The Beast That Was Max (45 page)

"No. We only have time for wet cleaning."

"I see." The gentle hands of the blood of killers helped him to stand and supported him as he walked toward the door. In a crevice between thought and action, the Beast sulked, worrying at the invisible feathers of escaped prey.

Alioiune gave Max the baby, then sagged into the arms of her helpers. "We must stop at a few stores in Chinatown," she said. "Before she left, Mrs. Chan told us what we needed to get for the baby."

"Not a problem," said the man with the clipboard. "And may I say what an honor it is to perform this service for you and your family. May I ask the name of your latest addition?"

Kueur stopped short. "Tonton?"

Max exchanged a look of despair and horror with the twins. In all that had happened, none of them had given a thought to naming the child.

Max resisted the pull of his handlers. He searched the ruined loft for a clue, something to offer the blood. He had a terrible premonition that if the child left his birthplace unnamed, he would not survive his first night. Then he relaxed and gave the twins a forlorn smile.

"We've named him in honor of those we've lost," he said. "Wulumu Bearpaw Chaudhri Mad Owl Pullman Ashes Blowing Shenara Child of Thunder."

"But we'll call him—" Kueur began.

"Not Dex," Max said.

"Max?" Kueur finished.

"Feu?" asked Alioune.

"No, not fire," Max said. "Angel."

The twins nodded their heads and smiled, and all three were carried away, surrounded by the reverent murmuring of the blood of killers.

By Gerard Houarner

The single knock on the door fell into the depths of Max’s meditation.

The rap of a knuckle on steel fell through the driving rhythms and blaring instruments of big band salsa blasting from the apartments below and above him, the traffic noise on 10
^th
 
Street and Avenue B, and the din from Tompkins Square Park.
  
The sound should have been lost like a drop rain over a hurricane sea.
 
The Beast, slumbering in memories of carnage, did not stir as the sound passed it.
  
Max, following Mrs. Chan’s directions, inhabited the silence deep inside himself.
 
He stood where the Beast slept, in an emptiness, almost forgetting himself, the world, his appetite, his rage.
 
Almost.
 
In the silence, he heard the sound, like a dust mote landing on a still pond’s surface.
 

If the Beast had been awake, Max would have missed it the sound, as well.

The sound did not belong in the storm of life and death in the city’s heart .
 
It was a sign.
 
An intrusion.

A warning.

He’d have to thank Mrs. Chan for the training.
 
Perhaps even tell him how meditation had helped him kill.
 

He hadn’t killed, yet, this hour.
 
But the hour wasn’t done.
 

Mrs. Chan would be hurt.
  
Max found satisfaction in that possibility.
 
Pleasure, in that power he had over Mrs. Chan.
 
Sometimes, the power to simply kill someone else was not enough.

Max waited for the rest of the sign.
 
The emptiness inside his mind began to fill.
 
Someone had put on thrashing bass and guitar music to try drowning out the salsa.
 
The screech of song reverberated in Max, familiar and comforting, though the salsa’s rhythmic drumming brought him back to purer versions he’d heard in Cuba while stalking gloomy Havana alleys.
 
The taste of different flavors of pain came back to him.
 
His fingers closed reflexively.
 
The Beast shuddered, catching the flicker of his memories in its dreams.
 

The careful balance he’d struggled to maintain crumbled under the strain of anticipating danger.
 
The world, and his world, broke through the walls he’d built to keep them out.
  
His past, his appetites, his needs and rage, were all too much to be held back for long.
 
And the world outside of him, it was too rich in pleasures to be ignored for long.

He had to answer the knock.
  
Mrs. Chan slipped from consciousness, leaving only a nagging sense that there were discoveries yet to be made in the disciplines of the mind.
 
Something about killing, but on the inside, not in the world of flesh and blood.

The thought blew away.
 
Max was back in his lower east side apartment, Alphabet City, grimy windows overlooking a perpetual theater of the cruel and the absurd, paint peeling from cracked walls hiding the scurry of roaches and mice, floor slanted, the smell of mold and roasting meat and backed-up toilet mingling to create an aroma that told him prey was all around him, careless, distracted, waiting to be caught and devoured.

Max moved, scanning for peepholes, listening for the breath of enemies, the sound of desperately fleeing foot steps.

He opened the front door.
 
He hadn’t bothered to reach for the Glock tucked behind the waistband of his trousers.
 
The hallway was empty, except for trash, broken furniture, and the thick, round, red candle burning on a plate at his feet.

The plume of smoke tickled his nose with the scent of blood, metallic, rusting and corroded like the iron and copper pipes that hadn’t yet been stripped out of apartment building.

The Beast twitched, its dreams made real by the blood candle.

Max went down on one knee, snuffed the flame.
 
The door
 
to the apartment further down on the left opened.
 
He knew only the young men and women who came in and out of the place, brothers and sisters of varying ages, but he’d suspected the old woman who poked her head out was living there.
 
White hair, narrow eyes, frock half-opened to reveal withered breasts and a shaven slit, the old woman hugged the far side of the hallway as she approached.

“Did you see who left this?” Max asked.

“¿Me puede dar esto?”

Max didn’t answer.
 
The old woman, a grandmother by the smell of her, snatched the candle and raced back inside the apartment.
 
An old bruja had uses for blood, old and new, preserved in all kinds of way.
 
An old bruja had nothing to lose taking what she needed.

He liked the old woman.
 
The smell of her provoked the Beast to snort and growl.
 
It liked her, too, and its dreams made Max’s cock hard.

Max turned back into the apartment.
 
He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water over his head.
 
The face in the mirror didn’t interest him.
 
From his closet, he picked clean jeans and a charcoal top, black construction boots, a leather jacket.
 
He kept the Glock, collected clips and a suppressor.
 
He wasn’t sure what the work would require, added a single and a double-edged knife.
  
There was always hope a sign could be returned.

He looked forward to the hunt.

The door to the apartment closed with a hollow echo behind him as he left.
 
Aside from a table, chair, and a cot, there was no furniture in the place.
 
Only one closet held his clothes.
 
The kitchen was bare.
 
What he valued most, the tools of his profession and his pleasure, remained hidden inside where they’d never be found or in safe drops.
 
He’d already stayed longer than he usually did in any one place.
 
Six months.
 
The renovations to the loft he’d bought downtown would take another 6 months.
 
No one ever came to visit, no business or recreation was ever conducted in the place.
 
Not even his adopted nieces, Kueur and Alioune, were allowed to pass by when travelling on break from their Paris boarding school.

It was an empty space, so much like what Mrs. Chan claimed might be created inside Max to cage and tame the Beast just a little, for the sake of his adopted nieces, and for
 
the good of its own terrible nature in a world that held no place for it.

Things would change when he could operate from a secure and private space.
 
He’d be truly settled, with a home to offer the two girls who’d changed his life.
 
His employers, perhaps even his enemies, would find him more easily.
 
It was a new life he was preparing to squeeze into, with strange practices and habits that didn’t fit the life he’d made for himself since escaping his Calcutta childhood.
  
Responsibilities.
  
Commitments.

The air in the hallway seemed thick with smoke from the blood candle.
 
It choked him a little, sticking in his throat, clogging his lungs.
 

The hollow echo of the door’s closing reassured Max.
 
It told him, now as it had throughout his life, that he’d left nothing of value behind.
 
He carried everything he needed with him, all the time.
 
His hunger, his Beast.
 
And it promised he’d come back to nothing, to an emptiness as certain as any another den he might have made for himself.

It promised there’d be no prison to capture his Beast, or frustrate his appetites.
 

Even if the promise was a lie.

On the street, the cool dusk air cleared the smoke from his lungs, the doubts from his mind.
  
The Beast opened one of its secret eyes.
 
The hunt was underway.

He went to the park first.
  
In the intermingling of predator and prey, he might pick up the scent of whoever had left him the message, or flush out the messenger.
 
Or perhaps draw another warning sign.
 
Someone wanted his attention, so here he was.

The drug dealers at the park’s perimeter knew him and let him through without asking what he needed.
 
Someone called out “Policia,” a few nervous looks were cast his way.
 
Someone laughed.
 
He sat a bench and checked his trail.
 
People sat by their windows in the surrounding buildings, calling out and conversing with people on the street, listening to the music, watching, waiting for something to happen.

An older, white-haired man in black stepped out of a entry, held the door open, watched children playing and running back and forth.
 

Hunting.
 
But not for him.

His attention passed to the park’s inhabitants and visitors.
 
He recognized the local dealers, addicts, crazies, prostitutes, loan sharks, skinheads, pimps, homeless, bookies, street artists and musicians, vendors of everything from bootleg videos and tapes to stolen electronics, and the rest of the city’s detritus cast out of their steel, concrete and brick shelters.
 
Some familiar faces had dropped away, new people had drifted in to take their place.
 
Sometimes, he and the Beast culled the herd, or tracked others who did it and took them.
 
He checked the newcomers.
 
There were a few drummers fresh off the plan from Puerto Rico, joining the regulars for a taste of home and to audition for bands, and dozens of kids, coming in from Jersey or Long Island to slum or score.
 
Clusters of tourists and even a tour group from Japan threaded their way through shacks, tents and cardboard boxes, surrounded by beggars.
 
A new crop of AIDS patients waited for the finality so many others in the park denied.
 
A newspaper man was buying interviews, and an NYU film student crew was trying to catch an atmospheric apocalyptic shot in the day’s last light accented by the cooking fires and their smoke.
 

The Beast picked up interest.
 
Voices singing, laughing, arguing, drew its attention from the memories of its last feasting.
 
The scents, too many to single out, stirred its appetite.
 
Max felt the strength of its waking course through him.
 
His own rage and hunger sparked.
 

A dealer standing nearby, eyes hardened, face weathered, glanced at Max and moved away.

Max focused on the kind of bait that usually drew other predators.
  
Zap, survivor of a failed pre-Woodstock concert in North Dakota, was surrounded by the usual younger generation of vulnerable prey drawn to her dreamy reality.
 
Heroin addicts stood teetering on the brink of falling over from this world into the next.
 
The tourists were already leaving, having taken as much as they could in the few minutes they’d spent in the park.
 
They’d earned their New York horror stories.
 
The fresh runaways were already being circled by pimps.
 
He began picking out the other predators, watching, waiting.
 
The world was reducing itself to a simpler reality.
 
A basic foundation.
 
The Beast’s interest was aroused completely, and it was picking out its own possible victims for them to pursue.
 
Max stoked its interest, feeding the Beast the candle’s blood scent, and the transgression of its presence at their doorstep.