And Sometimes I Wonder About You (14 page)

A
fter a month of a dedicated housekeeper’s hard work the smell of old socks and twenty years of brooding had finally been cleaned away from Dimitri’s room. My father, whom I would always and forevermore call Clarence, was asleep therein. He told me that he felt best sleeping in a different bed every night; that he felt safer moving around.

I should have been asleep too. My days had been strenuous and the drinking wasn’t light. But there I was in my den/office wondering how it could be that I had discovered hidden feelings for my wife and once again lost her in just a few minutes’ time?

I picked up the phone at four minutes shy of midnight and dialed a number. After four rings a recording of Aura Ullman’s voice said, “You have reached me, so talk to me.” I hung up before the beep.

I’d called Aura hoping that there might be love somewhere for me, too. But if I couldn’t have love I had to dig deeper.

“Mr. McGill,” she said after the Hotel Brown switchboard operator connected us. “What revelation do you have for me at this hour?”

Just the sound of her voice brought up a vibration like a growl in my chest. The creature making this sound in me was like a wild thing—both hunted and free.

“I want you to know that I’m not asking you for anything, but…” I said.

“But what?” There was a lot of satisfaction in those two words.

“I’d like to come over.”

“I understand,” she said with no underlying gratification. “Come along.”

I walked there. The whole time I was thinking about how foolish it was to pursue a woman like that; a woman as dangerous as any killer I’d gone up against.

I was so wrapped up in these thoughts that I bumped into a pedestrian waiting for the light at Seventy-third and Broadway—a very large pedestrian male.

White, short-sleeved, and generously tattooed, the man made a sound like the one in my chest.

He said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, nigga?”

We live in a brave new world. Many white people in their thirties, and younger than that, take the derogatory slang from the music they listen to with no notion of insult based on race. I felt, however, that this particular individual had learned his slurs behind bars and under guard; at close quarters and in situations that were life and death on a daily basis.

I smiled broadly and held my upturned palms near shoulder level.

“Bring it on, my brother,” I said. “Bring it on.”

The tattooed man moved his left shoulder to put himself in an advantageous position for fighting. My smile deepened. He took me in with well-trained eyes, and the anger he carried around like a weapon suddenly faded. The light turned and he walked away at a pace he hoped I wouldn’t try to match.

If there was anything that should have dissuaded me from going to the Hotel Brown it was that ex-con’s reaction to me at that moment in time.

Marella and I didn’t speak until after 4:00 that morning. With her eyes, teeth, and clawlike nails (both hand and foot) she dared me to do things to her that most women have no stomach for. And no matter how far I went she was ready for more. It wasn’t fun and it certainly was not love but more like an operation to amputate a gangrenous limb or to excavate a diseased organ. We were doing each other for survival, not edification.

When it was over I wondered how far I’d have to go to get back to some version of civilization.

“I know a man in New Orleans named Gregor Vincent,” she said as she was washing the sex off both of us with a warm hand towel.

“Yeah?”

“He thinks I’m a virgin.”

“And?”

“His family owns half of South America and they do business in gold, not currency.”

“Sounds like your kinda guy.”

“We could make enough off him to take a five-year vacation and not even feel it.”

“Why you need me?” I asked, turning the notion of a criminal on holiday around in my mind. “I mean you’re the whole business on your own.”

“It’s good to have a strong man in the wings,” she said. “And even people like us need somebody to talk to from time to time.”

Despite my better nature, my desire to make up for my
transgressions,
I was tempted by this woman. She had touched a part of me that I hadn’t even known existed.

“We could take a piece of the next score and set up a trust fund for your wife and kids,” she offered.

“You don’t really care about the money,” I said, experiencing a sudden epiphany.

Marella smiled.

“Money’s nice,” she said. “It’s necessary, too, but…But I like to feel alive, you know? Love and money are fine but they’re only useful if they bring you to life.”

“And do you love me?” I don’t think I’d asked that question since my single-digit years.

“That’s not really a possibility for people like us now is it, Lee?” she said.

She reached out and took my damp penis in her left hand. As it engorged, her smile broadened. Looking in her eyes I realized that I was ready to go with her, to leave my family and office, loved ones and enemies to fend for themselves.

She had me, so to speak, by the balls.

Her stare brought to bear a will that was bending me like she was my dick. I didn’t resent her power any more than a bear resents the warmth of the sun waking him from blissful hibernation.

It was 5:00 a.m. and Marella was my escape hatch, my enlistment papers for the Foreign Legion.

It was 5:03 and the tune of the song “Seventh Son” played on my cell phone.

I reached for the phone while Marella clung to my erection.

“Twill?” I said on a hollow breath.

“Hey, Pop.”

“What do you need?”

“From the sound of it maybe what you gettin’.”

One of the reasons I loved Twill was that I couldn’t hide much from him. With this thought I realized that I did have the potential for love. My erection waned and Marella released her hold on me.

“Where are you?” I asked my son.

“At the front of your hotel. That GPS shit work like magic.”

“I’ll be right down.”

“Are you leaving me, Lee?” Marella asked as I was pulling my pants up.

“I got to get downstairs and see about my son.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“When I was your age, Mar, I did everything you’re doin’ now. I stole and cheated and lied and worse. Meeting you makes me realize that I miss those wild days. I miss it. I got friends that miss it. But I know, and you should know, that one day one of us would have to stab the other in the back—have to. That’s as much a fact as Gregor Vincent’s gold.”

There was a feral genius glowing in Marella’s eyes. She nodded ever so slightly and then shook her head.

“A few nights like the one we just had might be worth a knife in the back,” she speculated.

“Not if you see it comin’.”

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

“I’ll fix this thing with your DC ex,” I said. “And I’ll come spend the night again if you still want that.”

She kissed me with a fierce passion and then kissed me harder.

T
will was parked in front of the hotel in my 1957 dark green Pontiac. I smiled at the young man and the car; both boy and machine were classic in their own way.

When I was putting on my seat belt Twill handed me a paper cup of black coffee.

“Thanks,” I said. I took a big gulp of the bitter liquid, burning my tongue and groaning.

“What’s wrong, Pops?”

“Burned my mouth.”

“No, man,” he said. “You still actin’ kinda off.”

I had brought Twill on as a trainee detective to keep him honest; but if the truth be told he, more often than not, performed that function for me.

“I feel like a kid when his testicles have just descended. Nothing’s the same and somehow I know that it never will be again.”

He turned over the engine, pulled away from the curb, and asked, “She that good?”

“You know you should respect your father.”

“Cecil’s?” he asked instead of taking the bait.

“Sure.”

Down in a part of Chinatown that used to be Little Italy is a workman’s coffee shop simply called Sicily. It opens every morning at four thirty and serves breakfast until just about twenty past eight. Over time the people that frequented the diner began calling it Cecil’s.

The restaurant had a counter that sat nine, and six tables. Tomas and Donna were the owners, cooks, janitors, and dishwashers of the establishment. When they opened the place, sixty years earlier, they had been married but then Donna had an affair with a wannabe gangster named Michael. Tomas divorced Donna, who in turn married Mike, who was then gunned down by a real gangster.

Tomas and Donna still ran the breakfast joint. I only ever heard them talk about the work they were doing. Once, when he was nine, Dimitri asked me if Tomas and Donna were still in love.

“There are things in the world more important than love,” I said to him.

Those words came back to me as Twill pulled up to the curb across the street from Cecil’s Sicily.

We sat in a corner booth that I liked. I ordered oatmeal because my stomach was a little raw from too much booze and agitation. My son had half a grapefruit and a rasher of bacon. Old Italians, Chinese laborers of various ages, and a few knowledgeable partygoers at the end of their night were there eating and talking in low tones.

“Fortune’s gone missing,” Twill said after Donna took our order. “I went to his room over on Avenue D. Somebody had broken down the door.”

“Any blood?” I asked.

Twill shook his head.

“So maybe the ones busted in missed him, too,” I suggested.

“That’s like I see it. But you know he ain’t gonna make it long if Jones has his people after his ass.”

“It’s a big city,” I offered. “Fortune might be the kind who knows how to hide.”

Donna brought our fruit, cereal, and meat on a cork-lined cherrywood platter.

“Don’t see you in a long time, LT,” she said.

“Not enough trouble around here anymore,” I said in way of explanation.

“Used to be your old man and his brother would come here when they was just kids,” Donna said to Twill, one bony fist on her skinny hip. “They’d eat honey cakes and ham and then help Tomas empty the garbage.”

“How old was he?” Twill asked, though he’d heard the story a dozen times.

“LT was twelve-thirteen and Nicky was two years less than that. They come and listen to the old gangsters after a night of partying or maybe a job. That’s where both boys learned all their bad habits.”

“We got customers,” Tomas shouted. His back was turned and he was leaning over the grill.

Donna sucked a tooth and moved on.

“Jones got a LoJack on all his people,” Twill said.

“What?”

“It’s this tube that they put under the skin, usually behind the knee. He got this one nurse cut you open, shove it in, and then sew up the wound with one stitch. I got one the first day. Fortune told me that Jones got this computer that locates people good as your GPS.”

“Damn.”

“You better believe it.”

“So he could look and see that you’re here right now?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

“Bug.”

Tiny “Bug” Bateman had lived and worked for a decade in a cellar under the apartment building he still owns in the West Village. But after he started dating Zephyra he abandoned that property and bought a brownstone on East Twenty-ninth. His computers and other electronics occupied the upper floors and the basement of his new place, but at least now he spent most of his time aboveground.

His paranoia is still in evidence however: the windows are bulletproof and there are high-yield explosives knitted into every wall. After many years of therapy Bug had figured out that living under a perceived state of siege was why he had ballooned up to three hundred eighty-five pounds.

“But I’d rather exercise four hours a day and eat protein powder than give up my guns and bombs,” he told me the day after he stopped going to his analyst.

Twill pulled my Pontiac into Bug’s attached parking garage.

Bug opened the front door to admit us at a few minutes past 7:00 a.m. He was wearing a plush burgundy robe and bright yellow slippers. He usually slept late but I figured that he’d want to see us as much as we wanted him.

The caramel-colored young man was a shade under six feet with the physical conditioning of a young heavyweight. He’d lost so much weight that even his face had changed shape.

“I got breakfast in the kitchen,” he said.

“We already hit Cecil’s,” Twill told him.

Bug’s living room had been designed by Zephyra. The pine floor had been replaced by bamboo and the furniture was original eighteenth-century French Provincial. I think Z just liked being able to spend two hundred thousand on settees, chairs, and tables.

“We need to find somebody in Jones’s system,” Twill said when we were seated.

“You told LT about the location devices?” Bug asked.

“The question is,” I said, “why didn’t
you
tell me?”

“Twill’s a man,” Bug said gravely.

I wanted to argue about blood, a father’s duty, and the chain of command but there were more important things to concentrate on. Anyway Bug left the room.

He came back in a few minutes with an oversized laptop under his arm. He summoned us to an ornate table set in the bay windows. We pulled chairs next to him while he unfolded and switched on the computer. He spent a few minutes answering security questions and setting us up among the dozens of projects, operating systems, and external systems that his machines straddled.

Finally he got to a screen where each of the pages had an electronic watermark—
JONESDOWN
.

“Explain to me how this system works,” I said.

“It’s pretty rudimentary,” Bug began, leaning forward hungrily. “But really efficient. The units are always on, always transmitting to a satellite system that a trucking transport company uses.”

“How did he get wired into that?” I asked.

“From what Twill tells me he probably had something on one of the controllers, maybe even the CEO…Anyway, I was able to isolate the pulse and then piggyback into the system. I downloaded the virtual addresses of eight hundred ninety-six units implanted in the people he keeps track of.”

“Eight ninety-six?” Twill and I both said.

“Yeah. It’s probably more than that but that’s the people active today. I just mapped it out last night after you called,” Bug said to Twill. “I can track or derail any monitoring of the eight ninety-six. Right now I have Twill sleeping in an apartment building up in Washington Heights.”

“What about Fortune?” Twill asked.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “These devices identify themselves?”

“No,” Bug answered. “They just have four-byte hexadecimal addresses, but the Jones system associates those addresses to files. I’m tied in there so it’s easy to put a name to a pulse. The only problem is that the devices can’t be monitored underground. The last time I have a reading on your friend is him down around Wall Street.”

“Shit,” Twill said. “How long ago?”

“Six hours.”

“And he hasn’t showed up since then?”

Slowly Bug wagged his head from side to side. For a moment I remembered him as a fat man gazing through semiopaque rainbow-colored glasses at a dozen monitors hanging from a ceiling in a hole in the ground.

“I know where he is,” Twill said to me. “Problem is he been down there with half the girls on Jones’s crew. It’s this subbasement room in a construction project that’s been stalled. Fortune snipped off all the padlocks and replaced them with his own.”

“So he thinks he’s safe?” I asked.

“Prob’ly so.”

“We should be going,” I said. Then to Bug, “Do you mind if we leave our car in your garage for a bit?”

“Sure you can.”

“And turn off Fortune’s tracker,” Twill said.

“You got it.”

At the door Twill said that he had to retrieve something from the car. As soon as he was down the front stairs Bug put a hand on my shoulder.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.

“About Zephyra?”

“How’d you know?”

“Because you only ever want advice on exercise or her.”

“I hear she went away with some guy, some prince, to South Africa.” There was a vein standing out in the middle of Bug’s forehead. It throbbed, resembling an earthworm undulating just under the surface of wet sand.

“How many women you been with in the last three months?” I asked the math genius.

“She said she wanted an open relationship,” he protested.

“That don’t mean she wants you to rub her nose in it.”

“What does she expect me to do? I asked her to marry me. She said no.”

“In my line of work, David,” I said, uttering his rarely used given name, “I find that what people say and what they mean are often quite different entities.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Twill waved at me from the curb.

“You’re a smart guy,” I said. “Work it out.”