“Who the hell are you?” someone shouted.
Ê€„
38
Standing in the doorway of the kidney-shaped den was a very skinny and tall young man with wiry red hair that stood up here and there. His eyes were bluish and his expression one of indignation that teetered upon madness.
This, I knew, was Fritz, Hannah’s slightly older brother. There seemed to me something natural about this wild intrusion, like the comic relief in a bloody slasher film.
Fritz wore a dark-green jacket, brown trousers, a buff-colored shirt, and a red-and-black bow tie. He wasn’t wearing glasses but should have been—to make the geek image complete.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked again, a little louder this time.
“You don’t have to shout, Fritzie,” Hannah said. “This is Mr. McGill. He’s looking for Daddy.”
“Why is he in my house?”
“It’s my house, too,” the princess said to the nerd.
“What are you doing with my sister?” Fritz asked me.
I couldn’t help but feel a little bit exposed, a masher in the sudden light of a passing car.
“What are you doing to my sister?” he said again, this time looking at Hannah.
“He’s not doing anything. He was just telling me about why he’s here.”
“He might be stealing from us,” Fritz said. His agitation was definitely escalating.
“I’ve been with him the whole time,” Hannah argued. “How can he steal anything when we’re sitting down, looking at each other?”
“He has pockets,” the boy pointed out as if having discovered a new continent in the distant ocean. “I have to search him. He could have taken something when you weren’t looking.”
I began to think that Bryant Hull’s endowment of the Sunset Sanatorium might have been a wise long-term investment.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I said to Fritz in a detached, objective tone.
“I sure the hell do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Why not?” he screamed.
“Because I’m a trained fighter and if you touch me I’ll knock you unconscious. And when you’re out cold, imagine how much I could steal before you came to.”
“Why did you let him in here?” Fritz yelled, turning on his sister.
The girl’s response was to look at me. She didn’t want me to do anything. Hannah just asked me silently, with her eyes, to bear witness to something she lived through every day, or maybe every other day, making the span in between one of dread.
I thought, Of course she wants me to stay. And of course she couldn’t ask. I understood the impulse in an instant. I wanted to protect her but didn’t know how.
So I turned my attention to Fritz, worried that in his agitation he might try something foolish.
The boy was standing in place, shivering—no, shaking. The tremors were increasing. His eyes lost their focus. Pretty soon his balance was affected. As he fell, I stepped forward and caught him. His was an awkward weight because he’d gone rigid. I lowered him to the couch as his sister fled the room.
I wanted to run myself but there were flecks of foam coming from the boy’s mouth. He was shuddering. I looked around the room searching for a wedge that I could put between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue. His blue eyes were wide, staring right at me, indicting me as a dead man accuses his murderer.
For a brief moment I felt the urge to kill him, to wrap my hands around his throat the way Willie Sanderson had done to me.
I squelched the impulse before Hannah scurried back into the room. She was carrying an alligator case that she unzippered while running to her brother’s side. She took out a disposable syringe that was already filled with an amber fluid.
“Help me!”
“What?” I asked.
“Pull off his jacket.”
It wasn’t easy but I turned the boy on his side, yanking against his jacket collar, pressing down on his rigid arms. When I got it down to the middle of his forearms Hannah moved in between us. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and so she easily found the vein just below the biceps and then expertly injected the medicine.
Maybe twelve seconds later Fritz relaxed and fell into a deep sleep.
Hannah sat down on the floor and sighed.
It was the family photograph that would never be taken: a sister who had just saved her brother, exhausted by the lifelong task of having to be there when the emergency arose. Why didn’t he have a nurse? Why wasn’t he on a regular regimen of drugs? Because Hannah was there to save him and to bear the brunt of his imbalance and frenzy.
She stood up and began pulling on her brother’s arm.
“Help me take him upstairs,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you call a doctor?”
“No. This happens all the time. He’ll be fine.”
“Don’t you have any servants that can help?”
“They’d tell my parents and then Fritzie would be hospitalized. He can’t stand that. He’ll kill himself if they commit him again.”
I bent down and lifted the skinny boy in my arms.
“Where?”
She led me further down the hall, away from the front of the house. After a little way we came to a staircase leading up. I carried the kid to the second floor and, under Hannah’s direction, brought him to a small room filled with various kinds of science tools: a microscope and telescope, a rock collection and butterfly pinboard. There were no posters, not even any music players. Here was a young man born to one of the wealthiest families in America and he didn’t even have a TV set.
I put him down on the single bed and stood back while Hannah undressed him. She took off all of his clothes and threw a sheet over him. Then she folded his shirt and pants, placing them on a walnut table in the corner.
Fritz looked very different in his sleep: older and defeated. I watched him for a while before Hannah touched my arm and we walked out into the hall.
I hadn’t registered the surroundings before as I was straining under Fritz’s deadweight. The white carpets were of thick virgin wool and the paintings on the hall walls were originals by Chagall, Picasso, and the like.
“Thank you,” Hannah said, attempting to express some deeper feeling.
I remembered the young woman who had made love to me in her small apartment. A little tingle in my chest was the hope that I could actually make up for some of the wrong that I’d done.
“It was nothing,” I said.
“You didn’t have to stay and help,” she said. “You don’t even know us.”
“It’s okay,” I replied, placing two fingers on the crook of her elbow.
It wasn’t anything sexual or suggestive. She folded her arm, hugging my fingers in that fashion to show how much the little I’d done had meant. And I understood. Unconscious, casual kindness is sometimes felt most deeply.
“I like you,” she said, and my heart, despite all intentions, quailed.
“I have to go.”
Ê€„
39
The rest of that day consisted of the drive back to Albany, a bottle of Wild Turkey, and a dreamless sprawl on the big bed at the Minerva; that and a midnight call from Katrina.
“Huh?” I said into the cell phone, so eloquently articulating my state of mind.
“Leonid?”
“I’m in Albany, Katrina. I need to sleep.” These words bumped around in my head, reminding me of my eldest, my only blood child.
“I just wanted to tell you that we can work something out,” she said.
“I’ll talk to you later.”
The next thing I knew it was morning and I wasn’t sure what my wife had meant or if she had called at all.
I DECIDED TO TAKE the train back to New York. I couldn’t face the notion of flitting around in the sky after the emotional chaos of the Hulls’ house.
When I was a kid, living in enforced poverty because of my father’s commitment to being working class,
I used to pray that I would be adopted by a family of rich capitalists. In the fantasy, my father went away, never to return, and Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags decided to take me in, feeling sorry for the poor, black, red-diaper orphan.
My father did go away, and my mother died for good measure, but I never got adopted. Looking at Fritz and Hannah, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe I got off lucky.
AS THE LOCAL TRAIN wended its way down toward Manhattan I sifted through the various newspapers and books I carried in my bag. But after a while I realized reading was beyond me.
At first this was because I couldn’t get my bourbon-soaked mind off of Hannah Hull. Most people I get a read on pretty quickly; it’s a requirement in my line of work. But Hannah was indecipherable to me. She could have been a psychotic child with depraved tendencies, though I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe that she was the victim of a family that had veered off course, that she saw in me a man who could be relied upon—a jutting rock in a stormy sea.
That was the role I fantasized myself in since relinquishing my underhanded ways. I wanted to be seen as I hoped Hannah had seen me.
It was almost funny, the way I was buffeted around by these mercurial emotions. A step or two more, I thought, and I might have turned into Fritz. This realization brought a smile to my lips.
“What you grinnin’ at?” a man said derisively. “Life is hard out there. You see me smilin’? I ain’t got time to be silly. I got to pay the rent an’ put shoes on your feet. Life is serious, not no playtime.”
This voice came from across the aisle. The speaker was the male head of a young black family, which included a mother and child. The boy was no more than four years old and could have been younger. His father hadn’t been in his twenties very long. The mother, a gentle and plain-looking woman, glanced in my direction and smiled apologetically. The boy’s head was bowed under the heavy criticism of his father.
They were all the same dark-brown color.
“Are you listenin’ to me?” the father asked his son.
I picked up my newspaper, looking for an article to distract me. The main story was about some midwestern governor arrested by the FBI for paying prostitutes to cross state lines. It was hard for me to concentrate on the article, partly because it reminded me so much of the kind of work I had once done to bring down otherwise good men, and partly due to the fact that a nearby article said that the Left was claiming that the death toll in Iraq was nearing a million while, by some calculations, we would end up spending a trillion dollars on the effort. That meant, by the end of our Middle Eastern folly, that we would have spent a million dollars for each death. The front page was a kind of triple obscenity . . .
The boy mumbled something to his mother.
“Why you askin’ her for water?” the father said. “Does she look like she have water for you? Sometimes you just got to be thirsty. I’m thirsty. Do you see me goin’ around askin’ people for water?”
I gathered my things together and stood up. The man’s idea of pedagogy was too much for me to bear.
I guess my body language betrayed my feelings.
“Where you think you goin’?” the young father asked me as I lugged my bag toward the door between cars.
“I need quiet in order to think.”
“What’s so important you got to think about?”
I should have just moved on.
“I think about a lot of things,” I said. “Just now I was thinking that a child needs to laugh and have mother-love in his life, otherwise he’ll turn out to be a little man pushin’ children around to make himself feel like he knows somethin’ smart.”
That said, I went through the door and into the next car.
THERE WAS NOTHING to distract me in that section. One guy was yak-king on his cell phone, but I wasn’t bothered by that.
The release of anger had put me into a free-floating state of mind. I stopped obsessing about the girl’s unbidden, unconscious forgiveness and started wondering about the connection between the Hulls, Willie Sanderson, and the murders that I was implicated in. Certainly there was some connection. And beyond that I had Tony the Suit to answer to, and Twill to save from his own dark heroism.
Everything was flowing together and so I began coming up with ideas that might fit anything. I considered talking to Twill, telling him that I knew what he was up to and offering another way out. I seriously entertained the idea of telling Tony where A Mann lived. The guy was dead anyway. Was that what Harris Vartan was asking me to do?
I had just begun wondering about the Hulls’ cleaning lady when a voice sounded at the other end of the car.
“Hey, you!” the young father from another lifetime shouted.
For a brief moment everything had made perfect sense: I wasn’t confused or worried at all. It was the kind of moment that never lasts, but it feels permanent for the few seconds it’s there.
I stood up as the young father rushed down the aisle. I could see in his face that he’d been stewing over my words.
The guy on his cell phone said, “I’ll have to call you back.”
My nemesis was in no mood for talking, either. As soon as he came within range he threw a punch. I caught it like a seasoned coach catching a Little Leaguer’s first toss, pushing the fist back at its pitcher. He wasn’t daunted by my obvious superiority and threw another. This time I backed away to let the punch go wild. A woman yelped and I pushed against the man’s chest with both hands. He fell on his butt. I could see by the look on his face that he had finally understood my strength.
The young father jumped to his feet, but he was no longer sure what to do. I had already blocked one blow, slipped a punch, and dropped him on his ass. He knew that the next response would be even stronger.
He hated me, wanted to beat me down into submission, but that was not to be and we both knew it.
“Fuck you!” he yelled, clenching his fists and hopping an inch or so off the floor.
When I didn’t flinch he turned around and stormed back to his poor, unsuspecting family.
I felt bad about humiliating the father. He couldn’t help what he was, and I hadn’t helped, either. At least his son wasn’t there to witness his defeat. At least that.
I gathered my things again and moved down a few cars more. That way if he found more courage, or a weapon, I’d be somewhere else and he’d have a few extra moments to think about consequences.
In my new seat I wondered about what kind of father Fritz would make. Then I thought about my own father, who indoctrinated and then abandoned me. It seemed that there was a whole world of wounded, half-conscious sires picking fights and losing them.
Ê€„
40
When you have no answers, ask different questions,” my father once said to me. He was quoting a man who had been a minor official on the fringe of Joseph Stalin’s inner circle toward the end of the madman’s reign.
I had rejected all of my father’s ideology, but his logic remained with me. So about fifteen miles out from Manhattan I called a man I knew in the electricians’ union. His name was Duffy and he’d had a hard time of it for a while there when one of his rivals wanted to unseat him from a plum position. I balanced the scales, so to speak. I did such a good job that Duffy and his rival became good friends.
“HELLO,” A YOUNG woman answered.
“Let me talk to Duffy.”
“He’s in a meeting.”
“He’s always in a meeting. Tell him it’s Leonid McGill.”
He was on the line ten seconds later.
“What’s up, mutt?” He gave the same line to everyone, so it was no insult.
I explained that I needed to root around a building. I didn’t say why.
“Sure,” Duffy said. “What name you usin’?”
“Richard Siles.”
“You need keys?”
“No. I got my own.”
He gave me a line to give the super and I committed it to memory.
“What
time?” Duffy asked.
“One today.”
“Done.”
“See ya later,” I said.
“Not if I see you first.”
I WENT TO my office, changed into a pair of coveralls I kept in a closet, and loaded up my toolbox with a few gadgets, a jumbo ring of master keys, and some electrician’s tools. I also grabbed a coat in spite of the fact that it was eighty-five degrees outside. Then I took a cab up to a big gray apartment building about fifteen blocks from my apartment, a block off Broadway.
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