by Norman Green
It was in that frame of mind that I opened my door to see Shmuley Gelman sitting on the bed looking at me. “I thought you’d forgotten,” he said.
“ ’Course not,” I lied. “Gelman, if you ain’t gonna wear a tie, you don’t need to do up all them buttons. Undo that top one, at least, you look like you’re trying to strangle yourself.”
“Well, he’s a professor,” Gelman said. “What do professors wear? Do you think I need a tie? Mine are all back at my mother’s house and I don’t wanna go back there. How much does a tie cost? Is there somewhere on the way where I could stop and get one?”
I breathed a sigh of relief as I remembered promising to accompany the kid across town. “Gelman, relax, you don’t need a tie. The guy don’t care what you look like.” The kid was in a state, he looked like he was gonna vibrate right out of his shoes. I started to wonder how I wound up with this job, it seemed to me that the kid deserved better than me, but it looked like I was all he had. Besides, Tommy and William had taken time out for me just the night before and they weren’t gonna see a thing for it. What the hell, Saul, it’s not going to fucking hurt you to do something for someone besides yourself for a change. “Is it time? Are you ready to go?”
He rubbed his forehead and started to hyperventilate. “No,” he finally said. “But I think I need to go now anyhow. Where did you find that raincoat? It looks like you slept in it. Do you have to wear that?”
“I think I do, but when we get close to where we’re going I’ll take it off and carry it. No one will notice. Does that work?”
“Yes,” he said, and he stood up somewhat unsteadily. “I hope I can walk.” He looked at me. “Saul, if you weren’t here, I don’t think I could do this.”
“Shmoo, this ain’t Lucifer we’re going to see. Guy’s a freakin’ math teacher.”
That broke the spell, and he laughed, but then he quickly got serious again. “Just so you should know,” he said. “When I wrote him the letter, I used my middle name. Samuel.”
“Sam Gelman.” He stared at me, a bleak look on his face. “Yeah, I can see it. It fits you.”
“I think that’s what pissed my mother off the most.” He looked like a man walking to his own execution. “I’m ready.”
Gelman’s ability to speak completely deserted him when he met his professor. The guy reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Ulysses S. Grant taken during the war. He was kind of a stocky guy, had a very short salt-and-pepper beard, and you could see the mileage on his face right through it. I put my arm around Gelman and got him calmed down a little bit, once the two of them got started up on whatever the hell it was the guy really taught, Gelman forgot about his nerves, and when a couple of post-grads showed up and joined the party he hardly missed a beat. They all could have been speaking Latin for all I knew. After a while I excused myself to go take a leak and I don’t think any of them even heard me.
I decided to hang around. It wasn’t that Gelman couldn’t find his way back. I didn’t know why, really, but I sat on a bench outside of the room they were in, rolled my coat up, stuck it in the bag and shoved it all underneath. But just say he was your kid. Say he’d just started to find himself, what he was, what he was going to be. How could you cut him loose, even if you didn’t approve of mathematicians? Or whatever? “If you don’t give up this normal shit you’re studying, kid, we’re going to throw you out and you can’t ever come back.”
And I thought I was a rat.
I sat there on the bench kicking it around while I watched the girls go by. Some of them looked to me like they had to be around fourteen, but you had to be older than that to go to college, didn’t you? Made me feel like Aqualung, especially when they smiled and said hi on their way past. It was probably about an hour later when Gelman’s professor came out and flopped down on the bench beside me. “Where on earth did you find this kid?” he said.
“Just ran into him, I guess.”
“He thinks the sun shines out of your nether orifice,” he said.
“I spread cheer wherever I go. You don’t sound all that happy to have met him.”
He shook his head. “Is he really . . . He’s completely self-educated? Let me tell you something. I spent the last eighteen months concocting a model for string theory that doesn’t require the existence of eleven dimensions . . .” He glanced at me, decided I didn’t need to hear the fine details. “What it is, Gelman just blew up my whole program. Just like that. There’s little pieces of equation all over the floor in there. I mean, I’m still right, I know I am, but I have to rethink . . .” He looked at me again. “He doesn’t even have a cell phone. When I asked him where he lives he got so nervous he could barely breathe.” He shook his head again. “Not for nothing, okay, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but you two don’t look like you’d ever inhabit the same room, at any time, for any reason.”
“Works that way sometimes, but I don’t know shit about string theory.” The professor tilted his head back and regarded me through slitted eyes. Reminded me of Luisa. “Funny, though, how the universe uses you. One molecule bumps into another one, changes its trajectory. And from then on, everything is different. That ever happen to you?”
“Yes,” he said. “It has.”
“And then you find out you got a new obligation you weren’t looking for.”
“That’s the way society is supposed to function,” he said. “Ideally.”
“Maybe. Gelman’s story ain’t mine to tell. Safe to let you know, he’s got nothing.”
The guy leaned his elbows on his knees and stared into space. Took him a minute to get there. He glanced over at me a couple of times while he added it up. “Hasidic,” he finally said.
“Until just a few days ago. His mother found the first letter that you wrote him back, and the shit hit the fan.”
“Dios mío.” He stared into space awhile longer. “He have a place to stay?”
“For the moment.”
“This kid’s extraordinary.” It was almost like he was talking to himself. He sighed, and then he shook his head. “All right,” he said, sounding like a guy who’d just agreed to adopt a cat that he knew his wife would hate. “I’m in. We should work something out, you and I. He’s going to need a lot of support. If you’re game. You and I, maybe if we work together we can keep him going. I mean, I can’t just let him walk out of here, what a mind that kid’s got. Are you really up for this? You got a cell number?”
I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I stared at the screen for a few seconds and toyed with the idea of ignoring it, but I hate voice mail, and I hate suspense. There must be something imbedded in the human psyche that makes you need to answer when you’re summoned by a mechanical clatter, or even the electronic approximation of one.
It was Brian, Li Fat’s lieutenant. “You still interested in talking to Kwok? If you are, you gotta do it right now.”
I went inside the classroom and made my apologies to Gelman, but they were hardly necessary, he was locked in. His professor waved me away, absolving me, at least in my mind, from seeing to it that Gelman made it back to Los Paraíso.
Brian picked me up about a half hour later. He was in a new Lincoln, the one with the grill that looks like Geraldo Rivera’s mustache. And he had a driver, too, an older guy who looked like he wanted to kick my ass. Which I thought was funny, because it’s usually the young guys who want to make their bones, not the old ones.
Dude glared at me.
“Even if you’re the toughest meatball on the block,” I told him, “you’re still just a meatball.”
He took a step in my direction.
Brian cleared his throat, and his driver froze.
“Mr. Fowler?” Brian said. “Please don’t stick your fingers through the bars. They might get bitten off. If you don’t mind? I just need to pat you down. Since we’re vouching for you and all.” He stepped around behind me while I assumed the position, right there on the Manhattan sidewalk. He searched me quickly and t
horoughly while the older guy and I glared at each other.
“Your associate doesn’t seem to like me.”
“His is not to question why.”
“A gangster who quotes Tennyson! I must have been misinformed about you guys.”
“I like Tennyson,” he said. “Running dog imperialist, to be sure, but a great poet.” He pointed at the car. “If you would.”
“Who picked this thing out?”
“We own the dealership,” he said mournfully.
“Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred.”
“I only see one of you.”
“Maybe he was talking about my IQ.”
“Six hundred?” he said. “Probably a lot closer to sixty. I feel compelled to tell you that Peter Kwok is not known for his sense of humor. And, on a related subject, if things get ugly here, which is a distinct possibility, we, ahh, we are not here to back you up. Just to be clear.”
“How’m I doing so far?”
“Well, you’re not dead yet,” he said. “So you got that going for you.”
“Wow. From Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Carl Spackler, all in the same conversation. Astonishing intellectual breadth in such a young man.”
“Get in the fucking car, will you?”
Downtown Manhattan, somewhere under the western end of the Manhattan Bridge, in a confusing warren of tangled streets, we stopped in front of a new six-story steel and glass office building with an attached parking garage. It was on a short block of ancient redbrick buildings. We parked on the third floor of the empty parking garage. Strange for anything in Manhattan to be empty. “Park facing out,” Brian told his driver. “And keep the engine running.”
“Kwok that bad?” I asked him.
“One never knows,” he said, giving me the eye. “Just remember what I told you.”
We walked through a connecting doorway into the empty office building. Almost empty. We were in a large, gray carpeted room that looked like it was fated for cubicles. A short fat guy in a suit was at the far end of the room. He was putting golf balls at a glass that lay on its side on the carpet. A half-dozen men stood around behind him, looking stiff and uncomfortable. And behind them, the inner office walls were in place. As I got closer I saw the signs of what might be called a history of physical confrontation in the faces of the six men, a cauliflower ear here, a broken nose there, a scarred lip on another. One of them hung back behind the others, but I caught a glimpse of his face.
I’d seen him before, wearing a hoodie, down on Tenth Street.
Aha, said I. To myself.
Brian leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “Try to follow my cue,” he said. “And let me speak first.”
I nodded.
I assumed the fat guy was Peter Kwok. His hair was mostly white on top, and he had it cut in a fifties USMC flattop. He paid us no attention at all, he seemed completely focused on his putting practice. I didn’t know much about golf but the guy seemed pretty good to me, consistently on or close to his target from about fifteen feet away. We stopped at a distance that I guessed Brian considered either prudent or polite. Kwok still had five or six balls to go, lined up at his chosen distance, and he stood over each one in succession, lining up his shot and connecting with the same careful, measured stroke. After the last one caromed off the lip of the glass and came to rest a short distance away, he stood erect, leaned on his putter like it was a cane, and looked at Brian.
Brian cleared his throat. “Li instructed me to thank you for your forbearance in this matter.”
Kwok nodded at him and then looked at me. “As a personal favor to Li Fat,” he said, “I’ll listen to your story. Make it short.”
“My name is Saul Fowler,” I told him. “I had a half sister named Melanie Wing. I have pictures.”
He stared at me for a few seconds. “Okay.”
I walked closer and handed him the printouts. “This is Melanie in life. This is what was left of her when they pulled her out of the river. And this last one is her mother, Annabel Wing. Annabel was murdered a few days ago at her home in Flushing. I don’t have a picture of her body but the MO was the same.”
Kwok looked at the picture of Annabel for maybe twenty seconds. “He’s Flushing,” he said, gesturing at Brian with the printouts.
“She was your second cousin.”
“So?”
“She was terrified of you.”
Kwok snorted. “She was afraid of ghosts. She . . .” He left off as a car pulled up outside, next to Brian’s Lincoln. Kwok handed the printouts back to me. “Give me a moment, please.”
I retreated, went back to stand next to Brian. Maybe it was my imagination, but Brian looked a little tenser than he had. Kwok retrieved his golf balls, lined them up about the same distance from his target as before and started again. Three men came through the door in single file. The center one had wet his pants. They, too, stopped and waited while Kwok practiced. When he was lined up over the last ball, Kwok spoke without looking up. “I thought we had an arrangement,” he said.
“Mr. Kwok,” the guy with the wet pants said. “Please. My daughter . . .”
Kwok waved a hand and a light went on in one of the inner offices. A girl stood just inside a window and looked out at us. It was hard for me to judge her age, but I guessed she was somewhere in her mid-teens. A large man stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders.
“Oh, Jennifer,” he said, and tears started to run down his face. “Oh my God, Mr. Kwok, please . . .”
“You decided to go into business for yourself. Against our agreement. In Jersey. I don’t do business in Jersey. Now I have to go out to Union City and apologize for your indiscretions. None of the people out there are going to believe that I had no hand in this. Do you have any idea how much trouble you have caused me?”
“Mr. Kwok, please, it had nothing to do with you . . .”
“I FUCKING OWN YOU NOW!” Kwok screamed, his face suddenly the color of raw beef. He abandoned the last golf ball and strode up to the man in the wet pants. “YOU DON’T EVEN TAKE A SHIT WITHOUT ASKING MY PERMISSION! DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?”
The guy didn’t answer but he folded up his hands as though he were praying.
Kwok swung his putter, catching the guy in both hands as the guy tried to shield his face.
The girl screamed.
Kwok got in three more good licks with the putter as his target melted to the floor but he went long on the fourth and the club head snapped off. Kwok grunted with the effort of each swing, and again when he flung the shaft of the golf club across the room, and then he started kicking the man, who had rolled into a ball and clasped his arms around his head.
That’s what you’re supposed to do if you get attacked by a bear.
Kwok was fat, though, and out of shape, plus he was wearing the wrong kind of shoes for the job. Italian loafers don’t provide much protection for your toes. He stopped after about a minute and a half, walked a short distance away, stopped to look at the girl, who was still screaming. He made a chopping gesture at the office window and the large man dragged the girl away, and after a moment her screams became fainter and fainter until I could no longer hear them. Kwok turned and went back and knelt down next to his target. “These men are going to take you away,” he said. “And they are going to ask you a lot of questions. If you love your daughter, do not lie. Do you hear me? If you love your daughter, do not lie.” He struggled back to his feet. “And after I hear what you told them, I will decide on your punishment.” He waved at the two men.
We all stood silent as the two men dragged the guy back out to their car.
Kwok ran his hands through his hair.
Then he turned back to me. “They were early,” he said calmly, his voice betraying only a very slight embarrassment. “My bad.” He stood there looking at me.
“Annabel Wing,” I told him.
“It wasn’t us,” he said.
“Is that all you got? Somebody murders your cousin and that’s y
our reaction? I know people who would consider someone murdering their cousin a bit of an insult.”
“I didn’t really know her. I hadn’t seen her in years. I know there was a thing about her getting knocked up, but that was a family matter, and it was a long time ago. None of my business.” He stared at me for a few seconds and I started to wonder if he had another golf club stashed somewhere close by. “Let me explain something to you. New York is a dangerous place. You can make money here, but if you fuck around you pay the price.” He gestured at a small pool of blood on the gray carpet. “That’s the chance you take. Now, I don’t know what Melanie was into, or Annabel, either. And frankly I don’t care. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a business to run.” He turned away.
“C’mon, Pete, we both know you’re smarter than that.”
He turned back, his face growing red again.
“I start asking questions about Melanie Wing, and very shortly thereafter two Chinese dudes working with a black guy try very hard to discourage me. And when that doesn’t work, someone puts a hit on Melanie’s mother and sets me up to take the fall. Something stinks, and I got this feeling that you know what it is.”
He pointed a fat finger at me. “Number one. I am not an equal opportunity employer. Got it? If a black was mixed up in whatever is going on, it has nothing to do with me, I don’t use blacks. Number two. I. Don’t. Care. Stay away from me, Fowler, and stay out of my business. I won’t say it again.” He turned and walked away, deeper into the depths of the office building, leaving his golf balls, and the small puddle of blood, behind. His men followed a short distance behind. The guy I’d seen before, wearing a hoodie, seemed particularly nervous.
“You’re as crazy as he is,” Brian said, after they were gone. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I didn’t move. “How far uptown does he go?”
“Nothing north of Houston, I would think.”
“You know the guy better than me. Between you and me, Bri, what’s your read on what just happened?”
“Between you and me?” Brian looked around. “He’s afraid of something,” he said, dropping his voice. “I don’t know if that routine with the golf club was supposed to impress you, me, or those guys he’s got working for him. Come on, Fowler, let’s go. Train’s leaving.”