The sounds we made got louder over the seconds and minutes. At one point I glanced to my left and saw that a young couple had stopped to watch; a white man in a black suit and an Asian woman in a rainbow-glitter dress. I noted the couple but they didn’t matter to me.
“Harder, Lee,” Marella groaned.
I can’t remember any orgasm being stronger or more satisfying.
When it was over we put ourselves together and walked out from behind the big crate. The young couple was still standing there, still watching us. I wondered if they might take our place when we were gone.
—
On the way across the street back to the restaurant I checked my phone. I didn’t want to but there was too much going on. Nothing from Twill but there were eight messages from Zephyra; most of these about Coco Lombardi—most but not all.
—
Back in Chambre du Roi, Marella made a stop at the ladies’ room.
I spent the few minutes reading over the various texts and e-mails.
“That’s much better,” Marella said when she returned to our booth. “We needed to get that out of the way before being civilized.”
I suppressed the desire to tell her I loved her.
The waiter came, placing garlicky salads before us.
“It was my grandfather,” she told me.
“What?”
“My grandfather and I were close. That’s why I had to fuck you.”
“Who was this guy you were engaged to?” I asked.
“You jealous?”
“As if you were the only woman left in the world.”
“You don’t have to be,” she said instead of answering the question.
“What about that diamond?” I said. I wanted to feel businesslike and sophisticated because Marella was bringing out a beast in me.
“What about it?” Her smile was crazy-making.
“How much did you get for it?”
“Why so many questions, Lee? Isn’t this enough for you?”
“It’s just that I was wondering,” I said.
“About what?”
Neither of us had touched our salads.
“About how you could be so sloppy to have a thug like Alexander Lett get so close.”
Her smile faded when she said, “The less you know, the better.”
“But I know so much already.”
“Like what?” There was a hint of danger in her mien.
“You got engaged to the man somehow knowing that sooner or later he’d break it off,” I said.
“You’re a smart man, Mr. McGill.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m a fool. Otherwise I would have taken your money and ignored the fact of the three-point-six-million-dollar diamond you tricked out of Melbourne Westmount Ericson. There was an article about the engagement and the ring on the society page of the Washington Post.”
“Oh my God,” she said with genuine surprise in her lovely, deadly eyes. “You really are a detective.”
“Yes,” I admitted as humbly as I could manage. “I know, for instance, that you have a gun in that bag, that Mr. Lett would have died, or at least he would have sustained serious injury, if he tried to take you. I was the less lethal alternate plan.”
“You’re the kind of man I like to take pictures with. The kind of pictures that drive fiancés mad.”
“You’re something else, Marella Herzog.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, as if there was a choice I had.
“You got me in this now, Mar, I got to make sure the Ericson family steamroller don’t make me Pancake Lee.”
“There’s a lot of rage in you,” she said. It was true but I didn’t know where that fact fit in our conversation.
“Maybe.”
“I’m the kind of girl who can let a man express that rage any way he wants, anywhere he wants.”
“I can see that.”
“So what are you going to do?” she asked again.
“Eat my dinner. Drink my wine. Look at you and be happy. Then walk you home and try to get my mind in the place it needs to be.”
22
I surprised Marella Herzog—also known as Mona Briannan, Cassandra Massman, Thulia Lewes, and some other names by sources that Zephyra had forwarded to me. I surprised her not with the knowledge of her aliases but by kissing her on the cheek at the hotel entrance and saying good night.
“You’re not coming in?” she asked.
“Not tonight.”
“Why not? It’s late.”
“It’s a matter of self-preservation.”
“I don’t bite that hard.”
“As I told you, I have other business that cannot be ignored.” My overly formal reply had the desired effect.
She looked me in the eye for a long moment, nodded, and then said, “Okay,” like a confederate, or an accomplice.
—
I walked the thirty or so blocks back toward my empty apartment. I needed to be on the street to organize my thoughts. Like the table layout of Chambre du Roi, my mind was spiraling and off-center.
Marella was the event that had thrown me out of kilter though she wasn’t what bothered me. Hiram Stent and Josh Farth posed a mortal danger, but that was just business as usual now that I had taken up the dead man’s cause. It was Twill’s dilemma that concerned me most. He was down in a hole somewhere and I didn’t know if my arm was long enough to reach him.
At Broadway and Seventy-second at 11:47 I engaged Twill’s emergency line. He didn’t answer but twelve minutes and eight blocks later he called back.
“You kinda leanin’ on the emergency button, ain’t ya, Pops?” were his first words.
“I need you to come home,” I told him.
“In a few days.”
“Now.”
“Can’t right now.”
“Why not?”
“Tigers up in the garden and tigers down below,” he said paraphrasing his and my, and my father’s, favorite Nasrudin Sufi tale. It meant that any way he turned would mean his demise.
“That bad?” I asked.
“I’ll be home in seventy-two hours,” he said, and then he disconnected the call.
—
I was pressing the key into the downstairs lock of my apartment building door when he said, “Trot.”
Tolstoy wore light-colored trousers, a dark green T-shirt, and a tan windbreaker that was creased and stained. He was hatless, wore glasses, and was as unfamiliar to me as a father could be.
“I thought you was in the wind, man,” I told him.
“Never again.” He punctuated this solemn oath with a soldier’s abbreviated nod.
—
Back in the dining room, once again swilling cognac, my father and I faced each other across the hickory table.
“You should get over it,” he said to me.
“What’s that?”
“The rage you feel. The rage that drives you. You were an angry child and now you’re an angry man. It’s no good.”
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard something like that tonight.”
“I’m sorry, Trot. I was wrong.”
When listing my problems on the way back home from the Hotel Brown I had forgotten about my father and the anger he called up in me. I wanted to answer him but the only words that came underscored the fury that he’d already identified. It galled me that I was little more than a child in his presence, that every misstep I had taken in life could be traced back to him.
He was just an old man, an old black man that could have been a train porter or the Martiniquean ambassador to Cuba or Italy. He was a fool and I had been his fodder. The beast that Marella called up in me wanted to rend Tolstoy McGill. This simple truth made me smile.
“What?” my father asked.
“I’ll make you a deal, old man.”
“And what is that?”
“You agree to be a grandfather to my kids and a father-in-law to my wife and I’ll put a
way the grief.”
“Grief?”
The ex-sharecropper might have been a fool but he was sharp. I had meant to say that I would put away the anger and the rage but instead my tongue said “grief.” Grief. It was at that moment I realized that my entire life had been spent grieving the loss of my father and the death of my mom. Anger was just a shield; the rage simple background music for a child who had pitied himself for decades.
Was I really that shallow and self-involved?
“So what do you say, Clarence?” I asked, using my father’s given name—what he called his sharecropper name.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Answer my question.”
“Your children are my grandkids. Your wife is my daughter-in-law.”
I sat back in the spindly and surprisingly strong dining chair. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, feeling with that outbreath that I was released from the custody of grief.
“Okay,” I said, “now tell me about Nicky.”
“Don’t you ever relax, son?” my father asked. “I mean are you always on some case, some job? Don’t you ever just sit back and watch the TV or jerk off or something?”
Free from sorrow, I laughed and shook my head.
“You know, I killed my first man when I was fourteen,” I said for the first time ever in my life. “If anybody had found out and brought me to trial they would have probably called it self-defense but it was murder for me. I strangled him with my hands. I watched him die and then I burned his body with gasoline fire.
“You live a life like that and the Beverly Hillbillies jokes lose their appeal.”
I had never even imagined that my father’s face could hold compassion for anything except the worker and the Revolution.
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Clarence. I had to kill that man or he would have done it to me. You had to go off and fight your wars. I accept that now. Just don’t sit judgment on me. That’s all I ask.”
My father finished his snifter and I poured him another dram. He drank half of that before speaking again.
“Nikita didn’t start off as an armored car robber, as I’m sure you know,” he said. “He dealt with hijackers and smugglers for years before deciding to rob that one tank and then retire to Tahiti.”
“Do ants retire?” I said, quoting a question my father would ask the straw-man capitalist he so often imagined.
He grinned, showing me his white teeth.
“Nicky never learned his lessons as well as you, Trot,” he said. “Anyway, like I was saying, your brother had been involved with certain smugglers that from time to time intersected with other smugglers who from time to time intersected with so-called terrorists. For a modicum of information on these people, and the promise to reinvolve himself in their business, the feds erased Nikita from their system and freed him to steal, spy, and smuggle, incriminate, and enjoy freedom.”
“Nicky’s a snitch?”
“He likes to say that he’s a government agent but yes, he’s a snitch.”
“Damn. Damn.”
“We all cross the line on a daily basis, Trot. It only took me forty years to realize that.”
“And what about you, old man?” I said as I poured my fourth drink. I was beginning to feel the alcohol in my fingertips and my lips.
“What about me?”
“Why you stayed in the shadows while me and Nicky roved in the street?”
Tolstoy, who I would almost always from that moment on think of as Clarence, looked at me with apologetic eyes.
“In my years in the Revolution,” he said, “I, more than once, was implemental in damaging, destroying, and sometimes assassinating American military and corporate interests and their staffs. I’m on a very special top ten most-sought-after list.”
“Because of the people you killed,” I concluded.
“Because of the knowledge I have. If I was ever brought to trial the prosecution would be forced to reveal things that no American president, military general, or corporate CEO would like to have made public. I’m a threat and so I try to maintain a low profile.”
“Then why come back at all?”
“You and Nicky needed a guardian angel. I watched over you.”
I didn’t say anything to that. If we talked about him playing the role of father-from-the-shadows I might have rediscovered the anger that I had so recently given up. But I really didn’t care about what he thought he was doing or who he feared was after him. I had just solved the most important case of my career. I knew what had happened to me. I knew what he had done and why. So what if there was no pot of gold, no happy ending—truth is its own reward.
23
I told Clarence he could sleep in my daughter’s bed. She wouldn’t mind. Shelly was away at college living with a man thrice her age.
It was early morning when I awoke in the emperor-sized bed that I’d shared with a woman who hadn’t needed love when anyone wanted it with her. But that didn’t mean we didn’t make a durable team. Katrina and I worked together like a machine constructed from indestructible parts and supplied with an infinite power source. We’d never stop functioning but we were terribly out of alignment. We clattered and struggled, twirled and fell down—but we never stopped working and we couldn’t turn off.
I missed Katrina, loved Aura, and wanted Marella so badly that I could taste her in my sleep.
So there I was at 5:47 with the father that had abandoned me down the hall, the women I needed jostling around in my mind, and a cognac hangover from my head to my gut and through every nerve of my body. It wasn’t until I made it to the bathroom, standing next to the tub where I had found Katrina in bloody suicide-water, that I remembered Hiram Stent.
As bad as I felt, he had got it worse.
When ice-cold water from the shower hit my skin I wanted to scream; three minutes later the shiver had made it to the bone; from that point I counted to a hundred and then came out of the glass box shower stripped of fear, lust, love, self-pity, and most importantly my hangover.
Leaving a key, automatic lock-release, and note for my father, I began the long walk down to Fifty-seventh Street and the first stop of my investigation.
—
There was a fancy diner across the street from the art school where Fontu Belair taught life drawing at a late morning class from 10:00 to 12:00. My watch read 7:14 and so I ordered an omelet with jalapeños, goat cheese, and merguez sausage. The fancy young waitress wore a pink miniskirt and a white silk T-shirt so short that it revealed her sapphire navel ring. Her nametag read MIDGE and her lips were painted apricot. When Midge went to deliver my order to the kitchen I took out my phone and made a call.
“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez said, answering before I could hear the first ring.
“Back at ya,” I said.
That was it for the pleasantries. From there Z went into her spiel.
“It was really hard finding a Briscoe/Thyme anywhere. I finally located papers filed for them in the Denver offices of a large accounting firm named Feggers and Sons, Ltd. F and S, the name they do business under, was originally a London-based firm that was old enough to have done accounting for Charles Dickens. I followed the trail of ownership back to a Boston company named Braverman Enterprises. Braverman is a holding company that’s owned by a private investment bank controlled by a woman named Evangeline Sidney-Gray. The only law Briscoe/Thyme practices comes from her desk in downtown Boston.
“Finding Ms. Gray was difficult but Josh Farth took no time at all. He came up through the Boston gangs making a living on heists, robberies, and extortion. He’s been mentioned as a person of interest in three murders but no charges have been made. Now Farth works for Evangeline Sidney-Gray, or at least a company her bank owns.
“I only found a little on Coco Lombardi, mainly phone records when she had some kind of relationship with a guy named Alfred Carr. His nickname is Buster. The majority of her calls were either to Carr in New York or various numb
ers in the Boston area.
“Finally there’s the moniker ‘Twitcher.’ That was by far my biggest headache. I had to piggyback on an NSA program that Bug infected. His subroutine has been crafted so that the feds can’t see it and Bug has it running twenty-four hours a day. I had to drop a key word into the transitional chatter-box and watch it until and if anything came up. Once a key word hit had been made by the box I had ninety seconds to remove it or some bureaucrat in DC would be alerted to the name and the hack.”
“I don’t need the technical explanation right now, Z,” I said. The pink and blue-jeweled waitress was delivering my upmarket eggs. “Just the details will do.”
“The name popped up seventeen times,” she said. “Four of these were about a meeting on the Upper West Side near the river and One-oh-two.”
“I know the place,” I said. “Thanks for all that.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Will you be needing any more help within the next few days? Because if not I called Petipor and we’re going on what he calls a surfing expedition in South Africa for a week or so starting tomorrow night. He’s got his own private jet.”
“Wow,” I said. “That beats my dark green Pontiac.”
“I’d rather be in the backseat with you than at Mach two with him.”
Zephyra had never spoken a flirtatious word to me before. I wondered what was happening inside me.
“If you need help you have Bean’s number, right?” Bean was her backup in times of emergency.
“I do. Just a few more things I need,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Make me a first-class Acela reservation for Boston tomorrow morning as much before ten as possible and e-mail all the information you have on Dame Evangeline Sidney-Gray and Coco. And don’t take any shit from some royal dude.”
“See ya, Mr. McGill. And thanks.”
—
The omelet was delicious. And Midge was an art student at the school across the street. Tiny as she was, she was a sculptor who liked to work in the double medium of iron and stone. I asked if she knew a teacher there named Fontu Belair.
“Oh him,” she said.
“Not such a good guy?” I asked, trying not to read too far into her tone.
And Sometimes I Wonder About You : A Leonid Mcgill Mystery (9780385539197) Page 11
