Angel of Death. Christian Russell
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obsessions.
For her he would turn into a real gardener of her suffering. He would sow it for the actress, tend it, and water it with the tears she would shed for every dead Wheller. When it bloomed, he would tear off its petals one by one. A petal for each tear. He longed for her tears and agony. He would make her wait for her death anxiously, beg for it so that her nightmare would end. The thought that before he killed her he would say to her: “That’s how you’re going to expiate,” warmed his heart. He liked the sound of it and he repeated it aloud.
“That’s how you’re going to expiate, Dorothy!” his voice vibrating strangely as if to increase the sense of threat.
CHAPTER ONE
Monday, October 12
Mark Du Nancy started his day in a cranky mood. The previous evening, due to consistent efforts and despite his reconciling attitude, Cathy had finally managed to start the usual daily conjugal fight. Actually, it had been more of a soliloquy. Mustering his last strength he had managed to send Tommy to bed and then, for almost an hour, he had listened to the usual sermon. Again he had been told he was a worm, an ungrateful sonofabitch, while she was the benefactress who had pulled him out of the dump. When the reprimand had finished, Mark had felt more tired than after an hour of iron pumping.
He had slipped outside quietly, like a shadow, heading to the small park nearby. There, sitting on a bench, breathing in the cold October evening air, he had wondered where his old Cathy was. The Cathy who used to push his wheel chair impatiently along the alleys of Bellevue Hospital.
He tried to imagine what his life would have been like if it hadn’t been for that stupid car accident, in the spring of 1988, which had prevented him from ever playing hockey again, but brought Cathy, his future wife, into his life as a compensation.
Despite the noble particle in his name, Mark came from a family of La Crosse poor farmers. Since early childhood he had liked hockey and given it a lot of practice. When the Sioux Falls people had offered him a college grant on condition that he played for them, he had felt like he had had the devil’s own luck. Only with a hundred bucks in his pocket, he had got on the first Grayhound to South Dakota. A smart boy, he had stood out due to his academic results but especially as an undisputed star and goal getter of the hockey team.
He had been playing so well that the Winnipeg scouts noticed him and offered him an NHL four-season contract with the Jets after he graduated from college. He had only spent a season in Canada for in 1986 the NY Rangers managers had bought his contract, bringing him to the city he had always thought to be the capital of the world.
With the Rangers his talent had simply bloomed. Playing as a left forward he had managed to score sixty-eight goals in two seasons. And everything had climaxed that day in 1988 when he had been picked to play in the All-Star Game. Unfortunately, his manager had proven quite inapt. If now, on the same team, Gretzky was making six million dollars a season, Mark had made only $300,000 in two seasons at the NY Rangers.
Then, a few weeks after the game of his life, the car crash took place. With backbone lesions and both legs broken,Mark had listened almost in a state of shock to the doctors’ gloomy prognosis: a fifty per cent chance that he would ever be able to walk again. His strong will had managed to turn it to the best account after four months of wheeling around in a chair. Playing hockey was out of the question, though. It was there, in the hospital, that he had met Cathy Ravelli. The newspaper lady had come to do a story on the sad fate of a talented hockey player. They had fallen for each other. Then the woman had prolonged the interview using as a pretext a new set of questions every time she visited him. Slowly a love affair came to life.
The story had been printed weeks before but she kept on coming and he enjoyed her visits. Mark had believed he had seen sensitivity and delicacy in Miss Ravelli. Today he was wondering whether those qualities had really existed outside his own mind. Two months after his discharge they got married. With the hockey money Mark had managed to build himself a big house and furnish it properly.
In their first year of marriage everything had been OK. Peace and harmony. In the next few months, however, things had grown worse and he had found his wife to be a very cold practical woman. Had Cathy really changed or had she just taken off the mask she had been wearing? After several years of dull marriage little Tommy was born. And a very good child he was. To him had Mark transferred his entire affection. His wife’s defects hadn’t seemed that important to him any longer.
In 1989, Julius Beck, an FBI hot shot who had admired his hockey skills, had asked him whether he was interested in a job with the Bureau. And Mark, whose life was far from offering him too many opportunities, had gone for it full speed.
The time spent at Quantico had brought him and his wife further apart. Almost imperceptibly he had begun seeking comfort in other beds, more and more often. His charm and the remains of his lingering fame had opened the door to many bedrooms.
Professionally, he had devoted himself to fighting city crime. He had fretted with enthusiasm. He dreamed of locking up all the criminals in the States. But little by little, his eagerness had lessened and been replaced by mere routine. At this stage, life to Mark was neither a holiday nor a mourning day, it was simply a working one. A working life whose routine didn’t bore him yet but managed to take away some of that joie de vivre characteristic of the first years in the FBI. Meanwhile too many curs had pissed on his ideals. But he had decided to stick to his road, resigned to know that there was no better world.
Mark didn’t have a playful spirit. Whenever there was a promotion in sight, a “fat bone” as they called it in the department, he hesitated as if he had just run into some relics. He let the more ambitious ones grab it. Besides, he had systematically refused to get his degree in law. Which meant he would never get to be a SAC: special agent coordinator.
He was, however, one of the most gifted federal agents and Beck was well aware of that. 1997 had been a difficult year for Mark who had taken up drinking and still hadn’t lost his job. And that because even at such moments he had proven very effective, and Beck was a practical man. For almost a year now he had broken up with Daniel’s and hadn’t touched liquor ever since. Sometimes he missed that inferno and would have been extremely interested in a short visit. Only he knew it was completely out of the question.
Such a visit would have meant falling back into that abyss forever and Mark liked to think he was powerful. Now everything was fine at work but his marriage was awful. He would have to make a decision as soon as possible.
He went inside. The light in their bedroom was out. He lay down on the sofa and fell asleep thinking of his next step: an honest discussion with Cathy about getting a divorce.
* * * * * * *
The same thought was on his mind the following morning while he was heading for the office. The FBI department on Church Avenue in Kensington where Mark was working now had opened three years before. It belonged to the NIFO, the FBI field department in New York, and was the second largest in the city. His boss, SAC Julius Beck, also known as ‘The Mogul,’ was a black man who had climbed all the steps in the Bureau hierarchy. He had even run for the job of head of the Security Department. In the Brooklyn department he had almost two hundred agents under his command.
His trump cards were his strictness and severity. Few could brag about ever seeing him laugh. There was even a story that went about the department according to which, while at a party, he had once told a joke to a secretary. Yet nobody had been able to trace that secretary.
Beck had no family. He had dedicated his entire life to his career. He was a tough guy and never called his co-workers by their first names. In college, he had shared a room with Will Bratton, head of the NYPD, and they had remained friends ever since. ‘The Mogul’ was very keen on his habits the way most bachelors are. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, he went to Harlem and had dinner at Sylvia’s.
While heading for the office Mark kept running into the “young wolves.” They rushed up and down the steps and along the corridors giving off an air of vitality and exuberance. They were heartless to the ones they investigated but turned rapidly into yes-men in front of their bosses. In ten or fifteen years, Mark thought bitterly,