Angel Face (2 page)

‘I guess it's just goodbye,' Carter says, the words lost in the mist before he closes his mouth. He removes the twist-tie and leans forward until he's looking down at the water. As he tilts the bag, as the powdery gray ashes slide into the Hudson, Carter thinks, as he often does, of the boy soldiers, of their drug-fueled courage, their unthinking cruelty, of how easily they were killed. He remembers their scattered bodies in the ruins of an African village, remembers the smell of their blood and an unrelenting sun that beat down on the living and the dead alike. He and his companions, thieves all, had briefly considered burying the children. But there was no time and they'd left the bodies to the vultures circling overhead.

‘Goodbye, sister,' he whispers.

Carter shakes the bag to release the last flakes of ash. He places the bag inside the black box and the black box inside the white box. Then he sits for a time, until the dark gray water is again marked only by the falling rain, until there's nothing more to see, until what remains of his sister is gone. Only then does he rise to his feet and vault over the rail to drop on to the pier. A short distance away, a man wearing a yellow raincoat stands with his mouth agape. And not without reason. Carter is thoroughly drenched. His chino pants cling to him like a second skin. Did he emerge from the depths only a moment before, a monster come to feed? Judging from the expression on the man's face, he's not sure.

Despite the soaking, Carter's not uncomfortable. After years of special forces training, after a winter in the mountains of Afghanistan where the cold burrowed into you like an invading virus, May afternoons in New York don't intimidate him, rain or shine. He turns on his heel and marches off toward the beckoning skyline of Manhattan.

Back to work.

TWO

O
n one level, Angela Tamanaka, called ‘Angel' by friend and client alike, is pleased by the steady rain. At least she's not being hit on by every jerk who passes by. She's still pissed, though, because the client's late and she's been walking up and down Broadway between 108th and 109th Streets for twenty minutes. Huddled under a baby-blue umbrella speckled with pink rosebuds.

Stay positive, she tells herself. Use the time, don't let the time use you. Angel has culled her rules of success from a dozen websites, and she might have perused thousands more. A Google search for ‘rules of success' had turned up ninety-seven million hits in 0.22 seconds. On the first three pages, she discovered success rules for the mail order business, the music business, the trucking business and the business of politics. Nothing specific about the business of whoring, though. No good advice for sex workers.

Focus on the outcome, Angel tells herself. Success breeds success. The happier the client, the more jobs Pierre will send your way. At this stage of her working life, Angel's about the business of accumulating capital. And that's another maxim: Poverty leads to dependence, which leads to more poverty.

An articulated city bus pulls to the stop at the corner of 108th Street, its accordion pleat flexing and folding as the driver works in close to the curb. The bus rocks on its springs when it finally comes to halt and the front door opens to reveal an elderly woman in a lavender pants suit. The woman comes down the steps slowly, leading with her right leg. Her left hand grips the railing, her right the curved handle of a long black umbrella. Safe on the sidewalk, she presses the umbrella's release button and it pops open, spraying the man poised on the step behind her with rainwater. He closes his eyes for a moment, too exhausted, apparently, even to become annoyed.

Angel watches the drama unfold, thinking this is what I don't want, this is my big motivator. Not to come home every single night of my life, utterly spent, with nothing to show for it at the end of the week. But, no, not
nothing
. Enough to provide the bare necessities, enough to get me out the door on the next day, and the day after that and the day after that. Until I'm used up and nobody wants to employ me and I get to retire on Social Security and food stamps.

Call her a communist, but this is the way Angel sees it. This is a fate she's determined to avoid. Better to lose everything.

As she rehearses the scenario she's worked out over the past couple of days, Angel paces up and down, accompanied by the spatter of rain on her umbrella. If the client doesn't show by the time she finishes, she decides, she'll call it a night and head back to her apartment. She'll call her agent, too. She'll call Pierre to demand payment for time she might otherwise have spent profitably. She knows the client has paid in advance, and with a credit card.

There's a simple rule of thumb operating here. The client specifies the fantasy, but the provider brings the fantasy to life. In this case, the client, a mob guy named Enrico Benedetti, a real jerk, was predictably vague. A demure young woman, a drudge, visits the office of her therapist, as she has many times before. Only this time she finally divulges the terrible secret she's been hiding all these years: she was molested by her stepfather. Her therapist listens sympathetically for a while, then informs her that she can escape her pain by reliving the original experience. She's reluctant at first, but finally agrees, only to discover that her therapist was right. Before morning, she finds herself transformed, from a sexless drudge to a sex-crazed nymphomaniac.

Three other girls turned the job down. Angel said yes. Not because she wasn't repulsed. Angel was disgusted, too, but she wasn't about to be distracted by her feelings.

Be the one who's there for the team when everybody else quits. Be the last woman standing. Be the go-to girl. Tomorrow morning, her agent will direct-deposit $800 into her account at Citibank. She'll put aside four hundred of those dollars to pay for general living expenses and her taxes. The rest will go into a second account at Chase, her capital accumulation account. Angel has forty grand in that account and she's proud of every damned penny. Most of her schoolmates at Brooklyn College, even the ones who work part-time, have already accumulated enough debt to keep them broke for the next decade.

Be Prepared – you don't have to be a boy or a scout to accept that piece of advice. She's supposed to remain in character from the minute she slides into the car until she's dropped off tomorrow morning at seven o'clock, three hours before the client's wife and kids return from a visit with the grandparents. That's why she's wearing a brown corduroy dress a size too big, a dress that hangs all the way to mid-calf. That's why she didn't put on make-up, why she's wearing a plain white bra and cotton panties thick enough to pass for a diaper.

So, all right, remember to stare down at the floor when you get into the car. Answer in monosyllables and don't forget to mumble. You've made up your mind. This time you'll tell Dr Rick the whole truth, which he suspects anyway. You'll do it, but you're scared out of your mind and . . .

Angel's thoughts are interrupted by the honking of a horn. She stares for just a moment at the Lincoln Towncar parked in the bus stop while she slips into the part. Then she walks forward, slowly, as if approaching a gallows, to peer through the window. The client is sitting at the wheel. Marked by acne scars on both cheeks, his meaty flesh, the color of ground beef, drapes his jawbones like a shroud. But his little black eyes are on full alert. They're balls of desire. Most likely, he's been jerking off all week in anticipation.

The client reaches across the seat to open the door and Angel, after only a brief hesitation, closes her umbrella and slips inside. Without looking up, she fumbles in her worn brown purse, pulls out an aerosol breath freshener and squirts it into her mouth, a good touch.

‘Hi, Dr Rick,' she mumbles.

Angel takes a certain amount of pride in her theatrical talents. Creative by nature, she can improvise with the best of them. Still, she needs cooperation. She needs the client to participate, to work the game. But Dr Rick's imagination is as thick and meaty as his complexion. He keeps reverting to Ricky Ditto, which is what his gangster friends call him, and he can't stop bragging about the bars he owns in Queens and Staten Island, or his string of Manhattan laundromats, or the house he owns in Riverdale, or the house in Flushing he bought for his mom.

Maybe he wants me to admire him, she thinks. Or maybe he thinks the game doesn't start until he gets into the house. Whatever, Angel decides to stay in character.

‘I feel little, Dr Rick,' she says. ‘Like I can't do anything.'

‘Yeah?' Ricky Ditto chuckles. ‘Well I could show you a few good moves.'

And what's she supposed to say to that? Except that she's not going to work with any more gangster jerks. Most of her clients are wealthy and successful businessmen. They're sharp and quick and they know how to play the game. Sometimes, they're even fun. But this guy? He's a CFA, born and bred, a Complete Fucking Asshole.

‘Please, Dr Rick, you're making me very nervous.'

Ricky Ditto has the seat pushed all the way back to accommodate his belly. His arms are stretched out, both hands on the wheel, and he stares fixedly through the wiper-streaked windshield. They're driving north on Broadway, headed over the Broadway Bridge connecting Manhattan to the Bronx, running four blocks at a time between the red lights. Ricky finally turns left on 234th Street and pushes the Lincoln toward the steep hill leading into the neighborhood of Riverdale, an upper middle-class enclave tucked between the Hudson River and the slums on the other side of Broadway. On Riverdale's far western edge, the views over the Hudson River are spectacular.

‘Hey, check this out,' Ricky says when they're about halfway up the hill. ‘See that apartment building?'

‘It's very nice,' Angel replies, although she's looking at a six-storey, red-brick, plain-as-mud structure with a sagging cornice.

‘There's an apartment in that building, right now it's got three hundred grand sittin' under the fuckin' floorboards. You wouldn't believe just lookin', right? Me, I could put my hands on the cash right now. And that's just one place. We got others.'

Angel's trying to decide where to go with the bragging. How can she work it into the scenario? Make a reference to his exalted credentials? Make him a Harvard graduate? Or maybe he's won the Nobel Prize. Yeah, that's good. She'll look directly into his eyes when she congratulates him. She'll project trust and awe and deep, deep respect. He'll come around.

They drive the rest of the way in silence, finally turning into a cul-de-sac lined with single-family homes on generous lots. At the far end, a garage door opens and Ricky guides the Lincoln into the space, inching forward until his bumper touches a wooden rail on the far wall. Then he presses a button and the door rumbles down.

Show time, Angel tells herself, as she always does. She gets out of the car and half-drags herself to a door leading into a kitchen. Ricky Ditto walks ahead of her. He flips on the overhead light and crosses the kitchen floor.

‘Lemme show ya where the office is gonna be. I got a couch in there, ya know, like in a shrink's—'

A loud crack brings Rick's broad body to an abrupt halt, a crack Angel knows to be a gunshot, though she can't bring herself to think the word. But then Ricky falls backward, his body tipping over, his spine straight. His head bounces when he crashes on to the linoleum, just once before he lies inert, eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Blood runs in three directions from a hole in his head, to the right and the left and into his stiff black hair.

Angel's only beginning to process the data when Carter steps into the kitchen. He's holding a small caliber revolver in his right hand and he's looking directly into her eyes.

‘Did you touch anything?' he asks.

THREE

N
ot that it makes any difference, but Carter's stunned for just a moment. He's looking at one of the most beautiful women he's ever seen. Eurasian, no doubt, with big dark eyes that taper sharply at the corners, an assertive little nose and a luscious mouth. Her face is heart-shaped, her chin rounded, her complexion is the color of newly carved ivory. Carter's eyes rake her face in search of a flaw, a pimple, a blackhead, a mole, but her skin might have been painted by an artist working from his personal fantasy of the ideal woman. And not a sexual fantasy, either.

Only at the very last minute, before he gets back to business, does Carter realize that she's not wearing any make-up.

‘Did you touch anything?' he repeats.

‘Huh . . . I . . . Oh, God, don't kill me.'

Carter's virtually devoid of sadistic impulses. Good thing for this woman. If he did harbor a well of sadism, if he liked to cause pain, her fear would only turn him on.

‘Stop for a minute and think. Did you touch anything?'

Angel finally does stop, long enough at least to draw a breath. He's hasn't killed her yet. That has to be good news, right? Assuming he doesn't plan to drag her into the basement and take his time about it.

‘I don't think so,' she says.

‘What about inside the car?'

‘The handles? Maybe the door?'

Carter pulls a navy-blue handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers. ‘We're going to go into the garage and I'm going to wipe down the car on your side. You're going to walk ahead of me and you're going to stay between the front door of the car and the wall of the garage. Do you understand what I just said?'

‘Yes.'

‘Repeat it.'

Gradually calming, Angel does as she's told, careful to focus on the task at hand, and not on Ricky Ditto, whose head rests in a swelling pool of blood.