Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  The anarchist smiled.

  “Your first baby step outside the lies they have you living, young man.”

  “That doesn’t help me.”

  “There’s a hotel on East Thirty-fifth,” he said. “Over by Park. It’s called the Barony. Go there when you get tired. Tell Frederick that I told you to stay there tonight. Other than that you can do anything. Anything that you’ve never done before.”

  “Can I get an advance to eat with?”

  “Frederick will feed you.”

  “What if want to go to a movie?”

  Lawless shook his head. I could see his thoughts: Here the child could do anything and all he can come up with is a movie.

  “Or maybe opera tickets,” I added.

  “I never carry more than ten dollars in cash myself,” he said.

  “But I don’t have a credit card.”

  “Neither do I.” He held his pious palms upward.

  “How do you make it with only ten bucks in your pocket?”

  “It’s a challenge,” he said. “And challenge is what makes life sing.”

  I must have looked miserable because he gave me his quick laugh and said, “In your office. The bottom half of the pink file. Eighteen, eighteen, nine.”

  With that he rose and went to the door.

  “When do I see you again?” I asked.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “Be prepared.”

  With that he left the office. I heard him say a few words to Lana Drexel. She laughed and said something. And then they were gone.

  I felt uncomfortable staying in his private office. It seemed so personal in there. There were private letters on his closed laptop and all those curiosities along the walls. I went to the storage room, what he called my office, and sat at the long table in a chair that seemed to be made from stoneware pottery clay. It was glazed a shiny dark red and slender in every aspect. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it broke under the weight of a man Lawless’s size.

  I perused a couple of Red Tuesday’s newsletters. The paranoia struck a note with me though and so I put them down.

  I wondered about what Lawless had said; that we lived in a skein of lies. So many things he said seemed to be anchored in some greater truth. In many ways he was like my father, certain and powerful—with all of the answers, it seemed.

  But Lawless was wild. He took chances and had received some hard knocks. He lived with severe mental illness and shrugged off threats that would turn brave men into jellyfish.

  Don’t do anything you’ve done before, he told me. I experienced the memory of his words like a gift.

  I picked up the phone and entered a number from a slip of paper in my pocket.

  “Hello?” she answered. “Who is this?”

  There was a lot of noise in the background, people talking and the clatter of activity.

  “Felix.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy you gave your number yesterday at lunch . . . I had the soba noodles.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “I was wondering if you wanted to get together tonight. After work I mean.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I was going to go with some of the guys here to . . . But I don’t have to. What did you want to do?”

  “I’m pretty open,” I said. “Anything you been really wanting to do?”

  “Well,” she hesitated.

  “What?”

  “There’s a chamber music concert up at the Cloisters tonight. It’s supposed to be wonderful up there.”

  “That sounds great,” I said, really meaning it.

  “But the tickets are seventy-five dollars . . . each.”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I stretched the phone cord over to the tiny pink file cabinet. The drawers were facing the wall so I turned it around—it was much heavier than I expected.

  I could see that the bottom drawer was actually a safe with a combination lock.

  “Are you still there?” Sharee said.

  “Oh yeah. Listen, Sharee . . .”

  “What?”

  “Can I call you right back?”

  “Okay.”

  It took me a moment to recall the numbers eighteen eighteen nine. The combination worked the first time.

  There was more cash in that small compartment than I had ever seen. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills and fifties and twenties. English pounds and piles of euros. There were pesos and other bills in white envelopes that were from other, more exotic parts of the world.

  “Wow.”

  I took two hundred and fifty dollars leaving an IOU in its place. Then I hit the redial button.

  “Felix?” she answered.

  “What time do you get off work?”

  Sharee was a music student at Julliard. She studied oboe and flute. There was an oboe in the quartet and a violin that made my heart thrill. After the concert we walked along the dark roads of the Cloisters’ park. I kissed her against a moss covered stone wall and she ran her hands up under my sweater scratching her long fingernails across my shoulder blades.

  We took a taxi down to the Barony. At first the desk clerk didn’t want to get Frederick but when I mentioned Mr. Lawless he jumped to the task.

  Frederick was a tall man, white from his hair to his shoes. He guided us to a small elevator and brought us to a room that was small and lovely. It was red and purple and mostly bed.

  I must have kissed Sharee’s neck for over an hour before trying to remove her muslin blouse. She pulled the waistband of her skirt up over her belly and said, “Don’t look at me. I’m fat.”

  That’s when I started kissing around her belly button. It was an inny and very deep. Every time I pressed my tongue down there she gasped and dug her nails into my shoulders.

  “What are you doing to me?” she said.

  “Didn’t anybody ever kiss you here before?” I asked her. “It’s just so sexy.” And then I jammed my tongue down deep.

  We spent the night finding new places on each other. It was almost a game and we were almost children. We didn’t even go to the bathroom alone.

  At five I ordered room service. Salami sandwiches and coffee.

  “Who are you, Felix Orlean?” she asked me as we stared at each other over the low coffee table that held our early morning meal.

  “Just a journalism student,” I said. “In over my head every way that I look.”

  She was wearing my sweater and nothing else. I wanted to kiss her belly but she looked too comfortable to unfold out of that chair.

  “I have a kinda boyfriend,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you mad?”

  “How could I be mad?” I said. “What you gave me last night was exactly what I needed. And you’re so beautiful.”

  “But I’m not very nice,” she said, experimenting with the thought of being beautiful while at the same time feeling guilty about her deceit.

  “I think you are.”

  “But here I am smelling like you in your sweater and he’s in the East Village sleeping in his bed.”

  “And here you are and here I am,” I said. “Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

  She came over and began kissing my navel then.

  The phone rang. It was the last thing in the world that I wanted but I knew that I had to answer.

  Sharee moaned in distress.

  “Just a minute, honey,” I said. “It might be business. Hello?”

  “Between Sixth and Seventh on the north side of Forty-seventh Street,” Archibald Lawless said. “Deluxe Jewelers. Nine thirty. I’ll meet you out front.”

  The moment I hung up the phone Sharee whispered in my ear, “Give me three days and I’m yours.”

  I grunted and pulled her blue-streaked hair so that her lips met mine. And for a long time I didn’t think about big-eyed models or anarchy or where the day might end.

  14

  I was standing across the street from the jewelry store at nine fifteen, sipping coffee from a paper cup and
rubbing the sand from my eyes. When I say jewelry store I should be more specific. That block is all jewelers. Almost every doorway and almost every floor. There were Arabs and India Indians and Orthodox Jews, white men and Asian men and every other race counted on that block. Big black security guards joked with small wizened dealers. I heard French and Spanish, Hebrew and Yiddish, Chinese and even a Scandinavian tongue casually spoken by passersby.

  I had put Sharee in a taxi an hour before. She said that she was going to get some sleep and that I should call her later that day. I told her that I’d call that day if I could and she asked if I was in trouble.

  “Why you say that?”

  “My daddy was always in trouble and you remind me of him.”

  “I like it when you call me daddy,” I said before kissing her and closing the yellow cab door.

  Deluxe Jewelers was just a glass door with unobtrusive gold letters telling of its name. There was an older brown man, with an almond shaped head accented by a receding hairline, sitting on a fold-up metal chair inside the door. There were many more impressive stores on that block. Stores with display cases lined with precious stones set in platinum and gold.

  I figured that the people who worked at Deluxe were Lawless’s low-rent toehold in this world of unending wealth.

  “Hey, kid,” Archibald Lawless said.

  He was standing there next to me as if he had appeared out of thin air.

  “Mr. Lawless.”

  “Being on time is a virtue in this world,” he said. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an indictment. “Shall we?”

  We crossed the street and went through the modest entrance.

  “Mr. Lawless,” the seated guard hailed. “You here for Sammy?”

  “I think I need Applebaum today, Larry.”

  The sentry nodded and said, “Go on then.”

  The room he sat in was no more than a vestibule. There was a black tiled floor, his chair, and an elevator door. Lawless pressed the one button on the panel and the door opened immediately. On the panel inside there were twelve buttons, in no particular order, marked only by colors. The anarchist chose orange and the car began to descend.

  When the door opened we entered into another small and nondescript room. It was larger than Larry’s vestibule but with no furniture and a concrete floor.

  There was a closed door before us.

  This opened and a small Asian woman came out. Her face was as hard as a Brazil nut until she saw Lawless. She smiled and released a stream of some Asian dialect. Archibald answered in the same language, somewhat slower but fluent still and all.

  We followed the woman down a hall of open doorways, each one leading to rooms with men and women working on some aspect of gemstones. In one room there was an elderly Jewish man looking down on a black velvet-lined board. On the dark material lay at least a dozen diamonds, every one large enough to choke a small bird.

  At the end of the hall was a doorless doorway through which I could see a dowdy office and an unlikely man.

  He stood up to meet us but wasn’t much taller than am I. He was brown with blond hair and striking emerald green eyes. He was both hideous and beautiful, qualities that don’t come together well in men.

  “Archie,” he said in an accent I couldn’t place. “It’s been so long.”

  They shook hands.

  “Vin, this is Felix. He’s working for me,” Lawless said.

  “So happy to meet you.” The jeweler took my hand and gazed into my eyes.

  I suppressed a shudder and said, “Me too.”

  There were chairs and so we sat. Vin Applebaum went behind his battered oak desk. We were underground and so there were no windows. The office, which wasn’t small, had been painted so long ago that it was a toss-up what color it had been originally. The lighting was fluorescent and the Persian carpet was threadbare where it had been regularly traversed.

  Applebaum, who was somewhat over forty, wore an iridescent silver and green suit. It was well tailored with three buttons. His shirt was black and open at the throat.

  The most surprising thing to me about his dress was that he wore no jewelry. No ring or chain or even a watch. He was like a gay male pimp who specialized in women or a vegan butcher.

  “Strangman,” Lawless said.

  “Lionel,” Vin replied.

  “If you say so. What about him?”

  “He was the luckiest man in the world there for a while. Through an investment syndicate he made a purchase that kings salivate over. Now he’s in bad trouble. As bad as it can be.”

  “He was robbed?”

  “That word doesn’t begin to explain the loss of twenty-three nearly red diamonds.”

  “Red?” Lawless said. “I thought the most you could get in a diamond was pink or purple.”

  Applebaum nodded. “Yes. You might say that these stones, not one of which is less than six karats, are a deep or dark pink. But to the eye beholding they are red.”

  “Fifty million dollars red?”

  “If you could sell the whole collection,” Applebaum said, nodding. “Yes. Think of the necklace you could make with just nine of those gems.”

  “My scales run to starving, dying millions,” Lawless said.

  “You could feed a small country with Strangman’s find.”

  “What about Lamarr?” Archibald Lawless asked then.

  I wondered if he were really working for an insurance company. I realized that even if he had a client that their needs might dovetail like the interests of a gem dealer and a mad anarchist in a basement room in Manhattan.

  “Benny?” Applebaum asked. “What about him?”

  “Did he know Strangman?”

  “Everyone knows Lionel. He’s been on the periphery of our business for many years. Do you think that Benny had anything to do with the theft?”

  “The diamonds were definitely stolen then?” Lawless asked.

  “Definitely.”

  “Who has them?”

  Applebaum shook his head.

  “Who insured them then?” Lawless asked.

  “Auchschlous, Anterbe, and Grenell. An Australian company.” Again the odd jeweler shook his head.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Strangman is old-fashioned. He likes to carry stones around in his pocket,” the ugly diamond dealer said. “A lot of the old-timers are like that. Somebody says that all they would need is fifty thousand dollars and life would even out and Strangman would pull two hundred thousand in diamonds out of his vest pocket just to show them how small they really are. Stupid.”

  “The insurance didn’t cover personal delivery?” I asked just to feel that I wouldn’t blend in with the colorless walls.

  “That’s right,” Applebaum said with a generous smile. “Somebody made a deal with Strangman. A deal so sweet and so secure that he brought the stones home and made an appointment with the buyer.”

  Archibald Lawless’s eyes were closed. His hands were held upward. He began nodding his head as if he were listening to a subtle tune coming from a bit too far off.

  “Who is the investigating agent?” he asked behind still closed eyes.

  “Jules Vialet,” Applebaum said without hesitation.

  The anarchist opened his eyes and asked, “How did you know that so quickly?”

  “Because he’s AAG’s best man and even though they have a clause saying that he couldn’t carry the jewels without proper protection he still might be able to make a case against them.”

  “And what about Strangman,” Lawless asked. “Is he still around?”

  “Up at Obermann’s Sanitarium on sixty-eighth.”

  “He’s fakin’ it?”

  “I doubt it,” Vin said. “He never had much money or much power. Those stones represented a whole new life for him on these streets. All he needed was that collection in his vault and he would have had the respect of the whole community. Now, of course, all of that is gone.”

  There was great deal of pleasur
e Applebaum felt about the professional demise of Lionel Strangman. I got the feeling that life in the jewelry district wasn’t friendly or safe.

  15

  There was a silver-gray Cadillac waiting for us when we came out. A dark man with broad shoulders, and a neck an inch too short, climbed out of the driver’s seat to greet us.

  “Mr. Lawless,” he said in a Caribbean-English accent. “Where do you wish to go, sir?”

  “This is Felix Orlean,” Lawless said. “Felix, meet Derek Chambers.”

  The chauffeur’s hands were rough and strong. He was shorter than Lawless, only about six feet.

  “Pleased to meet you, Derek,” I said.

  “We’re going to an address somewhere in Manhattan,” Lawless said. “I’ll need the phone books.”

  Derek opened the back door and Lawless slipped in, moving all the way to the other side in order to make room for me. I got in and the door shut behind me. The chauffeur went to the rear of the car, opened the trunk and closed it. After he’d climbed into the driver’s seat he handed my temporary employer the white book and Yellow Pages for New York City.

  Derek drove off and Lawless began thumbing through the Yellow Pages, the business to business volume.

  “Corruption on this level is always pretty easy to crack,” he was saying. “Big companies, rich men, and the government are all too arrogant to waste time hiding their crimes. They have official avenues to follow and reports to make, agents with health benefits and paramours who nurse aspirations of their own.

  “Derek, take us to Second Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth.”

  “Yes sir, Mister Lawless.”

  “Is that your real name?” I asked. “Lawless?”

  The nihilist smiled at me and patted my knee.

  “You would even question a man’s name?” he asked, amazed.

  “I mean what are the odds?” I said. “An anarchist named Lawless? That’s just too perfect.”

  “What if my parents were revolutionists? What if I looked up my name and decided that that’s what I’d become?”

  “Your parents were revolutionaries that changed their names?” I asked.

  “I am Archibald Lawless,” he said. “I’m sitting here before you. You are looking into my eyes and questioning what you see and what you hear. On the streets you meet Asian men named Brian, Africans named Joe Cramm. But you don’t questions their obviously being named for foreign devils. You accept their humiliation. You accept their loss of history. You accept them being severed from long lines of heritage by their names. Why wouldn’t you accept just as simply my liberating appellation?”