“Excuse me, sir,” a man’s voice said in a tone of false deference.
A car door slammed shut.
There were footsteps of more than one man.
I smiled at the respite this minor threat offered.
“Yes, officer?” I said before turning around to meet the cops.
They were, of course, both taller than I. They were white, but that hardly mattered. Young men, they made the mistake of thinking that I was no threat because of my height and weight and obvious age.
“What’s going on?” the one on my left asked.
“I’m standing here on an empty street taking stock of my life such as it is.”
“You been drinking?” the other inquired. This one had a beauty mark on the left side of his face, half an inch from the nostril. Being a man, he probably called it a blemish.
“All my life,” I said. “But not in the last twelve hours.”
“Show us some ID,” Beauty asked.
“Why?”
“Come again?”
“I’m a middle-aged man, wearing a suit, standing alone on a public sidewalk with nothing in my hands. What about that is suspicious?”
The cops moved toward me—a movable barrier against my anger.
“Show us some ID,” the guy without a mole asked.
I closed my eyes, considering first the immediate response of civil disobedience. Then I gathered my intelligence, opened my eyes, and stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of my darkblue jacket.
Coming out with two laminated cards, I handed these to Beauty.
He took them and read the contents. It was my PI’s ID and driver’s license. Both of them had my real name, so the encounter was bound to continue.
“Wait here,” Beauty said to his partner and me.
He went to the squad car to call in. The police were always supposed to call in when they came across my name. I was infamous.
“Would you submit to a search of your person?” the cop left with me asked.
“By Beyoncé, if she asked nicely,” I replied.
The cop’s eyes tightened and my phone made a sound that I recognized.
“You can answer that,” my guard told me.
“And you know what you can do,” I told him.
Revolution is fought on every street corner of every city, town, and hamlet in the world, my poor besotted father used to rant. The only true power that the authorities have is the people’s belief in that power.
Beauty returned and said to his partner, “Let’s go.”
“What?” the cop said and I thought.
“They said to leave him be.”
“But he resisted.”
“The captain got on the line,” Beauty explained to the both of us. “He said to let him go.”
The cops gave me the look, the gaze that’s supposed to stay with you long after they’re gone. I grinned and waved at them as they folded their long bodies back into the black-and-white and then drove off to find some other suspicious loiterer.
Once they were gone I wondered about a police captain somewhere telling his minions to lay off Leonid Trotter McGill. I was Public Enemy Number 26 or so in the city of New York. I’ve been rousted for vagrancy, littering, jaywalking, and public drunkenness. They could have put me in stir for seventy-two hours on a resisting-arrest beef.
I might have worried if my phone hadn’t sounded again.
“Hey, Aura,” I said into the cell.
“We were interrupted in our talk earlier,” she said.
“Luckily for me, I’m sure.”
“Where are you?”
“A twelve-minute walk from you.”
“Meet me at Trey’s in half an hour.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
TREY’S IS A SMALL BAR with a really good pianist and sometimes a singer, Yolanda Craze, who could bring tears to the eyes of the dead.
That night Yolanda had off and so the music was just deeply moving, somewhere just outside of the heart of desolation.
Aura came in fifteen minutes late. She always did that on a date. I was used to it. She wore a loose-fitting, antique-white dress that somehow showed off her fine figure anyway.
I was sitting at a small round table away from the white baby grand with a bottle of Beaujolais breathing for her.
She took her seat without stopping to kiss me and I didn’t complain.
I held out a hand, palm up, and she touched it with four fingers.
“What were you doing in the neighborhood?” she asked.
“Dinner with Hush, planning an international bank heist, and then being stopped by the cops for standing still on a street corner.”
“They’ll kill you one day, Leonid.”
“That and breathing,” I said, “the only things that all human beings hold in common.”
She smiled and looked down at my hand on the table.
This was the beginning of her speech, I knew. So I kept quiet, if pensive.
“When you,” she said and then paused. “When you were in the hospital after being stabbed and beaten, I was there looking at you unconscious and burning with fever. At the time all I thought about was you. I used all my will to imagine you healthy and smiling again. But later, after you were out of danger, I began to realize that this was your life and even if we were together you would be in that bed again and again until finally one day you wouldn’t recover.”
She looked up into my eyes, maybe hoping for me to deny her claim. But I didn’t have anything to say.
“Theda loves you, and I do, too, Leonid. I would die for you. I would do anything . . . but even if you left Katrina, how could I bring you completely into my life, knowing that you will be killed violently, senselessly?”
The notes of the piano made no musical sense at that moment. They were dissonant sounds coming from nowhere and flittering off into space like children jumping from a fast-moving merry-go-round.
I had no answer to her question, so I sat back and nodded.
“Will you still love me?” she asked.
“Let me walk you home,” I answered.
35
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TREY’S and bed I called Zephyra, asking her to reserve a first-class seat for me on the earliest morning Acela train down to Baltimore. I left a text with Mardi to look up real estate sales in and around the Maryland city for transactions by Chrystal Chambers for a year or so after the time of her first successes as a painter.
The talk with Aura, in spite of the bottle of wine, had left me quite sober. She saw my life the way it was and loved me accordingly. Who and what I was, was what she loved and, at the same time, too much for her heart to bear.
This thought trailed after me on the early-morning taxi ride to the train station, down the long concrete platform to the first-class car. It settled with me into the single seat on the right side of the upscale cabin.
“First class, sir?” a not so young white woman asked. She had pink-and-dirty-blond hair and the hint of an elaborate tattoo just above the line of her uniform collar.
“Yeah.” I handed her the machine-generated ticket I got upon entering Penn Station.
She handed me a menu. I waved it away.
“Ate a bagel in the station,” I explained.
She shrugged and moved on to the seat behind me.
“Good morning,” she said with a note of recognition in her voice.
“Good morning,” an elderly, male, German-accented voice replied.
I knew that voice—only the voice, not the man who spoke, not personally at any rate. It was the voice of a celebrity, someone I knew about from the media.
Who was it?
“You’re going down to meet the president?” she asked.
“Just a dinner,” he said. “How are your children?”
Tickled, she replied, “Wonderful.”
“Doing well in school?”
“The girl, Rebecca, is. Felix just wants to rip and run.”
“It takes longer for boys to se
ttle in,” he said.
“I hope so.”
Another man entered the car. The way he walked said that he worked for Amtrak but he wasn’t an engineer or porter. Older, near about sixty, with a certain recognizable strain in eyes that looked out for trouble, he gauged me and then proceeded to the voice I recognized but had not yet identified.
“Good morning, sir,” the train security man said.
“Mr. Landsdale,” the voice greeted.
“Everybody treating you okay?”
“Marvelously.”
“I hope you can go down there and kick some butt, sir,” the slender, gray-haired troubleshooter said. “They want to turn this country into Russia down there.”
The celebrity laughed softly and said, “The wheel is always turning, Mr. Landsdale. Wait long enough and you always come back to the place you started from.”
“I hope so,” Landsdale said, though I wasn’t sure he understood the symbolism.
While they spoke, a dozen or so first-class passengers boarded. Men and women in business attire with cell phones and briefcases, laptops and personal DVD players.
I stood up to put William Williams’ satchel in the storage area above my seat. Glancing to my right, I saw that my neighbor was none other than Rainier Klaus, called by some the Architect of Death in Southeast Asia, in a war either forgotten or misunderstood by anyone under forty in contemporary America.
Mr. Landsdale looked at me and I returned to my seat, wondering again—wandering in a mind littered with details aglow with ancient passions, like long-dead stars glittering in a moonless night.
My father used to lecture me about Mr. Klaus. He worked in the State Department. There he planned the decimation of nations judged to be the enemies of democracy’s master—corporate America. It was he who initiated the carpet bombing and legal torture. He was said to have such a good memory that he never wrote anything down and so neither he nor his bosses were ever held accountable for their crimes.
His assassin can use the legal stand of self-defense, my father used to say.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths were on this man’s head and he was going down to advise our new liberal president.
I was armed and fast. My father, in his unmarked grave somewhere south of Mexico and north of Antarctica, was hoping for an impromptu assassination. But I was no judge, much less an executioner. The wheel that Klaus talked about did its orbit, and all I could do, all he could, was to hold on.
I HAD TO do something so I stood again and took down a few of William Williams’ texts on politics and philosophy. Almost every word was highlighted in either pink, yellow, or blue. Many phrases were underlined and there were cryptic notes throughout.
The unconscious is not known but ignorance gets no hearing in the court of Fate, he wrote in Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . In Lear he wrote, Yes, the stink, this odor is how you can tell what festers in the hearts of bricklayers, seamstresses, and convicts.
Much of what he expressed was so idiosyncratic as to make its meaning indecipherable. The language was fevered, maybe not quite rational. But there was also banal information. Shopping lists, special dates (like Corinthia’s birthday), and more sinister info like the shadowing of a man from one part of the city to another.
I followed him again today, Mr. Williams wrote on a flyleaf at the back of The Gift of Death. He kissed his wife goodbye and then went to see his lover. They dallied on a park bench while the children of the people he destroyed wallowed in fear. I had a pistol in my pocket and sweat in the palms of my hands. But that man was long dead, we both were. Now we were ghosts and no action would change that.
“I see you’re reading Kapital by Marx,” a voice said. “Are you a Communist?”
I turned to see Rainier Klaus standing next to my seat. The train was moving. He was probably headed for the john. I hadn’t even noticed us leaving the station. There was a swamp outside the window. A solitary heron, standing on one leg, stood sentry over the muck.
“Not reading exactly,” I said, patting the unopened tome sitting on my tray.
“No? What, then?”
“I’m a private detective and these are the books of a man who went missing a few decades ago. I’ve been retained to find him, and these books are the only testament.”
I think it was my last word that really got the diplomat’s attention.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to be found,” Klaus suggested.
“Since when did what we want change the acts of others?” I asked.
He smiled, shrugged, and said, “I cannot argue.”
A burly-looking man at the end of the train was watching me closely.
“Tell me something, Mr. Klaus.”
“Yes?”
“Do you ever feel guilty?”
He looked down into my eyes and took at least fifteen seconds to consider my question. Finally he said, “Every year I go to the countryside of northern Vietnam. There I visit the towns and provinces with a group of doctors to bring aid to those who need it. My wife used to come with me. Now my sons come along.
“But, to answer your question—no, I do not feel guilt. That would be an insult to my enemies.”
Klaus moved on, and I was reminded of my conversation with Hush. Killers lived and died in their own ether.
I opened the cover of Williams’ copy of Kapital; a folded-up and yellowed scrap of old newspaper lay there. It was a torn section of the real estate page of a Hoboken newspaper with an ad for an apartment circled.
I scribbled down the phone number on one of my falseidentity business cards and tucked it neatly away in the breast pocket of my blue jacket.
36
WHEN THE TRAIN was pulling into Baltimore’s Penn Station I reflected on the fact that I’d come there because of an uncorroborated hunch. Fatima just remembered the sound of the name of a place where her aunt had a secret hideaway. The child could have been confused, or repeating the name of some hamlet in Maine or South Carolina.
I left New York because I needed some time off and didn’t know how to take it in a straightforward fashion. Between Hush’s transformation and Aura’s bright light of perception, between the deaths of three young women and the children I took, I was exhausted and, worse, a little uncertain.
Looking up, I saw Klaus returning from the head for the fourth time.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said in his powerful, if elderly voice.
“Yes, Mr. Klaus.”
“You never said whether you were a Communist or not.”
“I was trained not as a party member but as a revolutionary,” I said truthfully. The burly man in the back of the train stood up, though I was sure he couldn’t have heard my words. “Somewhere on that journey I lost my way . . . or maybe found it. Anyway, the answer to your question depends more on you than it does on me.”
My response seemed to amuse the mass murderer.
“May I have your card?” he said.
I gave it to him, more to bedevil the bodyguard than for any other reason. The hapless protector watched from six strides away as I got close enough to cause all kinds of permanent damage.
“Leonid?” Klaus said upon reading the card.
“Just part of my training,” I told him.
THE BALTIMORE TRAIN Station’s waiting room was the size of a hangar for a dirigible. The Acela arrived twelve minutes early and so I decided, for no clear reason, to wait in the huge space with its long wooden benches, high ceilings, and murky windows that allowed in copious, if filtered, light.
Taking out my PDA, I found that Mardi had done her work for the week.
Using Bug’s templates she found that eight years earlier Chrystal Chambers had bought a small home, comprising only nine hundred square feet of living space, on a street named Freeling Drive. The deal was brokered by Starkman Realty and the mortgage was held by a small bank in New York called Herkimer-People’s Trust, a name that would have caused my father to give me a lecture on the incestuous and corrosive nature of
capitalism.
“Excuse me, sir?”
She was young, poorly dressed in brown cotton pants and a baby-blue short-sleeved blouse. Her hair was straightened in places and not in others—as if maybe in the middle of a hairdressing session she told the stylist that she couldn’t afford the appointment. Mahogany brown, twenty at the most, her shoes were pink and plastic. Her once-red nails were cut close.
“Yes?” I said.
Twenty feet away a black man, maybe forty, was watching us closely. This reminded me of Rainier Klaus and his ineffective bodyguard.
“I need some money to buy a, um, a ticket,” she said.
“That guy in the black pants and gray shirt put you up to this?” I asked.
“Um . . .”
“That’s all right, sugar,” I said. “I’ll do what you want, just tell me if that dude is running you.”
“Yeah. He my boyfriend.”
“Drugs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“For the both’a you?”
“Just him. Just sometimes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Seema.”
A security guard was watching the man watching us.
“So I’ll tell you what, Seema. I’ll give you some money if you want it. But I’ll also take you out of here and drop you anyplace else you want.”
Her eyes pondered over the broad field of possibility.
“Brody won’t let me go.”
“Brody can’t stop you, baby. ’Cause you know I am both a rock and a hard place.”
She must have recognized the paraphrasing from some old-time relative.
“I bettah not cause no trouble, mistah.” She turned as if to leave me.
“Hold up, girl,” I said. “I told you I’d give you money. How much you and Brody need?”
“Fi’ty.”
I reached into a back pocket and took out my thirty-year-old red-brown wallet. I teased out a fifty-dollar bill and a business card. These I handed to Seema.
“Put the card away,” I said. “If you feel sometime later that you need to get out, just call me. I will be there and I will do my best to help.”
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