Chapters 13-16
The last batch of chapters ended with Stephen Barton’s body being discovered in a sewer, strangled and killed apparently right around the same time that Catherine Demeter disappeared. The method of death immediately sends the police and FBI towards the Ferrera crime family, as “strangle and dump” is a murder method associated with them. Parker suspects that the mob is actually being used as a convenient scape-goat and a means of distracting law enforcement from the real crime, Demeter’s disappearance.
Connolly’s depiction of the Ferrera family is interesting as it mostly does away with the “noble men who just happen to be criminals” portrayal that we often see in crime fiction. These people are thugs; violent, murderous thugs, and though they may adopt the pretense of having honor and nobility, they are simply bad men. Parker talks directly with Stefano, the head of the family, and it is indirectly confirmed that the police are looking in the wrong direction if they suspect they had anything to do with Barton’s death. Ferrera draws Parker’s attention to a gold plate that his son gave him, in imitation of a story about Al Capone dining off golden plates. Ferrera told the story to his son to send him a message about propriety; his son took it as a story about power. “Some tastes should not be indulged” is Ferrera’s lesson to Parker before restating that Catherine Demeter is the key to everything that has been going on.
Back at his home, Parker receives a telephone call from someone claiming to be the Traveling Man, the call assembled from clips of other people’s voices. TM claims the he “choose” Parker, that he answered his “call”-again implying, as if Parker needed any more angst, that what happened to his daughter was something he somehow deserved or brought down upon himself. The creepiness of TM’s obsession with Parker is compounded by the disquieting nature of speaking with jumbled voices. It’s inhuman and lacks identity, just as by removing the faces of his victims he takes away their identities. This is made even more, and sickeningly worse when it becomes clear that TM is calling from a pay phone outside Parker’s apartment, but when he leaves all he finds is a terrified boy holding a jar with the face of Parker’s daughter in it. It’s a violent and gruesome scene, but the boy’s description of TM is only that the man has no face, hammering the lack of identity theme home with a final nail.
These chapters also bring up the idea that the Traveling Man is not, literally, human. One of the things that interested me about this series was the notion that, though grounded in reality, the possibility of supernatural events being “real” exists. Though this becomes much more prominent a theme in later books, it’s the suggestion that the Traveling Man is, in fact, an actual demon that gets this ball rolling.
After this, we settle into some more flash-backs, including a crucial one, the revelation of what exactly Parker did after the murders of his family, the event that has been alluded to by several characters. After fleeing the city in an alcoholic haze, and then drying out with a religious commune, Parker returns to the city to investigate. On the pretense of looking for information on whoever killed his wife and daughter, Parker trailed a pimp, Johnny Friday. Friday was known to be a procurer of children for pedophiles and was strongly suspected of helping to cover up the murders of children by those same clients. By any definition, then, a “bad man” and one deserving of punishment. Parker knows that Friday, in all likelihood, doesn’t know anything about the death of his family, but he follows him, assaults him and grills him for information anyway, knowing that when none is forthcoming he will have justification for killing him. This is an important detail to bear in mind about Parker and makes his associations with, for example, Louis and Angel more clear. Friday is a bad man and deserved to die. Parker is also a bad man, because although he has only killed another bad man, it was not something he had the right or responsibility to do. He took it upon himself. Just as he takes the guilt for the death of his family on himself. He is bad, therefore everything bad that happens to him is justified, no matter if his pretensions of nobility or a higher calling are not significantly different than that of the Ferrera family.
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