“He did, did he?” I could picture him raising an eyebrow. Funny how that kind of news always interests another member of the fraternity.
“You’ve got enough to question him,” I said. “If you need me to come in if you want to hold him, no problem. Press him on Sonia Salgado. They went to high school together.”
Traffic started to bunch up ahead at 51st. I tapped a finger on the dividing glass. When the driver looked in the rearview, I told her to ease over.
“First Mango, now Sonia Salgado,” Addison said with a touch of resignation in his voice.
“And you’re going to hear that Danny Villa’s been picked up,” I said. “Tell him that.”
“Danny Villa?”
“Right.”
“He’s in this thing too?”
“I think you’re going to find that out, Luther.”
“All right. Give me your cell number.”
“I’ll call you,” I told him.
“Don’t make me wake up Gabriella again,” he said. “Payback would be waking you up.”
As I stepped out of the cab, I said, “I don’t sleep, Luther.” Then I stopped myself. Once again, Addison had just helped me and hadn’t needed to.
“Luther, I’ll call later.”
I was walking west on 45th, book-ended by visitors milling outside the Marriott Marquis, sinewy delivery men leaping from boxy trucks, red-eared optimists with the theater listings clipped from the Times on their way to the TKTS booth, steel-jawed cops on horseback, hard-hearted hustlers who sought to blend into brick and brownstone.
I hit the last few numbers and waited for a response.
“Hello?”
“Julie?”
“Terry,” she said, “hi. Are we courting some sort of bad luck? To talk on the morning of— Or is there a problem?”
“No, no problem,” I said.
“OK. Good.” She sounded relieved.
“Julie, I need to come clean with you on something.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Something about Sonia Salgado,” I said, as I approached the Aladdin Hotel.
“I see,” she said, in her professional voice. “Go on.” She was ready to hear confession.
I squinted as I looked east to cross the street. “I found something in Sixto’s file,” I told her. “A connection between Tommy Mango and the guy who might’ve been Sonia’s boyfriend.”
“What is it?”
“Mango’s father wrote up Sixto two years before Glatzer was killed,” I said. “Moving violation.”
“I see.”
“Tommy knows I know,” I told her. “He’s keeping me away from his old man.”
“Well, Detective Mang—”
“He’s been intimating to a few people that I was involved in this,” I said.
“In the Salgado murder? How so?”
“Either he or his brother Jimmy are telling people that I’m working for them.”
“Which is in exact contrast with the facts, I hope. …”
“Sure.”
“Good, Terry,” she said.
I nodded. “The guy I went at on Forty-fifth? The guy with the wrench? Turns out Jimmy Mango sent him after me.”
Pen scratching on paper: Even over the cell, with its occasional bark of static, I could hear Julie taking notes.
“He’s been arrested, by the way. His name is Bascomb. They found him in Queens, his nose all busted up.”
“May I guess how that happened?”
“And Danny Villa’s been brought in too,” I reported. “They found three books from Sonia’s apartment in his office. It’s a setup. Villa’s not that dumb.”
“No,” she agreed, “Danny’s far from dumb.”
No, he’s not. But he’d called me in to send me away from digging into Sonia’s murder. Addison was right that telescoping a 30-year-old case was bound to be a distraction. I needed to know why Villa had done it, and how he knew Bascomb.
I stopped near the scoop of the underground garage and looked back toward the rising sun, toward Times Square. “Tommy’s moving to wrap this up, Julie.”
“Have you called Sharon?”
“No.”
“I’d better.”
“Why not?”
“Does anybody else know about this?”
I said, “It depends on how much Luther Addison gets out of Alfie Bascomb.”
“Luther—”
“I called him when Bascomb shook me,” I said.
I started heading west again. On the other side of Ninth, a yellow school bus was taking on passengers outside the Seventh-Day Adventist church.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“Forty-fifth, on the West Side.”
“So you can have another fight?”
“I owe a guy an update,” I said. “He’s the only one who showed Sonia any heart.”
“I see.”
I was outside the Avellaneda now. Reviews of a play that needed a subway station were behind me.
She said, “You be careful, Terry.”
I felt the heft of the gun against my stomach. “I am. I will.”
“Try to stay in one piece until tonight, OK?”
I told her I would.
FIFTEEN
I pressed the intercom buzzer a second time before I noticed that the Avellaneda’s entrance was unlocked: A thin strip of bare wood was visible in the crack between the black door and frame.
I went inside and, choking back a desire to call out, I pulled the door shut tight behind me, turning the lock until the deadbolt snapped.
Something was wrong; I knew that right away. Hassan protected his theater. It was his life. He wouldn’t leave the front door open. Unless something extraordinary had occurred.
Or someone forced him to.
Before heading down the steep stairwell, I stopped to listen.
I heard the sizzle of steam heat, water rushing through rattling pipes, the subtle creaking of the wood under my feet, the sound of my breathing, my heart beating.
“A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an understanding simple and unschooled.”
Claudius, that greedy fuck, might’ve been a bit less condescending to his nephew had Hamlet pressed a .38 to his ear.
I reached under my coat and into the pouch.
My fingers fastened on the gun’s grip.
Fortified, I went down the stairs, patiently.
I could feel the subtle, persistent ache in the kidney where Bascomb got me, the moisture on my chest under the heavy sweatshirt, as I took the steps one at a time, leaning my weight against the black wall on my left.
I reached the bottom step, waited and then, with my left hand, yanked back the velvet curtain that led to the seats.
I moved fast down the carpeted aisle into the empty theater.
And I saw him. He was in the light of a single bright spot.
He wore his djellaba over a black turtleneck and black corduroy slacks. One of his embroidered slippers had fallen to the floor.
Probably when he’d kicked over the high stool.
The other slipper was still on his foot, which dangled some three feet above the stage.
Hassan’s head had settled close to his chest, but the thick rope prevented his chin from resting against his body.
The other end of the rope was tied high in the flies.
He swayed slightly, in a small circle, hanging amid the subway station that No Direction Home required. He was downstage from the unseen tracks, from square pillars that seemed to be made of steel but were crafted of plywood and foam and painted to deceive.
As I came down the aisle, I saw on the proscenium his colorful half-fez. When I reached the stage, I saw a sheet of paper underneath it.
I slid the .38 into my coat pocket.
And in the cool silence I lifted the sheet of his private stationery: The name Safi Majorelle was in calligraphic script on the top right. At the bottom, the address of the theater.
On the paper, a note written by
hand, carefully, deliberately:
To my brothers and sisters:
I have lived my life to educate, to entertain, and to provide enjoyment and enlightenment. To bring joy and to relieve sorrow.
To celebrate the creativity of the Latin American people, particularly the Cuban people who live in exile in America.
This theater that I have created, and that we have sustained together, is very strong now. Strong because I have had the honor of dedicating my life to it.
Whatever I may have done, I have done not for myself, but for the love of the spoken word, of actors and their craft, for collaboration, for the thrill of theater—the highest form of Art.
I suffer now, my friends, and I wish to suffer no more.
Life has become unbearable and it will never become better. Soon, I will cease to be me—which means I will no longer be able to join you in the pleasures we have shared.
I wish to leave you with a thought. You know me and what I have done. I am very proud of what I have created, whatever the cost. The kindness that I have shown has been repaid countless times by others.
Finally, I want to say to you all—
Viva los grandes escritores de Cuba—Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Jacinto Milanés, Diego Tejera y Francisco Sellén y Manuel Martin, Dolores Prida, Edwina Acuñar-Gonzalez, Isolina Leyva y Héctor Pérez y Manuel Pereiras—all of you who live to show us what we must know and what we must never forget.
Adios,
He signed the letter with a flourish. Safi Majorelle.
When I lifted his little hat to slide the suicide note back under it, I felt something stiff inside, a piece of cardboard, perhaps, to help it retain its shape.
I turned the hat over. In the top was an old color photo, square with a white border, the kind taken with a small family camera. It was faded and bore vein-like cracks from years of handling.
Two boys in their late teens, early twenties. Standing on what was unmistakably a New York City street corner in bright daylight, they had their arms around each other’s shoulders and they smiled broadly, comically, at the photographer. It was summertime: One boy wore a loud madras shirt with short sleeves, the other a skintight T-shirt that revealed a fit, sturdy body. Both had wild, unkempt hair, long sideburns, wide belts with oversized buckles, jeans slung low on their hips. The boy with the madras shirt had a cigarette in his left hand.
On the white border under his image was written a name: Safi Majorelle.
Under the other boy: Danny Villa.
The names were written in the same ink he had used for his suicide note.
I understood immediately.
I turned over the photo to see if there was anything written on the back.
There was.
I have been a good man.
Before I left the Avellaneda, before I was back on 45th, I knew that whatever tolerance I’d developed for this fetid game, this depravity, this charade of life, had been exceeded. And now I was sick of everything: sick of taxis, of midtown, of the small whitecaps on the gray Hudson, of the scavenger seagulls; sick of stumbling across death while life continued for the corrupt who readily corrupt and, having done so, thrive. In this game, the dead were never innocent, and how they suffer for their flaws. And the corrupt: Where are they now? Lunch at La Grenouille, a drive to open the summer home on the Cape, a week of pampered luxury at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo? Not this bunch. A corner seat at a greasy spoon in TriBeCa. A table in a ratty bar in Little Italy. A handmade suit, a closet full of handmade suits: that appointment necessary for the illusion of power, for power over an impressionable few.
And me? I was sick of myself, my endless meandering, my purposeless purpose, my inability to understand all the reasons why things happen as they do.
I left Majorelle tied to the rafters. Someone for whom his suicide note was intended would arrive shortly.
Saturday matinee.
I was on Tenth Avenue, heading south, and I passed a gas station, rundown tenements, abandoned buildings as cars and small trucks from the Lincoln Tunnel rumbled north. As I crossed 39th, I went past hotdog vendors and immigrants with bouquets of roses trying, though not very hard, to serve those who sat in the disorderly queue of vehicles headed underground. Meanwhile, the sun had made its way over the skyline; or at least, its rays squeezed between the tall buildings in the steel-and-glass jungle to my left. It warmed the vendors and it caused people in cars to turn down their visors. It did not a god-damned thing for me.
Einstein said, “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.”
Sure he is. And for his own amusement.
From his perch deep in the cosmos, beyond the cosmos, he spots, down on the third planet from a sun in one small solar system, in one neighborhood soon to be destroyed in a city that lived to destroy, a young girl, not bright but hopeful—that deadly combination. This scenario, thinks God, needs a little something, a twist, that kind of special little zing that only a Supreme Being can conceive.
With a lift of an eyebrow, deux ex deus, it changes.
Enter a boy at school, charismatic, perhaps attentive. One of his friends, an exotic not from Hell’s Kitchen, not from Cuba, but from Morocco, loves what she loves: the theater, where nothing is as it seems, where dreams are possible. When the friend, Ahmed, talks about theater, stardust dances before the young girl’s eyes. And she sees a future for herself.
But the charismatic boy from Cuba doesn’t love the theater. Nothing interests him, except immediate gratification of the dullest sort—the cheap thrill of petty crime, for example. This charismatic boy is clever. He’s bold. He thinks he knows. He thinks he understands.
One score, he thinks, and I’m gone.
He meets a cop, with whom he shares a lack of scope. The proposition is interesting: diamonds, carried by a defenseless old man.
Luis Sixto rips off Asher Glatzer.
The thin edge of a sharp knife. Asher Glatzer is dead.
Luis Sixto runs off with the diamonds, stays away for a few years, changes his appearance.
I withdrew the photo from my coat pocket.
I looked at the boy with his arm around Hassan.
I put my finger over the boy’s large nose, his wide nostrils.
I imagined his hair as silver and well-groomed, rather than the wild black mop on the boy’s head.
A neat suit, a perfect suit. Handmade shirts, club ties, shiny wing-tips.
What else? An education. A diction that hides his roots but doesn’t deny his Cuban heritage.
A change in temperament. A dignified, gentlemanly attitude. Maturity.
Lifts in those wing-tips.
I was still studying the photo.
New teeth.
What else? A little work around the jawline? In the photo, the boy’s chin juts out ever so slightly.
Outside the Javits Center, a gaggle of men and women in business attire, cheeks red from the wind, all carrying the same royal-blue tote bag bearing a crestlike logo, waited impatiently for a shuttle bus, considered crossing Ninth on their own.
I’m in their old neighborhood, I realized: Some 30 years ago, Sonia and Sixto held hands here and, surrounded by tenements, Hassan dreamed. It was all gone now: tenements and dreams. So thoroughly and completely gone that it was as if neither had existed.
Christ, I was tired now. My kidney throbbed. It was better-than-even money that I’d piss blood when I got back to Harrison Street.
My knee was sore, from running hard on concrete, up stairs, skidding to a stop in the subway station. Choking.
Ghosts.
No, I won’t quote Hamlet again. That fuckin’ parlor trick. I took a two-credit course, aced it. I’ve seen it at the Delacorte, at the Public; hell, I almost saw it at the Old Vic. But Marina was worn out from the flight.
I made it to TriBeCa by 11:45 or so. Since my cell phone hadn’t hummed, I knew Bella was still sleeping: no requests for jelly donuts and hazelnut coffee, “if you don’t mind, Dad. And get something fo
r yourself. My treat.”
The green door was unlocked. Leo was behind the bar, reading Thursday’s Times-Picayune, sipping chicory coffee. For some reason, he opened the blinds on the Hudson Street side of the bar. Little mites fluttered in the sunlight.
So that’s the color of the Tilt’s floor. Somewhere between murky gray and Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon green.
Leo had something enticing burbling back on the hot plate in his office. The scent of nutty flour, thyme, and seafood filled the bar.
“Shrimp gumbo?”
He looked over his bifocals. “You got it. Be ready noon or thereabouts, if you ready.”
I shook my head.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Gotta squeeze into that tuxedo tonight.”
“Tuxedo. You too?” I asked. I was still over by the door.
“D says you got him this girl your daughter tell him is pretty fine.”
“We’re going in as four,” I said. “All goes well, we should walk out that way.” I put my hand on the lock on the green door. “He here?”
“No,” Leo said, shaking his head. “Probably trying to borrow some shoes.”
I snapped the lock and walked over by Leo. Above him, Saturday-morning cartoons without sound. Something from Japan, frenetic, violent.
I dug out the .38 and handed it to him.
“This has been here the whole time,” I said.
He took it.
“‘The whole time’?”
“Since whenever.” I sat across from him on a wobbling stool. “Or I’m going to have to answer for pulling it on somebody this morning.”
“Oh, yeah?” He took off his glasses.
“Addison had the guy picked up. When he hears I had that, he’ll be all over me.”
“No shit,” Leo said as he wiped the gun on the well-worn white towel he wore on his straining belt.
He lifted himself off his throne and, with a thick hand on the bar, inched along toward the register. He leaned down and, biting his tongue as he groped for the slot, slipped the gun back in its hiding place, from which it had been absent for two years.
“You don’t need it?” he asked as he edged back.
“I got no choice,” I replied. I slid off the stool.
“It’s here, you want it back.”
A Well-Known Secret Page 21