He looked at me and I hunched my shoulders. He was the last fighter a slugger like me wanted to meet in the ring. Didn’t have much of a punch but he could hit you all night long, and all you’d connect with was air.
I TOOK A cab down to Winston’s Diner to get my breakfast—and, hopefully, a glimpse of Aura. I knew she dropped in there sometimes to get her coffee before work—usually about seven.
But that hour came and went and all I had was the New York Times to keep me company. A man in Queens was caught building a fertilizer bomb in his basement. He planned to blow up his entire block; would have succeeded, too, if the guy who logged gas usage hadn’t noticed some of the telltale signs of bombmaking in the trash outside the garage.
The greatest natural disaster in the history of the world has been the human brain. Get rid of us and Eden will return unaided.
“Here you go,” said the strawberry blond waitress from the day before.
I had ordered fried pork chops, a short stack of oat pancakes, two eggs over easy, and a patty of grated and fried potato.
I ate my poisonous meal with hot sauce, maple syrup, and black pepper—all the while watching her dancer’s body move from counter to table, table to kitchen.
There was an emptiness in my chest that Nate Chambers had created by yanking the hatred out of there. No food or lust could fill that empty space.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked me.
“No,” I said, clipping the word down to its shortest syllabic span.
I wanted to ask her to come have dinner with me that night. I needed something, but it wasn’t her.
The check was $21.46. I left a twenty and a ten under it, hoping that maybe the next time I came she would ask me about my needs again.
THE RED-BRICK BUILDING took up the whole center part of the south block of D, north of First. I spied the rooftop stand of slender white tree trunks from the corner.
Approaching the eight-story building from across the street, I noticed a few things immediately. First, it was more like a fortress than the surrounding, gentrifying apartments and condos. The windows on the first and second floors were all blocked in different ways. There were grids and barbed wire, horizontal, vertical, and even slanted bars used.
Some of the upper windows were open. On the seventh floor a large woman was sitting on the sill, looking down at me looking up at her.
Crossing the street, I noted that the front door, actually a barricade, was fretted and strapped with forbidding green metal. There was no button or even a knocker to request entrée. The spraypaint red graffiti on the door read FREEDOM’S RESERVATION.
Why couldn’t I catch a normal case, a woman who runs away from her bourgeois husband with the janitor, living in a Jersey motel and dreaming about coming home?
I knocked on the door. It sounded like a three-year-old pounding on a pillow.
No one answered, so I waited.
PATIENCE IS ONE of my best qualities. I have sat in my classic car for days on the slim hope of catching a quick look at a cheating wife or a bail jumper’s yellow shirt. But patience is not my only virtue; I can also take a punch, or a hint, go for years without love or relief, and I can face Death in the eye and hardly flinch. Not only can I stand up under pain, but I can ignore the pain others feel. I always pay my debts but rarely act out of a desire for personal revenge.
Given all that talent, I could stand out in front of that red-brick arboretum for hours with no anxiety or rancor to get in the way.
A lonely seagull cried in my pocket.
“Hello, Aura,” I said after three heartbreaking exclamations. “I was at Winston’s this morning.”
“I’ve been thinking about you.”
I could face Death, but Aura made my chest quiver.
“Oh?” I said, fooling no one.
“I love you, Leonid.”
Those few words created a fissure deep down in the soul my father declared did not exist.
I was searching for an answer when a youngish white man clad in varying shades of green walked up to the fortified door. I say young, but he might have been all of forty with the youth preserved in his eyes and skin. There was something mirthful about him—a demeanor fit for one of Robin Hood’s merry men of legend.
“I got to go, Aura,” I said.
I disconnected the call before she could respond. It wasn’t a conscious act. Was this the warrior’s reflex my father was talking about?
Even the newcomer’s straw hat was green. His pants were olive and his T-shirt teal. His shoes and socks were crayon green.
His eyes were brown and they gauged me. If there was suspicion there I missed it, hidden behind a smile that was both practiced and natural.
He reminded me of the Artful Dodger. In my mind, that’s what I dubbed him.
He nodded out of simple civility, removed a tiny green phone from his shirt pocket, and made the call.
We watched each other and waited five seconds.
“Fledermaus at the door,” he said, “with someone who wants in, it seems.”
“I knocked but no one answered,” I said to the Dodger as he pocketed the cell phone.
“Fledermaus,” he replied.
“That a name or a code word?”
“They never let anybody in.”
“What are you waiting for, then?”
“I’m somebody.”
“Doesn’t a somebody have visitors now and then?”
“They have to be on guard for police spies,” he told me. “The previous owner of the building died with no heirs. The current residents are pioneers who have claimed the property, but the cops work for the bosses and want to take their squat away.”
There was my father again, this time lecturing me and my brother Nikita about the Paris Commune and what Engels did to free the workers.
“You say ‘they,’ ”I said. “Aren’t you one of them?”
“I’m a friend of a lot of people down around here,” he said. “They ask me to do favors now and again.”
“I have to speak to the woman who hired me,” I said. “A Shawna Chambers. Her mother told me to look for her here.”
“If you work for her why did her mother have to tell you where she lived?”
“Ask her, and send somebody down with an answer.” I was turning serious, a natural reaction against that perpetual smile.
My phone chirped.
“Shawna?” the Dodger asked.
“That’s all—and everything,” I told him.
The door pulled inward. There were at least seven men standing in the entranceway.
Fledermaus nodded to me and winked before making it through the mob and into the building. I considered trying to bull my way in but nixed the notion.
“Tell her that it’s Leonid McGill,” I said before the heavy door slammed in my face.
On the glass face of my cell phone the words These waters run deep glared in black and gray. It was a message from Aura.
I stood there, wishing I still had a father to hate.
21
ALONE AGAIN, I wondered if the merry man called Fledermaus would deliver my message. Even if he did, Shawna might not appreciate me finding out who she wasn’t. There was almost definitely a variety of other exits she could use to avoid me. But, I reasoned, a woman with six children couldn’t run as easily as a woman alone—again, like me.
The phone now growled in my pocket.
“Hello?”
“Mr. McGill?”
“Ms. Koen,” I said. “Anything you need?”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
“Kid?” Gordo said in my ear.
“What’s up, old man?”
“I got a call from Firpo. He said that Iran had some rough visitors up at the gym today. Lucky for Eye, he was out. They told Firpo to keep quiet about them bein’ there, but he called me first thing.”
Firpo was a jazz musician, a tuba player turned janitor. The tragedy of the human brain
is that it is aware of what it has lost and where it’s headed—both at the same time.
The barricade door swung inward and a solitary man blossomed forth.
“I got to go, Gord,” I said. “I’ll look into it right after I finish what I’m doin’ now.”
“Cool.”
The forty-something man was white and extra-large with hard muscles that proudly exhibited their definition. Six foot even, he was completely bald, had a variety of facial scars, and the blue tattoo of curling barbed wire trailing off from the left corner of his mouth down past the collar of his incongruous pink T-shirt. The look on the big man’s face was designed to instill fear.
I smiled for him.
“Who are you?” he asked in a guttural Muscovite accent.
“Leonid,” I said, pronouncing the word as some Russians might.
It was his turn to smile. His teeth had been stained by coffee, cigarettes, and the bitter taste of state domination.
“Ivan,” he said. “Ivan Beria.”
“Any relation?”
“Ve are all brothers, are ve not, comrade?” he said, exaggerating his accent.
“I’m here to see Shawna Chambers.”
“She is not here.”
“But she lives here, right?” I asked. “Maybe I could wait till she gets back.”
“Go away.”
“Happy to, Comrade Beria, but I’ll be back with the cops in under an hour unless I see Shawna in the next five minutes.”
“I don’t care about police.”
“You should. Down in Philadelphia they blew up a house of squatters, mostly kids. You think you had it bad in the Old Country, but we have a saying here in America—wherever you go, there you are.”
My tone, more than the information, worried the communal ex-Communist.
“Shawna is gone.”
I didn’t like the finality of his tone.
“What about her kids?” I asked.
“They are children.”
“Either I talk to Shawna or her kids right now or the police with their helicopters and bombs will be at your doorstep for lunch.”
From the threat in his eyes I could believe that this man was a descendant of the chief of Stalin’s secret police. Luckily for me, the NKVD was no longer in power and we were on American soil.
“Come with me,” the big man said.
He turned and walked past the vestibule and into the ground-floor hallway of the fortress.
I’m short but wide. My shoulders would easily fit on a man of Beria’s height. His shoulders were sculpted for a giant. I followed him to a small elevator where we squeezed in and he tapped the button for the top floor.
It took a good deal of courage to keep my hands from fidgeting on the ride. I have severe claustrophobia issues, and small elevators in the company of men named after a mass murderer, serial killer, and rapist went to the top of my list of places to avoid. Heat radiated from Beria’s pink chest as did an odor that reminded me of the barn my father, brother, and I slept in when we used to go to a private retreat in Appalachia for firearms practice with everything from .22-caliber long-barreled pistols to grenade launchers.
When the whiny door slid open I had to be mindful not to sigh.
The Russian led me down a long hall of apartments that ended at a door he pushed open.
This domicile was a surprisingly spacious room with high ceilings and many windows. A middle-aged woman from India was sitting at one of the windows, looking out. There were, I decided, many sentries at Freedom’s Reservation. Around her was a group of six variously colored children—the oldest of whom was a girl of seven, or maybe eight. The youngest child, a boy, was whimpering on the oldest’s lap.
All the kids were looking up at me and Beria with both fear and awe in their faces. All except the elder girl—a golden-skinned, copper-haired beauty—whose only defense against men like us was defiance.
“Do you recognize this man?” Beria asked the kids.
I thought the question was odd at first, but then, I thought, why wouldn’t they know one of their mother’s acquaintances?
At first the children didn’t respond.
“Fatima,” the Indian woman said.
“No,” said the golden-skinned leader of the small tribe.
“Have you seen her sister—Chrystal?” I asked.
“Aunt Chris went on a cruise,” Fatima replied, looking up at me.
“Your mom asked me to do Aunt Chris a favor,” I said, “but I wasn’t able to find her. So I came here to ask your mom what I should do next.”
I was just talking. The agreement between myself and the child had already been struck. That look she gave me was one I’d seen many times in my client’s chair.
Please help me, Mr. McGill.
The Indian babysitter and the Russian son of perdition stared down on the children, restraining them with their wills.
“Do you know where your mother is right now?” I asked Fatima.
The woman shook her head almost imperceptibly. Fatima cast a glance at her and then bowed, shaking her head at the floor.
“Can I speak to you outside for a moment?” I said to Beria.
He grunted and turned.
He was out the door first and I came just after. I allowed him to pull the unlocked portal shut before hitting him solidly in the gut. That right hook was executed just the way Rocky Marciano was teaching it in the Ph.D. program for pugilism up in heaven—or wherever. But I didn’t rest on my laurels. I hit him three more times in the midsection, threw two uppercuts to his face, and then landed a straight right on the tip of his chin.
He was unconscious before the last blow, falling to the floor with a heaviness that was indicative of insensibility. I wasn’t proud of myself. Hitting a man who is unaware of your intentions is the act of a coward, but as the referee of life says, Protect yourself at all times.
I turned my head to look down the hall. Fledermaus was standing there, three large steps out of reach. I thought about running toward him. A mind reader, he put up his hands in mock surrender. I looked back at Beria. He was going to be out for a while longer. So I opened the door to the apartment and walked in.
“Ivan wants to see you outside,” I said to the Indian nursemaid.
She approached me suspiciously. I held the door for her and slammed it as soon as she cleared the threshold.
I could hear her muffled cry from the hallway but that was of no concern to me. It was a heavy door and there was a bolt, so I threw it. There was also a lock, which I turned.
The children had organized themselves behind Fatima. She was standing behind her stool, the dark-skinned two-year-old boy in her arms.
“Where’s your mother, honey?” I asked the girl.
“Are you going to save us?” she asked.
“I’m gonna try my best.”
“She’s gone away to sleep.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last night. I was asleep and then I woke up and saw the man . . . he was climbing out the window.”
“Did he take her with him?”
She shook her head, holding back the tears with that motion.
“Then where is she?”
“Beria and them took her to the compost heap behind the People’s Garden over at St. Matthew’s. They put blindfolds on us to take us there but Boaz recognized it because the one time he ran away that’s where he hid.”
“But she was . . . asleep before then?”
Her nod had all the slow solemnity of a funeral march.
Somebody knocked on the door—with a battering ram.
22
“I HAVE TO ASK you a question, Fatima,” I said to the head child.
She looked at me, hardly shuddering when the heavy object hit the door a second time.
“Do you want me to take you and your brothers and sisters out of here?”
She cocked her head and squinted as if trying to decipher a new slang.
“I’ll take you out of here i
f you want to go, if you want to come with me.”
She nodded and the children huddled closer around her.
THE DOOR TO their unit was the fireproof kind; plated with thin but durable metal and, most probably, reinforced on the inside. I propped a chair up against the doorknob. The heavy object shook the barricade hard enough for me to see the hinges move.
With Fatima’s help I herded the kids to a fire escape that I’d located the moment I walked in. One little girl grabbed her favorite doll, and her brother, who was no more than ten months her senior, picked up a ray gun. I didn’t try to stop them. Getting in the way of a child’s imagination will almost always take more time than it’s worth.
Fatima’s toddler brother was crying. She handed him into my arms while urging her siblings through the window. The door shook again, causing the unfamiliar sensation of fear to blossom in my lungs.
The little boy stopped crying as soon as he could hide his face against my chest. We were the last two out on the fire escape. The others were scampering down, led by their courageous sister. She released the ladders and went from floor to floor, making sure that we were all safe. The second-floor landing was bolted and her hands weren’t strong enough to throw the latch. I was about to bend down when she kicked the iron rod and the trapdoor fell through, allowing my newfound brood to clamber down to the sidewalk.
“Hey, you!” a voice shouted from above.
I didn’t look up. Why would I? I knew that they’d be after us. Sometimes you just have to make the best of what you find.
I’m not superstitious as a rule, but when I saw the yellow cab trawling D for a fare I hoped that I hadn’t used up my taxi-karma on the guy I forced to drive to Brooklyn.
“Cab!” I shouted in a voice I hadn’t used in a long time.
He pulled to a stop.
“Get ’em all in,” I said to Fatima.
A chorus of complaint roared out from the window and fire escape above.
“Goodbye!” I yelled up at our pursuers as Fatima hurried the kids along. “We’ll see you when we get back from the zoo!”
I jumped in, gave the driver an address I knew well, and prayed for green lights.
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