City Of Lies
Authors: R.J. Ellory
Praise for R. J. Ellory
CITY OF LIES
‘Ellory writes taut, muscular prose that at its best is almost poetic . . .
City of Lies
is a tense and pacy thriller taking the reader into a world of secrets, betrayal and revenge’
Yorkshire Post
‘A gripping thriller with many twists and turns’
Woman’s Weekly
CANDLEMOTH
‘An ambitious first novel . . . incisive, often beautiful writing’
The Times
‘You know you’re on to something from the opening line . . . compelling, insightful, moving and extremely powerful’
Sydney Morning Herald
GHOSTHEART
‘This compelling novel, with its shock dénouement, is both beautifully written and skilfully crafted and confirms Ellory as one of crime fiction’s new stars’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Genuinely heartbreaking . . . an extremely vivid, moving picture of the human condition,
Ghostheart
is a superb tale of tragedy and revenge’
Big Issue
A QUIET VENDETTA
‘With exquisite pace and perfect timing, R. J. Ellory has given us a piercing assessment of the nature of love, loyalty and obsessive revenge, not to mention a deep understanding of la cosa nostra’
Guardian
‘A sprawling masterpiece covering 50 years of the American dream gone sour . . . [A] striking novel that brings to mind the best of James Ellroy’
Good Book Guide
A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS
‘
A Quiet Belief in Angels
is a beautiful and haunting book. This is a tour de force from R. J. Ellory’
Michael Connelly
‘This is compelling, unputdownable thriller writing of the very highest order’
Guardian
‘Once again R. J. Ellory shows off his special talents . . . it confirms his place in the top flight of crime writing’
Sunday Telegraph
R.J. Ellory is the bestselling author of numerous novels.
A Quiet Belief in Angels
, a Richard & Judy Book Club selection in 2008, was shortlisted for the Barry Award, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers’ Prize and was winner of the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide. R.J. Ellory currently lives in England.
By R. J. Ellory
Candlemoth
Ghostheart
A Quiet Vendetta
City of Lies
A Quiet Belief in Angels
R. J. ELLORY
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © R. J. Ellory Publications Ltd 2006
The moral right of R.J. Ellory to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 2429 0
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
Dedicated to
Jimmy the Saint
Frank White
Cody Jarrett
Johnny Rocco
Tom Reagan
Jimmy Conway
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Jon: editor extraordinaire, partner-in-crime.
To Genevieve and Juliet; everyone at Orion.
To Euan: challenging my prose, preserving my humour.
To Robyn: incisive, endlessly patient.
To my brother, Guy; my son, Ryan.
To my wife: the only woman who told me how to behave and got away with it.
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.
Le Corbusier
Always you must play yourself. But it will be an infinite variety.
Constantin Stanislavski –
An Actor Prepares
Old man crawled out of the doorway on his hands and knees. Crawled out like a dog.
Sound from his mouth almost inhuman, face all twisted, like someone had taken hold of his hair and screwed his features a few inches backwards.
Blood on his hands, on the sidewalk. Blood on his knees. Made it to the kerb and then collapsed forward.
Smell in the air like snow, cool and crisp.
Later, people would be asked what they remembered most clearly, and all of them – one for one and without exception – would speak about the blood.
Snow didn’t come. Not that night. Would come a few days later perhaps, maybe in time for Christmas.
Had it come there would have been blood in that snow, spooling around the old man as he lay there, twitching and mouthing while cabs flew by and people went from one part of their lives to yet another; while New York made it safely out of one long day and hoped the next would be somehow better.
Such is the way of the world
some would say, grateful for the fact that it had not been them, had not in fact been anyone they knew – and that, if nothing else, was some small saving grace.
People were stabbed and shot, strangled, burned, drowned and hung; people were killed in automobile accidents, in freak twists of nature; people walked from their houses every day believing that it would be a day no different from any other. But it was.
The old man lay on the sidewalk until someone called the police. An ambulance came; police helped the medics put the old man on a stretcher and lift him in back of the vehicle.
‘He try to stop the guy with the gun,’ a Korean man told the officer after the ambulance had peeled away, cherry-bar flashing,
lights ablaze. It was a Sunday evening; the traffic was as quiet as it would get.
‘Who the hell are you?’ the officer said.
‘I own liquor store.’
‘Liquor store? What liquor store?’
‘Liquor store down there.’ The man pointed. ‘Some guy robbing the store . . . some guy with a gun, and the old man went for him—’
‘The old man tried to stop a guy robbing your store?’ the officer asked.
‘He did . . . guy was trying to rob the store. He had gun. He was pointing gun at my wife, and then old man come down the aisle and went for the guy. Guy got real scared and shot the old man. Don’t think he mean to shoot anyone, but old man scared him and the guy lost it.’
‘And where did the guy go?’
‘Took off down the street.’
The officer looked down the street as if such a thing would serve a purpose. ‘He went that way?’
The man nodded. ‘Yes, that way.’
‘You better come with me then . . . you better come to the precinct and make a statement. You could look at some pictures and see if you recognize him.’
‘Who?’
‘The one with the gun . . . the one who tried to rob you.’
‘Oh,’ the store owner said. ‘I thought you mean old man.’ The officer shook his head. Sometimes he wondered about people, how they managed to make it through each day.
The owner’s wife came down from the liquor store later, maybe half an hour or so. She carried a bucket, hot soapy water inside, in her hand a mop. She cleaned down the sidewalk, sluiced the blood into the gutter, and she too thought
such is the way of the world
, perhaps those words exactly, perhaps something close. She was Korean. She had a short name, more consonants than vowels, which folks kept mispronouncing, so she called herself Kim. Kim was easy to remember, easier to say. She had come to America with every intention of being nothing but herself. Eleven years on and she was called Kim and standing on the sidewalk washing blood into the street from some old
man who came to buy his wine each Sunday, an old man who’d tried to help them.
And then it was kind of forgotten, because in and of itself such an event was of no great moment.
This was New York after all. Used to be Sinatra’s town. Now it belonged to
Sex and the City
and Woody Allen. Shit like this went down each and every day, each and every way. People wrote about this place – people like Roth and Auster, Selby and Styron. This was the center of the world, a microcosm that represented all that was senseless and beautiful about the world.
A place where someone could get shot for no reason; where a woman called Kim could wash blood into the gutter with no greater ceremony than if it were spilled diesel wine; where the reasons to live – love and money, perhaps the hope of something better – were indiscernible from the reasons to die. Blessed and brave, impassioned, afflicted, forever believing in fortune, a million lives crossing a million lives more, and all of them interwoven until the seams that lay between them could no longer be defined.
Sunday evening, mid-December; they rushed the old man to St Vincent’s and, despite knowing nothing of his life, not even his name, they all – the liquor store owner, his wife, the police officer, the medics in the Blue Cross ambulance . . . all of them hoped and prayed and willed that he would live.