by Norman Green
She shook her head. “We already decided. We’re gone. But I’m going to send my son to you. Look for him, say, twenty years from tonight. His name is Saul Fowler Jackson.”
“That’s an awful thing to do to a poor defenseless kid. Name him after your boy over there. Goober Jackson. How old is your son?”
“You’re terrible.” She grinned, though, and then she glanced over her shoulder where her man lay sleeping on the bed. “We haven’t made him yet. But don’t forget.”
“Twenty years from tonight.” I had to smile, in spite of everything. Some women can do that to you.
She walked me to the door. “You take care.” She said it like she meant it, which felt pretty nice.
Maybe she was crazy.
Who could tell?
I never found out what happened to Hector; the last time I saw him Klaudia was wrapped around him, and she is beyond my reach. I’m still looking, not that I could do anything much for him. Spring for the services of a decent barber, maybe. Not knowing all of his last name has not helped my cause, and dealing with the city can be beyond maddening. I put the word out through Luisa that Hector Samisomethingorother had a rich uncle who wanted to make a contribution, but so far, nothing. A friend of mine told me that so long as someone says your name once in a while you are never truly dead, so most nights after I turn out the lights, I try to quiet my mind and then I say, “Hector, five, maybe six, bowl haircut . . .” I don’t know if it does either of us any good.
Sam Gelman, as he is now known, kept his gig at Los Paraíso. I don’t think he really needs it anymore, but I suppose it keeps him grounded. When he isn’t there he spends all his time at NYU, blazing new paths through thickets of abstract reasoning where few men go. I don’t know that I have ever done a single constructive thing for him, not since the day I walked him across town, except perhaps to temper his enthusiasm for violently colored shirts. He makes me smile, though, and like Hector, he’s got guts. I look in on him now and then.
I am in regular contact with Tommy, and I think his protege William has made me his pet project. If emotional maturity counts for anything, I’m like, fourteen, I guess, and he’s nineteen going on sixty, so we make a good match. William keeps me in touch with what I have to do, should I wish to remain sane. Connection comes from such unexpected sources, and through it I am tied to life in ways I have never before experienced.
Who knew?
There was one last thing I felt like I had to do, from a certain perspective I suppose it was the sort of grand, useless gesture that addicts are good at, but there you are. It cost me about four grand to set up. The money didn’t bother me at the time because I was still thinking of it as Mac’s, but the begging that went along with it was much more distasteful. Mac initially hated the idea, and he didn’t want any part of it. I eventually managed to guilt him into it. He was in town for the memorials anyway, he was a prime candidate, and he had the chops to pull it off. The limo guy was no problem, to him it was a straight money deal, five hundred bucks and I had one white stretch for the night. The club I picked out was a joint called Ballroom Ballroom, the place was way uptown but it was in a nice space and I figured, with a name like that, what I wanted had to be right up their alley. I met the music director on a Monday in the early afternoon, he and a couple of other guys were in there cleaning up the wreckage from Sunday night. The guy gave me attitude from the very start, maybe it was because I couldn’t quit staring at his kewpie doll haircut. “We don’t do bat mitzvahs,” he kept saying. We were standing right next to the bar, I kept begging and he kept saying no. I told him my whole sad story, some of which was even true, and he just kept shaking his head. Finally the guy behind the bar walked around to where we were standing.
“We’ll do it,” he said.
The music director rolled his eyes. “Antonio . . .”
Antonio the bartender was a short and slight Hispanic guy but he wasn’t going to be pushed around. He stepped up to the music director. “It’ll be fine. We’re doing it.”
The music guy threw up his hands, literally, and walked away mumbling to himself. Antonio turned to me. “Come Sunday night,” he told me. “Come early, say around nine o’clock. We get a lot of Spanish on Sundays anyhow. It’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know how much I appreciate this,” I told him. “How much do I . . .”
He shook his head. “Just take care of the band.”
I really wanted to give him something. “Are you sure . . .”
He misunderstood me. “Of course I’m sure. They’re musicians, all they really want is an audience. I’ll speak to them first. You just tell them what you want them to play, and leave a nice tip.”
The dress guy was the worst. I think he was afraid of me, and that never helps. I’m not sure he’d seen many guys like me in his shop. “Oh my gooowad,” he kept saying. “By Sunday? And you don’t even know her size?”
“No, but I figured you could go down Tenth Street and Avenue C, where she lives and . . .”
“Tenth and C? Oh my gooowad, that’s a haarible block, haarible! I’d have to fit her, and then tailor the dress, it can’t be done. And what if she hates it? You just . . . picked one out, like you were buying a bag of potato chips!”
“Why overthink it? She’ll love it.”
“You’re nuts.” His hands were two fluttering birds. “And I’m overbooked as it is. I’d love to help you, really . . .” He was like a tree in the fall, shaking and losing bits of himself all over. I took him by the shoulder, led him over to his sewing machine and sat him down. He didn’t resist, and I thought he’d be more comfortable there. I sat down in his client chair.
“You’re in business to make money,” I told him.
“Yesss, but . . .”
“Can I try to explain why I need this?”
He gathered himself, I watched him do it. He rearranged himself on his chair, clapped his knees together and folded his hands in his lap. Then, when he was ready, he nodded.
“I met a lady,” I told him.
“Common problem,” he said. “Good luck with her.”
“Not that kind of lady. She’s Cuban. During the Korean War, she was a dancer. A professional. I wanna guess she was about nineteen or twenty, then. She showed me a picture. She was breathtaking. Back then.” So much for the easy part.
“So she’s, what, seventy now?” he said, his voice quiet.
Arithmetic again. “I don’t know. Old. But have you ever been in a situation where you thought you knew what was going on, and then someone comes along and says something to you, something that makes it possible for you to see things completely differently?”
He nodded.
“It was like that.” I wasn’t sure how to tell the rest of it. It was one of those things that made a cracked kind of sense when you were just feeling for it but then when you tried to put it into words, you sounded like you were out of your mind. Even to yourself.
Even I thought I was losing it.
“So you want to repay a kindness,” the dress guy said. “I can understand that. But surely something a bit more practical. Rent money, for example, or . . .”
“You know what, that’s not exactly it.” This was where the story started to get too much air under it, but there was no other way, so I sighed and jumped in. “When the Spanish brought African slaves to what became Cuba, the Africans brought their traditions with them. And when they got Christianized, okay, the goddess Oshun became Our Lady of Charity. I don’t know if she’s exactly a goddess. Probably not. A spirit, maybe, although that doesn’t quite feel right, either . . .”
“A saint,” the guy said.
I had him.
“I never believed in any of this shit,” I told him. “I always thought, if you can’t measure it, that means it ain’t there. Black and white, cause and effect, mechanical universe.”
He was shaking his head. “That’s so five hundred years ago.”
“So I’m told. Luisa . . .”
/> “Your dancer?”
“My dancer. She said . . . that Our Lady of Charity, or Oshun, or whoever, would sometimes, ah . . . look through a person’s eyes. Speak with that person’s voice. Feel with that person’s emotions. Shadowing, she called it.” I didn’t buy it, not then and not now, but goddamn, it explained so much of what I’d been seeing. Frank Porter’s mother, who’d made him take care of the Batshitmobile, the office manager at Whelen and Ives, who’d pointed me at the Hotel Los Paraíso, the teller at the Bajun Bank, and on, and on. It just felt to me like I’d been led by the hand, all the way through.
And Klaudia.
It wasn’t her. When I got to Klaudia’s the next morning she had a big duffel bag open in the middle of her floor, most of her stuff packed away. “Are you okay?”
Stupid question, really. She didn’t look okay. She was wearing a giant, shapeless brown sweater that effectively masked her features from her knees to her shoulders, and her blond hair hung like curtains on either side of her face, leaving barely enough space to peer out. “No,” she said, and when she glanced at me her face, what I could see of it, flared red. “I was hoping I would miss you.”
“Are you in there?” I asked her. “I can barely see you . . .”
“No,” she said. “I know who you’re looking for. She isn’t here. I’m sorry, Mr. Fowler. I’m sorry for what I did to you, how I acted. It wasn’t right.”
“I thought . . .”
“I’m going to go visit my aunt in California. I’ll call you when I, um, when I . . .” It was a lie and we both knew it. “I told you once that I didn’t know what had come over me. I still don’t. But it’s gone now.” She glanced at me, reddening. “Please . . .”
There was more, but it didn’t change anything. Maybe Oshun or Our Lady of Charity had been looking out through Klaudia’s eyes, but if that was true, she had departed, and that was that.
“If you were Christian,” the dress guy said, “you’d say that God speaks to us through other people. Just saying.”
“Yeah, maybe, but I am not a Christian. Listen, between you and me, I know this is all a misunderstanding. All of it. Oshun, the Yoruban spirit, is a misunderstanding, okay, a workable theory, trying to explain observable phenomena, nothing more. Our Lady of Charity is no different.”
The dress guy sat there all smug, looking like he knew something I didn’t. “But?”
“Yeah, but. What I think is this. For myself, at the very least, I think I need to make some kind of gesture. Something concrete. Something that says, ‘I saw you. I felt you.’ Something that nobody else would ever do.” I pointed at the dress, the one I had picked out like a bag of chips off the rack. “This dress is my gesture.”
He nodded. “All right.”
Yeah, for two grand it was all right. I paid him half up front, went back with the other half when he was done. “You were right,” he told me, misty-eyed. “She is beautiful.”
So on Sunday night I sat at the bar in Ballroom Ballroom drinking lousy coffee, and it turned out the dress guy was right. I gave my high sign to the band leader when Mac and Luisa swept into the room. He nodded to me, gave them time for a drink at their table, and then he and his band kicked into a slow and old-fashioned Latin symphony of swirling dream and lost love that the kids in Ballroom Ballroom had probably never heard before.
Mac stood up, held out his hand.
Luisa was glowing, but so was Mac. I think I finally got him, that night. He was just an actor, under it all, and without a role and an audience he was empty and lost. The other dancers, all younger, gave way as Mac led her onto the floor. She saw me then, way back in my dark corner, I know she did, and again I got that funny little quarter smile, that sidelong knowing glance, and a nod to go with it.
So I don’t much think the goonas forgive my sins, but I suspect that at least one among them is a woman, and that she understands.
And then Luisa and Mac tore that place up.
I left them to it.
Outside, I saw the white limo double-parked up by the corner, the driver leaning on the hood smoking a cigarette. I walked up to shake his hand and say thanks, thinking, as I did so, how different my life would have been if, in place of learning to do what I do, I had learned to dance, instead.
But we can’t all be dancers.
I’ll tell you one more thing I learned that night. I won’t say that I figured it out, it was more like I woke up to it. But if I ever do drive the Batshitmobile up to the coast of Labrador, it will be for fishing, nothing more. If I cannot find what I need in New York City, I won’t find it anywhere.
I do wonder who she was, the one with that smile I saw looking at me through Klaudia’s eyes, I wonder where she went after that night at Los Paraíso, and I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. Some dark nights, if I go up on the roof of my building and stare up into the sky, I think I feel something there, something just beyond my capacity to comprehend, but when I come back downstairs, it fades.
It’s probably nothing.
Chalk it up to a family history of mental illness, or to my overheated imagination, or to the primitive need to believe in easy explanations. After all, the girl did tell me, that very first time I met her, that she didn’t understand what had come over her, that she had been transformed by her friend’s death, and maybe that’s all it ever was. Maybe the sorrow and the rage she felt had activated some long-dormant gene, maybe a seed buried deep in her DNA from some distant savage ancestor had come alive long enough for her to help me hunt a murderer and avenge the death of an innocent, and then when the thing was finished it faded back into sleep. I do know that Klaudia Livatov turned into a pale imitation of the woman I had known, one that closely resembled Reiman’s and Ms. Branch’s memories of a frightened schoolgirl. I didn’t tell her that I’d hang on to the cell so that she’d have my number if she ever changed her mind, I meant to, but in the moment, I couldn’t think.
Maybe it was better that way. I really didn’t need to see the embarrassment flame across her face when she looked my way. Let her go, some inner voice told me. Let her go and be what she needs to be.
Gelman told me I was looking at the whole thing the wrong way. I’d told him about Klaudia’s transformation, and about the odd sensation I’d had, of being led, somehow, and that I thought maybe it was just a case of estrogen poisoning or something but I’d kept getting this funny look from the women I kept running into, and how could that be, man, when I didn’t know them and they didn’t know each other and now it was gone . . . Gelman had known exactly what I was talking about, even if I did not. “Yeah, so,” he said, looking at me like I was an idiot.
“What do you mean, yeah, so?”
“Life is more complicated than we think it is,” Gelman said, shrugging. “The universe is not a collection of inanimate objects. It’s alive, and you and I are part of it. Whoever it was you saw in those women’s eyes isn’t gone, nothing is ever really gone. She’s out there, somewhere. You’ll run into her again someday.” He paused, staring at me with those sad eyes, leaving me to wonder again how a shy and sheltered kid had gotten so goddamn smart. “It’s the only explanation that makes any sense,” he said. “If you think about it long enough, you’ll see I’m right.”
Maybe.
I’m holding on to the phone anyway just in case she decides to call me one day, but with each passing hour that star dims just a little more. I’ll tell you something, though, once or twice I thought I caught her watching me through some other woman’s eyes. I don’t know if it’s real or if I only want it so much that I make it feel like it is, but I swear I saw a woman just the other day looking at me through a bus window, she had that funny, queer little smile, that look that tells of longing, and maybe a touch of regret, but then the bus took off and she was gone.
Whoever she was. A goddess, maybe, or a spirit. Or maybe just a lady of charity.
Call it what you want.
An Excerpt from The Last Gig
If you liked Sha
dow of a Thief, keep reading for a
sneak peek at another gripping mystery by Norman Green
THE LAST GIG
Available wherever e-books are sold!
Chapter One
The things a girl’s gotta do to turn a buck . . .
Alessandra Martillo leaned across the pool table and lined up her shot. Black hair fell forward across her face and hung down over one eye. She knew Marty Stiles, the fat dude at the bar, was staring at the gap in her V-neck sweater, but she also knew that he couldn’t help himself. Her single unobscured eye flicked once in his direction, then back down at the table as she struck the cue ball softly. It rolled half the length of the table, knocked the last striped ball into a corner pocket, then caromed off the end bumper and rolled to a stop about a foot and a half behind the eight ball. She straightened back up, ignored Marty, tapped her stick on the other corner pocket. Her opponent, relegated to observer status since four shots after the break, stepped forward and laid a folded twenty on the table. “Forget it,” he said. “You’re out of my league.”
She shook her hair back out of her face and winked at him. “If that’s the way you feel about it, baby.” The guy walked off shaking his head.
She walked around the table and sank the rest of the balls. Now that her game was over, she hammered them home one by one, almost violently. No one had yet come forward with the price of the next game. Stiles didn’t reach into his pocket, either. Marty never played anything, anywhere, unless he had an edge. Besides, when Al was dressed for the club, the guy could never think straight; all he could do was waste his time admiring her ass.
She knew she was no cover girl, but she was tall, dark, lean, fine enough in her own way. If you wanted a Barbie doll, she wasn’t for you, and she was comfortable with that. She was more like the kind of broad who could pitch a shutout against your softball team, hit one out herself, then drink you under the table after the game. There were certain guys who went crazy for that, and Marty Stiles was one of them. She knew it: when she stared at him she could turn his guts to water. Every time she wore a pair of low-rise jeans his tongue would hang out so far you could put a knot in it and call it a tie. He’d had it bad for her for a while. He’d given her his best shot: laid off the sauce, dropped about thirty pounds, got into some new clothes, sprang for a fifty-dollar haircut . . . But when he made his move, she laughed at him.