“I have another gun,” he said. “It looks like I’m not the only one who hires cheap.”

He kept the muzzle trained on me for just a second longer than necessary before allowing it to disappear back into the folds of his coat. He smiled at me, then got into his car and drove away.

Murnos was right. Jackie Garner was a lunkhead, but not as big a lunkhead as the guy who employed him.

I drove back toward Scarborough, stopping off first at the Bible store. The woman behind the counter was happy to help me, and seemed only slightly disappointed when I didn’t add some little silver angel statues or a MY GUARDIAN ANGEL SAYS YOU’RE TOO CLOSE bumper sticker to my purchase of two books on the apocrypha.

“We sell a lot of those,” she told me. “There’s a heap of folks who think that the Catholic Church has been hiding something all these years.”

“What could they be hiding?” I asked, despite myself.

“I don’t know,” she said, speaking slowly as she would to an idiot child, “because it’s hidden.”

I left her to it. I sat in my car and flicked through the first of the books, but there wasn’t much that was of use to me. The second was better, as it contained the entire Book of Enoch. The names of the fallen angels appeared in Chapter 7, and, in this particular edition Ashmael’s was among them. I glanced quickly through the rest of the book, much of which seemed fairly allegorical in nature, apart from the early descriptions of the angels’ banishment and fall. According to Enoch, they were not subject to death, even after they fell, nor would they ever be forgiven for what they had done. Instead, the fallen angels set about teaching men to make swords and shields, and lecturing them on astronomy and the movements of the stars, “so that the world became altered…And men, being destroyed, cried out.” There were also some details about the Greek theologian Origen, who was anathematized for suggesting that the angels who fell were those “in whom the divine love had grown cold” and that they were then “hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men.”

I saw again the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop; the figure of the Captain; the bloody grapnel on the dead monks’ robes; and the grossest body of all-the fat, distorted creature marching by his leader’s side, all bloodied and grinning with the joy of killing.

I picked up a sandwich at Amato’s on Route 1 and filled up on gas before heading east for home. At the pump beside me, two men, one bearded and overweight, the other younger and trimmer, were consulting a map in their grimy black Peugeot. The bearded man was wearing a gray hand-knitted sweater. A clerical collar was visible at his neck. They didn’t pay me any attention, and I didn’t offer them any help.

As I drew near my house, I saw a car parked in front of the driveway. It wasn’t quite blocking me, but it would be difficult to go around it without slowing down. A man was leaning against the hood, and the weight of his body had forced the front of the car down so that the fender was on the verge of nuzzling the ground. He was taller than I by five or six inches, and massively, obesely overweight, shaped like a great egg, with a huge wad of fat at his belly that hung down over his groin and lapped at his thighs. His legs were very short, so short that his arms appeared longer than they were. His hands, far from being flabby and awkward, were slim and almost delicate, although the wrists were heavy and swollen. Taken together, the various parts of his body appeared to have been inexpertly assembled from a variety of donors, as though a young Baron Frankenstein had been let loose in his toy box with the leftovers from a massacre at Weight Watchers. He wore plain black shoes on small feet, and tan trousers that had been altered at the legs to fit, the ends folded inside and inexpertly stitched, making it possible to judge the extent of the alterations by the circle of holes halfway up his shins. The bloating at his stomach was too big, or too uncomfortable, to encompass, so the waistband of the trousers ran underneath it, thereby allowing it to hang free beneath his billowing white shirt. The shirt was buttoned almost to the neck, constricting it to such an extent that the great swelling concealing the collar was a violent reddish purple in color, like the terrible discoloration that occurs in a corpse when the blood has gathered at the extremities. I could see no hint of a jacket under his brown camel-hair overcoat. There were buttons missing from the front, possibly after some futile and ultimately doomed attempt to close it. His head balanced finely on the layered fats of his neck, narrowing from a very round skull to a small, distinctly weak chin, an inverted sparrow’s egg atop the larger ostrich egg of his body. His features should have been lost in jowls and flab, sunken into them like a child’s drawing of the man in the moon. Instead, they retained their definition, losing themselves only as they drew nearer his neck. His eyes were closer to gray than green, as though capable only of a monochrome version of human sight, and no lines extended from them. He had long eyelashes, and a thin nose that flared slightly at the end, exposing his nostrils. His mouth was small and feminine, with something almost sensual about the curvature of the lips. He had small ears with very pronounced lobes. His head was closely shaved, but his hair was very dark, so that it was possible to see the imprint of the faded widow’s peak above his forehead. His resemblance to the foul creature in the painting at Claudia Stern’s auction house was startling. This man was fatter, perhaps, and his features more worn, but it was still as though the figure with the bloodied mouth had detached himself from the canvas and assumed a new existence in this world.

I stopped my Mustang a short distance from him. I preferred not to draw up alongside him. He didn’t move as I stepped from my car. His hands remain clasped below his chest, resting upon the upper slope of his belly.

“Can I help you?” I said.

He thought about the question.

“Perhaps,” he said.

His washed-out eyes regarded me. He did not blink. I felt a further slight glimmer of recognition, this time more personal, as when one hears a song playing on the radio, one that dates from one’s earliest childhood and is recalled only on the faintest of levels.

“I don’t usually conduct business at my home,” I said.

“You don’t have an office,” he replied. “You make yourself difficult to find, for an investigator. One might almost suspect that you didn’t want to be traced.”

He moved away from his car. He was strangely graceful, seeming almost to skate across the ground rather than to walk. His hands remained clasped on his belly until he was only a couple of feet away from me, then his right hand extended toward me.

“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Brightwell. I believe we have matters to discuss.”

As his hand moved through the air, the sleeve of his coat dangled loosely, and I glimpsed the beginnings of a mark upon his arm, like twin arrowheads recently burned into the flesh. Immediately I backed away, and my hand moved for the gun beneath my jacket, but he was faster than I, so fast that I barely saw him move. One moment there was space between us, the next there was none, and he was pressed hard against me, his left hand digging into my right forearm, the nails tearing through the fabric of my coat and into my skin, drawing blood from the flesh. His face touched mine, his nose brushing against my cheek, his lips an inch from my mouth. Sweat dropped from his brow and fell upon my lips before slowly dripping onto my tongue. I tried to spit it away but it congealed inside, coating my teeth and adhering to the roof of my mouth like gum, its force so strong that it snapped my mouth closed, causing me to bite the tip of my tongue. His own lips parted, and I saw that his teeth came to slightly blunted points, as though they had gnawed too long on bone.