Angels of Detroit Read online

  The guys who’d readied the house hadn’t bothered to paper the upstairs windows. From the second floor, Dobbs could see for miles. To the south were the warehouses, the importers and exporters. Beyond them, the neat and tidy downtown, the slim pocket of tourist attractions. In every other direction stretched the emptiness, interrupted only occasionally by a house or a distant smokestack.

  What stood out most to him, though, were the trees. Some, he could tell, had been anchored there for decades, old and barnacled, scraped away by tire swings. But it was the new trees that surprised him, saplings springing up even from cracks in the sidewalk.

  For several minutes he’d been standing there, studying it all, when suddenly he was startled by a rustling in a thicket of undergrowth at the corner. At first there was nothing to see but a ghostly shaking in the web of branches. But then a white beak poked out, set upon a green head half-hidden behind a red eye mask. The neck that followed ended in a thick white ring. The body was a gradient of golden russet brown, stippled with white and black spots. The bird stepped cautiously out into the dew, and Dobbs watched it stroll, almost skipping, to the curb, dragging a tail almost as long as its body. A grouse? A pheasant?

  What else was out there?

  He ate the last of his food, half a granola bar and two-thirds of a spoonful of peanut butter. He ran his finger inside the jar.

  And he waited. It was spring, and the days kept getting longer. Nightfall seemed to take forever to come.

  §

  He started with a mattress, a small table, a chair. An abandoned city was an easy place to find cast-offs. Dobbs carried things back one at a time, going out only at night. It wasn’t hard to avoid getting spotlit by streetlights. Most of them didn’t work. There was the occasional shadow crossing a distant intersection, tinted cars shaken by their stereos. But mostly it was dogs he saw roving the empty streets, many of them too hungry even to bark.

  Late one night, several miles from the house, Dobbs came across a whitewashed brick building. Out front there was a display window, still intact, behind a grille of steel bars. Books. They’d been sitting there so long in the sunlight, he had to squint to read the bleached titles: gardening manuals, Beat poets, a thick, unjacketed tome by Marx. The placard in the window said CLOSED, but Dobbs could see a faint light burning somewhere deep inside.

  A black van was parked at the curb, a hi-top conversion job with chrome rims and a fresh coat of wax. Everything on it shone, except for a small, peeling bumper sticker pasted in the rear window. BRICOLEUR, it said in a typewriter-like script set beside a crude sketch of an ordinary office stapler. No particular interest in being understood.

  Dobbs was standing up on his toes, attempting to peer into the van’s rear window, when the door to the bookstore opened. He ducked, slinking across the dark street just in time.

  They emerged from the bookstore with the glazed disorientation of an audience strolling out into the falling dusk after a long matinee. There were three of them at first, an odd mix. There was a tall, thin blonde who looked pale and fragile, except for the thick, black strokes she’d painted on her lips, as if she had something to prove. The brunette stood two heads shorter. Stepping onto the sidewalk, she raised the hood on her sweatshirt, framing a face worthy of Japanese anime: tiny, doll-like nose and mouth little more than smudges under the huge reflecting pools she had for eyes.

  The black man between them was big but unimposing, a softness to his movements and gestures. The way he matched his strides to theirs, he and the girls were friends but nothing more.

  Two more men appeared in the doorway half a minute later. There was a second black guy—black from his sneakers to his stocking cap, too. A revolutionary look suited to Beats and Marx. The white guy behind him looked like a reader of neither. He was tall and blond and prep-school handsome, his hair artfully mussed. His torn, faded jeans looked like the kind that cost three hundred dollars a pair.

  The revolutionary flipped through a key ring, looking for the one that would lock the steel accordion security gate.

  They seemed too old to be college students. Too aimless to be working. To quiet to be looking for trouble.

  The five of them lingered for a moment beside their van, the Scooby-Doo gang gone underground. Dobbs could hear them talking, saying their goodbyes. Then three of them climbed into the van and drove away. But the anime girl and the revolutionary were walking. Dobbs was too far away to hear much of what they were saying. The woman repeated the name Myles. Every sentence she spoke either began or ended with his name. She used it exhaustedly, sighing. She kept stabbing her finger back in the direction of the bookstore, even once it was well behind them. She seemed to be complaining that Myles had said or done something back there to upset her. Myles in turn called her McGee, speaking the name as though it belonged to a sullen child.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Myles kept repeating. “Nothing to worry about.”

  They walked for at least a mile. When they finally stopped, they stood in front of a brick building with a loading dock overlooking a gravel lot. They approached the overhead door, and Myles unlocked it. A few seconds later two cloudy second-story windows lit up.

  Not homey, Dobbs decided, but it seemed it was there they’d spend the night.

  He was back at the house just before dawn. He’d been walking all night, and he couldn’t walk anymore. He sat down on the mattress, head against the wall, eyes as wide as he could make them. He’d gone two days without sleep. He thought he had it in him to manage two more.

  He reached into his bag, hoping there might be something in there he could eat, something he’d forgotten. But the bag was empty, except for a square of brown paper that hadn’t been there before.

  Stop fucking around, it said. Get to work.

  I know what I’m doing, he said aloud to the empty house. Everything’s under control.

  He wished he could talk to Sergio directly, reassure him. I still have what it takes.

  §

  The door to the bookstore was propped open with a fat hardcover, the spine separated, the dust jacket mottled with rain: The Encyclopedia of Urban Architectural Design.

  The place was a front for something, he’d figured, waiting at the house for night to return. A bookstore with nothing else around for miles? But a front for what?

  Once inside, he was surprised to discover the place really was a bookstore after all. Along the baseboard, vertical stacks of faded books at staggered heights created a miniature skyline sprinkled evenly with dust. The case just inside the door was jammed floor to ceiling with history books. The light was poor and oddly brownish, as if it were rising up from the dirty floor. After a few steps, another tall, unsteady bookcase appeared on his right, and he had to inhale to squeeze through the narrow passage.

  At the other end of the passage, the shop opened up slightly. Somewhere across the store Dobbs heard voices. Men’s voices. Neither one seemed to fit the group from the night before.

  Soon several more long bookcases appeared on Dobbs’s right, leading off into the shadows. It was as if they’d been set up to make it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. He turned left for no other reason than that the aisle was the most passable. But the window turned out to be another dead end.

  The voices had grown more audible, but Dobbs still wasn’t even sure where they were coming from. Above his head ran a length of pipe wearing a furry coat of cobwebs and dust. A security camera peered down at him from the corner. Cameras, for used books?

  He’d just come to another dead end when he located the voices somewhere around the corner.

  “Risky.” The man seemed to be straining to keep his voice down.

  “What’d you expect?” the second man said.

  “I don’t know,” said the first. “I just—”

  The second man sighed. “We’ve talked about this a million times.”

  Dobbs was sure now that neither man had been among the ones he’d seen the night before. Th
ey sounded older, too eager not to be overheard.

  He started off in the other direction. Around the bend he came upon a wooden desk and chair. And there was a side table supporting a primitive cash register. Beside it, a tiny flower-patterned teacup in a matching saucer let off a steadily climbing twist of steam. He thought of the blonde and the girl with anime eyes, and he wondered which of them the cup belonged to. The china was delicate, like the blonde. But there was no trace of her dark lipstick on the rim.

  The desk was cluttered with books and paper, a stack of blotchy flyers dangling over one edge: Bricoleur @ The Woodshed. No cover. All ages. Video premiere. Music + Revolution. And the same odd line drawing of a stapler that he’d seen on the van’s bumper sticker, no less obscure here.

  Dobbs folded a copy of the flyer into his pocket. Then he turned to go. But that was the moment the two men appeared in front of him, each carrying an armful of books. They were both middle-aged. The black man wore some sort of uniform: dark blue pants and a matching shirt. The photo badge clipped to his pocket said his name was Darius. The Hispanic man was stocky, with long hair pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were spotted with paint and stain, and his dry, coarse hands were nicked and scraped.

  “You surprised me,” Dobbs said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  The Hispanic man looked around. “Do you work here?”

  Dobbs lowered himself into the chair behind the desk. “Find everything you were looking for?”

  The two men set their books down on top of the posters. As if he’d been doing it all his life, Dobbs folded back the covers. The prices were penciled in the top corner of the first page, as always. The two men watched in silence as he tried to add up the numbers.

  Wiring. Farming. Home electronics. “You must be pretty handy,” Dobbs said.

  Darius had a look on his face like he’d been caught with a stack of porn.

  “How much?” the Hispanic guy said.

  At the bottom of the pile, unrelated to any of the rest, was a guidebook to Mexico, ten years out of date. “Beautiful country,” Dobbs said.

  The Hispanic man’s face grew taut.

  “For you two,” Dobbs said, “an even twenty.”

  Each man fished ten bucks from his pocket.

  The Hispanic guy picked up the books and turned away in silence, taking a step in the direction of what Dobbs hoped was the exit. The black man started to do the same, but at the last moment he paused, catching a glimpse of something over his shoulder. “Do you play?”

  Following Darius’s finger, Dobbs saw an old Fender propped up on a chair, its red finish crosshatched with scratches.

  “I’m learning.”

  “I played once,” the black man said. “I was pretty good.”

  “Darius!” the other yelled.

  Darius might have gone on, but he saw his partner’s jaw rocking in its socket. “I’ll see you,” he said.

  Dobbs gave a broken wave. “Come again.”

  As soon as they were out of sight, Dobbs put one of the tens on top of the register. The other, his commission, he put in his pocket.

  In his dream that morning, the two men from the bookstore came to him dressed as generals, donning pointed hats and sabers. Even without a weapon of his own, Dobbs knocked them off their horses, before single-handedly taking on their armies. But then why, when he woke up in the middle of the afternoon, did he feel so afraid?

  Two

  Everything on the monitors was gray: the blacks were a dark charcoal gray; the whites were like newspaper pages. The walls of bookcases appeared as undifferentiated smudges of darkness. Because of its size, the china cup was only a blur against the dark desktop, but Myles knew it was there. He’d dropped the tea bag in just moments before the meeting started, and then he’d forgotten it. All the way up the stairs and across the store—there was no way for him to get it now. And anyway the tea would be too bitter. He liked two minutes of steeping, no more, no less, with water just shy of boiling.

  “Myles,” McGee said. “Is there anything you want to add?”

  Myles turned his head at the sound of her voice, finding himself once again in the world of color. Everyone at the table was staring at him, McGee straddling her ladder-backed school chair. To see her there, surrounded by pads of yellow paper and three eager friends, made Myles happy and hopeful. They’d been meeting almost every night this week to go over plans for the demonstration. Finally they were down to the last details.

  “It all sounds great,” he said.

  McGee frowned. “I said I’m worried no one’s going to show up. Again.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” Myles said.

  “You always say it’s going to be fine,” McGee said. “And then no one shows up.”

  Across the table, Holmes and April watched the volleys in silence.

  “It’ll be fine,” Myles said. “It’ll all work out.”

  Myles could see by her expression that she wasn’t convinced, but when was she ever? She was too hard on herself. Lately she couldn’t see the good in anything they did. More than anything else, he wished he could show her.

  He returned his gaze to the monitors, to his forgotten cup of tea. But something in that brief time had changed upstairs. Myles detected movement on one of the cameras. Two customers, men—one dark, the other a medium shade of gray—stood inside the doorway of the bookstore. The black man had pulled a book off the shelf and was leafing slowly through the pages. Arms folded across his chest, the other looked furtively up and down the aisle.

  The cameras were a recent addition, installed with Holmes’s help. Now Myles could take part in meetings while also keeping an eye on the store. If customers needed him, he would know. And then, of course, there was security. Things being the way they were these days, you couldn’t be too careful.

  The two men came in and out of view, the black man leading. The other man kept looking over his shoulder. He was stocky, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail.

  What were they looking for?

  Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Myles turned around, eyes reluctantly following his head. McGee was holding a piece of paper. She was waiting for him to take it.

  “This is a draft of the press release,” she said.

  Holmes grabbed a copy, barely glancing at it. “It’s just more of the same,” he said, letting the sheet float back down to the table.

  “I think it’s good,” April said, eyes still gliding down the page.

  “This environmental stuff,” Holmes said. “No one cares. The city’s such a fucking mess.”

  “It’s not the same,” McGee said. “I’m trying to make it clear these are global issues that affect us locally—” All at once she stopped, her lips still parted.

  Myles felt her gaze narrowing in on him.

  “Seriously?” she said.

  In the corner of his eye, Myles could see something happening on the monitors, but McGee continued to hold him there with her binocular stare. “What?” he said.

  But she wasn’t looking at Myles. It was Fitch this time, slumped in the chair behind him, unshaven chin bobbing against his chest. Holmes and April had noticed, too, and they seemed to be waiting to see what McGee would do, what she’d say.

  The only sound across the entire basement was something burbling in Fitch’s throat. In his sleep, his knee shot up, thumping into the table. One of McGee’s red markers rolled to the edge and onto the floor. It was that dull clatter of plastic on cement that finally caused Fitch’s eyes to pop open.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  McGee’s nostrils flared, the way they always did when she was angry. “Why do you even bother?” she said. “What’s the point in showing up at all?”

  Fitch yawned into his elbow.

  “We were up late rehearsing,” Holmes said.

  Fitch laid his head down on his arms. “There’s just something about people talking.”

  “He always used to fall asleep in school,” April said
.

  McGee looked from one to the next. “Why are you defending him?”

  “We’ve been talking about the same stuff for weeks,” Holmes said. “What are you afraid he missed?”

  The stubble had been on Fitch’s face for three days. His clothes had been on him even longer. And yet somehow he looked the same as always, like one of those guys paid to glower in his underwear next to strips of scratch and sniff cologne. And April could have been the pouty, negligéed beauty draped over his neck. First cousins, and even perfect strangers couldn’t miss the family resemblance. Was there something in the country club water, Myles sometimes wondered, that bred people like these?

  “Moving on,” McGee said, making no effort to hide her anger. “We need to get the banners finished. We’re running out of time.”

  At the front of the store, where the two men had entered only a few minutes before, Myles now saw another guy, newspaper white, wearing a winter coat. All last week they’d gone without a single customer. Now they suddenly had three at once? As Myles debated whether to go upstairs, he watched the man in the winter coat move from monitor to monitor, coming closer with each step to the other two men.

  Myles was hunched over the desk, squinting at the screen, when McGee called his name again.

  “What?” he said quickly. “What?”

  “I asked if you think those friends of yours are still coming.”

  “What friends?” he said.

  McGee gave him a pained smile. “You said you knew some people who’d help us out.”

  “Yeah,” Myles said, already turning back toward the monitors. “Sure.”

  But McGee had another question for him, and another, and then another, and he wanted to tell her what was happening upstairs with the three suspicious guys, but the way she was looking at him made it impossible for him to tell her to wait a second, just one second, just long enough for him to get another look. Her eyes wouldn’t let him go. Five minutes passed, then ten. He waited for the bell at the cash register to ring for his assistance, but the ring never came.