“Regale me,” I said to my boy.
Twill shook his head slowly and did not smile.
“This dude Jones is the real thing,” he said. “He like the black plague and almost no one knows about it. He deals in underage prostitution, got a bigger burglary ring than I ever heard of, uses little kids and young women who pretend they’re the mothers for international smuggling, murders anyone who goes against him, and has underground public floggings for even if somebody steal somethin’ the wrong way. It’s like living in the Middle Ages here today in twenty-first-century New York.”
Somehow Mardi had gotten Twill to start reading. He used the knowledge he gained to further his understanding of the flaws of humankind.
“How many people work with him?” I asked.
“I only seen a dozen or so at one time but it’s got to be hundreds. He been doin’ it more than twenty-one, twenty-two years and the ones that grow up still do things his way. Fortune says that there’s at least two dozen dead in a graveyard below the tunnels.”
“What about the police?”
“Nobody seems worried about the law. Kids get grabbed sometime but Jones got a law firm called Bedford-Rule that gets them out. There’s a lotta talk among the kids, say that if somebody turns on Jones he’s not safe even on Rikers Island.”
“You believe that?”
“That man got a system, Pops. He got some serious people in his pocket.”
“And you couldn’t figure all that out before you got yourself this far in?”
“I just didn’t believe it, man,” Twill, my peer, railed. “I mean how you gonna have some crazy dude with a false beard only come out in the tunnels under the city and run a crime syndicate made mostly of children?
“When Liza come to me I figured that either Fortune was playin’ her or they were just believin’ some kinda hype. If he was scammin’ her I’d cut her loose and if he was for real I’d just move ’em out of harm’s way.
“Then, two days after Fortune brought me in, Jones sent us out on this one job where all we had to do was go to this warehouse in Long Island City. There was a young guy made night watchman two years ago. He’d been layin’ out plans to steal a truck that had more than a million dollars of electronics in it. We drove that suckah to an abandoned building over in Brooklyn where there was people waitin’ there to take it over and break it down.”
“What happened to the watchman?”
“Who knows? Vanished in the tunnels till Jones need him for another job.”
“Somebody broke into the office,” I said. “Used explosives on the front door and then broke down the wall to the back office. That sound like your man?”
“Naw,” Twill said through a sneer. “That’s too loud for him. Jones want everything to be quiet like.”
One shore achieved but there were still many rivers to cross.
“Why would they trust you on a job when you just got there?” I asked.
“The only weakness they have is that they don’t think they have no weakness,” my brilliant son opined. “Trouble is, they might be right.”
“Why didn’t you go to Carson?” I asked then.
“The way I see it, Jones got the uppity-ups by the nuts. You know your friend wouldn’t back down so I figured tellin’ him wouldn’t help my client and probably hurt him.”
“You think they might suspect that you’re a plant?” I asked.
“Why would they? I haven’t done nuthin’ except what they said. I did that one job okay. Today I gave out his letters. They don’t suspect me but Jones got these two lieutenants called Marcia and Deck, little younger’n me but serious as a land mine in a nursery school playground. I saw Jones gesture at Fortune with his eyes when Fortune was leavin’ a few days ago and Marcia walked out behind.”
“Fortune get you in?”
“Not really. He told me who to go to. It’s this newsstand near Grand Central. All you had to do was say you was lookin’ for a sales job and that was the way in.”
I stood up and Twill did too. He picked up the pink bucket and we were on our way north.
“Maybe you should get in touch with this Fortune kid and point him over to Hush.”
“A’ight,” Twill said with a nod. “You know I was thinkin’ that maybe we might need Hush on this one anyway.”
“Why?” It had only been recently that I’d read Twill in on my friend’s old profession.
“Jones don’t let anybody share the throne,” Twill said. “Cut off the head, you know.”
“We’re detectives, Twilliam, not contract killers.”
“A’ight.”
“So you think this Jones keeps his power by blackmail?”
“That’s the only thing makes sense, I mean if you got pictures of some council member or mayor’s aide havin’ sex with a twelve-year-old girl, that’s like gold.”
“You know where these records might be?”
“No idea whatsoever.”
27
Along the way to the apartment I picked up some chives and ice for my fish from a greengrocer. Once home I rinsed the two flounder and put them in the refrigerator while Twill changed clothes. Fifteen minutes after we got home we were off again.
—
Neither of us recognized the Filipino nun at the front desk of Tivoli Rest Home. When we came up on her she was staring off into space. She had a round face and golden skin. I didn’t know that woman from Eve, as I said, but I was willing to bet from that look in her eye that whatever it was she was thinking it had nothing to do with her Catholic vows.
“Katrina McGill,” I said and she jerked back to awareness. The face of wonder was replaced by one of atonement and loss.
“Sixth floor,” she said.
—
The only thing different about my wife’s room was that Katrina was not in it. She hadn’t been walking in the hall with Sister Agnes. Her bed was unmade so I thought that she might have gone to the toilet. Without discussing the mundane fact of her absence we decided to wait. I leaned against the windowsill and Twill arranged himself elegantly in the padded visitor’s chair. He was now dressed in black trousers made from light wool, a black silk T-shirt, and a pearl-gray jacket with no lapels or buttons.
“At least she’s walkin’ now,” Twill said after a minute or two. “That first six weeks I don’t think she got outta bed on her own at all.”
“You think she’s doing better then?” I asked my son.
“Better than at first but she kinda stalled the last month or so. I try to get her to walk with me but when I give her my hand all she wants to do is hold it.”
“I told her we could get a nurse at home but she wasn’t interested.”
“I think she wants to be the woman she was before all this,” Twill surmised.
Looking at my son I thought, not for the first time, that he was something like a creature, a baby puma or panther, that I’d found in the wild and brought home. There he slowly took on the form of a human child but his nature was still feral and unfathomable. He had deep feelings for his mother but these emotions were not nostalgic or self-indulgent. She was his mother and I was his father but the world was vast and we, all of us, were just a small part of that immensity.
“Mr. McGill, Twill,” someone said from the doorway.
In her fifties, broad-shouldered, and brown like cured mahogany, Sister Agnes stood there, a questioning look on her face.
“Sister,” I said, propelling my bulk from the window. “Where’s Katrina?”
“I thought you knew,” she said, almost as if the words formed a question.
There are moments in life when the heart makes itself known to the man that lives with his feelings but rarely recognizes them. When Sister Agnes spoke those words I felt the emptiness of the room and a coldness went through me. I could taste the grief that had escaped my lips when talking to my father. At that moment I was beginning to mourn the loss of my wife.
“Didn’t Sister Alona tell you?” Agnes asked.
/>
“Tell me what?” I said in a tone usually reserved for lowlifes and gangsters I intended to hurt.
“That, that she was down at the corner at the Trattoria Lucia,” the big woman stammered.
“What the hell is she doing down there?” My anger would not heel.
“She went there with your father.”
—
“I thought your father was dead,” Twill asked as we headed for the little restaurant.
I had never told the family that Clarence was probably alive. Why would I? I could hardly believe it myself.
“I just found him recently,” I said. “He came by the apartment last night. I forgot about it because of the break-in and tryin’ to find you.”
“Is that what’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” I said, stopping there on the sidewalk.
“There’s somethin’ definitely wrong with you,” my son averred.
“Wrong how?”
“Like you went crazy or sumpin’ an’ haven’t made it all the way back yet.”
Marella, I thought, or something Marella meant to me; something I had been missing for a long time; but whatever it was, that something didn’t fit where it used to be.
“Let’s go,” I said.
—
Trattoria Lucia had a smallish dining room with a high ceiling that was deceptive because there were many hanging plants drooping down from overhead. Through the foliage I could see a table for four in the far corner. Seated around various plates of food was Dimitri, my only blood son; Tatyana, his Belarusian girlfriend recently delivered from the East European underworld; Katrina, wearing an alluring blue dress; and Clarence Tolstoy Bill Williams McGill. Katrina, most recently a depressed invalid, and Dimitri, who had always been a sour child, were both laughing.
“Trot!” my father called out. “Twill, come on over.”
He spoke to a waiter who pulled up another table.
Twill went to join the family affair while I remained there at the entrance trying to get all the pieces of my life into some kind of semblance of order. I stood there for a full minute and was at work on the next revolution of seconds when Dimitri, whom we all called Bulldog, came over to me and put his hand on my elbow.
“It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “Everybody’s fine.”
Looking at my son was very much like peering into my own face. He was almost a walking facsimile of me except for the fact that he was five inches taller and almost always brooding.
“Come on, Dad,” he said. “Come sit with the family.”
—
Twill took to Clarence like his wild feline totem; more by scent than logic.
After we were settled the party went back to the way it had been before we arrived. Clarence was telling jokes and Katrina was laughing at them. She had color in her cheeks and that look in her eye that always told me when she was falling in love.
After a while I got my equilibrium back and asked, “How did you get Katrina out of that bed?”
“He came in and told me who he vas,” my wife answered. “That made me sit right up. Then he asked me vhen vas the next bus due in? I said there is no bus and he said ve better hurry then if ve want to get out of there in time for dinner. It vas so silly that I started laughing. I’m still laughing.”
A waiter came up then to refill Katrina’s wineglass, but my father waved him away. Katrina saw this exchange but said nothing. If I had tried to keep her from a drink we would have fought the rest of the night.
“And where’d you pick up Bulldog and Taty?” I asked, feeling oddly jealous of my father and family.
“Taty finally got me to come by,” Dimitri said. “Twill told her that I might help Mom get up or something but when we got to the front desk the sister told us to come down here.”
Dimitri was grinning while Katrina beamed, placing her palm on my father’s forearm from time to time. Everyone was saying how happy they were that Clarence came out of the shadows and rejoined them. No one questioned his long absence except to ask where he’d been. My wife and sons were all happy just to see him. Only Tatyana and I seemed somewhat somber. She caught my eye at one moment there and we both smiled.
“I’m checking out of the sanatorium tomorrow,” Katrina announced after devouring a plum tart. “Will you come get me, Tolstoy?”
“Me an’ Trot’ll be there with bells on.”
What could I say? The only way to get Katrina on her feet again was for her to be enveloped in the euphoria of love. I wondered if any hospital had ever used love therapy to cure their depressives and other psychosomatic sufferers.
—
At about eight o’clock the party broke up. Tatyana and Dimitri trundled off to their new place.
They went maybe fifteen feet when Tatyana turned and came back, to me. She took my arm and leaned in close so that no one else could hear.
“Are you all right, Mr. McGill?”
“Sure I am, Tatyana. Why?”
“My father left me, my mother, and sister and never said a word. He left and I hated him.” She was looking into me.
“What can I say, honey? You’re right.”
She kissed me and then went back to her boyfriend.
I watched them walking away, wondering at the complexities of the semisocial, partially civilized human heart.
Twill went off to find Fortune and remind the Jones gang that he was still with them. Clarence and I saw Katrina back to her room. She kissed us both good-bye but the caress lingered on my father.
“Tomorrow,” she said, looking at him.
—
“That’s a fine woman you got there, Trot,” Clarence said on our walk back to the apartment.
“Not hardly,” I replied.
“What do you mean by that?”
“She hasn’t belonged to me in many a year.”
28
After a month of a dedicated housekeeper’s hard work the smell of old socks and twenty years of brooding had finally been cleaned away from Dimitri’s room. My father, whom I would always and forevermore call Clarence, was asleep therein. He told me that he felt best sleeping in a different bed every night; that he felt safer moving around.
I should have been asleep too. My days had been strenuous and the drinking wasn’t light. But there I was in my den/office wondering how it could be that I had discovered hidden feelings for my wife and once again lost her in just a few minutes’ time?
I picked up the phone at four minutes shy of midnight and dialed a number. After four rings a recording of Aura Ullman’s voice said, “You have reached me, so talk to me.” I hung up before the beep.
I’d called Aura hoping that there might be love somewhere for me, too. But if I couldn’t have love I had to dig deeper.
“Mr. McGill,” she said after the Hotel Brown switchboard operator connected us. “What revelation do you have for me at this hour?”
Just the sound of her voice brought up a vibration like a growl in my chest. The creature making this sound in me was like a wild thing—both hunted and free.
“I want you to know that I’m not asking you for anything, but…” I said.
“But what?” There was a lot of satisfaction in those two words.
“I’d like to come over.”
“I understand,” she said with no underlying gratification. “Come along.”
—
I walked there. The whole time I was thinking about how foolish it was to pursue a woman like that; a woman as dangerous as any killer I’d gone up against.
I was so wrapped up in these thoughts that I bumped into a pedestrian waiting for the light at Seventy-third and Broadway—a very large pedestrian male.
White, short-sleeved, and generously tattooed, the man made a sound like the one in my chest.
He said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, nigga?”
We live in a brave new world. Many white people in their thirties, and younger than that, take the derogatory slang from the music they listen to
with no notion of insult based on race. I felt, however, that this particular individual had learned his slurs behind bars and under guard; at close quarters and in situations that were life and death on a daily basis.
I smiled broadly and held my upturned palms near shoulder level.
“Bring it on, my brother,” I said. “Bring it on.”
The tattooed man moved his left shoulder to put himself in an advantageous position for fighting. My smile deepened. He took me in with well-trained eyes, and the anger he carried around like a weapon suddenly faded. The light turned and he walked away at a pace he hoped I wouldn’t try to match.
If there was anything that should have dissuaded me from going to the Hotel Brown it was that ex-con’s reaction to me at that moment in time.
—
Marella and I didn’t speak until after 4:00 that morning. With her eyes, teeth, and clawlike nails (both hand and foot) she dared me to do things to her that most women have no stomach for. And no matter how far I went she was ready for more. It wasn’t fun and it certainly was not love but more like an operation to amputate a gangrenous limb or to excavate a diseased organ. We were doing each other for survival, not edification.
When it was over I wondered how far I’d have to go to get back to some version of civilization.
“I know a man in New Orleans named Gregor Vincent,” she said as she was washing the sex off both of us with a warm hand towel.
“Yeah?”
“He thinks I’m a virgin.”
“And?”
“His family owns half of South America and they do business in gold, not currency.”
“Sounds like your kinda guy.”
“We could make enough off him to take a five-year vacation and not even feel it.”
“Why you need me?” I asked, turning the notion of a criminal on holiday around in my mind. “I mean you’re the whole business on your own.”
“It’s good to have a strong man in the wings,” she said. “And even people like us need somebody to talk to from time to time.”
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 13