Then the door opened with a loud noise and Max came running out, jumped into the seat next to me and yelled, “Go, go, go!”
“But what about your friend?” I asked.
Max was frantic. “Never mind him. Just go,” he screamed.
I put the car in gear and started to make a three-cornered turn. Max’s fear was contagious. My heart began to pound and my knees began to shake uncontrollably. I wished I had turned the car around while I had all that time to wait and think. The turn seemed to take forever, as if I were driving in a slow-motion movie.
“Faster, faster,” Max shouted into my ear.
“I’m turning as fast as I can,” I yelled back. I completed the turn and started for the gate. But before I got there, a man in a yellow raincoat who I hadn’t seen reached the gate before we did and started to swing it shut. Instinctively I braked. The car slowed. The man was directly in front of me.
“Don’t stop,” Max shrieked.
“But the man…”
“Don’t stop.”
“I can’t hit the man,” I shouted. “The gate…”
“Keep going,” Max yelled. He waved what looked like a gun in front of my face.
“The gate is shut.”
“Go, go,” Max screamed. “Don’t stop.”
“I can’t hit him,” I shouted.
“Don’t stop or I kill you.” He pressed the barrel of the gun against my neck. It felt cold and hard. I knew he meant it. Max wasn’t a man to take lightly.
I hesitated, but not for long. The choice was simple. It was the guy standing in front of the car or me. The instinct for survival is very strong. I stepped on the accelerator.
The car surged forward. The man seemed surprised. He tried to jump to one side to avoid being hit and I tried not to hit him. But we weren’t entirely successful in our efforts. The fender caught him and tossed him in the air. I didn’t see what happened to him after that.
The accelerator was floored. We hit the gate. The car had enough momentum to ram through the gate and knock it off its hinges. We were out onto the street and racing back toward Tremont Avenue. There were no cops and no traffic. Just badly potholed streets and two scared men, speeding through the Bronx in a hurry to get out of harm’s way.
We drove at a rapid pace until I felt it was safe to slow down. Then I maintained what you would call a reasonable rate of speed given the driving conditions. We didn’t speak. We didn’t even look at each other. I was afraid to ask Max what had happened back there. I didn’t want to know. It was like one of those old western movies. I was the unsuspecting cowboy who was left standing there holding the horses while the desperados carried out their plan. Max just stared straight ahead, lost in his own demented thoughts, oblivious of my presence.
I drove Max back to the garage and we parted without any sign of acknowledgement, both of us studiously avoiding the possibility that anything out of the ordinary might have just happened. I walked home in the pouring rain, trying to decide if I was shaking because of the rain or because of my recent misadventure.
CHAPTER XXXIV
I didn’t leave my cave for the next two months unless I absolutely had to. There was work, of course. Driving by night to make money for food and rent. Very elemental, very basic. What does one need, after all, to live? Food, clothing, shelter. I had no need for new clothing. You know how much I pay for rent. Food was cheap. Pasta, beans and grains. The diet of a penitent monk in a cell. And I was penitent.
I was sorry for being a fool. For allowing myself to be drawn into some sort of scheme that could not have had a good end. For being the device of a wicked man. For causing harm to another human being. Perhaps for causing his death.
So I withdrew to my cave and licked my wounds. It was also fear that brought me to ground. I was afraid the police were looking for me. There was no reason to be out and about where they could spot me and take me in for questioning.
I turned the lights low and sat for endless hours reviewing my past and my fate. I had never physically hurt a man before, let alone killed one. I’d never been in trouble with the law before. But now I knew that, regardless of my protestations of innocence, I had committed a crime. I didn’t know the specific statute of the penal code I had violated, but I knew it was punishable by time in jail. I felt like an unindicted co-conspirator, but one whose indictment was imminent.
When I slunk back to work after dark like some nocturnal mammal, Max and I never spoke an unnecessary word to each other. Our intercourse was limited to brief work-related matters. We avoided each other like lovers after a bad spat. I never asked him about the friend he had abandoned in the wilds of the Bronx. There was no point in engaging in potentially incriminating conversation. I had something on Max and he had something on me, so it was essentially a Mexican standoff.
That was the way my life ran until the night my landlady told me they were looking for me.
I was returning home from work. It was five in the morning and I was about to insert the key into my front door when I heard her hob-nailed boots scraping down the concrete steps. I turned and faced her. The silhouette of her massive frame almost obscured the first light of dawn.
“It’s two more days until the first of the month,” I said.
She shook her head. “Not that.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Knowing her, there had to be a problem. She wasn’t the type to engage me in pleasant repartee. My Ural-Altaic mountain guide didn’t know how to make small talk. The best she could do in the area of interpersonal communications was to bark out drill sergeant commands like a large dominatrix.
“They looking for you.”
Her words hit me like a sledgehammer. I couldn’t breathe. A small beast with very sharp teeth began chewing a hole in my stomach.
“What? Who?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Detective.”
“What did he say?” I asked her.
“Not he. She. Woman detective.”
“What did she say?”
Her eyes narrowed further and her brow furrowed. “What you do? You in trouble? I don’t want no trouble, you know.”
I shrugged. “Neither do I. It’s probably nothing. Probably just a case of mistaken identity. I look like so many people and so many people look like me. That’s what it is, is all.” I tried to reassure her with a torrent of words. But she wasn’t buying it.
She shook her head. “She looking for you specific. She ask when you coming back.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said you sleep day, go out night. Sometime your girlfriend come over. You stay in all day. Never go out.”
That was true. Malkie would often stop by after her teaching chores were finished and we would hide like two wounded creatures. And, bless her, Malkie never asked why we didn’t go out and enjoy the daylight. She was simply content to be with me.
“Is the detective coming back?” I asked, afraid of what the answer would be.
My landlady shrugged. “She don’t tell me nothing. She just say she looking for you.”
CHAPTER XXXV
The days that followed were filled with terror. The fact that the police knew where I was made me think of fleeing. But where would I go and what would I do? I was drowning in indecision and uncertainty, paralyzed into inactivity. So I did nothing.
Malkie was with me in my apartment a couple of days later when there was a loud knock on the door. No one had ever knocked on my door. I held my breath. Malkie must have noticed the way I tensed up because she said, in a voice that was too loud, “What’s wrong?”
I put my finger to my lip and kept it there.
She understood because she didn’t make another sound.
The shades had been drawn as usual and the lights were off. Malkie had complained that she had difficulty reading my lips because of the lack of light but when I told her it was necessary, she didn’t question me. We just sat there, holding each other.
A woman’s harsh voice shouted through the
door. “Open up. Open up. I know you’re in there.”
Then there were some more loud bangs on the door.
“Open up, for chrissake. Open the door. I know you’re in there. Open the damn door.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I sat like a statue, frozen in place. Malkie didn’t move either. She knew something was very wrong. We sat there, immobile, for ten or fifteen minutes while the woman alternately pounded on the door and shouted obscenities. Finally, she must have tired of that fruitless course because the noises stopped.
My room was very quiet. The only sound was the insistent ticking of the Big Ben wind-up clock. We didn’t move or make a noise for another hour. We sat in the shadows, fearful of retribution.
Then Malkie said in a loud stage whisper, “Why are you hiding?” She obviously couldn’t judge how much noise her voice made.
“There are several answers to that question,” I said. I put my hand on hers. “I suppose I owe you the truth.”
She nodded. “Please tell me the truth.”
I got up and tiptoed over to the window and peeked through the small opening on the side of the shade. From where I stood, I could see most of the area in front of the door. There were only garbage cans and some small plastic bags filled with recyclable items. The woman was gone.
It was time to explain to Malkie what the situation was. I could have given her the existential answer that we are all hiding and I suppose Ethan would have approved of that. Or I could have said that I was hiding for fear of being found out and that wouldn’t have been a lie. But I didn’t. I told her the truth. I couldn’t help myself. There was an uncontrollable compulsion that came over me. An urge to pour out everything I’d been concealing for more than a year. It was as if a wide and deep torrent had been released from some giant sluice gates and there was no way to shut down the flow.
I told her of my flight from a house that held no love and a family that had squandered its emotions. I told her of my wife and my son. And I told her of my change of identity. Her eyes widened and became more and more intense as she took in my story.
“It’s so hard to understand,” she said, shaking her head, when I had finished. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have just divorced your wife. There was no reason to sneak away like you did.”
“You may be right, but I wanted to make a sudden and clean break without any recriminations.”
She had a puzzled expression on her face. “What is re…?”
I had to explain to her what recriminations meant. “I didn’t want a long and painful process full of blame and fault-finding. This way everyone could put the blame on me. It seemed to me at the time much quicker and easier. Perhaps, in retrospect, I was wrong.”
She squared her shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I think you were wrong.”
“Maybe.” I lowered my gaze. “Maybe I was. But that’s not the real problem now.”
She stared at me. “You mean there’s something else?”
I nodded without speaking.
She didn’t say anything. She just watched me. There was sorrow in her eyes. Perhaps she hoped what I was going to tell her wouldn’t be so bad. She put her hand in mine.
“A few months ago I drove my boss and his friend to the Bronx,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?” she said with a small smile. “I come from the Bronx. It’s not so horrible, you know.”
I nodded. “Yes, but we went at night…to do something that I think was questionable.”
A little wrinkle appeared in her forehead. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know. But I think it was probably illegal. It just smelled bad.”
“So you made a mistake?”
“Yes. It was an error in judgment. I shouldn’t have gone.”
She looked at me. “But that’s not so terrible, is it?”
I squeezed her hand to forestall what I had to tell her. “That’s not the worst part,” I said. Then I described in aching detail the hurried getaway from the warehouse and hitting the man in the yellow raincoat with the car. Her face twisted in distress. She moved toward me and pressed her face against my neck and held me.
“Oh, how sad,” she said. “How sad for you.”
I moved her away so she could see my lips. “I’m afraid of what will happen. I don’t want to be apart from you.”
Her eyes were filled with tears. “I don’t want to be apart from you either,” she said.
CHAPTER XXXVI
“Detective come see you?” my landlady asked.
“No,” I lied. “She never came back. I wonder whatever happened to her. Perhaps she just made a mistake and wasn’t looking for me.”
My landlady shook her head vigorously. “She come back again to see me. She show me her ID badge. She really looking for you.”
“But what could she want? I’m innocent of anything. Why would the police want to see me?”
Her eyes glinted with a harsh proletarian intelligence. “She not from police.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“She not policewoman. She private detective. I see ID badge. New York State private detective, you know.” Her mouth widened in a gap-tooth smirk. She took a step toward me. “What you up to?”
“I’m up to nothing, actually and sincerely. It’s very kind of you to inform me.” I turned abruptly in order to put an end to our conversation and quickly opened the door of my flat and entered. I shut the door in her face and just stood there with my back to the door, breathing heavily.
*
At first I couldn’t comprehend what my landlady had just said. I leaned against the door in a daze, trying to piece together what little information I had. I stood like that for a long time. Then, slowly, the facts began to make sense. The police would have had no way of placing me at the scene of the crime in the Bronx unless Max informed them. Max would have had no reason to inform them unless he was implicated. The people in the Bronx would have had no reason to go to the police. From what I had seen, they would have wanted to stay as far from the police as possible.
It was just the close proximity in time from the accident to the appearance of the detective that had caused me to believe it was the police that were looking for me. There was probably no connection.
So who had sent the private detective to find me? There was only one person.
My wife.
This detective must have been good. It had taken her a year but she had been able to track me down. What was the reason my wife had hired the detective? Perhaps she wanted me to come back. Perhaps she just wanted to be sure I was alive and healthy. Perhaps she was angry and wanted to get even with me. Or perhaps she wanted to know where I had left the TV remote.
CHAPTER XXXVII
I went searching for Ethan the next night at the garage. He was entering through the back door when I spotted him. His face beamed when he saw me. There was just a pure open honesty about him. No guile, no deceit.
“My man,” he boomed, and grabbed me in a bear hug. “What’s shakin’?”
“My wife sent a private detective to track me down.”
“Well, well,” he grinned. “I didn’t know you had a wife.”
“Now you know,” I said.
His grin widened. “Matter o’ fact, I don’t know nothin’ about you.”
“And you had the decency never to ask. For that, I’m grateful to you. You’ve been a good friend to me.”
He shook his head. “Uh, oh. That sound like some kind of farewell.”
I turned away from Ethan and scanned the entire garage from side to side. I wanted to be sure Max wasn’t anywhere near us. The place had a malodorous sulfuric stench that reeked of the devil’s fundament. I felt like putting my hand over my nose to cover the stink.
“Tell me, Ethan,” I said. “What do you know about women?”
He laughed. “First thing, they all insane. That’s a given. Once you know that, everything’s easy. Second thing, they shallow thinkers. Re
ad Schopenhauer. He tell you all about women. He say they take appearance for reality and prefer trifles to the most important affairs.” He poked me in the chest. “Go ahead, name me one great woman philosopher.”
I thought for a moment. “What about Simone de Beauvoir?” I said without much conviction.
He shook his head. “Naw. She a feminist, not a philosopher. Big difference there.”
I nodded. “All right, I see your point. But tell me, why do you think my wife would send a detective to find me?”
He squinted at me. “You do her some harm?”
“I guess I did by leaving, but I didn’t mean her any harm. I wanted the leave-taking to be as painless as possible. I really didn’t do it to hurt her. But she could have interpreted it in a different way. I just wanted to start a new life.”
“That’s a dangerous proposition. No such thing as a new life. You still carrying yourself around with you.”
“I guess so,” I said. “And it certainly didn’t turn out the way I expected.”
Ethan put his bear paw on my shoulder. “She probably lookin’ for you to come home. Start over with forgiveness all aroun’.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to go back. There’s no benefit in that for me or for her. It’s too late to go back.”
“Then what you gonna do?”
I looked down. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
*
I was still very much afraid of the police. If this private detective had tracked me down, who was to say the cops wouldn’t be far behind? Maybe the two were even intertwined. Maybe they were working in concert. In my confused state of mind, every sound and every person was a threat. Because of the interminable stress, I’d lost the ability to sleep peacefully. My appetite had deserted me. I was losing so much weight that Malkie commented on it.
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