about him. He was some sort of fixer. The guy you went to when you didn’t have anywhere else to go. I made him for a bagman. The public face of something bigger. I was wrong about that. Anyway.

“I found him in a bar on the Upper West Side. He had an apartment, and he was doing business out of it. I tried to lean on him. I don’t know exactly what I said. I think I gave him some crap about not having a business license or something,” Karen said, and she smiled. “He didn’t buy it. I’d meant to go in and roust him, break some heads, find out who his boss was, and if there was any connection to the rider. Instead, we wound up drinking whiskey and… and I told him everything. He had a way of listening that made you say things you didn’t mean to.”

“And he helped you?” I asked.

“He did,” Karen said, but her expression was bleak. “We didn’t catch the rider, but we cast it out of the body it had taken over. Broke its power a little. Weakened it. Afterward, I was sick for almost a month. It hadn’t been… it wasn’t easy. He let me stay at his apartment. He made me bathe once or twice a week. He kept me eating food.”

“He guided you back,” Chogyi Jake said. Karen considered for a moment, then nodded.

“He was with me through my breakdown,” she said.

“Were you lovers?” I asked.

“Only a couple times toward the end,” Karen said. Her voice had taken on a low, throaty amusement. “I wouldn’t have been much fun in the sack right at the beginning. But no, we weren’t serious about each other. We were just a man and a woman in close proximity for a few weeks. And neither of us had anyone. That’s all.”

“What was his price?”

“Twenty thousand dollars, and five favors to be named later,” she said. “He called in three of the favors. Before I left the bureau, he had me expunge some information from a guy’s police record. Then after I left, he needed someone to be a lookout on a job he was doing in Seattle, so I went out and helped with that. The last time I heard from him, he needed me to keep a baby at my apartment for a couple weeks in March of ’03.”

“A baby?” Aubrey asked.

“Yeah. Little boy,” Karen said. “Looked Indian. Subcontinent Indian, I mean. I called him Raja, but I don’t know what his real name was. Eric dropped him off, then came and got him again. I didn’t ask what it was about.”

“March of 2003,” Ex said. “I remember that. He said he had to go take care of his mother for a few weeks. In Kentucky.”

“Well, he spent at least some of that time with an eight-month-old in Boston,” Karen said.

“And Grandma Heller died when I was twelve,” I said.

“That was the thing with Eric,” Karen said. “I knew a lot of things about him, but I was never sure any of them were true. Maybe he’d been in the military, maybe that was just a story. Maybe he’d gone to Juilliard. Maybe not. He had this way of suggesting things without ever exactly saying them. And then sometimes he was just joking. Or he was protecting me from something.”

The muted trumpet rose like a child wailing for her mother and went silent. Karen’s structural half-smile softened.

“I’m not helping, am I?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like everyone knew a different version of him. I just wish…”

That he’d told me what he was, and what I was going to become. That he’d taught me. That he’d trusted me.

The Eric Heller I’d known had been the benign uncle, hated by my uber-Christian parents. When I’d gone on the queen mother of all teenage rebellious benders at sixteen and woken up with an honest-to-God lost weekend and a tattoo on the small of my back, Eric had been the guy to cover for me. When my father had informed the family that Eric was an abomination before God, I’d thought it meant he was gay.

And Eric had also been the architect of a secret war against riders. And having an affair with Aubrey’s wife, Kim, which was another thing I’d carefully not mentioned. And secreting anonymous babies with former FBI agents.

I ate an oyster, the stony shell feeling unnaturally solid and real.

“I’ll tell you what,” Karen said. “I’ll tell you anything I remember. Any question you want answered about him, I’ll do my best. And you can have those last two favors I owed him. And if I happen to win the lottery, I’ll pay you back for the house and car.”

“Deal,” I said, managing a smile.

As we ate, the conversation warmed. Karen was a good storyteller, and Ex, Chogyi Jake, and Aubrey all chimed in. It gave me room to step back and let the fatigue seep in. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, asking Karen to give me information about Eric. Some handle on him, some indication of whether he would have done what I was doing now. Something. The truth was, I didn’t need to charge prices for what I did, and at twenty thousand a throw, Eric didn’t either. With the money he’d left me, twenty thousand was pocket change.

But still, he’d taken it from Karen. He’d slept with her, taken her money, nursed her back to health, involved her in his work without explaining anything. I didn’t know what to make of any of it, and as the food hit my stomach, my few remaining neurotransmitters seemed to break down. The after-dinner coffee came at nine o’clock. Or five in the morning, Athens time. Fatigue was shaking in my veins.

I paid off the bill just as the band came back for a second set. Five black men in good suits and thin black ties. I wondered if it was a uniform designed to make me think of the Blues Brothers, or maybe it was the other way around. The sax player caught me staring at them and smiled.

“Why don’t you guys get the car,” Karen said. “Jayné and I can walk it.”

I was too tired to object, even though the idea of walking as far as the sidewalk seemed optimistic. Karen tucked my arm in hers and led me out into the thick night air. It was easy to forget how short she was, but as we reached Bourbon Street, she shifted, putting her arm around my waist and looping mine over her shoulder. I was easily four inches taller, and she fit beside me the way I had once fit beside my boyfriend.

The old Sting tune kept floating through my head as we turned north. “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” And here I was, walking through the narrow street. Cars moved past us slowly, careful of pedestrians like us. A wide brick courtyard on our left reverberated with a song that was thick and passionate and powerful the way only live music could be. The air was thick with humidity and the smells of gasoline and hot grease and, incongruously, fresh bread. Karen leaned her head against my shoulder, and the intimacy of her body next to mine was unfamiliar and inappropriate, and it was also as comforting as hugging my best friend. Part of me was freaked out by her, and part was grateful she was there. Her perfume was hyacinth and musk. I was surprised she wore anything so feminine.