From three feet away he bounded into my arms. I swung the nut-brown boy around in a circle and then held him high in the air.
“You got me, Thackery,” I said. “You got me.”
“I got him, Daddy,” the boy, now almost upside down, shouted at the man.
Thackery’s father looked worried as any man might when a brute like me manhandles his offspring.
“Leonid,” a woman said from the doorway leading to the ground floor of the twelve-million-dollar home.
“Mama, I got Uncle L,” Thackery said, laughing madly.
The woman was darker even than her son. She had a plain face but there was something about her that spoke of prayers and angels—an inner beauty that could not be contained.
“Tam,” I said and she came forward to kiss me while her squirming son thumped down to the floor.
“You’re here right on time, LT,” the mild-mannered man said. “We just put dinner on the table.”
His wife smiled, kissed me again, and then hugged me.
“Come on in,” she said.
I smiled and she put her arm around me.
I’m proud to say that I didn’t tremble at all.
A MAN WOULD have to be crazy to sit down to dinner with a contract serial killer, even if that murderer was now retired and driving a limo to keep busy.
Tamara had prepared a meatloaf of veal and lamb crusted with chunks of apples and peaches. There was also a tropical fruit salad, wild rice cooked in chicken broth, and collard greens simmered all day along with ham hocks and then finished with pearl onions.
The dining table was from a sixteenth-century French master, carved with gargoyles and saints along the apron. Each leg was a horse standing on its back legs carrying riders who were holding on for dear life.
The food, the décor, even the color of the walls made little sense outside the family’s unique context, but this was the home of a man and woman, neither of whom should have been able to survive in this modern world.
“Daddy,” the boy said.
“Yes, Thackery?”
“Uncle L told me that he almost fell out of the tree across the street one time.”
“He did?” Hush said, smiling and looking at me.
“Uh-huh. Would you almost fall?”
“I wouldn’t be silly enough to climb a tree.”
“Why not? I like climbing trees.”
“Maybe that’s why your uncle told you that he almost fell,” Hush suggested. “Maybe he was telling you that anybody can hurt themselves falling out of a tree, even him.”
“Not me,” Thackery said bravely. “I wouldn’t ever hurt myself fallin’ out of a tree, huh, Mama?”
“Not as long as your father or I am there to catch you,” Tamara Cunningham, Thackery’s best teacher, said.
“And Uncle L,” the boy said. “Uncle L would catch me, too.” It wasn’t a question.
We had a very enjoyable meal. Every now and then Thackery would get loud or fidgety but all Tamara had to do was reach over to touch him and the nervous energy would drain away.
Hush told stories about a brave knight who wore black armor and a beautiful princess who loved him. The princess was kidnapped and the knight’s best friend saved her and then the knight saved the best friend and they all lived in a big pink palace where the full moon shone every night and the days were all sunny.
It was another side of the assassin, a side that only the people in that room ever saw.
It gave me the feeling of being singled out—like an elk in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle.
AFTER A SERVING of strawberry rhubarb pie and ginger ice cream Hush said, “It’s time for bed, young man.”
Thackery’s eyes showed his disappointment, but he got up to kiss his mother and then me.
“Good night,” he said and Hush led him off to bed.
When they were gone Tamara made to rise, saying, “I’ll get you some more coffee.”
I held out a hand, not quite reaching her.
“I don’t need it,” I said, and she sat back down.
We were silent a moment. She liked me. I was that knight’s friend. I had saved her life, and Thackery’s, too.
“Timothy loves you,” she said after a deliciously enjoyable period of quiet.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell him that.”
She laughed and said, “You’re the closest thing he has to family outside of us.”
“How are you doing, Tam?”
“I love my husband and son,” she said. “They are everything to me. But . . . but I’d like to have something for myself. Maybe I could take classes or something. It’s only that Timothy worries so much. Whenever I’m gone he thinks the worst. Once I went to visit my brother in Florida and when I came back he was a wreck.”
I remembered that long weekend. It was the only time that I had ever seen Hush drink alcohol.
“Tell him what you need, honey,” I said. “He’ll just have to figure out how to deal with it. And I’ll find you a babysitter, one that’ll meet his high standards.”
Tamara smiled. She and I were on the same page for reasons completely opaque to me.
Hush walked back into the room then.
“He wants you to come up and tell him a story,” he said to his wife.
“Okay,” she said. “Will you still be here when I finish, Leonid?”
“You bet.”
When she was gone Hush went back to his chair.
“She likes having you here,” he said.
“You wanna go take a walk with me?”
He knew what my words meant. I could see the funeral lights going up behind his eyes.
32
ON THE STREET we looked like any two working-class stiffs at the end of a too-long day. Hush wore a brown jacket over his tan shirt and I was in an iteration of the blue suit that was my uniform.
“How many of those suits do you own?” Hush asked as we walked along the pathway beside NYU’s monolithic library.
“Four now,” I said. “It used to be only three but I bought one to keep in the office in case Katrina puts the other three in the cleaners at the same time.”
That was a lot of meaningless chatter for us and so we strolled along in silence for a few blocks.
When we were waiting for the light at Houston Street it was my turn to speak.
“Two women,” I began. “Allondra North and Pinky Todd. The first was lost at sea, fell from a yacht off the Florida coast. The second was killed by a homeless man on Fifth Avenue. He hit her in the head with a stone and then escaped in broad daylight.”
“I remember that,” Hush said as the light turned green. “The guy just ran up behind her and whacked her where the skull meets the spine.”
My heart tittered. It wasn’t a real laugh but an inner revelation of anxiety. That was when I explained that both women were purported to be having problems with the same man—their husband.
“The woman who told me all this,” I said, “was just pretending to be his wife. She was murdered in front of her children not two days ago.”
We were walking in the touristy part of SoHo then. At one time this was a neighborhood of warehouses and small Italian shops, but now there were restaurants and hotels, and street vendors selling everything from big silver rings to paintings of naked women with fat bottoms.
Hush had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the sidewalk until we passed Spring, headed south for Canal. Then he looked up at me.
Lower SoHo was dark and silent at that time of evening. It was a place where a man like Hush could speak freely.
“You remember what you said to me on this street five months ago?” he asked.
I nodded, admitting to the shadows that I did.
It had been a lesson that my sometimes anarchist, sometimes Communist, but always revolutionary father had drilled into me and my younger brother when I was nine and Nikita was seven.
Some people live outside the sphere of Law and Man, dear old dad used to say
. They see something off the road or follow after a tune that no one else can hear. This solitary event leads them on a journey that could be taken by no other. They’re gone for years from their families and the world. They have fantastic adventures and battle for the freedom of all men.
Then one day the same flash or color or song that led them away from everything and everybody leads them back into a life where they don’t belong. All of a sudden there are rules and customs that, if you touch any part of them, will hold you, trapped.
Tolstoy McGill meant this as a warning for the true radical or militant. You were never to abandon your goal—not even for love.
It occurred to me one day that my father’s cockeyed warning contained so much truth that Hush might see it as a positive illumination of his transition from murderer to family man rather than a signpost cautioning him to turn back into the darker ways.
“How did you do it, LT?” Hush asked.
He stopped walking, so I did, too. Two women who were a dozen paces behind us crossed the street almost as if that was their plan all along.
I smiled at the innate intelligence of the young women in short dresses and bright colored heels. That smirk was also in recognition (for at least the hundredth time) that Hush, possibly the most dangerous individual man in the world, considered me his peer and maybe even an example of the way a man was supposed to live his life.
“You still going to that Buddhist monastery?” I asked.
Hush shook his head and then we were walking again.
“Now that Tamara and Thackery are here I like to spend the time with them. It was either the job or the retreat.”
Hush drove a limo for an upscale New York service. I never understood why. He was a millionaire many times over but he worked four days a week driving around people who would have run screaming if they had any idea who he was.
“But you still meditate, right?”
“Yeah. I do an hour or so in the morning, and sometimes, when things get cold in my head, I hit it at night, too.”
“When you were at the monastery they talked about enlightenment sometimes.”
We were crossing Canal. The street vendors were closed by then and it was pretty empty. Hush and I turned left, walking over toward Broadway.
“They did,” he said.
“I once heard a student of Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan master, say that meditation is a gesture toward enlightenment, though that was a state of knowledge that we would never truly attain,” I said. “I think he meant that we’ll never be wholly in the real world. It’s like we’re shadows, invisible to most people. What we have to do is concentrate real hard just to be seen at all. And it’s that concentration that may one day normalize us, make us members of the group.”
“But what about our sins?” the ex-contract killer asked.
Sins?
My surprise at his word choice must have shown in my face because Hush said, “I know that what I’ve done is wrong, Leonid. I feel it every time I look at my son.”
I smiled. We turned left onto Broadway. When I looked up at the sky all I could see was darkness. The words came to me from a place I could rarely connect with.
“It’s a luxury to feel guilt, Hush. Little Thackery might sneak into the cupboard and take a cookie when his mother told him to leave them alone. Afterwards he feels guilty. That’s because he’s innocent and needs to confess because he was a bad boy but still able to be forgiven. That’s not us. There is no forgiveness for us. For people like you and me, guilt is an indulgence. It’s meaningless, like a platter of caviar served up on the front lines of a war. Our confession, our clemency, comes from doing what’s right.”
I wanted to say more but the tap shut off.
Hush stopped walking again.
The look in his eyes was angry and hurt, like a suitor who has just been snubbed.
I’m used to giving people bad news. Your wife and your best friend . . . Things like that. Some people get mad when they hear things they don’t want to believe. That’s all part of the job—but I wasn’t so blasé about the impact of my words walking north on dark Broadway with Hush.
He winced and I wondered.
He looked both ways and I wondered some more.
“I can’t say for sure but I think you’ve run across the path of a man named Bisbe,” he said and I realized that I’d been holding my breath.
“Bisbe?”
“I was the last word when it came to killing,” Hush continued, nodding. “Meat and potatoes. Never fancy unless I had to be. But if I had to be, I could kill a man with a hailstorm. But Bisbe’s crazy. You hire him to knock off a man with a bullet behind the head and BB’d kill him with a tooth infection or a suicide. Superstitious people say he’s some kind of mystic. I think he’s just a madman.”
“Are you sure?”
“That he’s a madman?”
“That he killed these women.”
“Nothing’s for sure,” Hush said, “but for a homeless man to hit that woman with a perfect killing blow and then to disappear in broad daylight . . . safe is better than sorry.”
33
AS I EXPLAINED the particulars of the case, Hush and I walked back to his door. He took two steps up and stopped when he realized that I was not coming with him.
“You want some coffee?” he offered.
“No, thanks. I need to be getting along, figuring out what to do next.”
“If you want my advice I’d say take a vacation. I hear Tokyo’s nice.”
Warnings, even from Hush, always brought a smirk to my lips.
“My client left six kids to fend for themselves.”
“She lied to you.”
“So? Why should she be any different?”
Hush winced. This was an expression of his concern.
“Thanks for the talk, LT. I’m not a lost cause, you know.”
“Say good night to Tam and Thackery.”
“We have to do this again soon,” he said.
I nodded and turned away, ruminating over the little scenes of my life. I was like a bug that had learned to live close to, maybe even inside of, fire, so that the predators would be scared away—going to hell to keep the bad men off my tail.
Thinking of bugs, I pulled out my cell phone and punched a few digits.
He answered on the second ring, “Hey, LT.”
“Bug.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You get an answer?”
“An envelope with a MetroCard wrapped in a small sheet of lined notepaper. I took it down to the subway on my evening power-walk and ran it through the machine they got down there to show the amount. It had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents on it. The card looked a little beat up. I figure Twill has a read-write stripe machine and he gets people to pick up discarded cards in the subways. He might even be tapped into the MTA computer system. He takes the money you transfer and gives back more than four times as much.”
“You sound impressed,” I said.
“I am. I mean, it’s a pretty simple scheme, but it took your son to implement it. He’s only a kid but he’s way ahead of everybody else.”
“I’ll call you back,” I said, breaking off the connection.
“HELLO?”
“Twill?”
“Hey, Pop. What’s up?”
“Katrina there?”
“Mom went out with Dorrie to a movie.”
It was a phrase that might as well have been code for: She was out with a man who had a Y-shaped scar on his left buttock.
“You hear from D?” I asked.
Twill hesitated. That was good for my purposes.
“Come on, boy, I know that Tatyana called and Dimitri borrowed money from Bertrand.”
“That Bertrand’s a dog, Dad,” Twill replied.
“I was asking you about Dimitri.”
“He’s in France, man. Flew to Warsaw, met Taty at the airport, and then they both winged it down to Nice. He called me because he needed some m
ore cash.”
“He came to you because of all your savings from that box-boy job at the supermarket?”
Twill went quiet.
“Where’d you get the money, Twill?”
“I thought you wanted to find out about D.”
“Where’d you get the money to send to your brother?”
“It was only a couple a hundred. I used the money I got from Uncle Gordo that time.”
“You’re going to be eighteen soon, son.”
“Uh-huh. I know.”
“They bust you again and I won’t be able to get you out of it.”
“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ to get busted for, LT. My hands are clean.”
“Don’t jerk me around, son.”
“No sir, not me.”
“Okay. The next time Dimitri calls tell him I need to hear from him. All right?”
“You got it.”
After we said our goodbyes and got off I called Bug again.
“Hey, LT.”
“Can you hack into Twill’s account?”
“Can a hot knife cut through butter?”
“Empty it,” I said, “every centavo. Put it somewhere safe.”
“Okay.” There was reluctance in Bug’s voice.
“One day you’ll have kids,” I said in response to the hacker’s tone, “and when you do you’ll understand.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “I’ll get on this right now.”
34
I WAS ON NINTH STREET near Third Avenue. The night was electric but empty. There wasn’t much traffic of foot or tire, and though I was standing still, my mind was breaking all the speed limits.
Hush was rarely wrong about contract killers. He knew his profession and I had the good sense to avoid a fight that I was bound to lose.
Twill’s business had to be shut down but it wasn’t just that. I had to somehow stop my favorite son from drifting into a life of corruption. There was no way that he could comprehend, in his youthful confidence, how the weight of his actions would pile on him, on his soul.
I was making progress but it was like having taken three strides into a five-hundred-yard-wide minefield. I could see the other side. I could imagine walking on ground that wouldn’t blow up under my feet. But first I had to take that next step, and then the one after that.
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