Katrina and I were definitely man and wife. Maybe we were no longer in love but we knew how to get under each other’s skin.
“That’s something you know a lot about,” I said, wanting to attack my daughter’s attacker.
I downed the rest of the cognac and Katrina reached back behind the other side of the sofa, producing the new bottle. She poured me another drink.
“I vas looking for love,” she said, her blue diamond eyes staring into my brown ones.
To say I felt the stirrings of an erection would be a gross understatement. This biological reaction was shocking to me but not to Katrina. She looked down on the lengthwise tent of my trousers and shifted over, laying her left hand on it.
“I used to kiss yours,” she said. “I used to cry out for you.”
Her grip tightened and I thought about pushing the hand away. Instead I took another drink.
Katrina started moving her hand up toward my belly button and then down again.
“Do you vant to come like this?” she whispered. “Like a teenage boy on a date with some fast girl.”
“Ummmmmm.”
“Or do you vant me to show you what I have done with my lovers? Do you vant me to take you right here on this couch?” Her voice was getting stronger. “Do you vant to get on your knees and suck the pussy?”
“ What . . . ?” I said.
“Vat did you say?” she asked me. She leaned over and gave me a wet kiss.
“ What did you do?” I asked. “ With them.”
I already knew. One of her old boyfriends had hired a detective to take pictures of her with the new man. The jilted lover sent the photos to me, expecting that I would exact retribution. He miscalculated. I threatened him and put the pictures in my safe.
But hearing her tell me was better than any pictures. Having her position me and encourage my manhood was exactly what I needed right then.
I don’t think that Katrina was trying to help me. She was just angry at life and getting back at the world by seducing me. It made no sense but I wasn’t really thinking . . . “Shouldn’t I use a condom?” I remember asking at some point.
“I don’t need it anymore,” she said into my ear.
IN THE MORNING I woke to find the empty fifth of cognac on the night table next to our bed. Naked, Katrina was on her back, half out from under the covers, and snoring. The erection from the night before reappeared but I was sober enough to ignore it this time.
I lurched from the bed and went down the hall, holding a towel around my waist in case one of our kids had come in during the night.
Another cold shower and I was out the door and down to the street. I felt like a young man with a hangover. My dick was waiting for any excuse, as my mind wandered from here to there with no direction, no reason.
I stopped at a greasy spoon on Seventy-first Street and ordered fried pork chops with an American cheese and garlic omelet. That, with home fries, white toast, and grape jelly, put enough poison in my system to slow down the rampaging hormones awakened by a woman who I now understood was overwhelmed by her change of life.
27
I DO MY best thinking while walking, but sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off with the blinders of an office cubicle around me, facing a monitor with solitaire on it; the only thing on my mind would be the next card to play and if the boss might be walking by.
I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. My emotion was more an uneasiness about having sex with my wife because my ex-girlfriend had asked me to come back. This conundrum seemed petty, childish even.
But I knew the perturbation over the drunken sex orgy with my wife was really just a blind for the murders I’d caused. Stumpy Brown, Bingo Haman, and there might have been more; certainly more was coming.
Walking down Tenth Avenue with artists, businessmen and -women, and the homeless, I tried to imagine that desk job. If the worst thing that happened in my life was getting fired because I was a slacker and replaced by a better-educated Hindu from Mumbai, if that was the cruelest event, then I’d feel that I was blessed.
But instead I was godless, blindfolded, and in line for execution by parties unknown. I did the right thing and got the wrong outcome. I could have been a lyric in the Dr. John song.
My cell phone throbbed somewhere between Thirtieth and Twenty-ninth.
“Boss?” Zephyra said.
“Yeah.”
“ What’s up today?”
“Not much.”
“I can see from the GPS of your cell phone that you’re headed south. Are you going to see Charles?”
I had to remember to have my tracker disconnected.
“Yeah,” I said. “Anything you want me to tell him?”
“No. Just hi.”
I WALKED pretty fast, making it down to the intersection of Charles and Hudson Streets in the West Village before nine. A quarter of a block east and seven granite steps down was a shamrock green steel-reinforced door that could stymie a SWAT team or a platoon of advancing Russian militia.
All I had to do was stand in front of that door because a blank white card in my wallet sent out a pulse that made the denizen of the underground bunker aware of my presence.
Thirty seconds after I got there a voice said, “Come on in, LT.”
I pressed the door and it opened. I walked through and the mostly steel portal slammed behind.
Everything seemed as it always had; room after room filled with electronic devices used for intelligence gathering, flat-out spying, and, now and then, triggers for more aggressive acts.
Three chambers down I came to a cavernous space that was once the master bedroom of the subterranean apartment. Now the room was lined with computers and air conditioners. In the very center of these frigid electronics was a round Formica tabletop with a man-sized hole cut in the middle. Twelve plasma and LCD screens encircled this desk. These monitors flowed with images, texts, and less definable waves of color.
Sitting in the hole was a caramel-colored young Adonis. On top of his head were glasses with one blue and one red lens. These I knew he used to see images represented by colors beyond the range of human sight.
“Hey, Bug,” I said.
Tiny “Bug” Bateman (né Charles Bateman) had weighed three hundred pounds when we first met. Somewhere along the way in our dealings he became aware of Zephyra Ximenez. He fell in love with her phone patter and the image he found of her in the virtual world. She told him that he’d have to get in shape if he wanted even a chance with her.
Iran became his trainer and, eighteen months later, he’d lost forty-three percent of his body weight and sixty percent of his fat. Now he ran 10K races and bench-pressed two hundred pounds.
“Leonid,” the beautiful young man hailed.
“Bug,” I said. “You almost ready for a marathon?”
“Never.”
“ Why not?”
“Because a guy named Pheidippides, the first man to run what was to become known as the marathon, ran the distance to warn the Greek army about an enemy attack. He was successful but the exertion killed him. I have no death wish.”
“Did you get my text?” I asked. On the way down I sent a message to Bug about information I needed.
“Yeah. Let me call it up.”
While he was working I thought I’d fill in some gaps.
“Zephyra was asking me about you,” I ventured.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She sounded like she wanted to know what you were up to.”
The computer genius smiled.
“ What’s up, Bug?”
“Z told me when we started going out that she was not an exclusive kinda girl. She said that she had a few men friends and didn’t want any of them clinging to her. So we made a deal that we’d get together only once and at most twice a week.
“I called her one time when I guess I shouldn’t have and she was obviously with somebody else. After that I started going out myself. I met this woman named Marcia, head of Western Hemisphere computer operations f
or Euro-Bank. I plugged a leak they had and she took me to Johannesburg for a weeklong vacation.”
“That’d do it,” I said.
“Here you go,” Bug announced. “Teresa Lesser has no regular cell phone but that doesn’t mean she might not have a throwaway. She hardly ever makes any outgoing calls from her landline. Up until four years ago she used to call a Margaret Rich once a week on Sundays but then that stopped. Rich is her maiden name. Margaret was probably her mother, probably died.
“For the last nine years she’s talked twice a week to various cell phones, all of them belonging to a woman named Claudia Burns.” Bug hit a few more keys and then said, “Ms. Burns is the executive assistant for a Johann Brighton at Rutgers Assurance Company.”
And curiouser yet.
“Can you pull up an employee flowchart for Rutgers?”
“Sure thing.”
While Bug hit keys and clicked around I wondered. What would Minnie Lesser’s mother have to do with the heist? I was the one who implicated Minnie’s boyfriend’s girlfriend. She had nothing to do with it—did she?
“ What you need, LT?” Bug asked.
“Are Johann Brighton and Antoinette Lowry along the same chain of command?”
He worked two mouses at once, moving data across a broad screen that hung from a metal stalk attached to the ceiling.
After some study he said, “No. They work in completely different sections. As a matter of fact they are entirely unconnected. He works under the auspices of the CEO, François Dernier, while she reports upward to the president of the company—Pat Rollins.”
“Can you get me the name, address, and phone number for this Claudia?”
“It’ll be on your phone and computer in under a minute.”
Almost as an afterthought I said, “ While you’re at it will you look up a guy named Seldon Arvinil?”
“Anything special?”
“I hope not. He lives in New York and is over forty—I think.”
I took a deep breath and turned to leave the frigid computer room. I hadn’t sat down because there was no chair for visitors in Bug’s electronic playground.
“Leonid,” he said to my back.
“ What?”
“There’s somebody upstairs in the apartment that I want you to see.”
“Somebody for me?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d he even know I was gonna be here?”
“All I can say is that you don’t have to worry. Take the second door on your left in the second room. That leads to the stairs.”
28
I’D NEVER BEFORE taken the stairs from Bug’s underground electronic grotto to his first-floor apartment. I knew that Bug owned the apartment above his intelligence laboratory; that he had all mail and deliveries come in and out of there.
I walked up the stairs with sliding panels closing behind me as I went. Finally I came to a slender door. From there I entered into a bright living room that had a large window looking down on Charles Street.
There was a young white woman and an Asian man walking hand in hand on the other side of the block. She wore a pink miniskirt and he blue jeans overalls.
“Leonid,” a woman said from behind and to the left.
I turned to see Helen Bancroft, my wife’s personal physician for at least twenty-five years.
She was taller than I, but not by much, and gray- instead of raven-haired as she was when we first met. Back then her hair was long and lustrous. Now it was short, more revealing of her face and smile.
“Helen?”
She smiled and said, “ Would you come into the kitchen?”
“Maybe if you tell me what you’re doing here,” I said.
Helen was slender and smart. She wore a gray pantsuit and an orange blouse with a necklace made from leafy and nacreous ceramic charms. Her hands were small and delicate. Her eyes were brown, but one of their ancestors might have been salmon.
“Your wife called me,” she said.
“ When?”
“Yesterday. She said that you were running a fever and didn’t want to take time to see a doctor. She told me that I’d be called by a woman named Zephyra when she knew that you’d be in your office. I had agreed to make a house call. You know, Katrina and I go way back.”
“That doesn’t explain how you got here.”
“This morning, half an hour ago, Zephyra called and told me that you’d be in Mr. Bateman’s apartment. She said that she knew my office was only a few blocks away. She’s a smart woman.
“Now will you come with me into the kitchen?”
SHE HAD ME strip down to my underwear and sit on a sheet of wax paper that she spread out on the dining table. I sat upright and then laid back, got on my side and let her use her rubber gloves to inspect my prostate. She took my temperature, of course.
“ What is it?” I asked.
“One-oh-two-point-one. You should be in bed.”
“Not that you’re wrong, Doctor,” I said, “but bed is the last place I should be.”
She looked into my eyes, down my throat, shone a light in my ears, and felt around my abdominal area.
“Does anybody live in this apartment?” she asked toward the end of all those studies.
“Not physically,” I said. “ What’s wrong with me, Doc?”
“It’s hard to say. You definitely have a fever. It’s either a low-grade virus or infection or, more likely, a virus that has become an infection that settled in an organ or gland. The left side of your neck is a little swollen. You need bed rest.”
“Not unless you think the cure is more important than the life of the patient.”
This statement brought mild alarm into the doctor’s eyes.
“I’ve brought a new general antibiotic.” From her bag she retrieved a little glass bottle filled with tiny purple pills. “If you take one of these three times a day, preferably with meals, that should knock out any infection.”
“How many days?”
“Ten, to be safe.”
She went to the cabinet and brought out a glass that she filled in the sink.
Bringing the tumbler back to me, she asked, “Have you eaten recently?”
“Not too long ago.”
“Then take three of these to start with. It will bring down that fever and keep you going. After that take them three times a day.”
“It’s been a long time, Helen,” I said after downing the Lilliputian tablets.
“Yes, it has.”
“ What, twenty years?”
“Maybe more.”
“How’s my wife doing?”
A shadow passed over the physician’s intelligent face.
“I’m worried about Katrina,” she said.
“Is she sick?”
“I think she’s depressed. It’s unethical for me to be discussing this with you but the reason I agreed to this unorthodox meeting is partly because I wanted to tell you what I felt.”
“She needs medicine?”
“She needs help. A therapist, a psychopharmacologist . . . something.”
“Huh.” I was pulling up my pants.
“ Will you talk to her, Leonid?”
“ What do you think it is?”
“Menopause has started. Many times women go through depression at the change. They feel like they are no longer women. Some women believe that there’s no place in this man’s world for a female who is barren.”
Standing there, buttoning my shirt and looking at my wife’s friend and doctor, I thought about the barren apartment in which we stood, about the millions of terabytes of secret information that roiled below us—knowledge that could bring down corporations and do more damage to governments than ten thousand daisy cutter bombs.
Then I considered my wife. I felt that I had to be in that room, at that moment, after fever and fear and death. If one of those elements was missing I wouldn’t have stumbled onto the words I spoke.
“You know, Katrina doesn’t let you in, Helen,” I sai
d. “She thinks she does. She gets an idea in her head and she looks at you and imagines that you’re thinking the same thing—or that you aren’t. But what you think and what you say does not, cannot, mean a thing to her. The idea is already there.”
Dr. Bancroft winced as if jabbed with one of her own scalpels. She nodded and said, “But you know her better than anyone, Leonid. You have to try to get through to her.”
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 13