I can remember us sitting in that room, him in a big secondhand armchair covered in some nubby green fabric, and me on the floor, sprawled out, both of us drinking beer and smoking. It was the best time with my father, those years.
One morning he calls to my mother that he’s going out. I’m at home working for an exam; my mother is trying to cook something out of her French cookbook, and the smell is of wine and butter, which is all wrong on the hot semitropical day, but she’s happy.
And he goes. He buys his records in the best jazz store in town, on Dizengoff Street, and then seeing he’s late for dinner, catches the wrong bus, intending to walk the extra mile home when he gets off. Then a bomb goes off on the bus.
“And that was it,” I said to Lily
“You never told me that,” said Lily.
“Why can’t we be together?”
I was outside the club with Tolya who was smoking a cigar at one in the morning. The city looked slick, asphalt gleaming, ice on the sidewalks alight with the reflection from neon.
Just then, Marie Louise appeared, lugging a shopping bag.
“Can I get you a cab?” I said.
“I will find a bus,” she said. “Mr. Lennox gave me so many nice presents for my children, merry Christmas.”
“It is late, one o’clock. I will give you a ride,” said Tolya. He took the woman’s bags, handed them to his driver, who was waiting, and escorted Marie Louise to the big SUV.
“What’s wrong, Artyom?” Tolya said. “Something is up. I see your face when you come out of the club.”
“Nothing.” I didn’t want to ruin the evening.
“Time to go home,” he said.
“In a while.”
“I go home,” he said. “I go to new lovely new house.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Sure. I like this uptown, Artie. Maybe I’ll open restaurant or bar or little jazz club for you. You will quit this cop nonsense and make a life.”
“My God. You mean it.”
“Yes, this is me, I am God.” He kissed me on both cheeks three times.
“Tolya?”
“What is it?”
“You have one of your guys available?”
“Always.”
“That man with the very light hair? Now I keep thinking about him! See if one of your guys can find him, maybe hang out close by.”
Tolya held out his iPhone. “I already take little picture.”
“How come?”
“Why not? I don’t feel good about him, so nice to have a picture,” said Tolya, switching to Russian. “Goodnight, Artyom. I wait for you at my new house on 139th Street. Unless you are perhaps staying with Lily?”
“Send me the picture, to my phone.”
“I already did.”
CHAPTER 31
W hat did he want?” I said to Carver Lennox.
“Who?”
“The guy with light hair, a Russian? Tolya said he made you nervous.”
“It’s nothing. He was interested in an apartment, I said they weren’t for sale, it pissed him off a little, but it was no big deal,” he said. “Nice of you to ask. He had too much booze is all, and everybody’s getting crazy about the financial meltdown, now people think we’re screwed, and they think I know something. If I knew something, I’d do something, my brother.” He looked around the club. People were beginning to leave the party. “I don’t know, man, most of last century, black people lived in an alternate universe in this country. We had our own schools, clubs, neighborhoods, everything, you know, and whatever was going on in America, it had its mirror image in black America, banking, baseball, all of it. So if it’s bad for the country now, it’s worse for Harlem. I thought we were on our way; we even got a Starbucks,” he said, not without irony. “We were keeping those real estate companies like Pinnacle out and putting in our own people, and now, who the fuck knows? I’m sorry. I think I had too much to drink.”
“How are things with you, speaking of the financial fuck up?”
“You want the truth? They could be better. I lost a ton in the market. I’m just moving fast as I can to get things right with the Armstrong. Thanks for caring, man,” said Lennox. “Glad you could come, glad your pal Sverdloff made it. I like this dude, you know that? He’s your pal, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good party, right?”
“Very good.”
“You met my little girl?”
“I saw her with her mother.”
“Lucille is great with the kids, I’ll give her that. Did you know that Alex, my daughter, she’s getting straight A’s at Brearley. Best high school in the city. And beautiful, too, right?”
“She looks like a great kid.” I thought I might need his help, so I dropped compliments, and, anyhow, his kid probably was great. “What about your wife, you and her still friendly?”
“Why?”
“A matter of interest. A guy thing.”
“I don’t know,” said Lennox. “She gets on my nerves. She was always wanting to know where we were at, and I used to say we’re at this particular place, we’re married, we’re making great money, we have fabulous kids, you enjoy cutting up people over at Presbyterian, you run a free clinic for people who can’t afford you to cut them up otherwise, you do good work, what else is there? ‘That’s what I’m asking,’ she used to say; Lucille would say that. She was never content, you know?”
“I get it.”
“Glad to see you’re with your lady, by the way,” he said. “Couple of times we met by the elevator, and Lily kept saying Artie this and Artie that, and I said, who’s this Artie dude?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re thinking about her and Virgil? He’s a nice guy, but he’s not right for her.”
I called over the bar for another drink.
“On me,” he said, and I knew he was pretty boozed up. “You can’t pay anyway. The whole night’s on me. Christmas party. What do you feel like?”
I said I’d have what he was having, and he got a couple of malt whiskeys and we sat at a little table for a while and toasted some musicians I discovered we both liked.
“Lily was very sad about old Mrs. Simonova, I know,” Lennox said.
“You can get hold of her apartment, now, right?”
He shrugged. “I do what I do for the neighborhood. I grew up here when the whole of Harlem was desolate-crack and cronyism, murders, rapes, gangs, old ladies who couldn’t leave their houses at night, no investment, no jobs, white cops who went home before dark, rats in the schools-now we’re pulling ourselves up; we’re doing it. I found out at Princeton there’s a different way to do things, there,” he said. “I met with President Clinton, you know, when he first moved to his office down on 125th Street, and he says to me, ‘Carver, I like your approach.’ This is a year to celebrate, don’t you think, now we have President-elect Obama,” said Lennox.
“And you see yourself in his footsteps.”
He didn’t rise to the bait easily; he was a cool customer. Raising his glass, he just smiled. “Drink your whiskey, Artie. This is an excellent one I got over in Scotland, one of those glens, Glenfiddich, Glenallen. What about we brew up some Glensugarhill or something-We got glens, right?” He went on making up names for whiskey, and I drank. “I knew an old guy said once upon a time back in the day, him and a couple friends made wine in Harlem.” He laughed.
I drank. He gave me a guy hug, thumped my back, did a knuckle bump as a follow-up, let me know I was OK. “Good to have you on our side, my brother. Isn’t that right? Hello, Lily,” he said, as she came up alongside me and took my glass and drank from it.
I put my arm around her.
“Lionel Hutchison’s here,” she said.
CHAPTER 32
I have to hurry,” said Lionel Hutchison. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat, and he still had his velvet slippers on his feet. “Is Celestina here?”
“She left earlier. Said she was going to her sister’s pla
ce.”
“Thank God. But I have to hurry. She might come back to the apartment and find me out. The dog is all alone. She wouldn’t like that. Celestina, I mean,” he said.
I tried to get him to sit down. I tried to get him to drink something, but he was distracted. Something was wrong. He was agitated and almost incoherent. I asked what the matter was. He looked around the room, frantic. Had to hurry, he said. Had something to tell me, but he had to get back, the dog was alone, he said over and over. Celestina would be mad that he left Ed, the dog, alone.
Lionel started to talk about ghosts. Ghosts in the building, he said. He was shivering. A waiter got him a cup of hot coffee. He held it between his hands, and for the second time he said he had to talk to me. Ghosts, he said. Pale faces.
I got him to sit down. The club was emptying out fast now.
“It’s not right,” he said. “It wasn’t right.”
“What wasn’t?”
“What he did.”
“Who?”
“I have to go.” He put his coffee on the bar. “Sorry about this.”
“Did you take anything before you left?”
“I don’t remember. Sleeping pill. Maybe. Not sure.” He was rambling.
“You need some warm clothes,” I said.
“I like the cold,” he said, but he was shaking now. “Like it.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“Something to tell you.”
“I’ll take you home and we can talk on the way.”
He looked around the club and saw Carver Lennox who waved. Hutchison shrank back. He seemed afraid.
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when we leave here. It’s important,” Hutchison said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“About the ghosts?”
“About Marianna Simonova. I have to tell you something about her. Nobody knows. I know. Only I. I knew her in a way nobody else did.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Damn dog. I can’t wait. I have to go back for the blasted damn dog. Son of a bitch. Literally.”
“Or I could come in the morning? I could put you in a taxi and come over in the morning. Lionel?”
It was a mistake. I saw he wouldn’t ask again, wouldn’t beg for my time.
“Just wait here,” I said. “I’ll get my car keys.”
As I went to find my coat and my car keys, I knew I was too drunk to drive, and all I really wanted was to stay with Lily. Be with her. Dance with her. But Lionel had looked dazed. Maybe his wife had been right; maybe he did wander in his sleep.
I got my coat, went to look for Lily, told her I’d be back as fast as I could, and then discovered that Lionel had already gone. Axel said that one of the guests who was leaving, said he’d give Lionel a lift home. “Which guest?”
Axel didn’t know. “How did he seem?” I said.
“He seemed a little nuts at first, then he was calm. He seemed fine when he left,” Axel said.
I found Lily, I told her a little about Lionel, but not all. Just told her he had dropped by and somebody had driven him home. We got another drink and went to listen to the pianist who had resumed playing after the band left. He was playing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” It was the first song I’d heard with Lily, at Bradley’s.
So we danced in the almost empty club, for an hour-I lost all sense of time-then sat and whispered and danced some more together. I didn’t want to let go of her. I thought if I held on, she’d stay forever.
I forgot about Lionel Hutchison. I would spend real time with him in the morning, I told myself, I’d sit in the freezing cold, if he wanted, smoke with him, hear him out, but for now I just let myself forget. I didn’t think about him again, not for hours, two, three, four hours, there wasn’t much sleeping that night, so I didn’t think about him again until after I woke up in Lily’s bed.
S U N D A Y
CHAPTER 33
I t was a beautiful, bitter-cold morning, clear black sky, an icy slice of moon, the stars still out just before dawn. I could see them from Lily’s window. I could see the faraway lights downtown on the skyscrapers. On the dark, quiet streets closer to the Armstrong, there was only a solitary figure coming in the back door with a big, shaggy dog, somebody who couldn’t sleep, somebody whose pooch had begged for an early walk. Something else caught my eye, but I was distracted by Lily; dressed in a black skirt and jacket, green shawl over her shoulders, she was rummaging in her bag for her gloves.
“I have to go,” she said, picking up her coat. She kissed my cheek and rubbed off some lipstick.
I said I wanted to go to the cemetery with her. She said no.
“Just wait for me, will you? Please?”
I said I’d wait. As soon as she closed the door behind her, I looked out of the window again. My car, a slick of white ice over the red, was parked in the lot surrounded by wire fencing. On the ground a figure sprawled, face down.
I shoved the old sash window up and leaned out as far as I could, looked down, saw the row of gray metal garbage cans, one on its side, maybe knocked over by the wind, or by somebody falling. And the man, spread-eagled, black blood already pooling on the crusts of snow and ice. He was hurt bad, or dead, and then I recognized the Harris tweed jacket.
I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing, figured from fourteen stories up maybe I was wrong. I yanked on my clothes and, not waiting for the elevator, ran down the fourteen stories to the basement, hurried along the endless corridors, banged through the heavy metal door that led outside.
On the ground, face down, Lionel Hutchison was still wearing the jacket he’d had on when he came to the club a few hours earlier. It looked, first glance, like he’d skidded on black ice, fallen over a garbage can, collapsed on the ground, maybe had a heart attack, a stroke. I knelt down beside him. The light over the back door spilled a pool of white light over the body.
The garbage can was on its side, rolling back and forth in the stiff wind. Cigarettes, the Lucky Strikes I’d seen Hutchison smoke, were scattered on the ground. One of his velvet slippers lay on top of a ridge of dirty snow. There was no blood on it.
I got down and put my hand against his neck, and right then I suddenly felt somebody was watching me.
Hutchison was dead. There was no pulse. But there was too much damage to have come from a simple fall, too much broken for a man who had simply tripped on a garbage can. His limbs were skewed in strange positions, at least one arm and one leg looked broken.
I stood up fast because, again, I had the feeling somebody was watching, that I wasn’t alone out by the garbage cans with a dead man on the ice. I should have come back to the Armstrong with Hutchison last night, I thought, I should have paid more attention when he came to the club. But I’d been all wrapped up in Lily.
By now, I was dialing Virgil Radcliff on my phone, trying to get through, then finally reaching him, waking him up. He said he was at his apartment, a couple of blocks away over on 145th Street. He had just climbed into bed, but as soon as he could throw on some clothes he’d get to the Armstrong. I knew he’d been working most of the night.
When Virgil arrived, he found me crouched by Lionel Hutchison’s body. It was still dark.
“Christ, Artie,” he said, clutching two cups of Starbucks coffee, handing me one. “It’s Dr. Hutchison, isn’t it? Jesus, Artie. Shit. I liked the guy so much. Is he gone?”
“Yeah. I called for an ambulance.”
Virgil crouched near the body, his phone already out. At the bottom of his jeans, green flannel pajamas hung out over his boots. He looked like a little kid.
Gently he put two fingers alongside Hutchison’s neck, the way I had done.
“Fuck,” Virgil said. He gulped the coffee. “You’re thinking what?”
“He liked coming out for a smoke. I don’t know.”
“Heart attack?”
“What about all the blood?”
“Where’s Celestin
a?” said Virgil.
“Last I talked to her, at the party, she was going over to stay at her sister’s. You know where that is?”
He punched something into his iPhone. “I can find out. What time did you see her?”
“Midnight? I’m not sure. Poor bastard. We should check in case she came home. Somebody should go up to the apartment.”
Virgil got up. “I’ll go.”
“I was thinking it looks like he fell from somewhere high up. His bones look all broken.”
“Old people break easily,” said Virgil. “You don’t have to fall off anything, all you need is to trip.”
“You’re an expert?”
“Yeah, if you want to know. My grandmother broke her hip last year. Lionel’s age, you can break bones if you just trip and fall over, stumble on the ice, slip. It happens. But does that give you a stroke? Does it make you bleed like that?”
“No. Listen, I saw your father,” I said as Virgil started for the door.
“He told me.”
“Yeah?”
“He called. He liked you. I guess he told you his story. He tells everyone.”
“Those were lousy times when he was in college.”
“Hard to imagine, for us, I mean. These guys, my dad’s age, they suffered such fucking absolute segregation. Guys like Lionel Hutchison. Jesus, Artie. This is bad. I’ll go up.”
“You called your house?”
“Yeah, and I also managed to get through to the chief at home,” said Virgil. “Soon as I got your call.”
I’d been expecting Virgil to ask about the party. He didn’t, not about the party or about Lily. Maybe he knew not to. Maybe he was preoccupied with Lionel Hutchison. I felt guilty about Lily and me, but I didn’t sleep with her to get at him. I wanted her. Needed her. Maybe for her, it had been a one-time thing, a party, the booze and music. I didn’t want to think that.
I just leaned against a garbage can and waited for the ambulance, the cops, the whole gang of assorted characters who would arrive, each with a different part to play, a traveling troupe of death.
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