I smiled broadly at the outcome, and this confused my enemy. He turned to see if something was coming up behind him and I took the opportunity to land a haymaker on the side of his jaw. The jaw was definitely broken and the man was surely out.
I was breathing hard and so was my son. Two of the four we fought were unconscious and the other two couldn’t get to their feet. Twill was supporting the prisoner and smiling at me.
“You okay?” I asked my son.
“Just fine, Pop.”
I took a handkerchief from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to the kid we’d saved. He pressed the cloth to his mouth, pulled it away to see his blood, and then pressed his mouth again.
“Fortune?” I asked.
He nodded.
“We better get out of here,” Twill said.
—
The three of us walked and staggered through rush-hour foot traffic across to the E train station. Fortune had cleaned up his face pretty much and the bleeding had stopped. Like his four assailants he wore blue jeans, knockoff cross-trainers, and a black T-shirt. He was what people descended from the colonized world called white, and quite beautiful: full lips, blue eyes, and tawny hair that formed into ringlets. He might have been a minor god from a Mediterranean pantheon come to Earth to see what the big deal was about love and death.
“Why didn’t they kill you, man?” Twill asked as we waited by the southmost stairwell for a train to come.
“I don’t know,” the slightly woozy godling replied.
“Why would they?” I asked.
“When Jones sends bodies after you he expects bodies in return,” Fortune said, mouthing a homily probably repeated a dozen times a day by the Jones acolytes. “When they busted in on me I expected ’em to cut my throat.”
The train came and we got into a car that had only a few straphangers headed uptown at that time of morning.
I appreciated the sharp pain in my cheekbone. It was like a Zen bell ringing in the darkness of deep meditation. This clarion note obliterated the passion unleashed by Marella, leaving my mind open and free.
“Those boys are gonna report to Jones,” I said.
“Yeah,” Twill agreed.
“Maybe we can leave Fortune off here at Hush’s place.”
“What about me?” Twill asked.
“No,” I said. “I want you somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“For easy access.” I didn’t want Twill around Hush too much or for very long. Both my friend and son were psychopaths and sociopaths. Together they might create something that I couldn’t protect Twill from.
“Who’s Hush?” Fortune asked.
31
We called Hush while walking from the West Fourth Street station. He was waiting for us at the door when we got there.
“Come on in,” the killer said, ushering us into the posh entrance hall of his old-time Greenwich Village mansion.
Waiting for us in the octagonal room was Tamara, Hush’s wife. She was a black woman with a plain face but with spirit so powerful that it seemed to add a dimension to her visage; next to her stood Liza Downburton wearing a pale blue kimono that she must have borrowed from the lady of the house.
“Fortune,” Liza cried, and she ran to the pretty young man, caressing him, kissing his face. “What happened to you?”
I had never seen the young burglar except with the bulges and bruises on his face, so he looked normal to me.
“He sent the four after me.”
“And you fought them?”
“More like they took turns fightin’ my head. Twill and his father come to save me.”
“The two-man cavalry,” Hush said softly.
“Come on in the living room,” Tamara said. She’d put a hand on my forearm because she had a soft spot for me since I’d saved her life and her son’s.
“Where’s Thackery?” I asked as we moved from the red tiling of entrance hall to the oak floor of the living room.
“At the French school,” Hush and Tamara said together.
There were eight bright yellow padded chairs set in an oval around a pink marble table of the same shape. Everyone but Tamara took a seat. Liza pushed her chair closer to Fortune so that they could hold hands.
“I’ll go get us some ice tea and biscuits,” Tamara said.
“Don’t put ice in Fortune’s,” Liza said. “He’s got sensitive teeth.”
The two women glanced at each other and I saw a connection.
Hush saw it too. He didn’t look bothered, but anyone knowing Hush didn’t want his attention on them for any reason.
“What happened?” Liza asked again.
Twill gave the explanations with a word or two interjected here and there by Fortune.
For his part Fortune had gone to ground under the construction site. The entrance was hidden by the brown canvas tent.
“I didn’t wanna dig out the transmitter till I knew for sure that they were serious,” the young burglar said. “You know it’s a death sentence to do that.”
“Didn’t you realize that people in Jones’s army knew where you were?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but nobody ever told about it before. You know Jones didn’t want us gettin’ high or hookin’ up away from the places he controlled. We liked to keep places like that a secret.”
“But didn’t you know he was after you?” Liza asked.
“Yeah but I just thought it might’a just been for a beat-down like. I didn’t know he wanted to kill me.”
“But he didn’t kill you,” Twill observed. “Why not?”
This question raised Hush’s attention.
Tamara returned with a silver tray holding our tea and cookies.
“I don’t know,” the orphan named Fortune said. “I mean that’s what the four usually do.”
“What do you mean—the four?” Hush asked.
Fortune’s first response was a worried expression. He avoided Hush’s stare and did not speak.
“It’s okay, Fortune,” Twill said. “He already sent ’em after you. As far as Jones is concerned you’re already dead.”
“I’m not supposed to say,” Fortune said to Hush. “Jones got these rough dudes, four of ’em, and their job is to handle problems. If they don’t get the job done then he sends Marcia and Deck, and sometimes this dude named Thune. They got guns.”
“And they kill children?” Hush asked.
“If they do sumpin’ bad enough.”
“You’re bleeding,” Liza said.
There was a trickle of blood coming from Fortune’s mouth. He must have bit the cut worrying about telling strangers Jones’s secrets.
“Come on,” Tamara said, “let’s go clean you up.”
She and Liza helped Fortune up from his yellow chair and guided him out. I looked at the fabric but didn’t see any specks of blood.
“He’s got a concussion all right,” Hush said. “I’ll get a doctor I know to come look at him.”
“Thanks,” Twill said.
“You sure know how to get in trouble, young man,” Hush told my son.
“I get it from my pops.”
“You mind if we leave the lovebirds here a few days?” I asked.
“T loves Liza,” Hush allowed. “So I’m sure she’ll be happy. The kid looks street but he’ll be okay too. This Jones sounds like a motherfucker.”
Twill nodded and I said, “Yeah.”
—
“Where to now?” Twill asked when we were on the street again.
“Let’s walk a ways,” I suggested.
We headed north on Fifth Avenue, each of us a little stiff from the construction site rumble.
“Thanks a lot, Pops,” Twill said as we were crossing Sixteenth Street. “You know I should’a been more careful before jumpin’ into this shit.”
“The one thing you learn in the ring,” I said. “If you climb through them ropes trouble will find you.”
“Yeah. Ole Jones will have two hundred people on
the street lookin’ for me.”
“And you will be at Uncle Gordo’s helping him and Sophie get ready for their wedding.”
“Who’s Sophie? I thought he was marrying Elsa?”
“Another of his ring lessons,” I said. “Sometimes you got to change it up.”
“What about Mardi and her sister?” my son asked, accepting change faster than I was ever able to.
“I gave her a few days off. You think Fortune told anybody where Liza found you?”
“Never think,” Twill said, repeating my words to him. A detective never thinks, he knows.
“Give her a call,” I said. “Gordo got eight bedrooms in that rabbit warren on the top floor.”
—
An hour later my son and I were sitting at the cramped dinette table off of Gordo’s kitchen, on the fifteenth floor of the building he owned. With us was Sophie—a short and slight woman with big eyes, a patient demeanor, and skin the color of some dark pears. Iran Shelfly was there. He’d lost his shot at contention in Philly and had the black eye to prove it. Gordo was leaning back in his chair. He was a veteran of the Human Wars, having survived everything from Jim Crow to Willie Pep to cancer.
“Damn, LT,” he was saying, “you look worse than Eye-ran here and he went up against a top-twenty middleweight.”
There was a bump on top of my head and a swelling where I got sucker punched on the cheek. My eyes were probably bloodshot from too much liquor, too much sex, and very little rest.
“It’s been a good week,” I said.
Gordo chuckled.
“It’s good to see you again, Sophie,” I said. “Must be thirty years.”
“I’m surprised you’re still alive, Leonid.”
Remembering that Sophie was an incurable truth teller, I said to Gordo, “If you guys take Twill, Mardi, and her sister for the next few days it will be good for all concerned.”
“And how do you see that?” Gordo argued. He liked sparring in and out of the ring.
“Mardi is the most organized woman I’ve ever met,” Twill said. “If you need a sharp eye planning this wedding then you should probably pay her to come.”
“Twill has spoken,” Gordo intoned.
“Iran, I need you to keep watch on them,” I interjected. “They shouldn’t be down in the gym at all until after it’s closed, and the doors need to stay locked.”
“You got it, LT.”
Iran loved me because I’m the one that got him straight after he got out of prison—of course he didn’t know that I had framed him to get the conviction in the first place.
“As long as we’re all here,” Sophie said to Gordo, “you should tell them.”
“What?” I asked.
“I had a will drawn up leaving everything to Sophie. But she said she didn’t like that, that she wasn’t marryin’ me to become my heir. So we compromised that everything can be hers but that you are the executor. You dole out the cash and cover the bills for the first seven years.”
“And what if somebody shoots me in the back?” I thought this was a valid question.
Gordo did too because he said, “If you aren’t able then the job goes to Twill.”
“Me?” Twill said.
“Yeah, man,” Gordo said. “You the best of all of us.”
Twill stared at the unsung master trainer a moment and then nodded.
“Okay, man,” he said. “We all know you gonna live to two hundred anyways.”
—
I hung around for an hour or so until a limo from Hush’s fleet delivered Mardi and her sister Marlene to Gordo’s. After that, Gordo walked me down the fourteen flights to the first floor.
“Must be some serious trouble you got everybody hidin’,” the man I considered my true father said.
“Yeah, yeah. But now everybody’s in place and I can take care of other business.”
“What other business?”
“I got to see a woman in Boston about a killing or two in New York.”
32
I got home in the early evening. I was looking forward to the solitude of an empty apartment for the first time in many weeks. It had been a rough few days even if I had made some progress. I still had the business of my dead client, Hiram Stent, to settle up. And there was Hector Laritas to avenge.
“Leonid?” she said as I was making my way toward the dining room.
The voice came from behind, from the door of the little front TV room that we rarely used.
“Katrina.”
She was wearing an off-white silk blouse and a black woolen skirt that came down to her knees—no shoes.
“We’re in here,” she said.
We.
“Come join us,” she said, sober and happy.
My father was sitting in the blue stuffed chair and Katrina returned to her perch on the maroon sofa. It was a tiny room that the kids used to watch TV when they were small. The last time Katrina and I were in there we had passionate sex for the first time in years. That was a few days before she tried to take her life.
“Trot,” my father said.
“Clarence.”
“Your father has been telling me all about the Revolution,” Katrina murmured. She looked much younger than she had in the sanatorium, ten years younger than her actual age. She wore no makeup. Rather the youthfulness came from an inner light.
On the small, child-scarred maple coffee table was a hardback book with no jacket and a bottle of our good port with only one glass.
“What you readin’?” I asked no one in particular.
“First volume of the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci,” my father said.
“Bill said that he was the greatest thinker in the socialist movement,” Katrina told me. “He was arrested by Italian fascists and died in prison.”
I knew Gramsci’s story. My father had drilled the whole socialist pantheon into my brain by the age of eleven. But what interested me was that he wanted my wife to call him Bill; the third name he’d taken on looking for the man he wanted to be.
I sat on the opposite end of the sofa from my wife. She pulled her legs up under her, shifting her body so that half her back was toward me, giving her full attention to my father.
“How’s that boy of yours?” Clarence asked.
“Safe and sound.”
“Twill seemed tense at our dinner,” Katrina said.
“You came home today,” I replied.
“Bill got me just as he promised.”
I had spent so many years hating my father that his charisma was lost on me. I really didn’t see his power except through Katrina’s eyes. But there I saw what brought her home. If Katrina survived it was bound to be because she fell in love again. That was her nature.
I looked from one to the other of the people who were supposed to define the love of my life and saw only distraction and reckless folly.
“I got to get to bed,” I said.
I stood up expecting to spend the rest of the night alone.
“I’ll come with you,” my wife said.
She also stood.
“Good night, Bill,” she bade to my father.
“ ’Night, Clarence,” I added.
—
I was naked under the blankets with Katrina pushed up against my side wearing a gown that was more like an extra-long red silk T-shirt.
“What’s wrong, darling?” she asked. I could feel her warm breath on my ear.
“Lots.”
“Is it a job?”
“Twill got himself in a mess I can’t even begin to work out and then there’s these two dead men, a missing girl, and a marital job I got to work with. But that’s just a week’s work.”
“So it’s something else?” She traced the swelling on my cheek with a single finger.
“It was like magic you gettin’ up out the bed and coming home.”
“Your father made me laugh,” she explained.
“Are you better then?” I asked. “Because you laughed?”
> She laid a hand on my chest and after a minute or so said, “You have a strong heart.”
There was no answer to her declaration and so I gave none.
“I have never been so strong as you,” she continued. “I have always looked for someone or something to, to save me. I wanted money and love and something magical and you were always holding everything up. I could have other men’s children and you loved them. I could go away and you always took me back. Somewhere in all of that I got old and lost myself and couldn’t think of any way out but to die…”
She talked and talked about the ways she failed and my place in her world. At some point the language stopped having specific meaning. I just listened to her tones of love and loss, grief and understanding. There was something wonderful in the sound of her words and I might have wanted to make love to her if I wasn’t dead tired.
—
In the morning neither of us had budged. Katrina’s hand was still on my chest. She was asleep with a smile on her face. I could feel the heavy beat of my heart under the light touch of her fingers and palm. I wondered if she and my father would become lovers; if I would care at all or kill them both.
But that crossing was many miles ahead; beyond Boston and Washington, DC.
I removed Katrina’s hand gently and got out of the bed silently like a fat serpent uncoiling from a warm den.
—
I slept again in the quiet car of the Acela train going from Penn Station in New York to South Station, Boston.
Just south of Beacon Hill on Tremont Street across from the public garden was a four-story brick home that I knew from the phone book was the nerve center of the Evangeline Sidney-Gray Foundation and corporation.
I was wearing one of my four identical blue suits and black shoes that shone dully; standing in front of a doorway that had a door with no knob. At seventeen minutes shy of eleven in the morning, with at least a dozen hours of sleep behind me, I looked for a button but there was none. I glanced from side to side for another entrance; all I saw was wall. I chuckled to myself speculating that I’d taken a train to the future where the citizens were hermetically sealed into homes that were self-sufficient and unassailable.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 15