The Angel Tapes (24 page)

“You see these pictures, Slattery? Take a good fucking look at them. You see that little kid? He was two years of age, Slattery. Blown to fucking bits with the gelignite that
you
stole, that
you
gave to Carol.”

“Jesus, I didn't know. Honest to God, I didn't know. It was nine years ago.”

“So you'll help us find her then, will you, Colm? Because she's going to blow up more people if you don't.”

“Suspect nods his head in agreement,” Sweetman said.

“Now,” said Blade, “we'll have a doctor look at those little scratches of yours, before they turn septic.”

*   *   *

“Charlie, a word.”

“Right away, sir?”

“Yes, Charlie. Right away.”

Nolan found Duffy in his office, studying a length of perforated computer printout.

“Sit down, Charlie.”

Nolan could not read his superior's expression. Something was up, that much he guessed. But what?

Duffy folded the printout back into place. He steepled his fingers and fixed Nolan with a basilisk-like stare.

“I'll come straight to the point, Charlie. Why did you tamper with the Merrigan files?”

Nolan blanched. He attempted to speak. Couldn't.

“That's enough for me,” Duffy said. “You've just as good as admitted your guilt. And let's
please
not go through the rigmarole of you trying to convince me otherwise. I've been at this game as long as you have, Charlie. I know all the tricks.” He leaned back in his ergonomically designed chair. “Now, take your time. But for fuck's sake Charlie, don't lie to me, all right?”

Charles Nolan had always considered himself a tough man. It was why he'd joined the force. He'd been through the mill, as they all had: Duffy, Merrigan, Macken. He'd played rough when circumstances demanded it, and had no regrets. Thus, when he broke down in the assistant commissioner's office, he himself was more surprised than Duffy.

He didn't protest when Duffy summoned an officer to bring him away. He'd no words to describe the sensation of having a cell door shut behind him, as it had shut behind so many of his own detainees.

*   *   *

Rob McGrath looked up in mild surprise when Macken and Sweetman led in the man with bandages covering half his face. The right eye was shut, lost beneath a terrible, purple swelling. “Car-wreck victim” were the words that came to McGrath's mind.

“Rob's an artist, Colm,” Blade said. “He's never had a show at the Municipal—or anywhere else for that matter—but he's still one of the best in the business.”

Slattery nodded glumly as he was given a chair to one side of McGrath's twenty-one-inch computer screen.

“Rob,” Blade went on, “is an expert in portraits. He couldn't do much with
your
mug at the moment, but that's not what we're here for. I want you to tell Rob everything you can remember about Carol's appearance, do you get me? Every detail: the color of her hair, her eyes, the shape of her mouth, etcetera. Is that clear?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Good. Got your colored crayons and tracing paper ready, Rob?”

McGrath opened a new window on his big screen.

“Ready to go, Blade.”

McGrath had written the program himself, and worldwide sales of the software had made him a relatively wealthy man. It went beyond Identikit insofar as the images generated were not two- but three-dimensional. McGrath knew that a witness could sometimes remember a profile far better than a frontal view.

Sweetman was in awe of McGrath's brainchild, could freely pass an entire afternoon just watching a “virtual” human head taking shape and acquiring texture in the cyberspace behind the screen, as McGrath spun it slowly through 360 degrees. She considered it art.

“Age?” McGrath asked. He leaned back in his chair. “It doesn't have to be exact.”

“Nineteen or twenty,” Slattery said.

“Shape of face? Fat, thin, long?”

“Uh, medium. No, sort of uh…”

“Full?”

“Yeah, that's it. Full.”

“Something like this?” A hairless white head revolved slowly from left to right and back again. There were no features. It was as lifeless as a marble bust in the sculptor's preliminary stage.

“No. Not as fat.”

“This better?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I can't smoke in here, can I Rob?” Blade asked.

“No. Color of eyes?”

“Greenish blue.”

“Hmm, that's unusual. Let's see what we can do about that.”

McGrath reached into a menu, plucked out two eyes, and colored them from a palette at the base of the screen.

“That about right?”

“Yeah. Bang on.” Slattery was beginning to enjoy it, his swollen and damaged face almost forgotten.

“Hair? Did she wear it long or short?”

Slattery had to think about this.

“Uh, long, I think. No, short.” He paused. “Look, it was a long time ago, all right?”

“
Think,
Colm,” Blade urged and Sweetman heard that the menace had returned to his voice. She was still very shaken by the brutality she'd witnessed back at the cottage.

“No, it was long. Sometimes she wore it in a ponytail. I remember now.”

“Color?”

“Sort of mousy.”

“
Sort
of mousy?”

“Uh, light brown. It's hard to describe.…”

McGrath dipped into his palette.

“Something like this?”

“No, browner than that.”

And so it went for an hour or longer, as Sweetman watched in utter fascination. The sculptor's marble gradually assumed the skin texture and contours of a human head, until the eyes that looked out at her from the screen held
life:
a sentient being stared back at her in recognition. She almost swore she saw those eyes blink, those lips move.

“That's
her,
” Slattery said at last. “Jayziz, that's Carol.”

“You're sure now?” McGrath asked.

“As sure as anything. I can practically hear her voice. It's unbelievable.”

“Okay.” He saved the simulacrum and turned to Macken. “D'you want me to age it now?”

“You mean,” said Colm Slattery, “like they do with missing kids?”

“That's it. Blade?”

But Blade was entranced. He stared at the slowly revolving head and, each time the eyes met his, a thrill passed through him. He knew those eyes, remembered eyes like those looking into his. Another image tugged at a corner of his mind. He dug deep among the brachiate strands of his memory.

Nothing, nothing is ever lost. We are better than soulless computers.

“Blade?”

“Can you do the reverse, Rob? Can you go in the opposite direction?”

“Make her younger, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Pas de problème.”

McGrath pulled down a menu and clicked on a command labeled ENJUVENATE.

“Enjuvenate?” said Blade.

“Do you like it? Made it up myself. I'm rather proud of it, actually. How many years?”

“Try eight. And give me a full frontal.”

Like melting wax the image dissolved slowly. The cheeks grew chubbier, the chin receded, the nose lost its sharp edges. Only the eyes remained the same. The face of a little girl took shape on the screen.

It was not exactly the face as Blade remembered it, yet was so uncannily similar that he caught his breath in astonishment.

The face was that of Carol, Chief Superintendent Gerry Merrigan's daughter. A young girl once so fond of Blade Macken that she used to call him “Uncle.”

Twenty-nine

Her diary was her best—her only—friend. No one, no one in the whole world but she, had ever read the neat, handwritten lines contained in its pages. She seldom reread what she'd entered. She dared not. She swore that several of the diary's passages had been written by another person. They read so queerly. They frightened her.

Carol Merrigan stared at an entry, written in her own hand.

Saturday, 4 July

Dear Mammy and Daddy,

I hope your both keeping well and that God is good to you. I miss you Mammy and Daddy I dont know how much longer I can be without you.

I did a terrible thing yesterday. I think I am going to burn in hell for it but I dont care. It was for you and I am not a bit sorry I done it. But they said on the news that I killed little babies and I cannot believe that. they must be lying I wouldnt do a thing like that believe me.

Oh ask almighty God and the saints in heaven to forgive me will you Mammy.

I am leaving the house next week and going to the docks to live. Its a horrible place but they don't know me their and its the place where Im going to get revenge because of what they did to you. I know its wrong but I am going to do it.

Will you pray for me?

Your Angel

Carol Merrigan shut the front door gently and carefully behind her and walked the fifteen-feet distance to the gate. She paused on the sidewalk and gazed back over the overgrown yard of the little public-housing dwelling. She'd thought about this moment for longer than was healthy. It had sustained her through the black years following her parents' deaths; it was to have been, in another sense, the final closing of a door. Yet home, be it a fifty-room mansion or a shack in the boondocks, is always hard to say goodbye to. Carol looked up at the dirty glass panes of her bedroom window, then at the peaks of the Dublin Mountains, plainly visible to the south, and experienced a sadness she'd never expected.

A sudden thought struck her: She'd left the radio on in the kitchen. She always did; left one or two lights burning, too. She'd never had a break-in, unlike most of the residents of the area. Yet you couldn't be too cautious in this neighborhood. Carol wondered whether she should go back and turn off the radio. A waste of electricity now. She decided against it. What did it matter when you were never going home again?

“There's the witch!” a young voice called out, and Carol turned.

A group of boys were kicking a football around on a circular grassed area opposite the house. At seven in the morning—the boundless energy of the young!

“Hey, witch! Where's your fucking broomstick? You fucking freaker!”

Carol didn't mind the taunts. They reinforced her own opinion that her disguise was perfect. She swept her unwashed hair back from her forehead and tucked it under her plaid shawl, clutched her bundle more tightly to her chest, and walked slowly away. There was no hurry.

As she turned into Eamon Ceannt Park, Carol reflected on the events of the last ten days.

She caught herself smiling—as well she might smile. She'd fooled them all. All of them: the fuckers at Harcourt Square, the army of the Republic, the CI-fucking-A. It
was
the CIA; she'd no doubt about that. And she'd beaten them, too. Daddy would have been proud of his angel. Yes, yes.

No.
Was
proud,
is
proud. Carol paused and looked up at the sky, blue and cloudless. Up there was where Daddy was. When you split the sky into four equal parts, and split it further and further until you had 360 degrees, then Daddy lived in the eastern quadrant—there—at thirty-three point six degrees. He watched her by day from behind the blue, and at night from behind the reddish black that was the night sky above Dublin.

Carol crossed over the bridge at Clanbrassil Street and turned onto the footpath that ran beside the Grand Canal. There were swans on the water, a family of them, and she regretted not having brought that stale bread in the kitchen. Maybe tomorrow? Oh God no; it was beginning to sink in now. She was never going back to Crumlin.

The shade under the trees was welcome. She passed a white-haired woman seated on a bench, rocking a baby carriage, making cooing noises. Carol had to laugh, remembering. The sound caused the woman to look up. She frowned on seeing Carol, and her face took on the blank expression that decent people reserve for beggars who shouldn't, by rights, be sharing a city with them.

Carol continued to chuckle to herself, on recalling Blade Macken's bewilderment that Friday afternoon outside the American embassy. It had been foolhardy what she'd done: call attention to herself like that. But Blade! Blade, the great detective, the Pride of the Square: he'd looked right at her, looked right through her, past her, as she'd spoken those words through Dolly's mouth. Dolly had enjoyed the joke as much as she. Dolly hadn't had so much fun in twenty years.

Today was a good day, she thought. No spillage, no leaking out.

Carol hesitated at the corner of Charlemont Mall and Charlemont Street. Would she or wouldn't she? Harcourt Square lay in that direction, just a few hundred yards away. It was tempting—one last time. But she decided against it; best not to tempt providence on this, the last day before payday. She'd had her fun at the Square, squatting on the sidewalk opposite the entrance, watching Duffy, Nolan, and Macken come and go, their ugly faces growing more ugly and worried with each passing day.

Dolly had enjoyed that, had called “Mommy!,” “Daddy!” each time Blade Macken and his young, dark-haired whore emerged, speeding in pursuit of a new false lead. Once or twice Carol had hoped that the reckless hussy might crash the car and kill them both. Had hoped it only for an instant; Blade belonged to Carol, not to God or the Devil.

No leakage today. It was good.

The Voice was actually soothing. She is strolling, it said, along the path by the canal; she is leaving home; she is looking in wonder at the beauty of the city, its walks, its paths, its trees, its greenery, its buildings of centuries, its uninterrupted links with the past, its age, its agelessness; she is hearing the hum of traffic; it does not detract in any way from the sweet calls of the songbirds; it augments them; she is smelling the water, ripe and beautiful; she is tasting the carbide in the air, the metallic tang of glorious industry, the desiccating of steel in the drying sun; she is … she is …