The question tightened my eyes.
“B-Brain was the hard part,” I said, stalling now with superfluous information. “He had no record and so didn’t have a floater file in the police records. The other three had other friends. There was a gu CTheHe y named Thom Paxton who they called Smiles, and a girl, there’s always a girl, named Georgiana Pineyman. She called B-Brain Pops for some reason. Georgiana was Smiles’ girlfriend from September to June, but she hung with Pops in the summer because Smiles went away with his family during school break.
“I got it all right here,” I said, taking a thick envelope from my jacket pocket.
“B-Brain’s real name is in there?” the upstate detective asked.
“Yeah.”
Ambrose put out his cigarette and smiled. He lit up another and, taking a deep breath, I sucked up as much of the smoke as I could.
“You know this is just a normal job, don’t you, Leonid?” he said. “It’s not cloak-and-dagger. The client is known to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
At that moment Thurman proved that he was a shrewd judge of human nature. He offered me a cigarette. I really needed one right then. He lit me up and I was genuinely grateful.
Handing me the pack, he said, “Keep ’em. There’s some matches in the cellophane.”
I traded the history of four troubled young men’s lives for nine filterless Camels and eight red-tipped matches.
Ê€„
8
I got back to my street, a block east of Riverside Drive, at a few minutes past eleven. Katrina was at the door before I could get my key out of the lock.
Her presence annoyed me. In all the years of our less than loving marriage Katrina never waited up. She didn’t want kisses or make overtures for sex. She never asked how I was doing or when I was coming back home. She maintained the house and looked after her children and mine. We had a balance, a home life that I could follow like a German train schedule.
“Leonid,” she said, putting her arms around me, kissing my cheek.
She was wearing a frilly pink nightgown and lime-green slippers. Katrina maintained most of the beauty that she’d generated for Zool. She’d put on a few pounds but didn’t look anywhere near her fifty-one years. Her green eyes were actually luminescent.
“I was worried,” she said. She had a slight Swedish accent, which was a little odd since she was born in Queens and, even though her parents were Scandinavian immigrants, they hailed from Minnesota.
“I come home late two nights out of three,” I said, moving away from the embrace. “What are you worried about?”
“You didn’t call.”
“I never call.”
“But you should. I was worried.”
She followed me down the hall to the dining room. I sat at the table, not knowing what to do in a house where I felt both welcomed and alienated.
“You want me to heat you something?” my bride asked.
Katrina could make anything in the kitchen, and it always tasted great. Even those years when we lived separately together she made a good dinner seven nights a week.
“What you got?” I asked.
“French beef, with those wide noodles you like.”
“Red wine sauce?”
“Of course.”
I nodded because I hadn’t eaten.
“I’ll get the children,” she said.
“It’s late, Katrina,” I complained.
“Children must respect their father,” she said, bustling off down the corridor that led to the bedrooms.
We had a big prewar apartment, more than large enough for our family of five. I had my own den, the kids each had a bedroom, and the rent never went up. The landlord and Katrina had an arrangement. I never asked what that was. I never cared.
In the momentary solitude, Roger Brown came to mind. I hadn’t even met him but still I sold his name for the money bulging in my breast pocket. I tried to convince myself that this wasn’t like the people I’d bushwhacked in the old days. It was just a job. Roger would probably thank me, or maybe he’d get a call from his old friend’s parents and politely decline the invitation.
“Hi, Dad,” Shelly said. She entered the room from the hallway that led to the bedrooms.
Shelly had dark olive skin and almond eyes, in shape and color. She didn’t look like me in the slightest but that didn’t keep her from expressing a daughter’s love. She hugged my head and kissed my cheek. Shelly had been a daddy’s girl since she was a baby. I loved her, after a fashion, even though we didn’t have much in common.
“How are you?” she asked. There was still sleep in her eyes. She wore a T-shirt and jeans thrown on quickly in her haste to welcome me home.
“Workin’ hard,” I said. “Just finished a case tonight.”
“We should celebrate. You want me to make you a martini?”
It was the one thing she could do that I enjoyed.
“Sure, babe.”< K“SuI e/font>
As Shelly ran off toward the kitchen, Dimitri rumbled in. He was a shade or two lighter than I, with my body type but taller. He was brooding and heavy-handed. Dimitri was my blood, you could see it in every aspect of his personality and demeanor.
“Hey, boy.”
He grunted and sat in the chair furthest from me.
“How’s college?” I asked, intent on engaging him.
“I need my sleep.”
“I know. Your mother seems to think that we have to eat together no matter when I get home.”
“I already ate,” he complained. “I was in bed at nine.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”
The apology got me another grunt.
I wasn’t angry at the sullen junior. He didn’t like me, but he was my son and I would be a father to him no matter how he felt.
“Hey, Pop,” the youngest of the brood said.
He was standing in the doorway smiling and easygoing. Twill was a handsome teenager. Dark-skinned, he was sixteen but could have passed for twenty-one easily.
“Twilliam,” I said, saluting.
“You work too hard, Pops. If they paid you by the hour you’d make minimum wage look good.”
He took the seat next to me and slugged my shoulder.
“How’s school?”
“I got passing grades and my teachers are just about trained good.”
“You makin’ it to class?”
“Yes sir. Almost every day.”
I should have gotten mad but instead I laughed.
“Dinner is served,” Katrina announced. She entered the room carrying a large tray bearing two big bowls and a breadbasket. Behind her came Shelly with a chrome shaker and a martini glass. In the old days she would have had a glass for her mother too, but since Katrina had abandoned our family for Andre Zool, Shelly refused to serve her.
“Dimitri, get us some plates from the cabinet,” Katrina said.
“I’m not eating,” he replied.
Before I could say anything K sant>Twill popped up and went to get our plates. He was a peacemaker, a very important trait for a career criminal.
“Don’t give me one,” Dimitri said, holding his hands over his little parcel of the table.
“I’m on a diet,” Shelly said.
“Isn’t anyone going to eat with their father?” Katrina asked the universe.
“I will,” Twill said.
My wife served me and her son.
He only took one bite but I still felt good that he joined me.
Shelly chattered on about her classes and classmates, her teachers, and a cute boy named Arnold. Dimitri was silent and Katrina kept asking if I wanted more.
When the food was gone and the shaker half empty, Dimitri stomped off to bed. Shelly followed after kissing me goodnight. She was a lovely Asian child. Her father, I was quite sure, was a jeweler from Burma who’d had a yearlong affair with my wife.
“I’ll help with the dishes, Mom,” Twill offered when Katrina began stacking plates.
>
“No, darling. You keep your father company.”
She carried off the plates and we sat, side by side, at the table for eight.
Twill had a small scar under his chin, a blemish from a tumble he took as a toddler. I often thought that that little protuberant flaw made him even more perfect, telling the world that this handsome representation of a man was human too.
“How’s it goin’, Twill?” I asked.
“Can’t complain.”
“You see your probation officer this week?”
“This afternoon. He said I was doing fine.”
Twill always looked you in the eye when speaking.
“Any girls on the scene?” I asked.
He hunched his shoulders, giving away nothing.
Twill didn’t call girls hos and bitches, as many of his friends did; not that he was outraged by that kind of language.
That’s just the way people talk, he once told me. I don’t do it ’cause it don’t sound right comin’ outta my mouth, that’s all.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“It K sihinis what it is, Pop.”
Ê€„
9
The setting of the dream changes slightly over time but in essence it remains the same.
I’m in a burning building, running through a maze of blazing hallways. In this particular nightmare I come to a staircase and wonder if it’s worth trying to get down that way. But when I arrive at the door, flames vomit out at me. I run through an office door into a burning room. I run from room to room, breathing hard, choking on the smoke and hot air.
I come to another stairwell but it is blocked by smoldering timbers. I try to move them but orange embers burn my hands, sending me reeling backwards. I stumble and right myself again and again, running in between the stagger. All of a sudden I see a window at the end of a long, flame-licked hallway. I take a step and the floor under my foot gives way. Shifting my weight to the other foot, I spring forward, vaulting over the gaping hole in the floor. The walls and floor and ceiling are all flame now. At every step the floor gives way behind me. I keep on moving toward that faraway window, certain that I won’t make it. I’m running. Smoke is rising from my clothes. My senses become confused with each other. I see the concussive cracking of flame and hear the bright heat. My mind is burning and it is my soul more than any other part of me that is racing for the liberation of the window.
Suddenly I am standing on a solid floor before the huge plate-glass frame. The window is occluded by smoke residue. There is no mechanism to open it. I rush back into the conflagration to retrieve a burning timber. And though I am being burned I batter the glass, again and again. It cracks and buckles, weakens and finally gives way.
As the window falls I am faced with the most beautiful blue sky I have ever seen. Below, the broken pane and flaming timber are still falling through thousands of feet to earth. Fire and heat pulse behind me. The day beckons. The wind is bracing, and the choice . . . no choice at all.
I don’t remember jumping, just the sensation of falling through the frigid atmosphere, the cold wind freezing my burnt skin, clean air excavating the tar from my lungs. I expected that falling through space would be quiet, like the last moments in a film when the sound cuts out while the hero is being shot down protecting the town from a gang of bandits.
This fall is loud, however; it roars in my ears, a jungle beast hungry for prey.
The ground is racing toward me with deadly indifference.
I STARTED AWAKE, gulping for air, with my hands thrust out in front of me to stop the deadly fall. The television was droning on about some kind of new abdominal exercise machine. Katrina, who cannot sleep without the company of her precious TV, was unconscious there next to me.
Like a sprinter at the end of a race, I needed many deep gulps of air before I could breathe normally. My chest was hurting and I wanted more than anything to scream. I was shiveri Nep ng and cold, sweating too.
I never dreamt about my victims, but their memory is the mortar and stone of that burning building.
The alarm clock on my side of the bed said 5:06.
I couldn’t bear the thought of another meal with my half-family and pretend wife.
I knew full well that Katrina was being so nice to me only because she had faced the real possibility of being set adrift in life at middle age. If she met a new Andre Zool tomorrow she’d be gone by the end of the week.
I rolled out of bed and went to my den, where I always kept a change of clothes.
Down on the street I lit one of Ambrose Thurman’s Camels and walked toward Broadway. At a kiosk on the corner I bought the Daily News, which I started reading right there on the street. I might have made some headway but raindrops hit my nose and left thumb.
That’s Jesus kissing you with his tears, my mother whispered from the grave. She loved my father unconditionally but never accepted his atheistic ideology.
I COULDN’T READ in the subway because the closeness in there brought back the desperation of my dream. I imagined fire rolling through the subway car and people screaming, battering the windows with their hands and heads.
THERE’S A DINER DOWN the block from the Tesla Building. I read my paper there while eating a scrambled-egg sandwich with American cheese, bacon, yellow mustard, and raw onions. I scoured the metro section of the paper, looking for news about people I knew in my previous life. There were killings and robberies, a kidnapping, and three major arrests, but none of it had to do with me.
My heart was still thrumming from the nightmare and so I did the crossword puzzle. I had just penciled the five-letter name for “Black crime writer” when I noticed that it was three minutes after seven.
I made my way down to the Tesla and took an elevator to the eighty-first floor. That’s where Aura Ullman’s office was. She was always at work by seven.
The ornate halls that I had loved the day before now made me nervous, the corridors so reminiscent of the dream. But seeing her door and the light through the frosted glass pane eased my tension a bit.
“Who is it?” she called in answer to my knock.
“Leonid.”
“Come in.”
A click sounded from the electric release of the lock. I pushed the door and walked in.
It was one big room. S on in There was probably a window somewhere but there was so much stuff stacked along the walls that it was anybody’s guess where it might have been. There were cleaning supplies and filing cabinets, three safes and five pegboards, with dozens of keys hanging from each one. Fire extinguishers, cartons of toilet paper, a dozen new mops, and cans of paint were stacked in such a way as to form an aisle leading to Aura’s big black-metal desk.
The ceiling was lined with half a dozen rows of fluorescent lights, all of them glaring brightly.
“How can you bear this kinda light?” I asked when I’d gotten to her desk.
“I take life as it comes,” she answered and I thought about Twill and his similar philosophy.
I sat in a dark green metal folding chair in front of her. She looked up from the big ledger she’d been writing in.
“You had that dream again, didn’t you?” she said.
She looked into my eyes and I felt sick. Gazing across the expanse of the cluttered desk at a woman so aware of my mood seemed to be the symbol of my impossible life.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
Many a night while sleeping with Aura I had started awake from that same dream. Every time she’d ask me what it was about but I couldn’t answer. It felt like naming the dream would somehow make it real.
“I don’t know, Aura. I don’t know.”
She got up and went to her old, old Mr. Coffee machine and poured the strong brew into a Styrofoam cup. She brought this to me and sat on top of the desk, looking down on my head.
For three or four long minutes we sat there. I appreciated the respite, the moments when I could be myself in silence, but with comp
any.
“Why do you stay with her?” Aura asked at last.
“I don’t—” I said and stopped.
I looked up to see her stormy eyes. She was smiling because she knew that I had stopped myself from lying.
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