“Maybe Silas is just saying that.”
“Why would he?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When things are screwed up, they just grow more and more screwed up.”
She sounded so down. I felt down myself. Coming so close to success and then failing—which was what had happened with Tut-Tut—felt way worse than just flat-out not even getting in the game. I wanted to get back in the game and fast. “I’m going to talk to my mom,” I said.
“What about?”
“Tut-Tut. She’s a lawyer. Maybe she’ll have some ideas.”
“What are you going to say?”
“He’s a kid I knew at Joe Louis, and now he’s in trouble.”
Ashanti perked up, at least a little. “Thatcha,” she said.
“Comin’ atcha.”
And we were high-fiving in a half-assed sort of way—by this time in front of Ashanti’s stoop—when a cab pulled up and man got out, carrying a bag of Chinese takeout.
He was about my dad’s age, but taller and better looking in a conventional sort of a way, with symmetrical features, kind of preppy.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hi, Dad,” said Ashanti. “This is Robbie. Robbie, my dad.”
We shook hands. His hand, beautifully shaped, was a bigger, masculine version of Ashanti’s. Mine was shaking a bit.
“Nice to meet you, Robbie,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. All good.”
“Uh, thanks, Mr. Marshall.”
“Call me Nick.”
“Um.”
He shifted the takeout bag. “Join us for dinner?”
“Thanks, but . . . I should go home.” I turned to Ashanti, tried to look like my normal self. “Talk to you later.”
They went up the steps. I continued down the street toward my house. The news, real bad, was that I’d already seen Ashanti’s dad that day, seen him from the bus. What if she’d glanced out at that moment, too? But she had not, so she’d missed the sight of her father getting into a taxi, and just before getting in, saying good-bye to a woman and kissing her on the mouth.
I unlocked the outside door, climbed the stairs to our place, hearing Mitch playing something slow and dreary on his saxophone. Maybe I hadn’t seen him kissing that woman, but just imagined it. Or it had been somebody else completely, someone resembling Ashanti’s father. I toyed with those theories, hoping one or the other would grow into something convincing.
“Hi,” I called, entering our apartment. “I’m home.”
“Hi,” my mom called from the kitchen.
I went in, taking off my jacket, my mind elsewhere. But not a good time for my mind to be elsewhere. Sitting with my mom at the kitchen table, her red leather jacket thrown over the back of a chair, was Dina DeNunzio. My heart started pounding so hard it must have been audible to everyone.
“Robbie,” my mom said, “this is Dina DeNunzio—she’s a TV reporter. Dina, my daughter, Robbie.”
I thought I caught a flash of something brightening Dina DeNunzio’s eyes, something like triumph, but if I did, it was gone in no time, and she had her hand to her chest. “My goodness,” she said. “Aren’t you the girl I ran into the other night at Your Thai? Helping that lovely Mr. Nok with his notice?”
Triumph because she hadn’t been sure it was going to be me coming up those stairs? Triumph because she’d succeeded in tracking me down, right into my own home? I had no time to think all that through. “Uh, yeah, I guess so,” I said.
My mom looked at Dina, then at me. “Notice?” she said.
“Yeah.” What had she told Dina about me? What had Dina told her? How had she gotten my mom to let her in? Questions piled on questions. “Mr. Nok needed a little help in English with this notice he was putting up.”
“You never told me,” my mom said.
“It was no big deal. Just, you know, a notice on the wall kind of thing.”
“A notice about what?” my mom said.
My mom was just being my mom: curious by nature, interested in my life, and a total expert in following a chain of questions all the way to the last answer. I knew that, but still felt annoyed because of the look on Dina’s face: she was enjoying watching my mom do her work for her.
“Thanking the customers,” I said. “For being, like, good customers.”
“Wasn’t it a little more than that, Robbie?” Dina said. She turned to my mom. “Coincidentally enough, it relates to what we were just talking about.”
“The layoffs?” my mom said.
“Not directly,” said Dina. “At least not as far as I know. But Mr. Nok’s notice is connected to the failure of the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project. It turns out he was one of the tenants being forced out.”
“I didn’t know that,” my mom said.
“Of course not,” said Dina. “I realize now that wasn’t your area.”
“I had nothing to do with Sheldon Gunn in any area.”
“Right,” said Dina. “You mentioned that. Although I can’t help wonder where he goes for debt restructuring.”
“It wasn’t to us,” my mom said. “Don’t forget he had all that Saudi financing.”
Dina laughed. “It’s so complicated! What a world, huh, Robbie?”
“Yeah.”
“But getting back to something simple,” Dina said, “simple and very tangible, it seems that Mr. Nok was also one of the many tenants who had cash shoved through his mail slot the night of the storm. His notice was to thank the anonymous benefactor and offer him—or her—or even them, I suppose—free dining for life.”
“So that was true, all those tenants getting money that night?” my mom said. “I heard rumors.”
“Me too,” Dina said. “That was how I got started on the story.”
“What story?” my mom said. “Aren’t you working the Jaggers and Tulkinghorn layoffs?”
Dina blinked. Hey, Dina—bet that doesn’t happen often, huh? I wanted so much to say that aloud. No way for that, of course. I got the idea that there were two conversations going on here, one audible, the other silent, and that mixing them together would be a big mistake.
“Yes, of course,” Dina said. “I misspoke. But they’re like opposite sides of the coin.”
“What do you mean?” my mom said.
“Just that the NBRP crack-up brought good to some people and bad to others,” Dina said.
“What others?” my mom said.
“Why, you and your coworkers, for starters.”
“And apart from that?”
“I’m chasing down rumors of related job losses on Wall Street,” Dina said. “And maybe in London. But for now, I’d really like to do something on the personal side.”
“The personal side?”
“The collateral damage.”
“You want to do a story on me?” my mom said.
Dina’s glance slid my way, then back to my mom. “Yes, that’s the idea.”
“I don’t consider myself damaged,” my mom said. She said it quietly and strongly at the same time. I loved my mom.
Dina smiled. “That’s a terrific quote, right there.”
“You said this was all off the record,” my mom said.
“And it is,” said Dina. “Unless you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” my mom said. “And I’m still curious about how you found me, specifically.” She looked at me. “Mind checking on Pendleton?”
“Huh?”
“He’s upstairs somewhere. Please make sure he’s not getting into any mischief.”
“He’ll just be sleeping, Mom. I—”
“Robbie?” My mom raised her eyebrows. “Thanks, honey.”
I turned and went upstairs. This was part of being a kid. You could get sent out of the room on any bogus pretext. I felt Dina’s eyes o
n my back.
“Such a delightful kid,” I heard Dina say. “Kind of reminds me of me at the same age. What grade is she in?”
“Seventh.”
“I’ll bet she’s a great student.”
“She does all right.”
“And where is this?”
“What school?”
“Yes—what kind of school have you picked for such a bright girl?”
Their voices faded.
Pendleton lay on my bed. No surprise. He opened one eye, focused it on me, or close, and shut it, giving a contented little sigh. Did he remember anything of what he’d been like with the charm inside him?
“Pendleton? What do you remember? What did it feel like?”
No answer. No response whatsoever. I went to my computer, checked the temperature: twenty-nine degrees, going down to fourteen overnight. Did they keep it nice and warm in the detention center? Somehow I doubted it.
I went into the bathroom, looked out the front window. Down below, Dina DeNunzio was just coming out of the front door. She walked quickly down the stairs and got in a car. At that moment, I noticed a man sitting in another car across the street. Dina started her car and drove off. The man pulled onto the street. In a cone of streetlamp light, I caught a glimpse of his face. I knew that face, the broad hard face of the man who’d met Sheldon Gunn in the bar at P.O.V.: Mr. Kolnikov. He drove away, following Dina at a safe distance.
• • •
“How was your visit with Ashanti?” my mom said as I came downstairs.
“Uh, good.” Which couldn’t have been called true, not with Tut-Tut still a prisoner, but where was my starting point when it came to the truth? What I couldn’t bring myself to do was take that first step on a long, long road of confession and corrections, with magical stops on the way, a story that would just end up sounding like the biggest lie of all, since I couldn’t prove any of it. Did you have to tell your parents about everything in your life? Nobody expected them to tell you, the kid, everything about theirs. But none of that mattered right now. Bottom line: I was trapped in a secret life; a secret life about . . . about being chosen, for whatever reason, to fight injustice. I had to toughen up.
“What, uh, went on with that reporter?” I said.
My mom shook her head. “I really don’t know what to make of her. I guess it’s a story, these layoffs, but why me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, some of the lawyers who got laid off were much more prominent than I am,” my mom said. “Those five partners, for example.”
“Maybe she’s talking to them, too,” I said.
My mom shook her head. “Not so far—I e-mailed them all.”
“So the story’s going to be only about you?”
“I get the feeling she’s dropping the whole thing, especially when she realized I wouldn’t go on the record.”
“On the record means with your name and stuff?”
“Exactly. She wanted to tape an interview. Not too smart to go on TV criticizing your old firm when you’re job hunting.”
“I guess not,” I said. “Um, how’s that going, the job hunting?”
“I’ve got some leads.”
“Great. You’re an expert, right? Mr. Stinecki—that’s the history teacher—says the economy depends on experts more than ever.” He also said it was a bad development in terms of human happiness, but I left that out.
Mom looked like she was going to say something pessimistic, maybe undercut her expertise. She held it in, sipped tea from her mug. “Dina was sure taken with you, though.”
“Yeah?”
“She said she always wanted children of her own. Seeing you reawoke all that.”
Pretty clever, I thought. I said, “So how come she didn’t have kids?”
“I didn’t ask,” my mom said. “I assume it’s the same old career-woman story—it didn’t work out.”
“You’re a career woman. It worked out for you.”
My mom touched my hand. “No way I was going through life without that,” she said.
“Lucky for me.”
My mom laughed. Now was the time to hit her with some version of the Tut-Tut story, and I was all set to plunge in, totally unrehearsed, when my dad came in the door, laptop under his arm, face red from the cold.
“What’s funny?” he said, taking off his scarf and jacket.
“Nothing,” my mom said. “We’re just chatting. How was your day?”
My dad shrugged. “Heard from Eleanor Stine—she works with Shep van Slyke’s agent.”
Agents were important in the book business, and right now my dad was maybe between agents; Shep van Slyke was a writing buddy who sometimes hung out with my dad at Monsieur Señor’s.
“That sounds promising,” my mom said.
“She’s interested in the new book,” my dad said.
“Great! So she liked the pages?”
“In general. But there’s a catch.”
“Oh?”
“There’s something else she wants me to tackle first.”
“What’s that?”
“An assignment, I guess you’d call it.”
“A writing assignment?”
My dad nodded. “A paid writing assignment, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I wasn’t,” my mom said. “But isn’t that good news?”
“Depends on how one sees oneself in life,” my dad said.
“I don’t follow,” my mom said; which made two of us.
“Ever heard of George Gentry?”
“The guy who writes that series about the one-legged detective in Las Vegas?”
My dad looked annoyed. “One-armed detective. But yes, him. He’s one of Eleanor’s clients.”
“That’s good,” my mom said.
“What’s good about it?”
Now my mom started sounding annoyed herself. “Gentry’s a big bestseller, isn’t he? Therefore Eleanor must be doing well. So it’s good she’s interested in you.”
Kind of strange, since my dad was a writer, meaning a type of communicator, but lots of times I found my mom easier to understand.
“Right now,” my dad said, “she’s interested in me as a hack. Gentry’s overdue on the next book in his series, totally blocked and downing a bottle of scotch a day. He’s desperate for someone to write the book for him. The offer’s for eighty grand if I can do it in three months.”
“Of course you can!” my mom said. All of a sudden she had some color in her cheeks, looked more like her usual self. “That kind of thing will be a snap for you.”
“But you’re missing the point!” my dad said. “It’s ghostwriting. My name won’t even appear. Dead Man’s Hand—that’s the moronic title they’ve chosen—by George Gentry, even though he won’t have written a single word.”
Normally I’m not one of those people who thinks about things in terms of numbers. But two numbers arose in my mind right away, and I couldn’t get past them: eighty thousand for the dollars; and three for the months of work.
“And after this,” my mom said, “Eleanor will take on your new book?”
“She says.”
“So I’m missing the downside. You make a nice quick bundle of money and then get back to what you love doing, and with proper representation.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself, in fact couldn’t even have come close. I tried to memorize what my mom had just said, word for word.
Meanwhile, my dad had gone pale. “Hack work, Jane. Hack work. Didn’t I make that clear? Is that what you think of me?”
“Three months, Chas, for God’s sake,” my mom said. Then her voice rose in a way I’d never heard from her. “Do you think I believed in every damn deal I worked on?”
My dad’s voice rose, too. “This is different.”
“How?” said my mom. “How is it different?”
“I’m an artist, that’s how,” my dad said. He lowered his voice, lowered his head, too. “There, you made me say it.” He turned and hurried upstairs. My mom rose, went into the living room, closed the sliding door behind her. I sat at the table, all mixed up.
13
Ashanti called me bright and early, sounding chipper.
“You sound chipper,” I said.
“Uh-oh—did I wake you?”
“Sort of.” The truth was I’d been clinging to sleep rather than simply sleeping, in no hurry to rise and face the day. Face things like the sight of Ashanti’s dad kissing that woman, something I knew and Ashanti did not. Was it my duty to tell her? Not to tell her? I didn’t have a clue.
“What did your mom say?” Ashanti said.
“About what?”
“Come on. Are you in a coma? Tut-Tut, of course.”
“I didn’t get a chance to bring it up.”
I expected some follow-up on that, probably annoyed, but Ashanti let it slide right by. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve got another idea.”
“Like?”
“Silas’s dad.”
• • •
I went downstairs. No sign of anybody. My mom had left a note on the table. Good morning, Robbie. I’ve taken P. for a walk. Back soon. Under that I wrote, Gone to the museum with Ashanti. Back later. A voluntary trip to the museum: I could picture the expression on my mom’s face when she considered that one.
Ashanti was waiting for me on the street.
“Hi,” she said. “Nice day.”
“What’s nice about it?” The sky was one big dark cloud, and some strange smell was in the cold air, kind of sewery. “Why are you in such a good mood?”
“It’s my natural state.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
She gazed down at me and shook her head in a tsk-tsk sort of way. “Attitude is everything in life.”
“Are you on some kind of dope?” I said.
She laughed. “More like I was a dope.”
“Huh?”
“Remember what I told you about my dad? That text?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I must’ve misinterpreted. Not enough data points, as they say in science class.”
The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Page 9
