All I Did Was Shoot My Man (24 page)

50

FROM THE TRUNK
of my car I had retrieved the tools needed for the confrontation. I had plastic ties for my prisoner’s wrists and ankles, thick black electric tape for his mouth.

In the light I could see that he was white with dark hair. His hairline was receding but I put him at thirty—maybe even younger. I used nylon rope to lash him to a dining room chair.

My hands were shaking from the rush of battle. I took one of the pills that Dr. Bancroft had given me and sat in front of the unconscious assassin while letting the logic of polite society reestablish itself in my heart and mind.

The transition was like one of the old black-and-white movies where Mr. Hyde slowly turns back into Dr. Jekyll. The physics of the change were all internal. The killer in my chest slowly ebbing, leaving its human husk spent and exhausted on the shores of civilization.

THE WOULD-BE
and has-been killer was still unconscious. I took out my cell, found a number I’d called not long before, and pressed enter. After saying as few words as possible I disengaged the call and sat back in a chair, wondering what kind of fool takes on an unknown quantity in the dark without benefit of a weapon or a friend.

There could have been two or more killers assigned to the Quick family. How would I have fared against those kind of odds?

The answer to that question was quite simple. I had already killed two men, and even though that act provided ugly satisfaction in my heart it didn’t help me to figure out my client’s problems or my own. Anyway—if I had hefted a gun and pointed it at the killer, he would have probably relied on his reflexes rather than raise his hands in surrender—that’s what I would have done.

When I looked up I saw that the assassin’s eyes were open. His jaw was swollen and the left eye was almost closed but he wasn’t complaining. He was using that lopsided stare in a vain attempt to intimidate me.

I considered killing him but then decided to wait a little while more.

AT THREE FORTY-FOUR
I was wondering about the phone call I had missed—the unknown number that left no message. It was late for a call that wasn’t an emergency. I worried that I’d missed something important.

Just then the doorbell rang.

The assassin looked up attentively. I shrugged at him and lumbered off to the front door.

The navy dress blended almost perfectly with her dark skin. And she was wearing coral-colored lipstick. The makeup was probably my biggest surprise that night.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you were looking for excuses to call me” were Antoinette Lowry’s first words.

“I like seeing you,” I admitted. “But that’s because when you’re not there in front of me I have to wonder what you’re doing behind my back.”

She smiled, saying with that fleeting exhibition of humor that, just possibly, I could be the first black man in a very long time that she might give a second look.

“Come on,” I said. “Let me show you something.”

I led her into the living room.

She came in and stood beside me, looking at my human package and exhibiting no surprise whatsoever.

“ Who is he?” she asked.

I went into the long explanation of how I came to that little house in Queens. I mentioned Minnie and Harry, with all their names, and Johann Brighton too. I talked about Bingo and his dead men and my conviction that the hit list had expanded to include a primarily innocent family of three.

“Parlez-vous français?”
she asked the prisoner.

He nodded and then shot a glance at me. I tried my best to look as dull and brutish as I could; this because Antoinette did not first ask the man if he could speak English.

She reached into her nylon bag and came out with a good-sized blackjack. She showed him the bludgeon, they came to a tacit understanding, and then she ripped the tape from his mouth.

“ What are you doing here?” she asked in French. Her accent could have come from a Parisian’s lips.

“Rien,”
he said—nothing.

“You are in a tight situation, my friend,” she continued in the foreign tongue. “This man has already killed two who tried to get at him. If you want to go home, you have to give.”

“ What promise can you offer me?” he said. The French he spoke was from farther south, maybe as far down as Algiers.

Antoinette smiled while I stared stupidly off into space.

“The men I work for are more frightening than you,” the man said.

“Fine,” Antoinette told him.

She stood up and put the blackjack back in her bag. Before she could turn away he said, “ Wait.”

“ What?”

“I don’t know anything. They gave me my orders in a meeting in Berlin. Passports, papers . . . a phone. I only got the address of this house today.”

“You were supposed to kill these people?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Antoinette turned to me. “He doesn’t know anything,” she said.

“ What was all that he said, then?”

“He’s worried about you.”

“Me?”

“He thinks you’ll kill him.”

“ Where’d he get that idea?”

Antoinette gave me a knowing, lying smile.

The problem with people like Antoinette, people who have only partly comprehended that race is no longer the primary defining factor of American life, is that they, her and her kind, unknowingly keep watch over the masters’ wealth; and that the power of that wealth maintains all the ignorance of centuries of classism, racism, and the hierarchy that ignorance demands.

Antoinette knew that my brother and I were homeschooled by a father, a man descended from Southern sharecroppers. She knew that I was an orphan before my thirteenth year. Armed with this partial knowledge, she assumed that I was not versant in any foreign language, especially not one as important and inaccessible as French. But indeed I am conversant in French and Spanish—German too. We spoke all those languages in my house and at the radical meetings my father dragged us to.

“ What do we do now?” I asked, sounding as innocent and ignorant as any beast of burden.

“ What do you suggest?”

I unrolled more tape and moved to cover our prisoner’s mouth again. He avoided me so I socked him, taking out the anger I felt toward Lowry. I hit him harder than I planned, because the chair fell over and he went to sleep.

I set him upright, put the tape on his mouth, and turned back to the question at hand.

“ What do you know about Brighton?” I asked.

“He’s a very rich man,” she said. “They say he’s in line for CEO. I can’t believe that he’d be involved in this.”

“Then explain Claudia Burns.”

“I can’t,” she said and I believed her.

“ What about this guy?”

She sighed and said, “It’s rumored that sometimes our international arm makes connections with mercenaries outside of the U.S. These resources are usually there for protective services. But they do perform other jobs for governments and the like.”

“Assassinations?”

“I have no firsthand knowledge of that but it is assumed.”

“International arm,” I said speculatively. “Alton Plimpton was sent after me by a guy named Harlow . . .”

“Leonard Harlow. He used to be in charge of the international arm before he was transferred to domestic affairs.”

“ What about him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. Nine years ago he would have been involved with monies held. He has connections in places where the mercenary armies work.”

“How much money was taken in the robbery?”

“Fifty-eight million.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Why?”

“ What’s the reward on that?”

“Like I told you, one and a half percent on all funds recovered.”

“That’s fifteen thousand per million, right?”

“Yes.”

“If I lead you to it, you’ll put my name up?”

“If you do.”

“ What about this guy?”

“I have some connections at the State Department,” she said. “From my military days. I’ll call them.”

“And what will they do?”

“ What they do.”

51

WE LEFT THE HOUSE
with the would-be assassin still in his tape-and-nylon restraints. I didn’t like the idea but there were places to go and lives to save—not least of all, my own.

At a little after five I walked Antoinette to her vintage pink Jaguar. She stood in the way women pose when they expect you to try to kiss them and they haven’t yet made up their mind on how they might respond to the attempt.

I had no intention of failing or succeeding at said kiss. Antoinette thought I was stupid in spite of the progress I’d made on her case. This was an insult not deserving of any expression of desire.

I held out a hand. She took it, wondering, I believe, if I’d try to pull her into an embrace. But I just shook and released.

“ Will your State Department friends launch an investigation?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what they’ve told me by early afternoon,” she said.

“Okay. You got my number.”

IN THE CAR
on the way back to Manhattan I called the landline in my home. It was not yet six a.m. but I was concerned about my family and their safety.

“Hello?” She sounded awake and sober, if a little airy.

“Hey, Katrina,” I said. “I expected one of the kids to answer.”

“They are all asleep,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“They still got cops on the door downstairs?”

“Mmmm, Twill said so. They are all here taking such good care of me.”

“Are you okay, Katrina?”

“Oh yes. I’ve been thinking of how lucky I’ve been. To be loved, to have my health, and to be able to make mistakes and not lose everything.”

“You sound like it’s all over.”

“ What is?”

“Life. Like you been beaten or something.”

“No. It’s just that I spent so long blaming you, Leonid. Blaming you and never questioning myself. And I can see now that I came so close to keeping Dimitri from becoming a man. He is a man, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“ When will you be coming home?”

“Don’t know yet. I want to make sure that we’re all safe.”

“Thank you, Leonid.”

“For what?”

“For guarding over me,” she said, “for saving me from myself when I didn’t deserve it.”

I WAS DISTURBED
after the talk with Katrina. She’d rarely exhibited such friendliness and certainly not any appreciable degree of self-awareness. She was the kind of woman who men loved for their inaccessibility. For her myriad lovers she was a trophy like the head of a saber-toothed tiger mounted on a wall that no one else knew existed. For me she had always been the woman who could never be satisfied.

I didn’t even consider the next call before I made it.

“Hello?” Aura Ullman answered.

“ Want to meet me for breakfast at the new restaurant?”

“They don’t serve breakfast.”

“Not for you?”

After a brief pause she said, “I’ll call Maurice and see if anyone’s up there. Take elevator eleven all the way up.”

THE MUSTACHE
was on the ninety-seventh floor of the Tesla Building, just below the Observation Deck. It was a French restaurant that served lunch and dinner, but the cooks came in early, and the owner, Maurice Denouve, owed a lot to Aura for getting him in. There was a huge bidding war over the space, but Aura liked the Frenchman and paved the way for him receiving preferential treatment by the owners.

By the time I got there they were just serving our fruit-filled crepes and French roast coffee.

Aura was wearing a peach-colored summer dress and a shell-shaped white hat on the side of her head.

“Never seen you wearing a hat before,” I said, taking the seat across from her.

I took her hand and kissed it.

“You look kind of beat-up, Leonid,” she replied.

“You should see the other guy.”

“ We have found some bacon, mademoiselle,” a skinny black-haired, white-shirted waiter said. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; a silent complaint at the fact of being forced to work before the place was open to the public.

“No thank you,” Aura said.

“Mais lardons pour moi, monsieur,”
I said in my subpar version of his lingo.

He frowned and went away.

“You speak French?” Aura asked.

“There’s some things I have to tell you,” I said.

“In French?”

“In the language of fools but not love.”

Her smile made me happy in spite of the exhaustion and feelings of inadequacy.

“ What is it, Leonid?”

“I know I asked you to wait three days, Aura, but I don’t want you to think that I’ve changed or anything. I mean, I want to be with you in the worst way. I want you in my life, every day. But, but things aren’t getting any easier . . .”

I told her about Zella and alluded to how I had framed and then freed her. I explained that the men coming to kill me were probably there because of my actions with Zella. I laid the whole thing out there in front of her.

Before she could answer the bacon came and then my phone sounded.

I looked at the little panel and said, “I have to take this.”

She nodded.

“ What you got for me, Ms. Lowry?” I said into the phone.

“The man who broke into the Quicks’ house has been taken into federal custody,” she began. “He’ll probably be deported, seeing that there’s no proof that he intended to kill anyone. He’ll be questioned but I don’t think that he knows anyone connected to the crimes from this end. He had a pay-as-you-go cell phone and never met with anyone here in the States.”

“That doesn’t do much. What about Claudia?”

“She filled out an application for her job two weeks after she was put on the payroll. All earlier contact has been either altered or eradicated. I’ll have to talk to her myself if you want any more information.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I just ordered my breakfast,” I said, “in French.”

I disconnected that call and turned back to the woman I loved.

“Don’t worry about it, Leonid,” she said.

“About what?”

“Theda’s going away to college this year,” she said. “Brown. With her out of the house I won’t have to worry about anyone’s safety but my own.”

“But what kind of asshole would I be to put you in danger like that?” I asked. I meant it. “I’ve done some terrible things, Aura. There’s no getting away from that. And even when I try to make it right I only bring on more trouble.”

She took a mouthful of strawberry crepe and chewed it lightly. The window behind her looked up Central Park all the way to Harlem, almost to Yonkers.

“I joined an executive Internet dating site about nine months ago,” she said.

“Really?”

“Every other week I go out with some lawyer, banker, or entrepreneur.”

“Nice guys?”

“Most of them work out but not like you do. As a rule they have money and success. I’ve met at least three men who are tough-minded and equal to me in every way.”

“I see.”

“Twill and Theda had lunch yesterday,” she said. It seemed as if she was intent on keeping me off balance.

“Yeah?”

“He told her how you killed the men who broke into your house. He said that you wanted Katrina to go into hiding but she refused.”

I threw half a strip of the thick maple-infused bacon into my mouth and chewed.

“So?”

“Don’t you see, Leonid?” Aura asked.

“That Katrina’s gone off the deep end?”

“That you did not try to force her. That’s the difference between you and the men I’ve met.”

“ What’s that?”

“They’ve all become rich and powerful because they’re afraid of the world; they need to feel like they’re conquering everything and everyone in order to feel safe. You just face the problems and stand strong. Ever since I met you I’ve known that you are what I want in a man.” She paused a few seconds and then added, “In my life.”