She was a raven-haired wild-eyed thing in spite of her pedestrian, almost reserved, attire. She wore a white blouse that buttoned up like a man's dress shirt. I imagined that she had a navy skirt that came down below the knees to go with that blouse. But no matter how much she tried to be normal and reserved there was an abandon to her expression and also the kind of carelessness that drives the male animal, of all ages, wild.
I looked at the picture for a long while. She was leaning forward, laughing. There was mischievousness in her gaze and a tilt to her head that was saying, Am I hearing something else behind your words? After a while I came to believe that the wildness wasn't that of a party girl--she would have been wearing makeup and something more provocative if that were the case. No. Angelique was just happy--almost, and hopefully, unsinkably so.
There was another picture that caught my attention. She was all in black, at a funeral, crying. She stood next to a fair-sized headstone that read IRIS LINDSAY. True sorrow is hard to gauge, but I believed her pain.
The young woman, however, was less interesting than the fact of the photographs. Someone had followed Angelique and taken many dozens of pictures--these being only a few. And if those two shots were representative of the whole roll, or memory card, then the surveillance wasn't about who she was with but the woman herself. Someone seemed to be studying her.
Was that Rinaldo? Had he hired a private detective to take pictures of her on the street, at work . . . in the shower? Was he her protector or her stalker?
She had an undergraduate degree from Hunter College and an MBA from NYU. The latter diploma would have cost a hundred thousand dollars, minimum. There was no credit report on her. Was that left out on purpose or didn't it matter? I could get a credit report on my own, of course, but I wanted to tread softly around Tara until I knew why Wanda got half her face shot off.
Tara had been recently hired as a "fellow," whatever that meant, at Laughton and Price, an advertising firm on Lexington, not Madison. Her mother lived, at least at the time of the report, in Alphabet City proper, east of the East Village. Her brother, named Donald Thompson, was only a name with no address, or even an age.
Under the neatly typed pages was a layer of cash wrapped into bundles. Twenties, fifties, and hundreds that stacked up to thirty thousand dollars--money for my expenses. This told me that Mr. Rinaldo would spare no resource in finding the woman with whom he claimed to have no relationship.
I went through the pages again. There was no criminal record included.
It wasn't much but it was enough to go on.
When the buzzer sounded I was no longer surprised.
"Yes, Mardi?"
"A Miss Aura Ullman?"
"Uh . . . send her in." I wanted to stay focused, to keep my mind in the world of Tara Lear, but just the mention of Aura's name and I was at sea, in a fog, with no sense of direction.
"LEONID," SHE SAID.
"Aura." I managed to get some lightness into my greeting.
She frowned a bit. Every other time she had come into the office I stood up and, if we were alone, kissed her.
Now, however, those lips would have tasted of George Toller.
Aura was a woman of the New World. Golden-brown skin, natural and wavy dark-blond hair, and pale eyes that Nazi scientists tried to create in what they called the inferior races. She was forty and beautiful to me; of African and European lineage, she was completely American.
Aura lowered into the closest chair, giving a wan smile.
"How are you?" she asked.
"Thankfully busy," I said.
"A case?"
"A whole shipload."
She smiled. Aura liked my jokes.
"Who's that at the front desk?"
"Mardi Bitterman."
"The child who was raped by her father?"
"Yes." In the days when we were passionate lovers, and then platonic lovers, I told Aura everything.
"I thought she moved to Ireland with her sister."
"Where there's heat," I said, "there's motion."
"I came to see how you're doing."
"I'm fine."
"You didn't look fine yesterday when I, I told you."
"Listen, honey," I said. "You're a gorgeous woman and you deserve to have real love in your life."
"I wanted you."
I tried to start counting my breaths but got lost after one.
"Leonid."
"Yes?"
"Will you forget me now?"
"No."
"Will you ever talk to me again?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"You can give me a week, right?" I asked, once again managing a jaunty attitude.
She looked into my eyes and, after a moment or two, nodded. Then she stood up and went out the door.
If my father had been there I would have asked him how that particular moment was a product of the Economic Infrastructure unfurling through history.
I COULD SWITCH OFF the pain of Aura's departure by turning back to Angelique. She was a mystery and missing, the object of attention of a man who was as dangerous as any terrorist or government- trained assassin.
I honestly believed that Alphonse Rinaldo could bring down a president if he set his mind to it.
And now he had set his sights on this young woman. Whether he meant her harm or not was a question for later. Right then I had no choice but to follow my nose.
I decided that I was going to do my best to save Angelique. After all, she was the one in trouble. I'd call her Angie and believe in her innocence until proven otherwise. She was my client, and Rinaldo was the devil I had to deal with.
History guides all men's hands, my father's voice whispered from any of a dozen possible graves.
"Bullshit," I said aloud in my seventy-second-floor office.
And then the office phone rang.
Instead of answering I remembered reading a line in an article where a man somewhere in Africa had said, "In the lowlands, where I make my home, it never rains, but the floods come annually."
After two rings the phone went silent. Soon after that the intercom sounded.
"Yes, Mardi?"
"It's a Mr. Breland Lewis on the phone for you."
"Tell him to hold on. I'll be on the line in a minute."
14
I don't like getting calls from lawyers. Just hearing Lewis's name, I shuddered and shrank.
And this is in response to my own attorney. If somebody asked me for a list of a dozen friends, Breland would have been on it. But still, he was representative of the law, and law, regardless of its mandate to protect the people, is no friend to man.
"Breland," I said into the mouthpiece.
"How are you, Leonid?"
"You tell me."
"It's Ron Sharkey again."
Ron Sharkey was the metaphor for well over twenty years of criminal activity on my part. I had torn down the lives of well over a hundred men and women in the years I was a fixer for the mob. Most of those that I destroyed were criminals themselves and so I could console myself saying that I was just another means of retribution for what was right and good in the world.
But I had taken down innocents along the way, too. Ron Sharkey was one of these. He lost everything because of my machinations, and he never heard my name or saw my face.
After Sharkey was released from prison I had Breland keep tabs on him. Years in stir had bent the once honest businessman. On the outside again, he had become a drug addict and petty thief. The police arrested him on a dozen different occasions, and every time Breland was there with bail money and representation before the court.
"What's he into now?" I asked.
"It's kind of complex. Maybe we better sit down and talk."
"Yeah," I said, "okay. Listen, I got a lot on my plate right now. Can you give me a day or so?"
"Sure. It'll hold for a day or two. But it can't wait a week."
BRELAND LEWIS'S PHONE CALL was the beginning of one long headache.
It blossomed behind my left eye, a bright-red rose of pain. It wasn't Sharkey in particular, or even my oblivious client, Angie. It was more like everything, all at once.
"When you hit your fifties life starts comin' up on ya fast," Gordo Tallman said to me on the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday. "Before that time life is pretty much a straight climb. Wife looks up to you and the young kids are small enough, and the older kids smart enough, not to weigh you down. But then, just when you start puttin' on the pounds an' losin' your wind, the kids're expectin' you to fulfill your promises and the wife all of a sudden sees every single one of your flaws. Your parents, if you still got any, are gettin' old and turnin' back into kids themselves. For the first time you realize that the sky does have a limit. You comin' to a rise, but when you hit the top there's another life up ahead of you and here you are--just about spent."
The time for sitting on my butt on the seventy-second floor, playing like I could avoid my responsibilities, was over.
I hit the street at a good pace, moving north toward my home. On the way I thought about my duties to an unknowing world.
MY INTUITION WAS THAT the thing with Angie and Alphonse was not about sex. The details and photographs had intimacy but no heat to them. It seemed to me that Angie was like a family member, maybe even a daughter, who had somehow become estranged from the Big Man--after which she got into trouble. Or maybe the rift between them caused the trouble in some way.
I wasn't flat-out rejecting the notion that they were lovers. And even if they were related, he might still have had bad intentions toward her.
The problem was that I knew so little about Rinaldo. He was an honest-to-goodness twenty- first-century enigma. No one knew what he did or where his entry was on the chain of command. I'd only met a few people who'd ever heard of him.
"Rinaldo?" Hush, the retired assassin, had said when I'd asked him. "Yeah. I did work for him a couple'a times."
From the age of fifteen until his retirement, the only work Hush had ever done involved homicide.
"Funny thing, though," the serial-killer-for-hire opined. "I never met him in person. He was one of the few clients I ever had who I didn't look in the eye."
"Why's that?" I asked. We were in my office late one Tuesday evening. I was guzzling Wild Turkey while Hush sipped on a glass of room-temperature tap water.
"You can piss on a cardinal in his Easter suit but if the bush starts burning you have to lower your head and pray."
Remembering those words, rendered in Hush's deep voice, I stopped there in the middle of Broadway foot traffic. I was fool enough to be a friend to the killer-for-hire--but now to even consider investigating a man that Hush feared . . . that just had to make me stop and laugh.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" someone said.
He was standing behind me, a young black man whose attire I could only call modern-day Isaac Hayes: light-brown leather from head to toe, his hat and shoes, pants and vest, and of course the open jacket. The only thing on that young man that wasn't bovine in origin was the golden medallion that spelled out something. The lettering was so ornate that I couldn't make out the word.
"Say what, brah?" I asked him in the accepted dialect of the street.
He was taller than me, of course, and skin--not so dark. The brown in his eyes was light, unnaturally so. I guessed that they might have been covered by cowhide-colored contacts to make his image complete.
The synthetic eyes looked me over, saw my big scarred hands and slumped, strong shoulders. He beheld in me the immovable object--though he might not have known the physics term. I saw in his fake eyes that he had been stopped before.
"I almost run you down, man," he said, allowing a constrained belligerence to express his ire.
I just looked at him. Any word I said would have led to a fight, so I left it up to him. I was ready to go to war--I almost always am. Combat was how I made it through childhood; it was what kept me alive.
The young man in leather gauged me.
Finally he said, "Fuck you," and walked around. After a few moments I went on my way, thinking that he was smarter than me.
He knew when to avoid an obstruction in the road.
15
It was three o'clock when I reached the front door of my apartment building--3:01, to be exact.
The hyena yipped in my yellow pocket. That was Detective Kitteridge, of course. I was supposed to be at his office. I guess he expected me to answer his call. But I didn't have the sense of the city fop who knew to skirt around a threat when he saw one.
I ignored the call--creating at least a temporary antagonist by my inaction.
MY LIFE IS A series of trials testing whether or not I am capable of maintaining my perceived place in the world. One of these perennial auditions is the staircase of my apartment building. I live on the eleventh floor. There are fourteen steps between each stage--one hundred forty little ascendancies. Unless it's late at night I almost always walk up.
I take the stairs at a fair clip.
The first four floors are no problem. I'm breathing at a good pace between five and eight. It's only the last two flights that are a real strain. The only reason I walk up is for those final twenty-eight steps. If I'm not breathing hard by then I go faster the next time. When I'm no longer able to make that run I'll know it's time to quit the game.
The stairs are not my only test. There's the heavy bag at Gordo's Gym, and how frightened I get, or not, when a man pulls a gun on me. There's sitting in the same room with Hush, who, if he were to have put a notch in his gun for every man he'd killed, would have whittled off the entire handle in the first half of his career.
Life is a test, and the final grade is always an F.
THAT YEAR I HAD a black key made for the front door. Except for the color it looked like a regular key, but it also contained an electronic component. The physical device did indeed turn a mechanical lock, but the electronics flipped another switch throwing back a bolt that came up through the floor. The door itself was reinforced with a titanium plate.
In a drawer in my office I had a few key rings that had masters for almost every lock in New York City. And for those that were "unique" I had illegal masters that were able to adjust to the cylinders they encountered.
Just because I was aware of dangers that other people were ignorant of didn't make me paranoid. I didn't feel bad about having the locks on my front door changed at least once a year.
My enemies would have to work to get at me or mine.
BECAUSE THE LOCK IS always new it didn't make much noise. I was halfway down the hall to the dining room when I heard the voices.
It was a man and Katrina speaking in normal tones. There was no urgency or conflict there--no feeling.
"Dimitri?" Katrina called. "Dimitri, is that you?"
"It's me, Katrina," I said and then I entered through the open door.
My wife was sitting at her end of the rustic hickory-wood dining table and a man somewhere in his late thirties was sitting on the side, a place away from her. They both had teacups in front of them.
He was a brown man with straight dark hair and a small, Caucasian nose. His face was too boyish to be called handsome or plain. His eyes were brown also and more mature than the rest of his physiognomy.
"Leonid," my wife said.
She stood and walked toward me, past the pickle jar of wildflowers. She kissed my cheek and took my arm.
"This is Bertrand Arnold," she said. "He's one of Dimitri's classmates."
Arnold, who was as many years older than Dimitri as he was younger than I, stood up and put out a hand.
"It's an honor to meet you, Mr. McGill. D has told me a lot about you."
"You're kidding, right?" I said.
"No."
"How the hell's a kid who never says more than three words to me at a time gonna be singing my praises to somebody else?"
The look on the brown man's face was one of bewilderment. He had no prepackaged answer. That told m
e something.
"I . . . uh . . ." he said.
"Leonid," Katrina said in her maternal voice. "You're going to scare the young man."
"What did D tell you?" I asked Bertrand. "About me, I mean."
"He ssssaid that you were a detective. That, that, that he once saw you knock down two men at the beach."
CONEY ISLAND, FIFTEEN YEARS before. Two redneck Brooklynites got it in their heads that a beautiful young white woman like Katrina could find somebody better than a fat little black man. All three kids were with us. Dimitri, the oldest, was not yet eight.
The two guys had a brief span of time in which to retreat. I stood up, walked over to them, and time was up.
"HE REMEMBERED THAT, HUH?" I said.
"Yes," Bertrand replied, vehemently.
"Let's sit down, Leonid," Katrina, the peacemaker, said.
"You look kinda old to be one of D's classmates," I suggested to Bertrand as we sat down.
"My parents own a bakery. Arnold Bakery in Astoria. I wanted to open up a branch store in SoHo. But when the bank asked me for a business plan I realized that I didn't know enough to start a business on my own. So I decided to go back to school. At first it was just an extension course at CCNY. But then I began to realize that I really liked business and so I decided to get a degree. I met Dimitri last year."
It all sounded very plausible. Generation X and their heirs took longer to mature than their elders. I knew nothing about Dimitri's life, but he must have had friends and schoolmates.
"Is D in his room changing or something?" I asked.
"No," Katrina said. "He still hasn't come home."
"Then why are you here?" I asked the boy-faced man.
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