I pounded that bag with everything I had. The sweat was streaming down my face and back and thighs. I felt lighter and lighter, stronger and stronger. For a moment there I was throwing punches like a real contender in a title match; the underdog who intended to prove the oddsmakers wrong. Everything fell into place and I wasn’t anything but ready.
And then, in an instant, the feeling slipped away. My legs gave out andink gave o I crumpled to the floor. All that I had was spent.
Gordo leaned back in his office chair and glanced out the door in my direction. He saw me lying there and leaned forward again.
Ten minutes later I got to my feet.
Twenty minutes after that I’d showered and gotten dressed. A few guys were in the gym by then. Not boxers but office workers who wanted to feel what it was like to work out next to real athletes.
I was headed for the stairs when Gordo called out to me.
“LT.”
The visitor’s chair in his matchbox office was a boxing stool. I squatted down on that and took a deep breath.
“What’s wrong with you, kid?”
“It’s nuthin’, G. Not a thing.”
“Naw, uh-uh,” the man who knew me as well as anyone said. “For over a year you been comin’ in here hittin’ that bag hard enough and long enough to give a young man cardiac arrest. You wasn’t all that friendly before but now even the smart-asses around here leave you alone. Don’t tell me it’s nuthin’. Uh-uh. It’s sumpin’ and it’s gettin’ worse.”
“I got it under control,” I said.
“Talk to me, Leonid.” Gordo never used my given name. He called me Kid or LT or McGill in everyday banter. But there was no humor in him right then.
“You once told me that you didn’t want to know about what I did to make a living,” I said in a last-ditch attempt to stave him off.
The old man grinned and tapped his forehead with the four fingers of his left hand.
“I got more dirty secrets up here than a slot machine got nickels,” he said. “I didn’t wanna know about your business ’cause I knew that you couldn’t talk about it an’ still come around.”
In order to be a good trainer you had to be a teacher, a counselor, a psychologist, and a priest. In order to be a great trainer—add to that list, an irrefutable liar.
“You can do it, kid,” the trainer says when his fighter is down on points with his good eye swollen shut.
“He’s gettin’ tired. It’s time to pour it on,” the trainer says when the opponent is grinning and bouncing on his toes in the opposite corner.
Gordo never wanted to hear about my shady doings before. But before ceased to exist and all we had was now.
But I couldn’t tell him the truth. I mean, how could I confess that after twenty years a young woman had found out that I’d fraar. that Imed her father, sending him to prison and ultimately to his death? His daughter called herself Karma, and she framed me for her own murder using seduction and a hired assassin. I killed the killer but still the young woman, Karmen Brown, died in my arms cursing me with spittle and blood on her lips.
Karmen’s last breath was a curse for me.
“Let’s just say that I realized that I’ve done some things wrong,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to backtrack now. Tryin’ to make right what I can.”
Gordo was studying me, giving away nothing of his own thoughts.
“I got a kid tells me that he can be a middleweight,” he said at last. “Problem is he thinks he’s an artist instead of a worker. Comes in here and batters around some of the rejects and thinks that he’s Marvin Hagler or somethin’.”
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Punterelle, Jimmy Punterelle. Italian kid. He’ll be in here the next three days. If I put some fifty-year-old warhorse in front of him and point he’ll put on a shit-eatin’ grin and go to town.”
I pretended to consider these words for a moment or two and then said, “Okay.”
It was Gordo’s brief smile that eased my sadness, somewhat. He was my de facto confessor, and Jimmy Punterelle was going to be my Hail Mary.
Ê€„
3
I checked my illegal cell phone for messages but Roger Brown hadn’t called. So when I was out on the street again I felt lighter, easier. Maybe everything would be okay. It didn’t matter if my client only found out about three lowlifes. It didn’t matter at all.
I WALKED UP TO Thirty-ninth Street and over to the Tesla Building, between avenues Six and Seven.
“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren Oh said in greeting. Warren was one of the daytime weekday guards who stood behind a green-and-white marble podium set under a huge dark-red-and-white plaster mural in the lobby of the most beautiful Art Deco building in the world.
The fresco was of big blocky men and women walking/marching under a Romanesque arch that stood against a tiled azure sky. Some of the people were clothed, others not. They were all white, but I accepted the racial wish-fulfillment of the thirties.
“Hey, Warren,” I hailed. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Where you been?”
“Down home. My mother was sick.”
“How is she now?”
“Fine, fine. Thank you for asking, Mr. McGill.”
<„e="3">“How’s the kids?”
“Doin’ okay, sir. My boy got into technical college, and Mary’s expecting.”
Warren was Jamaican by birth. His mother was a black woman and his father a Chinese descendant of a long line of indentured servants. Warren had a beautiful face and loyal eyes. Every time I saw him I thought that he would make a great con man. You almost had to trust him.
“Ms. Ullman is looking for you, sir,” the copper-colored guard said.
“Oh?”
“Said to ask you to come by her office.”
“She just said to ask me?”
Warren shrugged and I smiled.
MY OFFICE SUITE in the Tesla Building was the apex of my professional life.
The old real estate manager, Terry Swain, had been siphoning money out of the maintenance fund for years. He never took much at any one time but it added up to quite a sum over twenty-six years. When my lease in the Empire State Building was about to lapse, I asked around and found out that Swain was being investigated by the Tesla’s new owners for having stolen one hundred seventy-one thousand dollars. So I did a little research and went to his office on the eighty-first floor.
Terry was tall and thin, sandy-haired even at the age of sixty-one. At fifty-three I’m already three-quarters bald and half the way gray.
“Hello, Mr. Swain, I hear you got some problems,” were my first words to him.
“Not me,” he said with an unconvincing smile.
“No? That’s too bad, because I’m the guy to go to when the hammer is comin’ down and you need to get out of the way.”
My words brought moisture to the man’s eyes, if not hope.
“Who are you?” he managed to ask.
“Peter Cooly used to work in here with you, right?” I replied, gesturing to an empty desk in the corner.
“Peter’s dead.”
“Yep. Died just this last March. His second heart attack in two months. Last day he worked was February nine.”
“So?”
“Did he have access to the books, bank accounts?”
Terry Swain had gray eyes that were very expressive. They widened as if seeing the rope that could save him just inches t h just iout of reach.
“Pete was honest.”
“He was that. But he was a loner, too. No parents or wife, not even a girlfriend.”
“So?”
“You got any money, Terry?”
“What’s your name?”
“Leonid McGill is my name. Jimmy Pine sent me.”
Jimmy was a bookie. Terry was one of his best customers.
“Leonid? What kind of name is that for a black man?”
“My father was a Communist. He tried to cut me from the same red cloth. He believed in living
with everybody but his family. McGill is my slave name. That’s why I got to do business with fools like you.”
“What kind of business?”
“You ever hear of Big Bank?”
“On Forty-ninth?”
“Peter Cooly had a savings account there. I got a guy, a business associate owes me a favor, who works with a guy who works there. The guy in the bank can make it look like Pete deposited an extra twenty-four thousand in his account over the last six years.”
“He can?” Terry passed gas then. He was a very worried man. “How?”
“My friend and his friend need six thousand apiece and then there’s the twenty-four.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.” Terry was so upset that he rose to his feet. “They’re gonna prosecute me, Mr. McGill. They’re gonna send me to prison.”
“Say the word and I’ll throw just enough suspicion on Pete so that any half-decent lawyer could keep the new owners from dragging you into court. Hell, they won’t even be able to take your pension.”
“Where am I gonna get thirty-six thousand dollars?”
“Forty-six,” I said, correcting his perfect math. “You need ten for the lawyer.”
“And what about you? What do you get out of this?”
“You got a jeweler vacating a suite of offices down on the seventy-second floor. Six rooms with views south and west. I like having a big office with a good view. People look at you differently when they think you’re livin’ large.”
“So?”
“You’re still the building manager. Give me a twenaggive me ty-year lease at eighteen hundred a month and I’ll pull the trigger on Pete.”
“The Melmans are paying eleven thousand,” Terry said.
I shrugged.
“I don’t have the money,” the sandy-haired fraudster complained.
“Jimmy Pine said that he’d advance it to you. I mean, you’ll have to get another job to pay him back, but I bet you’d rather run a hot dog stand than spend your sunset years in prison.”
We haggled for over an hour but in the end I got everything I wanted. Hyman-Schultz, real estate developers, dropped the charges when Breland Lewis, attorney-at-law, brought evidence to their attention that Peter Cooly was just as likely a candidate for the crime, even more so because Terry was always broke.
Swain retired early and bought a hot dog cart. Whenever I see him he gives me a hot sausage on the house.
Some people, when they see my office, think that I’m putting on airs. They want to know what I pay for rent but I never say. Others are quietly impressed, believing that there’s more to me than they at first thought. The reaction to my posh workspace could be anything but whatever it is I’m left with an edge.
WHEN I GOT OFF the elevator on the seventy-second floor I felt a rush of satisfaction. The light fixtures along the hall are polished brass, and even the floor is a complex design of purple, green, and white marble tiles. The Tesla has wide hallways and the doors are heavy, hewn from solid oak. I got to the end of the hall and turned left. It was no surprise to see Aura Antoinette Ullman at the far end, waiting at my front door. Warren Oh had probably called her.
Aura was a tall woman, the color of dark burnished gold. She was near forty with a womanly maturity about her that always made me feel a thrumming somewhere near my heart. Her wavy hair was blond, naturally, and her cool-colored eyes defied definition by the color wheel. Her mother was Danish and her father a black man from Togo, an ambassador to some east European nation. Her father’s Christian name was Champion. Aura had told me that her mother, Helene, married him for his name, but was let down.
She, Aura, took her mother’s maiden name and came with her to New York when she was fifteen. She majored in business at CCNY and took over Terry Swain’s job when he went into the hot dog business.
“You’re seventeen days late on the rent,” she said when I reached her.
I pulled out a keychain that held the seven keys I needed to open the locks that secured the outer chamber of my inner sanctum.
Hyman and Schultz had figured out that I was the likely cause of their problems, but they didn’t have proof. So when they hired Aura they told her that her top priority was breaking my lease.
size="3">“The landlords want their money,” Aura said. Her voice was also golden—sexy with an added vibration that sent chills down into my shoulder blades.
I had opened three locks.
“I will start eviction proceedings tomorrow if I don’t have the rent by tonight.”
Five locks.
“You know that your lease is a crime, Mr. McGill.”
So’s that black dress you’re wrapped in, I thought.
Seven locks and the door came open.
When we walked in, the lights came on automatically. A tripped switch turned on three silent cameras that took digital pictures every eight seconds. The cameras were installed on a rare site-call by Tiny “Bug” Bateman himself, and so they were foolproof. I would look at the pictures of Aura later, after she’d finished threatening me and went back to her own office.
I leaned against the receptionist’s desk while Aura shone her stern visage down on me.
“I got a job I’m just finishing up right now,” I said. “I can pay you by tomorrow night.”
She appraised my words with her stormy, sky-colored eyes and smirked. Then she shook her head.
“My number-one job is to get you out of here.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” I asked, standing up straight.
Aura was three inches taller than I but it seemed like a foot. She pulled her head back and sneered, shaking her head ever so slightly.
“Come on,” I said. “Just one day. You know that you can’t evict me if I pay by tomorrow anyway. It’ll just be a lot of paperwork.”
“The owners would like to see it.”
“One day.”
“One day,” she said, “for one kiss.”
It was astonishing to me that something so sweet could hurt so bad. Holding that woman in my arms, I ached for a whole other life, a life that I would never have. When she pressed her shoulder against mine I moaned as much from the pleasure as from the ache.
I pulled away, trying to remember how to breathe.
Her gaze was triumphant.
“I could tell you liked that, Leonid Trotter McGill.”
I hadn’t caught my breath yetv hmy brea.
“You don’t love her,” Aura said. “She’s done you dirt again and again. Why would you stay there when it’s obvious where you want to be?”
“Georg and Simon would fire you if they thought we were together,” I said lamely.
“I can always get another job.”
“I’ll have your money before six o’clock day after tomorrow.”
“I only gave you one day.”
I went to the door, opened it, and looked down at her feet.
Ê€„
4
After Aura had gone I sat down in the receptionist’s chair and put my feet up on her ash desk. I didn’t have a receptionist but it was important to keep up appearances. I might become successful one day and need someone to greet my long line of wealthy clients.
Sitting there, gazing out the window at New Jersey, I wanted nothing more than to have Aura in my life. I wanted her to be my woman in a world where I was an upstanding and respectable citizen with a receptionist who only allowed honest civilians like myself past the front office.
These bouts of fantasy were always bittersweet because thoughts of what I didn’t have always brought me back to the chain around my neck—my wife, Katrina.
“I’M GOING TO leave you, Leonid,” Katrina had said to me one evening eleven months before. We were sitting in the dining room of our West Side apartment, alone.
I looked at her, trying to decipher the meaning of her words.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
Some months earlier Katrina joined a gym, had a surgical procedure that transfo
rmed her face from middle-age sag into something quite lovely. I had hardly noticed but by an act of supreme will Katrina had regained much of her youthful beauty.
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