Archangel (32 page)

“This is it,” Mackenzie said to himself as he stepped into the Range Rover. It was morning and the mist was heavy in the tall grass. Soon
the sun would burn it off, and the heat of the day would rise in blurry sails from the baked roads. Mackenzie held up a letter he had just pulled from his mailbox and waggled it. There would be no more trouble from Madeleine. She had finally come to her senses and accepted his offer.

While he drove, Mackenzie held the steering wheel in one hand and the letter in the other. He read it in a murmur that sounded like his stomach rumbling. It was not from Madeleine. It was the letter that Gabriel had written, stating that two thousand trees had been spiked in the Algonquin. The words reached him like shouts from the page.

Mackenzie did not go straight to work. He motored up the logging road to the Algonquin, swinging his body into the turns, bony fingers in a bloodless grip upon the wheel. He passed a work crew who stopped their chain-sawing to watch him hurtle by. They ducked away from the shower of pebbles that his Range Rover kicked up. Mackenzie drove into an area of woods where the logging had not yet begun. Then he stopped the car and jumped out.

The silence of the forest swept around him.

Mackenzie made his way over the drainage ditch, clawing out handfuls of tall grass as he dragged his artificial leg down and up the embankment. He needed to be alone and it had been a long time since he’d walked among the trees. He had grown used to seeing the forest as a single thing, a mass, but now suddenly the details of it made him dizzy. The vast complexity of each branch, the texture of the bark and the way, when he bent down and dug his hands into the soft earth, he could see how generations of pine needles had become the black soil. He felt the coolness of the air beneath the sheltering trees. He stumped back to the car. He did not want to see anymore. I’m becoming my own enemy, he thought.

Back inside the Range Rover, Mackenzie turned on the engine and then the air-conditioning and the radio. He looked at the letter again, staring so hard at the words that they seemed to scatter across the page. He felt so certain that it was Madeleine who had sent it, or who had caused it to be sent, that he decided he would not even bother handing it in to the police. In fact, he thought, considering what I am about to do, it’s best if Dodge doesn’t see this letter.

Mackenzie began to feel very tired. He didn’t have the strength he
used to have. Voices in his head asked if he shouldn’t just give in. You could stand to lose just once, the voices told him. For every person who says publicly they do not like what you’re doing to the Algonquin, there are fifty who think the same but do not speak. There’s some sense to what the letter says—what use was a clear-cut wilderness? What right do you have to cut so far beyond the point of the forest’s recovery? These forgiving, soft-voiced reasons bulged into his head like the ballooning veins of an aneurysm.

Mackenzie heaved them aside. He wiped away all thoughts of weakness. Nothing more would be left to chance. He picked up his car phone and put a call through to American Airlines. He booked himself on a plane to New York, leaving from Portland the next morning. As he spoke to the booking agent, the phone tucked under his chin, he tore Gabriel’s letter into so many pieces that when he let them go out the window, the shreds slipped from his hands like the petals of a crushed white flower.

Half a mile up the road, Dodge and Coltrane stepped out from the canopy of trees. They had been patrolling the woods since well before sunrise. Their clothes were dusted white and the dust was in the corners of their eyes and the corners of their mouths and when they swallowed, they could taste it. Their canteens were empty. Pine needles had gone down their collars and were scratchy between their bare necks and their shirts. Everywhere they went in the Algonquin, through each dark stand of pine, they felt as if they were being watched.

Mackenzie’s Range Rover came rumbling toward them, sending up dust so thick it seemed to erase everything it passed. The Range Rover drew alongside them. Mackenzie powered down his window and stuck his head out. The dust cloud billowed past him and filtered into the trees. “Gentlemen!” he called. “How goes the war?”

Dodge and Coltrane squinted at the man. The cheerfulness in Mackenzie’s voice was something they had not heard since before Pfeiffer’s death and not very often before that.

“We found another bunch of spiked trees, sir.” Coltrane found it difficult to speak with all the dust clogged in his windpipe. He reached instinctively for his canteen, but then remembered it was empty. His fingers glanced off the metal.

“Well.” Mackenzie grinned. “Can’t get them all.”

“We’ll be continuing the patrol later this afternoon,” Dodge said, to fend off the charge of inefficiency he felt sure was coming.

“Right.” Mackenzie nodded. He barely seemed interested. “Truly, gentlemen”—he scanned them both with his pale-blue eyes—“you don’t have a chance of finding these people, do you?”

Coltrane stepped forward, boots shuffling in the dirt. “They’ll slip up sooner or later. Alls we got to do is catch one of them.”

“How many of them do you think there are?”

“We don’t know,” Dodge said. “Do you?”

“No, and that’s my point. We know nothing about them. The only suspect you had was that guy who took over from Benny Mott.”

“We kept an eye on him.” Dodge made his case. “He doesn’t go out at night. He doesn’t leave town. I talked to him and he didn’t seem nervous. I even searched the depot when he wasn’t there. There’s nothing suspicious.”

“Has he been doing his job?”

“According to the comptroller in St. Johns, he’s been doing as good as Mott.”

“Mott.” Mackenzie curled his lips around the word as if it were an obscenity. It was nothing personal. At that moment, he just needed to insult someone. “Anyway,” Mackenzie said, “that’s a dead lead.”

“We think it’s more likely to be someone local. Someone who knows the woods.” Coltrane needed to rest. It had been a long day. He wanted to sit down right where he was and let Dodge and Mackenzie carry on the conversation without him.

“What about Lazarus? He hates everybody.” Mackenzie smiled at his own suggestion—the idea of Booker Lazarus running through the woods.

Dodge breathed out sharply through his nose. He knew Mackenzie was just making a joke of it. “Lazarus doesn’t have the strength to hammer in even one of those nails.”

Mackenzie nodded, grinning. “You want a ride back to your car?” Mackenzie made the offer because he felt he had to, and he let his voice show it.

“No, sir.” Dodge shook his head.

When the Range Rover had gone and its dust was settling, Coltrane turned to Dodge. “How come you didn’t take the ride? It’s a mile and a half to the patrol car.”

“I don’t want to ride with him. Do you?”

“I guess not.” The sun had gone behind a cloud. In the softer light, Coltrane let the muscles around his eyes relax. Sweat-fused dust crumbled from his crow’s-feet wrinkles.

“I tell you, Victor, we’re fighting on the wrong damn side this time.” Dodge strode off down the road.

Coltrane shuffled after him through the dust. He had never heard such anger in Dodge’s voice. He knew Dodge was right. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

At two in the morning, Mackenzie lay restless on his bed. It was always at night that doubt would creep around him. He thought of what Alicia had said about Ungaro. Then he thought about his father, and wondered what the old man would have done.

Abraham Mackenzie had been a compact little man, creaky-boned in winter, looking half-dehydrated and oiling himself each night like the Tin Woodsman in
The Wizard of Oz
with the heavy cream he drank before he went to bed. The man had lived by codes that made no sense to anyone but him, harsh rules with penalties for breaking them. Abraham never taught these rules. He just pointed out when they had been broken. Years after Abraham’s death, Mackenzie would hear one of these maxims and cringe.

Of all the symbols of his father’s life, none had frightened Mackenzie more than the image of the blood eagle. Abraham invoked this image as a threat against himself, like someone drawing down a curse, whenever his business was failing. He said it came from the time of the Vikings. “They chose their leaders for many reasons,” Abraham told Mackenzie, “but the greatest reason was for their luck. And when the luck ran out, they turned the old leaders into blood eagles.” That was all he would say about it.

Mackenzie imagined a mythic red bird, painting the clouds scarlet as it flew by. How a man could be turned into this, he had no idea. This bird soared through Mackenzie’s dreams, with the same cold eyes and hard, hooked nose as his father.

Years after Abraham’s death, he had asked an old college friend who was teaching Norse history at the University of Minnesota to find out the meaning of the blood eagle. What the friend told him was
far worse than Mackenzie had imagined. As a punishment for failure, the Vikings would carve two gashes into a man’s back. Then his lungs were pulled through the gashes, to flap like red wings as his last breaths carried him off to death.

Mackenzie remembered the day his father handed over the company. It was one week before the old man died. He had walked into his father’s study with a briefcase, ready to take the company’s insurance documents away with him. It was Indian summer. The cold had come and the maple leaves had turned all shades of red and amber and marmalade and gold. Then the chill subsided for a day, the last gasp of warm air before hard winter set in. Abraham sat at his desk in the pale sunlight, which ran like water into the crystal decanters racked up on the mantelpiece. Small copper plates hung by chains around the necks of the bottles, listing the names of the drinks. The crystal contained the light, and compressed it and then threw it from the angled sides in rainbows. The square Seth Thomas clock standing alongside the decanters struck the half hour with delicate chimes, as if the crystal itself were ringing.

Mackenzie had never seen his father so tired. He had the white-faced look of an old golden retriever. Now that his work was over, age had flooded through and overtaken him. The years of work had ground him down until he was all foggy like a piece of sea glass. “Wealth dies,” he said. “People die. But the only thing that never dies is the judgment on how a person has spent his life.” The man’s hair hung illuminated like some shabby halo around his skull. His hands rested on the blotter of the desk in front of him, fingers crooked with age. “So how do you judge me now?”

Mackenzie had no answer. He had never thought to judge his father. Mackenzie had always assumed it was himself who was being judged.

All night Mackenzie could not sleep. He lay there watching the lace curtains billow in the breeze that came down off the mountain, like the drifting veils of ghosts come to his window. He kept thinking of the blood eagle. The verdict on each person dead.

CHAPTER 11

O
n a humid July afternoon in New York City, Mackenzie walked into the air-conditioned chill of the Yale Club, across the street from Grand Central Station. He was there to meet Sal Ungaro. He went up a wide staircase, past a rail of the fence that used to ring the old Yale campus, to the large sitting room filled with the sound of rustling newspapers. The huge, yellow-curtained windows did not let in much light. The massive building opposite cut out the sun.

Mackenzie found himself a chair and sat down. He set his trench-coat in the chair beside him. It was a deep leather chair with brass rivets and a smell of tobacco smoke sunk into the hide. After a few minutes, a man at the other end of the room stopped reading the pink pages of a
Wall Street Journal
and walked over to Mackenzie, not smiling, trenchcoat slung over his arm.

Mackenzie thought it was typical of Ungaro to have arrived early. It was all about having the edge. Mackenzie could not recall a meeting with Ungaro, not a conversation or a meal or a joke told or a glance
by which Ungaro did not try to gain an edge. Salvatore Ungaro had been at Yale with Mackenzie. He was a thick-necked man with heavy hands. His face was round and made rounder by the fact that he was bald. His ears were small and set back against his head like those of an angry cat. He was perpetually tanned, which almost but not quite hid the dark smudges below his eyes. They gave him the look of a man who never slept. He wore spread-collar Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties and Lobb shoes. His suits were double-breasted Gieves custom-mades, so perfectly fitted that most men who approached him immediately began to feel uncomfortable in their own clothes. It was the way Ungaro walked that let him down. He loped about as awkwardly as the artificial-legged Mackenzie. Ungaro was not muscular or tall. He had been forced at an early age to compensate for his lack of physical strength by being vicious.