Trouble Is What I Do

by Walter Mosley

  “McGill?” the petty overseer asked as if the name might have been pronounced aardvark.

  “The only thing my people need to know is if there’s a way to get to the special elevator entrance for the restaurant,” I said.

  “Nobody asked that,” the supervisor admitted.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kal.”

  “Well, Kal, the people who run things above me are citizens. They look for vulnerability, whereas a man like me looks for opportunity.”

  The little man didn’t know what to say to that, so he gestured me forward, and I was well on my way.

  Just beyond the loading dock was a medium-size one-car lift that was used to deliver food and the like directly to the restaurant. On the other side of the service elevator was a well of stairs that brought me to the first-floor special entrance for the restaurant elevator.

  Using this entry, I came up behind them.

  Clarice Boorland sat behind a specially set-up desk blocking the express elevator. She was there to vet guests for the private party. Flanking Clarice were two well-built men, both of whom wore suits like mine.

  “Hey, guys,” I said.

  The men turned first. They were broad-chested and wore blue ties, also like mine. Black suit, blue tie—that was the pedestrian uniform of Alberghetti’s security team.

  The woman stood and turned.

  “Mr. Rudolf,” she greeted, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

  In her forties, Clarice was about five nine and had heavily processed black hair the luster of Royal Crown Russian sable. She was said to be preternaturally strong. One story had it that once a purse snatcher grabbed her handbag on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights and ran. She went after him for seventeen or thirty-seven blocks, depending on who tells you the story. But whatever the details, when she finally cornered him, Willie Corbett turned, intending to slap the foolish woman down and make good his escape. All versions of the story, including Willie’s, say that she hit him with a single right hook that put him down for the count.

  “Ms. Boorland,” I said, returning her derision with a boxer’s respect.

  “The boss says that you’re working the entrance to the dining room tonight.”

  “The boss is always right,” I said with a not-quite-winning grin.

  Clarice knew that it would take more than a single blow to fell me.

  Looking into my eyes, she called out, “Willie!”

  From a different door on the far side of the elevator doors came a fleet-looking brown man. He also wore an ensemble like mine.

  “Yeah, Clarice?”

  “Mr. Rudolf here will be at the door upstairs. Why don’t you go up there with him?”

  “Okay.” Willie Corbett, the man Clarice ran down and knocked out, was now her subordinate and live-in boyfriend—what some might call half a love story. She said that she’d never marry a purse snatcher but would keep him around until the real thing came along.

  “What the hell you doin’ here, McGill?” Willie asked me when we were well on our way to the eighty-third floor.

  “Same thing you’re doing in Clarice’s bed,” I said. “Makin’ a livin’.”

  Willie didn’t like me, but that was okay. In my experience, there wasn’t much profit from the appreciation of scavengers.

  The upper entrance to Fancy Dan’s main dining room comprised two great glass doors set at the end of a long hallway. The walls of that corridor were lined by shelving containing hundreds of horizontal bottles of wine.

  My job was to stand to the side of the open doors and to be as innocuous as possible. Not a bad living for a man like Lonnie, a man with a high-school equivalency diploma and the willingness to stand in the path of physical threat.

  The young women guests began to appear at around 8:00. They wore bright-colored gowns, many with short hems and décolletages. Of the thirty-one guests, two were Asian, one café-au-lait brown, and there were no Latinx guests at all.

  By 9:00 the party was in full swing. The volume rose while they made speeches, gave presents, drank deeply from the hallway of wines, and laughed and laughed and laughed. There were shrieks and shouts and incomprehensible declarations. I remember thinking that the only painter appropriate for this bacchanal would be a modern-day reincarnation of Hieronymus Bosch.

  Willie Corbett had concealed himself around a corner somewhere. There to keep an eye on me while I stood guard over the young women’s revel.

  I was in no hurry.

  At 10:47 a flagging damsel emerged from the contemporary saturnalia. She was tottering slightly and bound in a gown fabricated from the skin of some very young animal. She was blond that night, thin but well proportioned, and so used to high heels that she might teeter but never would she fall.

  The heels had her at five seven. She smiled and held out a hand for me to take—for stability’s sake.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “But is there another more private bathroom? I’m feeling a little sick.”

  “I bet we can find one,” I assured her.

  We went down the hall of wine and then toward a door in the outer chamber that had the word PRIVATE stenciled on it.

  “Sounds like a bathroom could be in there,” I said.

  The young woman gave me a rather nauseated smile.

  Six paces down and then to the right was a door upon which was affixed a red-and-white plastic sign that announced WOMEN.

  “Here you go,” I said.

  “Will you come in with me?” she asked, obviously not put off by my brutish face and physique.

  You can really tell poise and sophistication when a woman is on her knees, vomiting into a porcelain commode, and still manages not to get one spot on her unborn-lambskin gown. When she was done, I drenched my handkerchief in cold water and held it to her forehead.

  “Oh my God, that feels good,” she proclaimed. “Is this all part of what the security service has to offer these days?”

  “No. It’s steering three kids through childhood illnesses,” I said. “Sometimes all on the same night.”

  “Children? You aren’t wearing a ring.”

  “It’s a compliment that you noticed.”

  “My name is Estelle Triumph.”

  “Leonid McGill.”

  “Do you have a card, Mr. McGill?”

  Estelle didn’t need my assistance on the walk back to her seat. But I accompanied her anyway.

  Before sitting down, she whispered in my ear, “I use security sometimes. I’m going to call you.” Then she lowered into her chair, and in a moment she was lost to me, like a fish darting off through the water after flopping out of the fisherman’s boat. As I backed away from her, she was once again laughing, making exaggerated gestures, and listening without hearing a word.

  Protocol would have me return to my post, but instead I moved toward the head of the table. The maître d’hôtel eyed me from the sidelines but decided not to interfere. After all, the rich women were only there to pad his pockets, not to open some new wound.

  Justine was happy and laughing like the rest of the women. There was a small table placed behind her. This was heaped with unopened gifts. She, it seemed, wanted for nothing.

  The first thing I noticed was her engagement ring: a diamond-crusted platinum band with a rectangular-cut deep-green emerald that was at least twenty karats in weight. It was a garish display. Everything else about the woman was understated and elegant. I had to wonder at the taste of the man she was marrying.

  “Ms. Sternman,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to hear, so I repeated her name.

  “Yes?” Her tone was condescending, but I didn’t hold that against her. It was quite a drop from her world into mine. I mean, she was the closest thing to royalty that America had to offer, and I was just a brown rowdy from down in the street somewhere.

  “A man brought this downstairs. He claimed that he was representing the royal family of Monaco, but they wouldn’t let him up.” I handed her the forged envelope.r />
  She took it from me and studied the two-thousand-dollar wrapper. I suppose that it passed muster, because she used her greasy steak knife to cut open the fold, and took the sheets out. She read the letter I had written first. It took about ninety seconds. Then she stood from the table like, I thought, Aphrodite rising from the sea. I had to catch the back of her chair to keep it from tipping over.

  Justine was as tall as Estelle Triumph, but she wasn’t wearing heels. Her cashmere dress was one-piece and teal colored, her lines perfectly proportioned. She was handsome with quiet dignity now that the party was behind her.

  “Come with me.” She turned and I followed.

  A few of the revelers called to us, but Justine did not heed them. She went to the maître d’hôtel and asked him a question that I didn’t overhear. He said something, then gestured toward a far corner of the dining room. She moved in that direction. I tagged along behind, wondering what she’d make of the words from her long-dead grandmother.

  We came to a cream-colored door that had a digital lock on it. The maître d’ must have given her the combination, because she pressed three buttons and pulled the door open.

  It was a small room with four straight-backed wooden chairs around a square-shaped, solid wood table that had an empty ashtray at its center. There was a sink against one wall. The one window was floor to ceiling, looking down Park Avenue.

  Justine sat at the table and took up the pages. I turned to face the window, giving her the illusion that she was not being watched. It was a simple ploy. The bright lights of the room cast her reflection perfectly in the glass.

  She reread the letter I wrote and then held up the ancient sheet, supposedly torn from a journal that began on the Mayflower. She seemed to have the same trouble I did deciphering the ancient text. She put it down after a bout of squinting, holding the document at arm’s length, and then bringing it to within an inch of her nose.

  I thought she’d flip to the seventy-year-old letter on the back, but instead she picked up my note again.

  I recalled the words as she reread them.

  To Justine Penelope Sternman,

  My name is unimportant. What is of interest is the letter written on the back of a page torn from the journal penned by one of your long-ago ancestors. My only job is to make sure you get this information. If, after reading the contents, you decide you want to meet the man in question, call the number at the bottom of the page. You will be connected to an answering service. Just give a time and place, and the party will meet you there. I apologize for the elaborate steps involved, but the phone must stay off because your father has threatened my quite elderly client. I need to make sure that he isn’t put into jeopardy.

  I cannot stress enough that there is no expectation on my part or on the part of the man who caused this information to be brought to you. If you want to burn the letter and forget it—that is your prerogative.

  Thank you.

  Miss Sternman then turned her attention to the back side of the journal entry. The letter Lucinda wrote was rendered in bright blue ink, and her granddaughter read it again and again. Now and then she looked at the other writings, but her main emphasis was on the intelligence her grandmother knew she needed.

  There was a moment when she put the letter down, pondered two minutes or more, then took off her opulent engagement ring and dropped it into the envelope I had delivered. After that, she read the letter again…and again.

  “Did you see who brought this?” she asked my back.

  I turned to look at her. “No, ma’am.”

  “They told you it was a man?”

  “I think so. Yeah, yeah. A guy said he had a message from some royals.”

  “A black man?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t seem likely but…” I hunched my shoulders.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rudolf, ma’am. Lonnie Rudolf.”

  She bit her lower lip, looked out the window, and considered. She stood up, took in and then exhaled a deep breath.

  “Mr. Rudolf, will you please go downstairs and ask the person who received this envelope to come up here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I took two steps toward the door and then stopped.

  “Excuse me, Miss Sternman.”

  “Yes, Mr. Rudolf?”

  “Are you okay? I mean…is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “No. I don’t believe there is.”

  Back on the first floor, I told Clarice the story she should adhere to. Nothing I said made her happy. I needed her to tell Miss Sternman that indeed an envelope was delivered but the man who took it had gone off duty.

  “Tell her that after the rush, you usually let a couple of guys go home,” I suggested.

  “I do not work for you, Leonid McGill,” she told me. “And I’m not about to get knee-deep in your shit.”

  “I know you’re not beholden to me, Clarice. But before you get all righteous and truthful with your betters, I suggest you call Antonio and ask him what he thinks.”

  Three minutes later found me crossing Park Avenue. It was just past 11:30, and the job I’d agreed to do was done. In many cases the next step was getting paid monies the client still owed. I would also, as a rule of thumb, be careful because of my proximity to the scene of my recent subterfuge. But the only thought on my mind was Justine Sternman putting her engagement ring in the sheath with her grandmother’s letter. What was the heiress thinking? I felt as if my life and hers were being guided by the dead hand of the past, as Marx taught me through my father’s homeschooling before Dad left us to struggle and my mother to die.

  This reverie was broken by a triple honk on a car horn. Even before I could look up, there came the screech of tires. I heaved to the left, hitting the grass of the avenue divider with my shoulder. The pistol was in my hand; two men were coming up from behind me; they were also armed. But before any shots could be fired, a yellow cab bounced up on the median and headed straight for my shadows.

  One guy jumped out from in front of the headlights, but the cab broke hard and swung to the right, hitting the gymnast gunsel with the passenger’s-side door. The other attacker was even more acrobatic. He leaped up on the hood and then belly flopped on the car’s roof. In response, the cab accelerated and then hit the brakes again. The second man was thrown hard to the pavement.

  By then I was on my feet, and the taxi pulled up almost as if I were an everyday fare. I pulled open the back door, jumped in, and the taxi took off.

  Twill guided the car into the street, among blaring horns and shrieking brakes. Then he ran a red light and swiveled into an illegal turn down a comparatively quiet crosstown street.

  We were headed west.

  “Damn, Pops,” my daredevil son exclaimed.

  “I guess one of the guys I talked to must have let Hilton know. Probably Shefly.”

  “Why didn’t they stop you coming in?”

  “I used an alternate entrance.”

  I stayed flat in the back seat, not due to fright but rather because my mind was so fixed on the problems at hand that my physical position seemed…inconsequential.

  “You okay?” Twill asked.

  “Bring us to the Eighty-Sixth Street parking garage.”

  “Truth to that.”

  A few minutes after midnight, in the little front room of our vast four-bedroom prewar apartment, Twill and I unpacked the events of the evening. My wife and father were asleep in their beds. My other children, Shelly and Dimitri, didn’t live at home anymore. Shelly was in a dormitory at college, and D lived with a Belarusian femme fatale, who, as my wife said, would either kill him or make him into a man—or both.

  “You think they were gonna kill you?” my son asked.

  “I don’t know. Zeal does play for keeps, and those guys were good. Thank you, boy.”

  “She get the letters?” he asked.

  “Got ’em, read ’em, and removed her engagement ring.”

  “So what do
we do now? Hit the mattresses?”

  I’d made sure that all my children were schooled in the classics of Hollywood and European film history. They knew Casablanca, The Third Man, The Seventh Seal, and Gary Cooper’s Virginian, circa 1929. The Godfather was definitely on their syllabus.

  “No,” I said. “First I need to go to the Port Authority bus station to meet a guy at 5:47. While I’m doing that, you tell your mom and grandfather that Hush will be by to take you all someplace safe.”

  “You don’t need me with you?”

  “I can’t have my son save my ass more than once in a two-week period. That happens and my forced-retirement clause automatically kicks in.”

  Twill went off to bed, and I napped on the little den’s sofa for a few hours. I didn’t want to climb in bed with Katrina for fear that she might wake up and ask me to explain why I was putting our son’s life on the line with my own. There was really no way for me to explain how keeping Twill close to me, even in dangerous situations, was better than leaving the young man to shift for himself. The spirit of the law was Twill’s heart, but he had no truck with lawmakers or their enforcers. He knew that a poor woman wasn’t going to get a fair trial; that the laws were made for the rich to pick the pockets of everyone else; and that, at the crux of it, the only real law was the one that nature provides.

  My job was to steer him along until his survival instincts matched his natural intelligence.

  I was floating just below the surface of consciousness when my phone clicked. If I’d been a caveman, it would have been the broken twig before the greatest war in unrecorded history.

  I picked up the cell, turned it on in the dark, and saw the text.

  Not safe at the place I said. ma

  I got the message, closed my eyes, and fell into a deep sleep as secure as a baby, safe in the womb of life.