City Of Lies Read online

  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.

  www.rjellory.com

  By R. J. Ellory

  Candlemoth

  Ghostheart

  A Quiet Vendetta

  City of Lies

  A Quiet Belief in Angels

  City of Lies

  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

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Dedicated to

  Jimmy the Saint

  Frank White

  Cody Jarrett

  Johnny Rocco

  Tom Reagan

  Jimmy Conway

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Praise

  About the Author

  By R. J. Ellory

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Epilogue

  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

  ONE

  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 – on
e 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.

  Such was human nature; such was the way of the world.

  An hour later, maybe less. Middle-aged man – greying hair, white shirt, woven silk tie, features made of character and muscular tension – stands in front of a desk. Replaces the phone in its cradle. Looks away towards the window of the room, a window that overlooks the street from where the sound of traffic, making its way from wherever to someplace else, is like staggered breathing.

  Middle-aged man turns and looks across the desk at a younger woman – dark hair, beautiful yes, no doubt about it, but a ghost within her features that speaks of some internal disquiet.

  ‘They shot Edward,’ the man says. His voice is matter-of-fact and businesslike, almost as if such news has been expected.

  Sharp intake of breath. ‘Who? Who shot him? Is he okay?’ The woman, name of Cathy Hollander, starts to rise from her chair.

  The man raises his hand and she pauses. ‘We don’t know anything,’ he says. ‘Maybe something direct, maybe simple bad luck. Go get Charlie Beck and Joe Koenig. I have to make some calls. I have to get someone here—’

  ‘Someone?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I have to get his son from Miami—’

  She frowns, shakes her head. ‘His son? What the fuck are you talking about? Edward has a son?’

  The man, goes by the name of Walt Freiberg, nods his head slowly and closes his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says, his voice almost a whisper, ‘he has a son.’

  ‘I didn’t know—’ Cathy starts.

  Freiberg lifts the receiver and dials a number. ‘You didn’t know he had a son? I wouldn’t feel left out sweetheart . . . neither did the rest of the world.’

  The phone connects at the other end of the line.

  Walt Freiberg smiles. ‘Evelyn? It’s Walter . . . long time, no see. Calling because I need you to do something for me.’

  TWO

  So this – amongst so many other things – was the real deal, the hard-bitten truth: when he was drunk he believed in God.

  But these days John Harper didn’t drink so often, and thus his moments of faith were few and far between. Harper was one of the very fortunate who’d experienced the moment of special revelation: sleep off the drunk and the debt was still owed; the girlfriend still pregnant; the wife knew you’d walked out on her for a twenty-two-year-old Thai girl with universal joints for hips. The fan was still spinning, the crap still airborne six ways to Christmas. Life turns a corner, and all of a sudden your soundtrack plays in a minor key.

  And so John Harper stopped drinking, and therefore stopped believing in God.

  But before that: raw-faced and noisy; thundering migraines surrendering to nothing but a combination of Jack Daniels and Darvon Complex; fits of anger, more often than not directed towards himself; a frustrated man; a man of words bound within the limits of a stunted imagination. Ate too little – corn-dogs and cinnamon cake and sometimes a cheeseburger from Wendy’s or Sambo’s; late-night shuffles through the kitchen searching out Ring-Dings and handfuls of dry Froot Loops, making inhuman sounds, hands shaking, wondering when the muse would come back.

  Because John Harper wrote a book one time; called it Depth of Fingerprints; sold it for twelve thousand dollars up-front to a smalltime publishing house in Miami. Optioned for film; film was never made. Helluva story, even posted a squib in the Herald Tribune which told him he had a future if he kept his narrative dry and his prose succinct. That had been eight years before. Started a dozen things since; finished nothing.

  Lived in
Miami now. Had headed south from New York in the hope of inspiration and wound up staying, and like someone once said: Miami was a noise, a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the Everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.

  Miami was a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that pointed accusingly at something that was altogether not to blame. And never had been. And never would be.

  Miami was a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.

  But home is where the heart is.

  John Harper’s heart was taken in Miami, and to date – as far as he knew – it had never been returned.

  Pushed his pen nevertheless; wrote inches for the Herald, and sometimes those inches were pressed out once more for the Key West Citizen, The Keynoter, Island Life and The Navigator. John Harper wrote human interest squibs about poisonwood and pigeon plum and strangler fig and gumbo limbo in Lignumvitae Key State Botanical; about shark sightings and shark tournaments; about the homes of Tennessee Williams and Papa Hemingway on Key West; about all manner of minutiae that swallowed the attention for a heartbeat and was just as soon forgotten.

  Greyhound Bus made eight stops between Miami and Key West. Down through Islamorada, Key Largo, Marathon and Grassy Key; two routes – one from the Florida Turnpike which wound up in Homestead, the other along 1-95 which became US 1 at the southern end of Miami. Both roads hit the Overseas Highway. Both roads he had travelled. And there was something about the islands – all thirty-one punctuations of limestone and the eight hundred uninhabited islands that surrounded them – that forever gripped his imagination. Here, on this awkward peninsula of hope, he believed himself a million miles from the disappointment of New York. South and east was the Atlantic, west was the Gulf of Mexico; forty-two bridges, dozens of causeways; New England and Caribbean architecture – gingerbread verandas, widow’s walks, wrought-iron balconies, population of twenty-five thousand, a million tourists a year. John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park with its starfish and lobsters, its sponges and sea cucumbers, its stingrays, barracuda, crabs and angel fish. And then there was Key Largo Dry Rocks, the Bronze Christ of the Deep Statue, shoals of blackfin tuna, the waves of frigate birds overhead that would tell you when the fish were running. And the smell, the once-in-a-lifetime smell of salt, seaweed, fish and marsh, mangrove swamps and rocks; the memory of pirates and Ponce de Leon, the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut.