He sighed and stood, walked to the door I’d entered through, and passed out into the riotous gallery/hallway.
After he was gone, I let my eyes nearly close and counted breaths until he returned, maybe ten minutes later. He handed me a white envelope, sealed, and a stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
“I expect something from this,” he said.
“I’ll deliver the note. That’s all I can promise. Do you have anything else to tell me?”
“Like what?”
“Like why she left? Maybe . . . what she might be afraid of?”
“It’s not of me, if that’s what you’re saying. I love Chrystal.”
“I love hamburger,” I said. “But when lunch is over the sandwich is gone.”
“Chrystal is not a plate of food.”
WE PARTED IN the brown library. I walked past Chrystal’s paintings and into the glass office, which was now empty. I ambled across the lawn to the private elevator, then down the empty floor to the other.
The light-brown doorman ignored me as I passed out into the street.
Two blocks away I tore open the envelope and read the poorly scrawled note. Chrystal, I love you and would never be upset about anything having to do with your actions or oversights.
I was amazed at the legal quality of the message, but that didn’t matter. I’m not an editor or a life coach. My job is, has always been, to take money from people either to assuage their fears or to fan the flames of their rage.
And there are worse elements to my profession.
9
CYRIL TYLER’S HIDDEN MANSION was only nine blocks from my place. The fact that it wasn’t the gossip of the neighborhood proved that he had extraordinary clout—and was willing to use it.
I made it to my building in nine or ten minutes and then climbed up the ten flights to the apartment at a good clip. A man in my line should at least be able to run up some stairs if the situation called for it. Somebody might be after me, or me after him—either way, I needed the edge.
I got to our big black door and stopped. The blood slamming through my veins had reminded me of something and I knew that once I was in the house that detail might fishtail away. Taking out my phone I entered and transmitted a text message: Mardi, download pic of woman who came in today. Said she was Chrystal Tyler but wasn’t. Look up last bug-search I did and see if you can identify her. Probably a relative, likely a sister. Thanx.
I could have called Mardi. She would have answered and promised to do the job. But the best way to talk to young people is on the tiny screen. They remember, save, and pay closest attention to the texts of their lives. That’s how they stay connected, coincidentally avoiding the overexcitement and the inherent inaccuracies of aural memory. Maybe one day all of our memories will be contained on little devices in our bags and back pockets. People like me will make their money looking for lost and stolen electronic recollections.
“Who was I, Mr. McGill?” the potential client would ask my descendant.
“I’ll get right on that, Mr. Doe. Just transfer the dollars into my Panamanian account.”
I USED the special electronic key on the lock, and two bolts—one at the knob and the other in the floor—slid open.
The place was deceptively quiet. You might have called it peaceful if you weren’t aware of the problems festering therein.
I walked down the hall toward the sanatorium that once was my office. I opened the door to see my wife and my best friend in the bed.
He was bare-chested, lying back on three pillows, while she sat at his side, feeding him soup with an antique silver spoon she’d inherited from her least favorite aunt—Gertie.
Gordo, boxing trainer extraordinaire, was dying of stomach cancer, and my philandering wife was nursing him.
The room was spotlessly clean and my friend was as comfortable as a man can be when he’s recovering from his third course of aggressive chemotherapy in a strange bed, on the eleventh floor, with nothing in his future except a hole in the ground.
On the other side of the bed sat the nurse, Elsa Koen, a forty-something red-haired, mild-mannered, German woman. She was speaking softly to Gordo. He swallowed hard, as if attempting to gulp down a spoonful of crushed glass.
They didn’t notice me at first. The women were concentrating their full attention on Gordo as he was experiencing the pain of dying slowly.
I took a step in and he became aware of me. That was Gordo—he caught every movement, in and out of the ring. He leaned forward as if trying to genuflect. Elsa placed a hand on his chest and one behind his head to help him. Gordo was one of the most independent-minded men I knew but he accepted the German’s help stoically, maybe even with a hint of gratitude.
Katrina turned her beautiful, only slightly worked-upon, face in my direction. She tried to smile, but she loved Gordo almost as much as I did. Our differences hadn’t dimmed her compassion.
“Leonid,” she said, rising from the rented hospital bed.
“Hey, Gordo,” I said. “What I tell you ’bout gettin’ in bed wit’ my wife?”
Elsa smiled as she placed another pillow behind the old man’s back.
“She told me you wouldn’t mind,” he rasped. His sandpaper voice wasn’t caused by the disease, or its treatments, but simply a tone left over after fifty-plus years yelling for his boxers to shape up or fall down.
Elsa stood and both women walked toward me.
You couldn’t see where Katrina had her face-lift, or even tell that her lustrous blond hair color wasn’t completely natural. If someone had told you that she was fifty-one years old you would have been surprised, but these were the least of her secrets.
She kissed my cheek, bending down slightly because I’m only five five and a half. Elsa touched my shoulder as she went past.
The women didn’t talk to me because the ritual was solidly in place by then: I’d come home in the evening and Gordo and I would have our powwow. The women saw to his physical needs, while I reminded him of who he was and why he struggled when he could have given up.
I pulled up a chair that was always there in the corner, next to the window.
“How’s it goin’, old man?” I asked.
Gordo tried to sigh but merely let go of a breath. He had always been slender but now he was nearly emaciated, sallow skin sagging on clearly defined bone.
“Poison doin’ its job all right,” he said. “Now we got to see if I could do mines.”
When I asked the oncologist, Dr. Ives, what were my friend’s chances, the physician said, Little to none. That was seven months before.
“Savin’ your strength for the later rounds, huh?” I said.
Gordo showed his teeth in a grimace that was meant to be a grin.
“How you doin’, boy?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head, saying without words that the weight was beyond my range. It was a truth I wouldn’t have revealed to most people. I wouldn’t have even told Gordo, but he needed to be needed, and I needed him to be—period.
“What is it?” he asked.
I told him about the woman pretending to be another, about the man feigning his identity, too. I told him about the hidden house on top of the building nine blocks away.
“Tricky,” the dying man said. “That’s the kinda boxer you got to worry about. He have you lookin’ for left hook but he bankin’ on a straight right. You think you got it figured and then—bang!—outta nowhere you crouch down right into a uppercut.”
It was good advice from a master trainer. Here I thought I had the case all figured, but the facts I knew really only told me that I didn’t know anything.
“And then there’s this guy,” I said. “Harris Vartan.”
“Vartan? What you got to do with that mothahfuckah?”
Gordo didn’t curse, hardly ever. He always told me that women and children come to boxing matches and it’s bad enough that they have to see their loved ones bleeding and battered.
They don’t need fo
ul language to spice the bloody stew, he’d say.
“How do you know Vartan?” I asked.
“Thirty-seven, no no no, thirty-eight years ago he come into my gym and told me that he owned one’a my boxers, said that he had plans for him. I told him that if he was a slave master, that if he thought of men as chattel, then he could take his property and get his ass outta my place. I let that boxer know the same damn thing.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nuthin’. Vartan looked at me and then he kinda half-smiled. He had a torpedo with him. That guy took a step at me but Vartan held him back. Lucky for the gunsel that he did, too. You know I was hot.”
“He let the boxer alone?”
“Sure did. Kinda surprised me, too. You know, I asked around about him. They said that he knew where the bodies were buried’cause he the one put ’em in the ground. What you got to do with him?”
“He was a friend of my father’s,” I said.
“Oh. I see.”
Gordo was respectful of the memory of my dad. Whenever the subject of Tolstoy came up he held back any opinion.
“How about you, old man?” I said to cover his embarrassment.
“This morning I heard Kat arguin’ with some guy,” he said. “The kids was all gone and they was talkin’ loud. I didn’t hear what she was sayin’ except when she told him to leave. I don’t know what the man said but he sounded pretty angry.”
I wondered but didn’t worry about the argument. Katrina could take care of herself. From there the conversation drifted over to the latest boxing matches. Gordo wanted to give his opinion on a potential Mayweather-Paquiao match-up but he started to fade before we got too deep into it.
I left the dying man dozing. Our conversations tired him out but he seemed to like them. They were the least I could do for the man who was more of a father to me than Tolstoy had ever been.
ENTERING THE HALLWAY, I saw Elsa going toward the front door. She had taken off her nurse’s uniform and wore a pink dress that showed off her form. She was maybe ten pounds over her ideal weight but that just made her look better.
I walked down to meet her at the door.
“I wanted to thank you for how you’ve taken care of Gordo,” I said.
“He’s a good man,” she said, “with kind eyes that take in everything. I always make him my last visit in case he needs me.”
“Would you like to stay and eat with us?” I asked, expecting her usual refusal.
“Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”
I WENT TO the kitchen to tell Katrina about our dinner guest.
“She’s a sweet woman,” my wife said. “We’re lucky to have her.”
“Gordo said he heard some arguing this morning.”
“Really?” Katrina said and then, “Oh. He must mean about Carlos.”
“The super?”
“He came up and said something about the boys throwing cigarettes from the windows. I told him that no one in this house smoked.”
“Huh,” I grunted, wondering what she was hiding.
10
AT THE BACK of the kitchen there’s a smallish walk-in pantry lined with shelves on every wall—from floor to ceiling. It’s there that Katrina keeps her spices, condiments, and the more arcane of her cooking devices. I put a three-legged mahogany stool back there so I could get some peace in my own house now that Gordo was dying in the den.
Hunkered down on that little boxer’s seat, I tried to regain my balance.
Watching Gordo fade was a hard thing for me. He was just ten days off the last dose of the medicinal poison the doctors used on him.
Gordo was a fighter, and I was, too. Watching him wilt under the cancer was like seeing your champion being worn down to a bloody pulp one fight after his heyday.
If stomach cancer was a man I’d’ve slit his throat, tossed him in the Hudson, and then gone out for a rare steak and red, red wine.
A tapping came at the cupboard door.
“Yes?”
“It’s me, Daddy,” Katrina’s blood-daughter said.
“Come on in, baby.”
The door opened, letting in the light and clatter from Katrina’s kitchen.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked, flipping the light switch.
Michelle’s skin was dark olive and her eyes were a definite almond shape. It wasn’t the gentle sloping of Chrystal and her pretender but the real Asian variety. Michelle was another man’s daughter, a diamond dealer from Jakarta whom Katrina once thought she might marry—after ditching me. But instead he was killed in an earthquake and Shelly was presented as mine.
The slender child plopped down on my lap, put her arms around my nearly bald head, and kissed me just above the left ear.
“How are you, Daddy?”
“Just about normal,” I said. “Head below the waterline, but at least that’s better than six feet underground.”
She squeezed my head tighter.
“You sad about Uncle Gordo?”
“I ever tell you that he used to let me sleep on a cot at the back of the gym when I’d be on the run from my foster homes?”
“Yeah, but you could tell me again.”
“Dinner,” Katrina called.
I stood up, cradling Shelly in my arms. She loved to be held like a child and I loved her even though we had nothing in common, from the blood in our veins to our outlooks on life.
I TOOK MY PLACE at the hickory dining room table. It was large enough to seat ten but lately only four of us sat down for a meal—Shelly and Twill, Katrina and me. Dimitri had stopped eating with the family since his girlfriend, Tatyana Baranovich, had gone off to Russia with her new beau, Vassily Roman. While Katrina and Shelly brought out the covered platters Gordo showed up at the door, leaning on a bamboo walker and assisted by Elsa. Her eyes were on him like a proud mother watching her youngest taking his first steps. Gordo’s head was glistening from the exertion but he pushed right through the strain and made it to a chair at the far end of the table.
“Hail, Lazarus!” I proclaimed.
He raised a hand to bless me and I smiled.
Elsa sat on Gordo’s right and Shelly took the left-hand side.
“Twill!” Katrina called. “Dimitri!”
“Dimitri?” I said to my wife.
“He’s part of this family, too.”
“But . . .”
Before I could say more the brothers rumbled in. Squat Dimitri was dark, my color brown, while Twill was lean and charcoal with not even a hint of his mother’s Nordic blood in his skin.
Broad, earthbound Dimitri sat across the table from me, while Twill sat at my side.
“What’s up, Pops?” Twill asked. He was no blood relation, like his sister, but he had been my favorite since the first day I laid eyes on him.
“Up?” I said. “Man, I’m flat on my back and the ref started the count at nine.”
Gordo heard the joke and grinned, nodding like one of those bobble-headed dolls people used to put in the back windows of their cars.
Katrina and Shelly took the lids off the platters, revealing a feast of fried pork chops, spinach and collards chopped and sautéed in butter, potatoes cooked with bacon, onions, and vinegar, and homemade applesauce. Katrina was a magician in the kitchen.
“Hey, boy,” I said to my one true son.
“Dad,” he said.
Since I had tried to help his girlfriend, Dimitri felt conflicted about me. Where once he expressed only disdain he now conversed with tepid deference. This was a definite improvement in our relationship, but we had a long way to go.
“How’s school?” I asked him.
“I haven’t been goin’ lately.”
“What you been doin’, then?”
“Nuthin’.”
He looked down at the plate his mother had put before him. That would be all he’d say that night. His pain tore at me, but what advice could I give? My heart had been broken the same way and I was just as lost.
> I turned my attention to Twilliam. He was saying something to his sister and she was holding Gordo’s thumb.
“What about you?” I asked Twill.
“Same,” he almost sang.
“What kinda trouble you gettin’ into?”
“Not me, Pops. Now I’m outta school I put in thirty hours a week at the D’Agostino’s. Got to make some money so I can move out when you let up on me.”
“You’re only seventeen.”
“Alexander was leadin’ a legion at that age.”
“What you know about Greek history?”
“Whatever Mardi Bitterman says. She reads her dry books and tells me the story.”
“Is she your girlfriend now?” Katrina asked.
“She’s my friend, but I can’t say from firsthand if she’s a girl or not.”
“Twill,” Katrina protested. “That’s rude.”
The conversation went on like that, Dimitri brooding while Twill danced around any question asked of him. Gordo was served a special soup that Katrina made, and he fought bravely against the gravity of fate as Shelly regaled him about a trip she planned to take to Senegal. Elsa anticipated Gordo’s every need. Her care for him somehow soothed me.
We ate and after a while Katrina broke out a couple of bottles of decent Spanish red. The liquor seemed to revitalize Gordo. He started telling us stories about the old days and the boxers he saw hitchhiking from one bout in Cincinnati to another the next day in Cleveland.
“Back in those days,” he declared, “a man was fightin’ from sunup to sunup. The only way he knew he was in a ring was he got a break when the bell sounded.”
THAT NIGHT KATRINA gave me a sloppy kiss before drifting into sleep. It didn’t mean anything. She was having an affair with Dimitri’s school chum Bertrand Arnold. Maybe she thought I didn’t know. I didn’t begrudge her the passion. She certainly wasn’t getting it from me, and since she was sated physically she wasn’t so anxious. She could even fall asleep without the TV crooning in the background.
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