The display made it to 3 and then stopped. I felt like I did when I was a boy waiting for the clock to tell me when my father was coming home.
“You’re a good boy, Trot,” my father said one afternoon shortly before he went away forever. “But you’re a little soft. You don’t understand that the police and the army and the government are your enemies. The school and the corner store, the tax collector and even the traffic lights are dead set against you. You will have to fight every day of your life against these enemies. They’ll probably kill you but your brothers in arms will walk over your body to take the world. That’s how tough you gotta be.”
I remember wondering what the difference was between the capitalists walking in my blood and the revolutionaries walking on my body.
The elevator doors came open and a slender black man in a long black trench coat came out. He was an old man balding on top, and then some, like me. When he saw me he smiled and tilted his shoulders forward to get his feet moving in my direction.
I honestly wondered who this man was. The father I remembered was a giant with fists the size of cantaloupes and teeth that could bite through iron nails. Tolstoy had wild hair and eyes that often seemed to be electric with their intensity.
“Trot?” the old man said when he was just a few steps away.
“Yes?”
“Don’t you recognize me, son?”
Even his voice was nothing like the man I had known. When Tolstoy spoke it was almost always in the tone and timbre of a rabble-rousing political speech. This man’s tones were soft and palliative, like a doctor with bad news.
“Dad?”
He walked right up and put his arms around me, murmuring, “Trot, Trot.”
“Dad, is that you?”
He took a step back and looked into my eyes. His smile was sad but resolved, knowing and somehow wishing he didn’t know.
I still did not recognize him. He was a good-looking man, pretty far up in his seventies. But he was not the father I remembered—not at all. I tried to think of why someone would want to impersonate my long-dead father. What possible profit could anyone make from such a scam?
“Leonid,” he said in a solid tone that was somewhat reminiscent of the father I knew.
He reached in a pocket and came out with a small square piece of stiff paper; this he handed to me. It was a worn Kodak snapshot, from the early days of color. It was a picture of Nikita and me, my mother, and my father posing at a studio on the Lower East Side. The man in the picture was my father and he was also the man standing at my door.
“Can I come in, son?”
—
Ushering the stranger in, I took his coat and hung it on a cherrywood rack in my office. I brought him down to the dining room and poured him a cognac. He wore black slacks and a gray shirt. Taller than I but not nearly the height of the father I remembered, he was thin, his movements fluid for a man his age. There had only been the slightest limp to his gait. His dark skin and slender grace would have marked him as Twill’s grandfather if I didn’t know for a fact that Twill was the son of an African man that Katrina had a dalliance with.
“How are you, Trot?” the man calling himself my father asked after his second sip of brandy.
“I can only tell it’s you by lookin’ at this picture,” I said.
“Memory is more like art than fact,” he said.
“Are you Tolstoy McGill or William Williams?” I asked.
The question seemed to hurt him. He put down the glass and looked at his upturned hands. They were very large hands; the kind of paws you would expect on a man who was a sharecropper in his youth. The muscle had softened but it was still there.
“Tell me what happened,” I said. The hands had convinced me. This was my father. With this certainty returned all the antipathy I felt.
“When?” he asked.
“When you left me and Nicky to fend for ourselves and our mother to die.”
“I thought that maybe you could tell me a little about yourself first,” he said softly. “That other stuff is so painful.”
“That’s all I’m interested in, man. I watched my mother die praying for you.”
The sadness in his face almost dissuaded me. Almost.
When he realized that I would not back down he said, “I was wrong, Trot. Wrong about everything I thought to be true. I believed in the Revolution but I didn’t know then that it was just a means to an end for people who couldn’t even imagine the great socialist state. I was wrong about your mother being the good party member’s wife who could survive the pain of loss and raise his children to be soldiers. Everything and everyone I believed in either betrayed me or was destroyed.”
“If you knew all that, then why didn’t you come back?”
“I fought for three years throughout Central and South America,” he said, his eyes pointed up toward the ceiling. “I was wounded in Chile. Then I was captured and imprisoned for eight years; sometimes by dictators and then by the U.S. government men. I was under a death sentence most’a that time. Then finally one day me and some other prisoners were bein’ moved in a caravan and there was a mortar attack. I was wounded but got away. Your mother had already been dead for years, and you and Nikita was grown men.
“A man named Cavalas found me and hid me in a cave in Uruguay. When I was better I moved back to Chile. I spoke the language and pretended that I came from Cuba by boat. I was a wanted man, a terrorist. At night I read and reread Marx and Lenin and Mao. And one day it hit me—the perfection imagined by socialist theory was impossible for human beings to attain. The philosophy was right but we were poor vessels for it.”
“My mother is dead and you’re blaming the misinterpretation of philosophy?”
“I was wrong.”
“You’re a motherfuckin’ bastard.”
“I’m still your father,” he said with an inkling of the old rebel.
“Not since the day you left Mom to die and me and Nikita to make our way in the streets. Now I’m trying to make up for all the hurt I’ve caused bein’ mad at you, and Nicky is in prison.”
I was ashamed of my self-pity. Here I was holding my father responsible for his crimes and mine, too.
“Nikita’s not in prison.”
“I talked to him there last year,” I said.
“A lot can happen in a year.”
For some reason I didn’t want to hear any more about my brother right then. I had reached my limit since coming back on the train from Philly. Between Marella, Twill, Mardi, Aura, and now my father, I didn’t want to take in another thing.
And so, of course, the phones rang; the house number and my cell phone, too. This wasn’t a regular ring, the kind with another person on the other end of the line. This bell, from both devices, was a fast triple-ring; a mechanical call set off by a specific set of circumstances.
I picked up the receiver of the house phone and a prerecorded pastiche of voices said, “Mr. Leonid McGill…the security system in your office in…the Tesla Building…has been breached. The proper authorities have been notified. Do not attempt to go there yourself.”
“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said, suddenly as calm as Buddha. “Somebody’s breaking into my office.”
“In the Tesla Building?”
“Right.”
“I’ll come with you, son.”
Just those five words almost brought me to tears.
14
We caught a taxi on Broadway and cruised down to the Thirties and the Tesla Building. A middle-aged doorman I didn’t recognize was sitting behind the high Art Deco reception desk. He was a bronze-colored man with light caramel eyes.
“Can I help you?” he asked in the slightest of Spanish accents.
His question was not an offer. This made me wonder how serious the break-in was.
“Leonid McGill,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, derailed by a name. “Um, uh…There’s been a, a break-in…Somebody was hurt.”
“You stay here, Pop,”
I said to my father. Even then it wasn’t lost on me that I called him what Twill called me.
I headed for the elevators.
“You can’t go up there,” the doorman commanded.
I pressed the elevator button with my left hand and felt for the pistol in my pocket with the right.
My father came up beside me and when I looked at him he nodded. He’d seen me retrieve the .45 from my office drawer.
“I’m with ya, Trot.”
“You can’t go up there,” the guard said again. His voice was filled with threat.
I took the gun out of my coat pocket and let it hang at my side; he calmed right down.
—
When we got to my office the door was gone and Rich Berenson, what stood for a third of the nighttime security force for the building, was standing in the gap.
It was no mean feat breaking down my office door. It was reinforced with titanium bars. There was a burned scent in the air and so I suspected an explosive of some type.
What kind of trouble could I have been in, to be invaded by professionals with bombs?
“LT,” Rich said.
When I approached the door the guard’s posture stiffened, telling me that it was probably worse than I imagined.
Rich is a tall white guy, bald on top with a graying ponytail down past his shoulders in back. He’d once been a policeman in Ohio somewhere, then retired at fifty and came to New York to be a security guard. There was a divorce and a married woman in the mix of his decision but all of that was over and done by the time we’d met.
I’d put the pistol back in my pocket in the elevator but the downstairs guard had probably warned Rich, his boss.
“Step aside, Mr. Berenson,” I said.
“The police are in there,” he replied as an explanation of his refusal.
“My office,” I said. “My cops.”
“Let him in,” a voice I knew declared.
Rich stepped aside and I entered Mardi’s reception area trying to make sense of the quiescent detritus left by the carnage that had hit the room.
The first thing I saw was the man-sized hole in the wall next to my impregnable inner-office door. I had always known that it would be possible to break down the plaster and wood wall, but I thought that I’d be on the other side with weapons ready if that were ever to happen.
The man who allowed me into my own space was the uniformed Sergeant Jess Dalton of the NYPD. He was glaring at me and my father. Behind him another policeman came out through the wounded wall. Just seeing that enraged me. I might have said something but I kept my peace in deference to the dead man stretched out in front of Mardi’s desk. He’d been shot and then bled quite a bit before his heart gave out.
“McGill,” Sergeant Dalton said—it was not a greeting. “What do you know about this?”
“You kiddin’ me, right, Sergeant? I mean I hope you don’t think I broke down my own damn door and killed Hector Laritas because I wanted to get rich on the insurance claim.”
I knew the dead man. He was another third of nighttime security at the Tesla. Young when I’d last seen him and always with a smile, he was Twill’s age and my anger was growing.
“You got it all worked out, huh?” Dalton said with a grin that clawed at the single shred of civility I had left.
Dalton was tall, his first mistake with me, and bulky from the wrong kind of exercise. He was forty years old, no more, and the color of a white napkin stained with olive oil.
“You better back up, man,” I said to the cop. “Back up or back it up.”
Buddha had departed the building, and all that he left was rage. My office, my door, my wall, my guard, my father…Dalton’s hand moved toward his firearm. His younger partner looked a little confused. I was absolutely sure of what I’d do. I didn’t have to draw out my gun—just reach in the pocket and shoot them both through my coat.
“What’s happening in here?” my archenemy/guardian angel said.
Carson Kitteridge came in behind me. It wasn’t the first time that his mere presence saved someone’s life.
“Break-in, Captain,” Sergeant Dalton said, suddenly compliant. “We got a call from Seko Security System about this office. By the time we got here it’s like you see it.”
“Seko called you too, LT?” Kit asked. He was standing on my fallen front door and so had a couple of inches on me.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t they tell you to wait for the police to call?”
“Would you?”
A glimmer of a smile crossed the veteran cop’s lips and then he looked down on the dead stare of Hector. The humor dissipated and Kit’s dreamy eyes were suddenly awake.
“What were they after?” he asked me.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “Everybody so far’s been body-blockin’ me.”
“Let him in the office,” the captain said to the sergeant.
The uniforms moved to the side and I took a step toward the hole in the wall.
“Who are you?” Kit asked.
I turned and saw that the question was addressed to Tolstoy. He had almost successfully become a shadow in the corner of the office, but when I moved he made to follow.
“Bill Williams,” he said, not extending a hand. “I’m an old friend of Trot’s father. We were having a drink when the call came through.”
Carson Kitteridge is a human lie detector and all his antennae were up. But since most of what my father said was mostly true, the captain did not pounce.
“This is an active crime scene, Mr. Williams,” Carson did say. “You’ll have to leave.”
My father looked like the man I once knew for a moment there. He was an outlaw at heart, like every true revolutionary. The rules did not apply as far as he was concerned. But he could see that Carson was a man to be reckoned with.
“Yes sir,” he said to my own personal cop. “See you later, Trot.”
He turned and walked out through the broken doorway.
I watched him go, wondering how many decades it would be before I saw him again.
15
From the hole end of the long aisle I could see that my office door was closed, the way I’d left it earlier that evening; there was no way to tell if it was still locked. I walked down there, checking the cubicles as I went. Twill’s space wasn’t visibly desecrated. Only the cubicle that held the office computer system seemed to be out of the normal. There were papers on the floor and one of our heavy-duty USB memory devices connected to its side.
Before checking out the mainframe specially built for me by Bug Bateman, I went to test my office door. It was still locked but somebody had used some kind of lever, probably a crowbar, trying to pop the mechanism there. My personal door was almost as tough as the one they circumnavigated getting into the inner sanctum, and they’d most likely used all the explosives—or maybe they were trying to make a space for more fireworks.
Looking back down the aisle at the captain and his pickup army of cops, I imagined the chain of events. Men, most likely three or four of them, came and blew out the front door to the suite then went right to work on the wall. Two or three of them came through, leaving one standing guard, probably just inside the hole they made. One of the men went to the computer and the others went to work on my office door. But Hector was on his rounds. Maybe he heard the explosion or the pounding; maybe Seko did their job right and called Rich Berenson after alerting me. When Hector walked in, the guardian shot him, yelled for his accomplices, and then they all ran.
Maybe they went down the stairs or hijacked the freight elevator.
“Let’s see what happened,” Kit said to me.
For a moment I thought he wanted to look inside my head but then I remembered.
—
It took me and Sergeant Dalton to pull the warped office door open. We all got behind my desk and I turned on the monitor system in the bottom drawer of my desk. Whenever someone enters the front door of the reception area three cameras come on for ninety seco
nds. The first few frames were smoke-filled but then the three intruders appeared through the haze. They wore face masks, of course, and gloves. Before the minute and a half was up they’d started beating on the wall with two oversized sledgehammers.
“They knew what they were doing,” Kit said. “They knew you pretty good, LT.”
I didn’t reply because whatever I said would have only been redundant.
“What did they want?” Dalton asked.
“Information,” Kit and I said together.
—
“They tried to download the computer files.” I was gesturing at the big memory stick they’d attached to my Bug-special computer.
“Is that your device?” Kit asked.
“Yeah. Yeah. Hector probably came in and the sentry shot him. The office door was givin’ ’em problems and the system wouldn’t cooperate. They knew a lot but they didn’t know that my files are downloaded every night, erasing whatever was held in the temporary files. They realized it was useless and just ran, just ran.”
“Who was it?” Kit asked me.
“You saw ’em, man. They had masks and shit. How’m I gonna know who it was?” I was that taciturn teenager living on the street again.
“What are you working on?”
“I don’t have a job right now.”
“You still say that wasn’t you smashing Alexander Lett’s head into that wall?” Kit suggested.
“It ain’t him.”
“He checked himself out of the hospital.”
I looked Kit in the eye so that his wetware lie detector had full access.
I said very clearly, “It ain’t him.”
“What about Twill?” Kit asked.
“He’s out workin’ with some girl he knew in high school. Her boyfriend changed his phone number and he’s lookin’ for the new one,” I said but I was wondering about Twill too.
“It’s a murder,” Kit told me. “We’ve got to do this by the numbers.”
“I know.”
—
My father and I got to the Tesla just after midnight. It was 4:00 in the morning before the police finished their questions. They didn’t take me down to some precinct because I hadn’t witnessed the crime firsthand. I answered their battery of questions four or five times, all the while Kit staring at me, searching for the lie. But I passed and the coroner’s men came. Hector was taken to the morgue and Rich Berenson was saddled with the unenviable task of calling the young man’s wife. Better him than the cops.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 7
