I was wide awake with all my responsibilities and failures floating aimlessly through my mind. I turned on the TV and caught the beginning of The Thin Man with Powell and Loy. The dry wit between the two made me restless. Before the final scene I climbed out of bed and went back to the dining room.
Elsa had gone home at ten and the large apartment was quiet. It was two in the morning but I entered the number on my cell phone anyway.
She answered on the first ring.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Aura.”
There was a moment of appreciative silence before she said, “Leonid, what’s wrong?”
“I miss you.”
“And I you.”
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“Reading,” she said. “Thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
She didn’t answer the question.
“Can I meet you tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe for breakfast?”
“Of course.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I’ll see you then,” she answered. “I really should be getting to sleep.”
I went back to bed, but sleep had settled in another room somewhere, down the hall with the children and the dying.
11
THERE’S A SMALL diner on Forty-sixth just east of Fifth called Winston’s. It’s got a red linoleum counter and yellow tables along the plate-glass front. I didn’t need to tell Aura to meet me there—it was our place. When I arrived just shy of seven I could see through the window that she was already at our table, just being served her coffee.
I stopped at the entrance and allowed myself to be amazed yet again at how my heart began to pound when I saw her. From this sphere of wonder I proceeded to the booth.
We didn’t kiss hello.
I meant to say good morning but uttered “I love you” instead.
She reached out to touch my hand and I felt a thrill of excitement. “Me too.”
I sat, and the waitress, a strawberry blonde with pale skin and a ballerina’s body, took my order.
In contrast to the server, Aura was the color of glittering dark gold. Her hair was blond but wavy. She came by this coloring naturally, seeing as her mother was Danish and her father from Togo. Her pale eyes were no color that I could name.
Less than a year before I had almost died and she sat by me whenever my family wasn’t there. Twill kept tabs on the visits and called her when the coast was clear. Now and then the fever would abate and I’d slit my eyes to see her waiting for my recovery.
I blinked and found myself back in the diner with the woman who willed me back to life.
“You need to pay your rent,” she said.
“I got an advance yesterday.”
The moments passed.
Our breakfasts arrived. I had grits, pork patty sausage laced with sage, and four scrambled eggs. She had grapefruit, Special K, and skim milk.
“What did you want, Leonid?” she asked after the silence stretched halfway through the meal.
“I want you back.”
“How’s Gordo?”
“Dying. Doin’ pretty well at it, too.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Why? I’ll leave Katrina.”
“I know. And maybe if you’d done it earlier . . . No. It’s not your fault. It’s just that I, I’m afraid of losing you.”
“You won’t lose anything. I will be there.”
“When I saw you in that bed I knew that someday you’d die like that,” she said, “bloody and beaten.”
What could I say? I knew it, too.
“Yes, but we all die.”
“Not like that.”
“No,” I agreed. “Not like that.”
“I’ll leave the Tesla Building if you want,” she offered.
“They’ll just hire somebody else to throw me out.”
“How is everything?” the dancer-waitress asked. She was standing there, smiling hopefully.
“Fine,” Katrina said.
“I haven’t seen you guys lately,” the waitress added. “You been away?”
“Different schedules,” Aura said.
When the girl was gone I put down a twenty and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Aura asked.
“I have to leave. You’ll have the rent by three.”
12
THE ART DECO wonder of New York, the Tesla Building, was eleven blocks from Winston’s, its elegant foyer replete with Italian marble and frescoes of monumental naked and toga-clad men and women. I had to smile as I walked past the security desk to the elevators.
It was no surprise to find Mardi sitting at her desk, studying her computer screen. She was the overachieving gal Friday of the movies from back before even I was born. Mardi was so concentrated that she didn’t stand up when I came in.
“You were right,” she said, not even looking up. “It’s her sister, Shawna Chambers-Campbell, divorced.”
There was a victory smile on her face when she shifted her gaze to me—but that faded.
“Ms. Ullman?” she said.
Mardi had been working for me less than a year and already she had become my closest confidante. The thirty-six years that separated us were nothing. I was a New York sewer rat and she a basket-case savant, raped for years by a man calling himself her father and then set adrift in a world that neither cared about nor comprehended her pain. Our unlikely alliance was, in its own way, perfect.
“I’m supposed to be the detective here,” I said.
“But you just look so sad.” Her eyes invaded mine with their compassion; the empathy of a girl made wise by psychic defenses a Soviet spy would have marveled at.
I pulled up her aqua visitor’s chair and said, “Teach.”
She gave me a wan smile—the doorway to acres of feeling I could only guess at.
“Her brother’s name is Theodore but everybody calls him Tally,” Mardi said. “He’s under arrest downtown. Her mother—”
“For what?” I asked. Shorthand was all we needed to communicate.
“Possession with the intent to distribute,” she said after hitting a few buttons on the keyboard. “Seven joints and an as yet undefined red capsule. Her mother is named Azure. She has a history of mental illness and is now a resident of the Schmidt Home in Battery Park City . . .”
You could see New Jersey out of Mardi’s window. From the seventy-second floor it looked like a scale model of Purgatory.
“What’s her problem?” I asked.
“Like that red capsule,” Mardi said, “undefined. The father’s name is Nathan. He lives in a retirement community, also downtown. He was a welder in the Merchant Marines for forty-six years. There’s no record of a divorce or separation.”
Mardi stopped reading the screen and looked up, allowing me to see in the deep well of her eyes that my sorrow was falling away.
“Shawna is a mystery,” she said.
“Go on.”
“At the age of sixteen she married Private First Class Richard Campbell. Three months later they divorced, citing irreconcilable differences. In the last seven years I could find records about three children she had but there might have been more.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Her sister wrote her a recommendation to an infant daycare center six months ago. None of the three children would have been that young, and it wasn’t an employment rec.”
“Got it.”
“Shawna’s last known address was a women’s shelter on Eighteenth Street. The last place she worked was Beatrice Hair Design on Flatbush in Brooklyn. But that was four years ago.
“Both sisters dropped out of high school. Tally too.”
I leaned forward, lacing my fingers and resting my elbows on Mardi’s desk.
Listening to the thumbnail sketches, I was aware of Aura slipping out of my consciousness like a small boat left untethered at the shore.
A man is defined by the work he does, my father told me over and ove
r again. If he works for the corporation, then he is the corporation. If he works for the people, then he is the people.
Mardi was saying something about a small school in Rhode Island that Chrystal had attended. She’d gotten her GED and made it to college.
And don’t you go thinking that you’re unique, my father went on to say, time after time. That you have defined yourself. It’s the city that has made you. The streets and streetcars, the police and the bankers. You aren’t anything more than an ant to them, and they are the kings and queens, tunnels and mounds that keep you from what you could be. They have made you into a hive dweller.
“Mr. McGill?” Mardi was asking.
“Yeah, babe?”
She always smiled when I said those two words.
“You drifted off.”
“What about Twill?” I asked.
“Huh? What about him?”
“If I asked you to give me a brief interpretation of him, what would you tell me?”
The wan girl frowned and pulled her head back a quarter inch.
“I’m not asking you for secrets,” I said. “I don’t want to get into his business, at least not through you. I want to know how you would describe him if somebody were to ask.”
“Why?” She put the word up like a storm trooper’s see-through shield.
“You know what the most important thing is that a PI has to know?” I asked.
“What?”
“That everybody knows things he doesn’t. Everybody sees things that he’s missed. Everybody. If he only relies on his own mind and memory and point of view he will never get a leg up.”
“But what if they lie to you?” Mardi asked. “Like Shawna did?”
“The only complete lie is that which goes unsaid and unseen,” I said. “Shawna spoke a lie, but what she showed me—her face and style—that was a truth I had to decipher. That’s why not everybody can do what I do.”
Mardi eyed me with a feeling akin to suspicion. I was telling her the truth, but there was something that she was missing. She knew this but nothing more.
Under that scrutinizing gaze I remembered that this girl was actually a woman who had decided to murder the man she thought was her father in order to save her sister from his predation.
“It’s like Achilles,” she said suddenly, the words leaping from her mouth.
“What is?”
“Twill,” she said. “He’s like an old-time hero. Beowulf and Achilles and Gilgamesh were just men, but they were so perfect that no one believed it. And Twill is even better.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Because he doesn’t think that he’s better than anyone.”
“So you’re saying that my son is perfect.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t have that connection that everyone else does,” the astute child whispered. “He, he sees things like they really are. And he isn’t afraid to do what he thinks is right or, no . . . not right but best.”
Yes, I thought, Twill was my father’s ideal revolutionary, a willing passenger on that dinghy I left without mooring.
I stood up, headed for my inner sanctum. It wasn’t until some time later that I realized I hadn’t thanked Mardi for her insights and labors.
13
BY EARLY AFTERNOON I was standing in front of the municipal courthouse downtown, waiting. I had on one of my four darkblue all-purpose suits and size twelve triple-E dullish, black leather shoes. My white shirt had grayed a bit after hundreds of washings at Lin Pao’s French Cleaners, and one of my socks was black while the other was dark brown. I’d become the downtrodden workingman that my father always wanted me to be—but with a twist.
I was also a predator that lived on the invisible ether of personal information. Not digital bullshit, I stalked people’s souls, took from them their most precious possessions, their secrets. And even though I performed this heinous job day in and day out, still I would have called myself rehabilitated—a simple wretch who had once been a monster.
What was I doing there, on the street, waiting? I wasn’t sure. In the past forty-eight hours I’d collected twenty-two thousand dollars in advances to protect a woman I had not met from a man who might be in love with her. A working-class hero from my father’s cracked pantheon would never work on such a project. Realizing this, I smiled, feeling that I’d dodged the revolutionary’s bullet—at last.
At that very moment I looked up and saw a young milk-chocolate-brown man clad in a fancy suit of synthetic olivegreen snakeskin coming down the broad concrete staircase. He was skipping happily, moving fast. He, like I did, felt that he was getting out of a bad situation. I wondered, as I moved to block his egress, if I was as misguided as he.
“Tally Chambers?” I said in a mild voice.
“Say what?” His grin disappeared like a small white rabbit down a deep dark hole.
“My name’s Leonid McGill,” I said quickly. “Your sister Shawna hired me. She gave me the money to pay your bail.”
“Shawna?” he said, stopping in spite of all instinct.
“Your other sister, Chrystal, is missing and Shawna felt that you might be able to help finding her.”
Tally Chambers’ hair was close-cropped and his head was sleek, styled for speed. He eyed me, wanting to run, but worried about his sisters and, on top of that, wondering how money was traveling through their hands into mine.
“I don’t understand,” he said truthfully.
“Shawna came to my office and said that Chrystal had disappeared,” I said in my most effective, matter-of-fact tone. “She, Shawna, said that she was worried that Chrystal’s husband had either killed her or that she was so scared of him that she ran to ground.”
“How much Shawna pay you?”
“She gave me twelve thousand. I used eleven hundred to pay ten percent of your bail.”
“Shit.” Tally swayed away from me, ready to walk on.
I touched his arm with a blunt finger and said, “Chrystal gave Shawna a ruby and emerald necklace that she sold to a woman named Nunn from Indiana.”
That stopped him.
“No.”
“Hey, man. I’m all up in your family business. I’m not trying to hurt you. Does anybody hate you enough to go into debt eleven thousand dollars over your bond?”
For a few moments he took the question seriously. Was there someone who’d pay good money to have him hurt or killed? Was there?
“You know there isn’t, Tally,” I said to the unspoken question.
I was a mind reader, and he a true believer. We made a connection and now all I needed were his secrets.
“So what is it exactly you need with me?” Tally asked, giving in, for the moment, to my superior, moneyed position.
“Shawna wanted me to get you out of jail,” I began.
“How she even know I was there? I haven’t seen her in days.”
“How many days?”
“Four . . . maybe five.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
Theodore Chambers clearly remembered the conversation.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Just shootin’ the shit is all.”
The kid was going to be a puzzle. That was fine by me.
“When she couldn’t find Chrystal, Shawna went looking for you,” I said. “When you were nowhere to be found, she came to me. I did a citywide systems search and found that you’d been arrested. I told her and she said to get you sprung.”
“Why didn’t she come herself?”
“With both brother and sister missing she went into hiding,” I said. “I don’t even know where she is. She calls me to get her updates.”
While Tally wondered at my story I got a closer look at him. The whites of his eyes were darkening and encroached upon by blood vessels. There was an odor coming off him that was mildly organic and not at all healthy.
Seemingly to underscore my perceptions he emitted a midlung cough.
&nb
sp; “So what do you want, man?” he asked when the hacking subsided.
“Shawna wants to help you,” I said. “She told me to get you out of jail and then question you about your sister. If you cooperate, I’m supposed to supply a lawyer to get you outta this jam and give you twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Show me the money,” he said, suddenly all ears and bloodshot eyes.
I took three fresh new hundred-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them over.
“This only three hundred,” he said.
“Down payment on the talk we have.”
Theodore “Tally” Chambers was twenty-nine years old. I knew that from Mardi’s research. His state of health made him look older, while his state of mind was reminiscent of a much younger man. I had him on my hook, but this didn’t offer me any comfort. Usually, when things went too easily something was bound to go wrong.
“I got to get to my house, man,” he told me and then he coughed some more.
“In Vinegar Hill?” Mardi’s research had been thorough.
“Yeah,” he said behind big reddish-brown eyes.
I hailed a cab and we piled in. Tally gave the driver his address after we both closed our doors.
“I don’t go to Brooklyn,” the foreign white man told us.
I smiled, thinking that this trouble was just the speed bump I needed.
“We’re not getting out of this car until you stop in front of the address my friend gave you.”
“I don’t know how to get there,” the middle-aged driver said.
“You take the Brooklyn Bridge—” Tally started saying.
“I’m not going!”
“Oh yes you are, my friend,” I said calmly. “Because if you don’t we’re gonna sit back here all day long.”
The man turned around in his seat, showing us a white wood baton that was about two feet long. Tally reached for the door but I laid a hand on his forearm and smiled for our mustachioed driver.
“Listen to me, brother,” I said in a modulated but still threatening voice. “I have been in the ring my whole fuckin’ life. Hit me with that stick and I will beat you until your own brother will not know your face.”
I meant what I said, the driver could tell. He turned around and shifted the car into drive.
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