Chapter 19
Liat drove Louis to the Lower East Side: Norfolk Street, south of East Houston, where she parked in front of a brownstone adjacent to the Angel Orensanz Center, once a Gothic Revival synagogue and now the studio and gallery of the eponymous Spanish artist, as well as a performance space.
Incongruously, a statue of Lenin stood on the rooftop of one of the nearby buildings.
It was either an art installation, thought Louis, or someone had despaired of even socialism providing an answer to the nation’s ills and decided that full-tilt communism was the way to go.
Louis gathered that the venue for their meeting had not been chosen lightly.
For a short time, the basement of the Orensanz Center had served as a holding cell for a killer named Kittim, and Epstein was one of his jailers.
Back then, Louis had regarded Kittim only as an unusually disfigured criminal, a marabou stork in human form, but subsequent events caused him to revise that opinion, though he had remained reluctant to accept Kittim’s nature as angelic, fallen or otherwise.
But over the years that followed, the reservation fell by the wayside.
Now, less than an hour since Kade had spoken to Louis of Sturgis and angels, here was the rabbi, a cup of green tea on the table before him, a pot next to it, waiting to hold converse next to the center.
From across the street came the laughter of children in a playground, but Louis could not say whether he found the sound reassuring or disconcerting.
“May I pour you some tea?” Epstein asked, as Louis took the chair across from him.
Louis, who regarded herbal tea as an abomination, declined, and coffee was sourced instead.
Louis took in the apartment. Its furnishings were old and very worn, but spoke distantly of quality and expense.
The art on the walls, both prints and originals, was uniquely German Expressionist: Louis identified at least one of the latter that might have been a Kandinsky, and another a Klee.
The air smelled of soups and stews left sitting too long, and beneath that a sickly sweetness, like cheap spilled wine.
He could see no books, and the environs said the owner was an older woman.
“The apartment isn’t mine,” said Epstein.
“I’d be surprised if it was.”
“It belongs to an old friend, but she’s frequently out of town. I find it calming in small doses.”
“It’s too somber for my tastes,” said Louis.
“The owner is photophobic. She’s also a depressive. I am not sure if one is a consequence of the other, and if so, which is cause and which effect.”
Louis heard noises from farther back in the apartment.
“I thought you said she was out of town.”
“She is. That’s Reuven. He’s a caretaker. You’ll meet him momentarily.”
Epstein plucked a tea leaf from his tongue and placed it on his saucer.
“I believe, when last we spoke, that our mutual friend Mr Parker was still recovering from his brush with mortality—his most recent brush, I mean, unless I’ve missed one since. With him, it can be hard to keep up.”
“Someone put him in the hospital last year,” said Louis. “Broken nose, busted ribs, concussion. For him, that’s like anyone else stubbing a toe.”
“He has a remarkable capacity for endurance,” said Epstein. “And a similarly remarkable need for it.”
“I’ll admit he’s a magnet for misfortune.”
“He must consider himself cursed.”
Those bright old eyes regarded Louis closely, alert to any slight response to words carefully chosen, but he received none and moved on.
“What did you learn from your former pupil?” Epstein asked.
“Kade wasn’t my pupil. Angel and I looked out for him after his mother and father died. He wasn’t with us for long.”
“But he learned from both of you.”
“He learned not to be like either of us,” said Louis. “As for what he had to say, he claims a man named Sturgis wants me dead, on the orders of an angel.”
Epstein pursed his lips.
“How curious,” he said. “I wonder what Sturgis’s reward will be. Perhaps he was promised salvation.”
“For arranging the killing of a man he’s never met? If I was Sturgis, I’d want that in writing.”
“I agree,” said Epstein. “There are all kinds of angels, and I wouldn’t trust any of them. But it’s also possible that this Sturgis is of unsound mind.”
“Which is the general view, Kade’s included.”
“But not yours?”
“It might have been, were Sturgis not a member of the Colonial Club.”
“Ah, that den of robber barons.”
“Robber barons may be the least of them,” said Louis.
The Colonial Club was an outpost of wealth and privilege on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue.
It hid its secrets well, but Louis knew, from Parker’s efforts, that among its members were individuals—“Believers”—committed to the search for an entity they referred to as the Buried God.
The most dangerous of them were the Backers, wealthy men and women who, whether they truly believed in the Buried God or used it only as a flag of convenience, were engaged in the systematic corruption of private and public institutions, including local, state, and federal government.
From the wreckage of a plane in Maine’s Great North Woods, Parker, Angel, and Louis had retrieved a partial list of conspirators in said corruption.
They were fellow travelers and compromised persons, many linked to the Colonial Club, if by degrees of separation, but so far had failed to identify any of the Backers.
The Colonial was discreet to the point of paranoia; some openly acknowledged being members, but most preferred not to, and there were those who had never set foot inside the club while enjoying the associated benefits of its business and political connections.
A surveillance operation mounted on the Colonial Club, even over a period of months, might have yielded no useful information—indeed, had yielded no useful information, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted just such an operation before finally admitting failure.
But D. Francis Sturgis, of that same Colonial Club, was currently attempting to suborn an act of murder, seemingly on the instructions of an inhuman being.
Louis’s coffee arrived, brought by a middle-aged man with prematurely white hair— Reuven, presumably—who did his best not to catch Louis’s eye, even when Louis thanked him. Louis saw that the man was nervous of him, but Louis was used to people being apprehensive around him.
“Traditionally,” said Epstein, “angels have done their own dirty work, as demonstrated by the fate of the firstborn of Egypt. Why outsource?”
“It might be cheaper, like buying machine parts from China.”
“Are you suggesting that God is a capitalist? His son, for those who believe, always struck me as a committed socialist.”
“And look what happened to him,” said Louis.
“He suffered the fate of so many who speak truth to power.”
Again, Louis thought Epstein’s words were being weighed precisely before he committed to them. Louis was being tested, but to what end he had no idea. What Epstein was saying appeared to be open to more than one interpretation, but the variations were known only to him.
“We could always ask Kittim,” said Louis. “He might have an opinion.”
“Kittim? I haven’t heard that name mentioned in years.”
“We can go next door to his former cell if your memory needs refreshing. Isn’t that why you arranged to meet me here?”
“Kittim is gone.”
“Dead?”
“Gone,” Epstein repeated. “We monitored his slow decay. We wanted to see what might happen at the end.”
“And?”
“The experiment was inconclusive. There was a fire. It may have been started deliberately. Kittim—or a layer of skin over old bones, which was all that remained of him by then—went up in flames. Others burned with him.”
“Meaning?”
“His essence, like theirs, was freed. In time, if we’re right about his nature, he’ll find another host and return to torment us.”
Epstein spoke almost lightly, like someone discussing a dogged cold caller.
“I have a question,” said Louis, “about the Orensanz Center.”
“Ask.”
“Did Orensanz know about Kittim? Was he aware of the use to which his basement was being put?”
Creamy late-afternoon light spilled viscously through the ancient lace drapes, the material so thick, and its decorative holes so minute, that Louis might have been witnessing the separation of curds and whey.
Epstein dipped a finger to pull back a drape and expose the glass, as if to check the Orensanz Center was still present and nothing untoward had befallen it.
“You know, I have always considered evil to be antithetical to the creation of good art,” said Epstein.
“So there are no evil artists?”
“Art being in the eye of the creator, even more so than the observer, I might have to accept the existence of a great many,” Epstein replied.
“But I would contend that, in the main, evil produces bad art. Good art—and great art, which is far rarer—is a manifestation of the divine, from which it draws its inspiration. Evil has no such wellspring.”
“And what if you’re an artist who doesn’t believe in God?”
“All artists drink from the same well, whatever they choose to call it,” said Epstein.
“And the artist is always reaching for God, even if they do not call Him by that name, or any name beyond ‘beauty’ or ‘perfection.’ Mr Orensanz is, in my view, a very fine artist. He and his late brother Al saved the synagogue from the wrecking ball, and in return, I like to think that the spirit of the place infused Mr Orensanz’s work.
It would not have done so were he not, in addition to being a good artist, also a good man. ”
Which was, Louis accepted, as close to an answer as he was going to get.
“And now?” he asked.
“The Orensanzes’ basement holds nothing that would raise an eyebrow. It served us when we had need of it, but that need has passed.”
“Until Kittim comes back.”
Epstein shrugged. “Then we’ll find another basement, pending an alternative solution.”