Garcia did not know if the fat man’s name was really Brightwell. In truth, Garcia did not care. He trusted Brightwell’s judgment, and was grateful to him for finding him, for bringing him to this great city once Garcia had honed his abilities to Brightwell’s satisfaction, and for giving him a place in which to work and to pursue his obsessions. Brightwell, in turn, had found in Garcia a willing convert to his convictions. Garcia had merely absorbed them into his own belief system, relegating other deities where necessary, or dispensing with them entirely if they conflicted utterly with the new, compelling vision of the world-both this world, and the world below-presented to him by Brightwell.

Garcia was concerned at the wisdom of not intervening once they saw the three men approach the pimp G-Mack, but he would make no move unless Brightwell moved first. They had just been a little too late. Minutes earlier, and the pimp would have been dead by the time these strangers had found him.

As Garcia watched, two of the men took G-Mack by the arms and led him from his car. The third man seemed about to follow, then stopped. He scanned the alleyway, his gaze resting for a moment on the shadows that obscured Garcia, then moved on, his head tilting back as he took in the buildings that surrounded him, with their filthy windows and their battered fire escapes. After a minute had elapsed, he followed his companions from the alley, but he kept his back to them, retreating from the lot, his eyes scanning the dirty windows as though aware of the hostile presence concealed behind them.

Brightwell had decided to kill them. He would follow the four men, then he and Garcia would slaughter them and dispose of them. He did not fear them, even the black man who moved so quickly and had an air of lethality about him. If it were done swiftly and cleanly, then the consequences would be limited.

Brightwell was standing in the grimy hallway of an apartment block, close by the entrance to the fire escape, where a single yellowed window looked down upon the alley below. He had taken the precaution of removing the starter from the fluorescent light behind him, so that he might not be seen if for any reason the lights were switched on. He was about to turn away from the window when the white man in the dark jacket, whose back had been to Brightwell for the duration of their confrontation with G-Mack, turned and scanned the windows. As his gaze fell upon Brightwell’s hiding place, Brightwell felt something constrict in his throat. He took a step closer to the window, his right hand instinctively reaching out and touching the glass, his fingertips resting against the figure of the man below. Memories surged through his brain: memories of falling, fire, despair, wrath.

Memories of betrayal.

Now the man in the alley was backing away, as though he too sensed something hostile, a presence that was both unknown yet familiar to him. His eyes continued to search the windows above, seeking any sign of movement, any indication of the source of what he sensed within himself. Then he disappeared at last from Brightwell’s sight, but the fat man did not move. Instead, he closed his eyes and released a trembling breath, all thoughts of killing banished from his mind. What had so long evaded him was now unexpectedly, joyously revealed.

We have found you at last, he thought.

You are discovered.

As I retreated down the alleyway, I tried to put a name on what I had felt as I stared at the window. The sense of being watched was strong from the moment that we confronted G-Mack, but I was unable to detect any obvious signs of surveillance. We were surrounded by brownstones and warehouses, and any one of them could have concealed a watcher, maybe just a curious neighbor or even a whore and her john on their way to a slightly pricier assignation in a rundown apartment, pausing briefly to take in the men in the alleyway before proceeding on their way, conscious always that time was money and the demands of the flesh were pressing.

It was only when Angel and Louis began moving G-Mack, and I had a moment to scan the windows one last time, that the prickling began at the base of my neck. I was conscious of a disturbance in the night, as though a silent explosion had occurred somewhere in the distance and the shock waves were approaching the place in which I stood. A great force seemed to rush toward me, and I half expected to see a shimmering in the air as the circle widened, churning garbage and scattering discarded newspapers as it came. My attention focused on one particular window on the fourth floor of an old brownstone, a fire door close by leading to a rusted fire escape. The window was dark, but I thought for a moment that I saw a shifting against the glass, black momentarily giving way to gray at the center. Buried memories, both alien to me yet almost familiar, tried to emerge from my unconscious. I sensed them there, moving like worms beneath frozen earth or like parasites under the skin, desperately seeking to break through and expose themselves to the light. I heard a terrible howling, and it was as if voices were raised in rage and despair, descending from some great height, twisting and tumbling through the air, their cries distorting and fading as they fell. I was among them, jostled by the flailing of my brothers, hands striking me, nails tearing in a desperate attempt to arrest the descent. There was fear in me, and regret, but more than anything else I was filled with a dreadful sense of loss. Something indescribably precious had been taken from me, and I would never see it again.

And we were burning. We were all burning.

Then this half-remembered, half-created past, this phantasm from my mind, found itself bound up with real loss, for the pain brought back the deaths of my wife and my daughter and the emptiness that their passing had left inside. And yet the torment that I had endured on the night that they were taken from me, and the awful, debilitating pain that followed, seemed somehow less than what I now felt in the alleyway, the footsteps of my friends slowly growing distant, the protestations of the doomed man between them fading away. There was only the howling, and the emptiness, and the figure lost behind yellowed glass, reaching out to me. Something cold touched my cheek, like the unwanted caress of a lover once cherished and now rejected. I drew back from it, and thought that my response had somehow generated a reaction in the hidden figure at the window. I sensed its surprise at my presence mutate into manifest hostility, and I thought that I had never before been in proximity to such rage. Any impulse I had to ascend to the upper floor of the building immediately disappeared. I wanted to flee, to run and hide and reinvent myself somewhere far away, to cloak myself in a new identity and lie low in the hope that they would not track me down.

They.

He.

It.

How did I know this?

And as I moved slowly away, following Angel and Louis to the busy streets beyond, a voice that was once like mine spoke words that I did not understand. It said:

You are discovered.

We have found you again.

Louis was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Lexus when I reached them. Angel was in the back beside G-Mack, who sat sullen and hunched, sniffing gently through his ruined nose. Before I got in beside Louis, I took a pair of cuffs from my jacket pocket and told G-Mack to attach one cuff to his right wrist and the other to the armrest of the door. When he had done so, and his right arm was crossed awkwardly over his body, I got in the car and we drove toward Brooklyn. Louis stole a glance at me.

“Everything okay back there?”

I looked over my shoulder at G-Mack, but he appeared lost in his own misery and hurt.