“Kosher deli? Your Greek ancestors are spinning in their graves.”
“Jews, Greeks, same thing. Our flags are white and blue. See you there at noon.”
He was off the phone. I was glad for that. I had expected a lecture from him about keeping my nose out of other people’s business. Maybe he was saving the lecture for lunch, or maybe he didn’t think I could do much harm with such an open-and-shut case of murder.
As I pulled up to the Airport Diner, Annie was walking up the stairs. It was hard for me to see her and not wonder how we had gotten to where we were. To wonder if it was only John’s death that had torn us apart or whether there were already cracks and fractures in our marriage. Even now, with all the grief and pain and hard feelings, my heart skipped a little at the sight of her lean, streamlined body and feline face with her perfect nose and lush, dark brown hair. The way she walked still knocked me out. I think I once described her as an arrow built to slice through the air. An arrow, the perfect way to describe my ex.
She smiled when she saw me. It wasn’t the old, unfreighted smile, but there was love in it. There were other things in it, too, things that outweighed the love. Yet we had come to an understanding. We would always be connected through our kids and what we had shared. We wouldn’t pretend that the pain and fury hadn’t existed. We had kind of agreed to put it aside. That life was too short to hold on to the wrong things, the things that shortened it even more.
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of citrus—fresh-cut oranges and limes—and mildly of cigarettes. She had gone back to smoking after John’s death and had tried to stop, but as she once said, “Stopping would be like forgetting and I can’t do that.”
I didn’t agree. That was another battle for someone else to have with her. Threads of gray appeared in her hair. I thought they suited her. She wouldn’t have agreed with that, either. She was drumming her piano fingers on the tabletop, the surface of her black coffee vibrating in kind. She seemed anxious or poised for a fight.
“So what’s this about, Gus?”
“Relax, Annie. I just haven’t seen you in a while and I wanted to tell you that there’ll be two guys in the old house for a few weeks. I know you don’t like weekly rentals, but it’s some cash.”
I didn’t get the reaction I thought I would.
“Fine” was all she said, distracted.
“Hey, what’s up with you? Usually when I mention the house, you—”
She reached her left hand across the table and took my right. “Let’s put it on the market.”
I wanted to say something, but no words would come out of my mouth. Luckily, the waitress arrived with a cup of coffee and placed it in front of me. She dropped off some creamers as well. I fixed the coffee up the way I liked it, sipped some, sipped some more, but what I was really doing was stalling. I had always been the one to push putting the house on the market. Annie had been the one to move toward my way of thinking by the inch, and now here she was proposing we sell the house we thought we’d live in for the rest of our lives. My guts twisted up, and much worse than they had the night before in Coney Island.
“But what about John’s room?”
Silent tears rolled down her cheeks and she squeezed my hand. “He’s gone, Gus. And after what happened last year . . . I mean . . . he’s just gone and he’s never coming home. I don’t want to hope anymore. It hurts too much.”
“I know.” My voice was brittle. “Have you talked to Krissy about this?”
Annie shook her head. “She’ll be good with it. Don’t worry.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to the real estate lady when I get a chance.”
She squeezed my hand even more tightly. “Can we get out of here, Gus, please?”
“Sure.” I pulled free of her grasp, stood up, and threw a ten-dollar bill on the table. “Where do you want to go?”
When she looked up at me the way she did, I knew the answer.
• • •
I’D MADE MY ROOM as dark as I could manage in midmorning, not because it would help me pretend I wasn’t backsliding or risking everything I had with Magdalena, but because the artificial twilight blurred the lines between right and wrong just enough to let me do this. I knew what was on the line. I also knew that we each needed this to let go of the house and of each other, finally. The last time we’d slept together was December and it had been angry and spiteful and marvelous, too. Annie had shown up at my door naked beneath a long leather coat I had bought for her birthday years before. She said that day was about goodbye. What it really was about was punishment for us both. This, though, really did feel like goodbye.
Almost an hour had passed since we walked through the door and we hadn’t uttered a single intelligible word since. We undressed each other in silence, though the sex had been noisy and urgent. We laid in bed next to each other, her shoulder in the nook under my left arm. Her hair against my chest and cheek. The room smelling so intensely of her that I felt myself getting hard again. She noticed and used her mouth to encourage me. Then a strange and intimate thing happened. As Annie went down on me, she cried, her tears raining down on me. I didn’t try to stop her or comfort her and she seemed not to want to be stopped or comforted. I lifted her up at the hips, careful not to slam her legs against the headboard, and pressed my lips to her. We both came almost immediately.
After she collected herself, Annie got up and showered. I didn’t join her. She didn’t want me to and I knew better. I knew a real goodbye when I saw one. As the water ran, I called our real estate agent and left a message about putting the house on the market. There would be time to change our minds, but that wouldn’t happen. Still, it would be good to do it as soon as possible. Magical thinking and hope are persistent powerful things. It was best to treat them both with strong doses of reality. In this case, reality would come in the form of a SOLD sign dangling from the FOR SALE sign astride the mailbox at 11 Pinetree Court.
Annie came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her, an odd expression on her face. It was an appropriate day for an odd expression. I didn’t need to look at a mirror to know I had the same expression on my face. I thought she might simply get dressed and leave without a word, but no, Annie had something to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it, though I wasn’t going to stop her. There was no stopping her. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Rob asked me to marry him.”
I thought I heard someone ask, “What did you say?”
“I didn’t answer him yet. I couldn’t until . . . I just couldn’t yet.”
“I think I understand.” There was that someone’s voice again. “But you don’t really love him, do you?”
“He makes me happy, Gus. I want to be happy.”
“You don’t need my approval.” I recognized the voice as mine.
“I want it.”
“Then you have it. He’s a good guy.”
I sat up, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek. I hugged her hard, very hard.
“So you’ve talked about it with Krissy?” I asked.
“She was harder to convince than you.”
I laughed. “Let’s not go there, okay.”
She laughed, too.
“I just have one question, Annie. Did the decision about the house have anything to do with Rob’s proposing?”
She thought about it for a second and said, “No. Until you mentioned renting the house, I hadn’t even thought about it. It just seemed right, you know? I have to let go.”
“Okay.”
Ten minutes later, Annie was gone. I almost hung the DO NOT DISTURB placard on the door handle outside my room because I didn’t want the sheets cleaned or the room aired out. I didn’t do it, though. Annie wasn’t the only one who had to let go.
12
(MONDAY NOON)
I had about an hour before I was
to meet Al Roussis, and it would only take me about fifteen minutes to get to the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, so I went down to Michael—Mikel—Smith’s room to collect his things and pack them in his blue duffel bag. I figured I’d bring it over to the house after lunch with Al. One of the privileges afforded me as the house detective was a passkey card. I only used the thing once, and that was when I’d mislaid the keycard for my own room. The Paragon wasn’t the kind of place that attracted trouble, not the kind that required me getting into people’s rooms. We had some drunks on the weekends at the Full Flaps. That was about it.
The Paragon was a convenient way station, a hotel used by cheap businessmen or bargain-hunting travelers to spend the night before early-morning or late-night flights. Not the kind of clientele who attracted the assholes and dirt bags you’d find fifty miles west, lurking around Manhattan hotels. That said, someone did try to shotgun me in my sleep last year. The only casualties were the mattress and the bedding. But so many people had tried to kill me last December that I would have needed a scorecard to keep up.
As I left my room, I noticed the maid’s cart two doors over to my right, heard her vacuuming. I thought about going back into my room and blasting the AC, but I didn’t. Nor did I strip the bed and bundle up the sheets to obscure the stains. I guess I was beyond embarrassment if not beyond guilt. I wasn’t feeling guilty, not exactly. It hit me in the shower that although I understood what had just happened between Annie and me, that there was an inevitability to it, there would be no way for Maggie to see it as anything but a betrayal. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes there are things between people that defy the usual moral judgments. I didn’t try to fool myself or give myself an out because Maggie and I had never made declarations of eternal love or pledges of monogamy. We had only one spoken rule: no rantings about our exes. So it was easy to see how this situation would be particularly touchy.
I took the stairs down to the first floor, turned left out of the exit door, and headed for room 111. There wasn’t much happening on this floor, or anywhere else in the hotel for that matter. We were about a third full. Business would pick up in May as we headed toward summer. The nature of the business changed in the summer because vacation travel would pick up and because we were a convenient stop for people on their way to or back from the Hamptons. A few hours stuck in traffic on the LIE on a ninety-degree day made the Paragon look like Eden. There were Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and Monday nights when we’d be almost full. But now it was the usual crowd of returning snowbirds and business travelers.
As I approached room 111, I got the sense that something wasn’t right: a noise that seemed out of place coming from a row of empty rooms. Or maybe it was too quiet. It was hard to know, but I wasn’t imagining it. Something was up. I reached down, pulled out the little Glock 26 that I carried on my ankle, and pressed my ear to the wall outside 111. Nothing. With the Glock in my right hand and the passkey in my left, I moved slowly toward the door, the carpeting swallowing up the sound of my footsteps. I moved past the door. Listened. Nothing. I gently slid the card into the lock and pulled it out. The green light popped with its accompanying electronic tune, the door unlatched, and I pushed the paddle.
Just as I stepped into the darkened room, a jet thundered over the roof of the Paragon. No matter how many times a day you experience it, that roar is distracting. I knew I should have waited or stepped back until the jet passed. Too late. My eyes were still adjusting to the change in light between the hallway and the dark room, my ears to the renewed quiet when a metal baton slammed down across my right wrist. Burning pain radiated both ways along my arm, the Glock tumbling out of my hand to the floor in spite of me trying to will my fingers to stay locked around its grip.
I dropped down to my knees and felt the breeze of the baton swishing over my head. I rocked back on my heels, coiled, and sprang at the shadowy figure to my left. My shoulder plowed into his midsection, some air going out of him. More air went out of me when he whacked me in the ribs with a jackhammer fist. We toppled backward, bouncing off the side of the bed, then crashing onto the floor. I landed on top of him. Between the pain in my wrist and ribs, I was unable to put my advantage to much use. I caught my breath and tried kneeing him in the balls. No good. He pushed me up off him as if I was a bag of leaves, and he slid out from under me.
He staggered some getting to his feet, and that gave me time to get myself upright, too. I threw a chopping left lead at where I thought his jaw would be and connected. That did two things: It hurt my knuckles and made him laugh. It wasn’t like I was a small man or that I didn’t know how to make an impression with my fists, but this guy had a jaw like a stone wall and a perverse sense of humor. When he stopped laughing I knew I was fucked. Before I could even try to get in a defensive stance, something like a baseball bat, his shin, thumped me across the liver. I went down again. He was behind me, on me. His arms locked around my neck and the already dark room went black.
I don’t think I was out very long, but it was long enough for the guy with the sick sense of humor to have gone. I got up in stages and was still a little dizzy when I wobbled over to the wall switch. The room had been tossed, but neatly so. Neither the chair cushions nor the mattress had been slit. The drawers were open, but not pulled out and dumped. The closet door was ajar. The ratty blue duffel bag was gone, as were its contents. At least my gun was there on the floor where I’d dropped it. My attacker had also left his telescoping metal baton behind as a kind of parting gift. I collected my gun, put it back in my ankle holster, and reached for the baton, pressed the tip of it against the floor to fold it up, and placed it in my back pocket.
Before heading to the ice machine, I took one last look around the room. And there, peeking out from under a fallen pillow, was the corner of a newspaper article. I nudged the pillow aside with my foot and picked up the strip of print. It was yellowed with age, dry and brittle to the touch, and not many years away from disintegrating into dust. The fading print on the paper was like the signs on the stores in Brighton Beach, Cyrillic and totally incomprehensible to me. There was a black-and-white photograph of a man above the print. I didn’t recognize his face, not that I expected I would. I carefully folded it and put it in my shirt pocket. At the moment my wrist and ribs were screaming at me. I also had to get to my meeting with Al Roussis.
13
(MONDAY AFTERNOON)
I laid down for a few minutes to recover, an old T-shirt tied around the makeshift ice bag to hold it to my wrist. Gravity held the other ice bag to my ribs. I called Al Roussis and told him I’d be a half-hour late. He said he was willing to wait for a free meal. My next call was to Slava. I dialed the number one digit at a time as I read it off the dollar bill on which he’d written it. The phone rang four, five, six times but didn’t go to voice mail. I hung up, figuring Slava’s phone would capture the number, he would recognize it, and he would know to call me back. Five minutes later he did just that.
“Something is going wrong?” Slava said, dispensing with hellos.
“When I went to get Mikel’s things from his room, there was already someone in there.”
“He is hurting you, this man?”
“I didn’t say it was a man.”
“Gus, now is not time for playing the games, I think. Are you hurt?”
“My wrist and ribs a little bit, but mostly my pride. Nothing’s broken. He hit me with an ASP. You know what an—”
“Is metal stick like police are using.”
“He was a tough motherfucker, Slava. I hit him flush in the jaw with everything I had and all he did was laugh at me. Then he kicked me in the liver and choked me out the same way you choked out that Jamal guy last year.”
That seemed to get Slava’s attention, because he went quiet.
“Whatever Mikel had in that duffel bag of his is gone,” I said, to break the silence. “He cleaned out the room.”
“Is all g
one?”
“All of it,” I lied, remembering the folded newspaper clipping in my shirt pocket.
I owed Slava a lot, but not everything. I realized he was never going to tell me about his past. He wasn’t ever going to volunteer information about why he and Mikel had been involved in last night’s execution. Or even information on who the hell Mikel was. Slava and I had made promises to each other that we would keep, but I had never promised not to look into things on my own. And besides, this was now personal. Somebody fucks around in my hotel and attacks me, I’m not going to sit on my hands. I’m just not.
“This man who is attacking you, he is big man?”
“It was pretty dark. You know how rooms in that part of the hotel get no light. And it happened fast. Took maybe fifteen, twenty seconds before he choked me out. But I guess he was pretty big, yeah. He would have been about my height. Maybe an inch taller.”
“You are seeing his face?”
“No. Do you know who it was?”
“I do not know, Gus. Maybe.”
“Well, maybe you and Mikel need to keep an even lower profile than you planned.”
He grunted, then said, “Slava is sorry to causing you trouble.”
“I’ll live.”
“So will I. I must. Surviving is Slava’s punishment.”
The phone went dead. Slava had said all he was going to say.
14
(MONDAY AFTERNOON)
The mall was located on the borders of the towns of Smithtown and Brookhaven, hence the name Smith Haven. And when I was growing up, the mall was where we hung out on most weekends. The place had a multiplex and some character back then. There were Calder mobiles hanging from the ceilings and the food court, Calder Court, had a big orange stabile right in the middle of all the tables. The birds that got trapped inside the mall used to perch on it and crap all over that thing. It was kind of neat how sparrows would come beg french fries and pizza crust from you. I liked that.
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