And Sometimes I Wonder About You (19 page)

H
e wore a brown jacket, skinny black jeans, a gray-and-blue-plaid shirt, and a bright orange bow tie. His shoes were blunt-toed and brown, and the generous thatch of brown hair was shot through with strands of gray. He still had those freckles and if I was forced to report on the color of his eyes I would have said blue-gray.

Those pale eyes opened wide when I greeted him.

“You Violet’s new man?”

“Leonid McGill,” I said, extending a hand.

We shook, him squeezing to test the strength of my grip.

“What do you want, Mr. McGill?”

“I need to have a talk with you. I was going to offer Violet nine hundred dollars to put us together. I’ll be happy to give it to you instead.”

“Talk about what?”

“Let’s go grab a coffee and make the exchange,” I said. “Cash for information.”

The skinny scam artist considered his options. He didn’t want his business messed with but I posed a threat whether we talked or not. He needed to know what I knew and also there was a shot at nine hundred dollars.

“Okay,” he said after a full minute standing in front of Violet’s cell-like door. “All right. There’s a place I like over on Lafayette. We could hoof it over there.”

Half a block from Violet’s apartment my phone sounded. I looked at the screen, saw it was another unknown caller. I figured that it was Violet, disconnected the request, and turned the ringer off.

On the way Paulie probed me.

“How you know Violet?” he asked.

“Never met her.”

“Then what were you doing waiting for me at her door?”

I told nearly the whole story, leaving out Luke’s name. By the time I got to the visit with his mother we had reached the Excellent Bean on Lafayette, just a few blocks south of Astor Place.

At the counter I ordered a triple latte for me and a large hot chocolate for Paulie. He’d taken a small table in a corner.

“What is it that I know worth all that money to you, McGill?” he asked when we were finally settled.

“I’m looking for a young woman named Celia Landis but you might know her as Coco Lombardi.”

With eyes as expressive as his, Paulie could never be a cardplayer. Those bright orbs darted from my big hands to the door. They calculated his chance of getting away but came up with odds too long for his comfort.

“I, I don’t know those names.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because if I can’t get to her I’m going to have to tell the people I work for that I came to a dead end named Paulie DeGeorges. I don’t know for a fact but I’ve heard that they already killed two men who didn’t know anything.”

Paulie’s shoulders juddered and he looked down at his hands.

“This is not your regular scam, Paulie. These people have power and money. They don’t give a fuck about an ex-con like you.”

“You don’t have to give them my name,” he suggested.

“I do if I expect to get paid.”

“So if I tell you where she is you’re gonna tell them?”

“Actually no,” I said. “I think that book she stole might get me a whole lot more than they’re offering.”

“I thought you said that they were dangerous, killers.”

I sat back in my coffeehouse chair and smiled. All around the café young men and women were sitting and talking. I noted that the women smiled more than did the men. I was smiling too, challenging the odds. It was an easy grin because I was confident in my footing.

“Who do you know, Paulie?”

“What do you mean?”

“In the Life,” I said, “somebody that knows the names of the players who could tell you about Leonid McGill.”

“I got my people,” he said defensively. “Prison ain’t on the moon.”

“Call him up,” I said. “Tell him my name and see what he says.”

Paulie peered at me like a sparrow that thinks he might have seen a shadow moving through the bushes. He even turned his head to the side.

Finally he brought an old cell phone out of a green pocket and flipped it open.

While he entered the number I took up my phone and typed in the letters HU.

Hush answered on the third ring.

“LT.”

“Twill said you had some worries.”

“No worries, brother.” He had never called me brother before. I wondered what that meant. “Might be something, might not. Either way I know what to do.”

“You need me to come by?”

“Mr. McGill,” Paulie said.

I held up a finger for him to wait.

“No, LT, I’m okay. Matter’a fact I’m kinda havin’ fun.”

I didn’t like the notion of a smiling killer but there was no time to deal with that right then. I said my good-byes and turned to Paulie.

“Yeah?”

“My friend asked if I could send him a picture of you.”

“That piece’a shit phone has a camera?”

“One of the first.”

“Snap away,” I said.

He held up the phone for a moment and then turned it around to hit a few buttons. He sat there watching it as the outmoded technology organized and sent the picture, one pixel at a time.

After maybe three minutes he brought the phone to his ear and asked, “You get it?…Uh-huh…Uh-huh…Yeah, yeah, all right. Thanks, T.”

He put the phone away and looked at me like a man who had just been convicted and now waited for the sentence.

“You know,” he said after a moment or so, “I always felt like I was born in the wrong place and time. I mean the people here and everywhere don’t know shit about style or
sophistication.
My own wife went out and had an affair with some dude and then tells me that he made her feel like she never knew she could. He broke it off with her but she left me anyway. That don’t stop her from askin’ me for help whenever she needs it. There ain’t nuthin’ right about that. And my mother…My mother had this check-kiting scheme she used to use at banks in different cities. She’d hit town for a week and get fifteen, twenty thousand and then move on. Never saw two Mondays in the same town and never even got questioned, much less arrested. She refused to visit me in prison because she was humiliated that I got caught. Here I stole the money to pay for her goddamned nursing home and she wouldn’t even answer a letter. Shit. There I am in prison for her and she cut me off.

“You know my old man was no better. Strong motherfucker like you, only taller. Rob banks and armored cars. He said that he was ashamed to have a scrawny son like me. He run off from my mother because he said I was the issue of an affair…”

What surprised me was his proper use of the word “issue.” There was an education under that bony, sad-sack brow.

“Here I could’a made somethin’ of myself but everybody live in the modern world where nobody gives a shit about what’s right. And the worst place is prison. Motherfuckers up in there brag on all the crimes they did that no one ever tumbled to. Serial killers in jail for assault; arsonists put away for trespass. I don’t have no choice but to do what I do and to be what I am. Nobody does.”

“How did you meet Coco?” I asked to get the derailed scam artist back on my track.

“Her brother.”

“How you know him?”

“They busted him for smuggling drugs. He was my cellmate time before last. When his sister got in trouble he got in touch with me
’
cause he knew I was just about to get out.”

“Why didn’t he help her?”

“Prison again,” Paulie said. “North Carolina. Here every motherfucker and his kid is hooked on
pharmaceuticals
and they put Timothy in for moving seventeen ounces of hashish. Seventeen! Shit. The best of us are the worst of us. We have lost our right to God.”

If I had only heard that one diatribe I would have known that Paulie was a jailbird. The odd mixture of philosophy, religion, and despair marked him as sure as a black man’s skin.

“One thing remains the same,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“You either eat or die.”

Paulie looked up at me then and a smile came unbidden to his lips. He was a scam artist who thrived on truth; no wonder he was so sad. He probably thought that his wife’s lover was better endowed than he; I was willing to wager that the one-night stand just knew how to laugh.

“What you want, McGill?”

“I want to talk to Coco. I want you to tell her that I know about the book and about the woman that wants it back. Tell her that I say that I can make it right for her and even get her a little scratch, you too.”

“How much?”

“More than twenty-five thousand for her and at least five for you if we get this business done. I’ll pay you nine hundred right now on good faith.”

“And you won’t, you won’t tell about me?”

“If you help me there’s no reason to.”

I reached in my jacket pocket and came out with a wad of hundreds.

Paulie jerked his head around and said, “Put it away, man. You can pay me outside.”

“Okay.”

“Look,” he said. “I don’t want no trouble with you. My friend T says that you’re serious business, that people have to be careful around you. So I’ma say that I’ll call Coco an’ ask her but if she says no there’s nuthin’ I could do.”

“What more can I ask for?” I asked.

I
t was nighttime in Greenwich Village. I went to a bar on Second Avenue, had three cognacs to toast my lost and long-dead lover Gert Longman, and then trundled down into the subway to make it back home.

My wife and father were sitting in the little front room again, drinking wine punch and telling each other things. She was laughing. There was color in her face. My father might have been blushing too but his skin was as dark as mine so the blood stayed hidden.

“Trot,” he said.

“Clarence,” I replied.

“Are you hungry, Leonid?” Katrina asked.

“Why?”

“I made chicken and dumplings the way you like them.”

Chicken and dumplings brought to mind a pop song from the
’
60s about a cuckold who came home early.

My father and wife joined me in the dining room. They asked a few perfunctory questions about my day and then went back to talking to each other.

The food was great. To accompany the protein and starch, Katrina had made fried okra in a roux—a dish she liked to call half-gumbo. There also was an apple-cabbage slaw and peach cobbler for dessert.

I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He’d learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he’d read. When he was a young man he eschewed fiction, thinking that reality was all that mattered. But working at that wheel he had the time to remember the stories he’d read and somehow came to the realization that the novel was the only way a human being could truly express the lives he experienced.

“Lives, not life?” Katrina asked.

“If you live long enough,” Clarence explained, “you take on many personas. I’ve gone from sharecropper to revolutionary to scribbler in my seventy-nine years.”

“You seem so much younger,” my flirtatious wife chimed.

“I notice you didn’t mention ‘father’ in your list of personas,” I anteed.

I almost felt bad about the pain that wrenched Clarence’s face.

After the meal I looked at my phone and saw that there were fifteen texts and six calls. I wondered at that and then remembered that I’d turned off the sound to concentrate on Paulie.

In my office I listened to the voice mails first. That was easy because four of them were from Violet Henrys-DeGeorges-Trammel. She wanted that nine hundred dollars—badly. I thought that she’d probably get the money before the night was over; maybe even Paulie would get lucky.

Of the two other messages one was a hang-up and the other from Aura. Just hearing her voice set off a chill in my chest. It was a physical manifestation of love, just as the erections I’d experienced recently were from the lust Marella Herzog brought out in me.

“Leonid,” she said, “I need to talk to you right away.”

“Hello,” she answered, wide awake at 11:49.

“What’s up, A?”

There were no preliminaries, no “how are you doing.” Aura went right into the problem saying, “A man calling himself Abe Hollyman came to my office today and said that he was working for a lawyer who needed to serve a summons on you.”

“He show some ID?”

“Yes, but it was just a business card. He offered me five hundred dollars and promised fifteen hundred more if I would call to orchestrate a meeting with you in the meeting room on the fifteenth floor. He said all I had to do was make the meeting time and he’d be there to serve the papers.”

“What did you do?”

“Took the money,” she said. “You know I have college expenses for my daughter. Then I told him that I’d call as soon as I got in touch with you.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“This is serious, honey,” the woman I loved said. “He wore gloves
and
a hat.”

Sitting there in my dark den, I got a little light-headed. That, as the old folks used to say, was the last straw. It was getting to be time for me to push back.

“Call Mr. Hollyman and tell him that you set up a ten-in-the-morning meeting with me. Tell him that he can pick up the key from Warren at the front desk anytime past nine. Tell Warren that I’ll get the key to the observation room at seven. And don’t you go to work at all. Stay home till I call and tell you that it’s okay.”

“LT?” Carson Kitteridge said at a few minutes after midnight.

“Did I wake you?”

“What do you need?”

“It’s not about Jones,” I said. “Not yet. But I got this other problem you might be interested in.”

There was a lull in the conversation, such as it was, for ten seconds or so. Carson was wondering if he should hang up on me. But we’d known each other too long for that. If I was calling then there was something happening that he should be aware of.

“What is it?” he asked.

I told him Aura’s story and we made half of a plan.

As a youth, sitting in the dark was always a relief to me. An adolescent roaming the streets of New York, I was often in trouble with the older boys and some men, too. I was a killer before my fifteenth birthday and for some years I’d have night terrors over the man I strangled. If I was very quiet under the cover of darkness this panic subsided, somewhat.

As a man I put away my guilty fears; I was, I told myself, prepared for anything, always prepared. I saw myself like my favorite mammal, the honey badger—a squat brute with exceptionally thick skin, powerful long claws, and always looking for trouble. The honey badger spends his days trampling through the world killing, digging up corpses, and defying even lions if he has to. He’s always in danger, and danger is always in him.

With these thoughts I got it in mind to turn on the lights and then, just as if God heard me, there was light.

“You goin’ to bed, Trot?” my father said from the door.

“Come on in, Clarence.”

Shrugging, he walked across the slender glove of a room to the stuffed chair set to the side of my desk.

“You got trouble, son?” he asked.

“Don’t you have a home?” I replied.

“Sure I do. I just thought you needed a little help around the house with Katrina just back and that thing with your office.”

“What is it with you and my wife, old man?”

“Is that what’s bothering you? You actually think I’d go after my own son’s wife?”

“She wants you like a tick craves blood.”

I realized then that my father’s face used to be rounder. This was why he looked like a stranger to me. He’d been a portly revolutionary but old age and a long list of failures had reduced him. His face was now long and oddly empathetic.

“Women are drawn to me, Trot. It’s because I’m always thinking about something else, something that seems like it might be more important than them to me. They want the love I feel for the Revolution or great literature. It’s hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.”

“They want you to want them,” I said. It felt as if I were a child again at my father’s feet.

“That’s it. A man feeling deeply about anything makes a woman want him to pay attention to her like that. When his passion is for something else she feels safe enough to look at it. And if you look long enough you want to try it out.”

“You know I hate you, right?” I said.

“I told you I’m not after your woman.”

“It’s not that, Clarence. You killed my mother. You promised me the world and then took it away. You save my wife and then tell me she yours if you want her but you don’t want her. I spent nearly half a century tryin’ to build back the engine of my life and here you come throwin’ a monkey wrench in the gears and ask, what did I do?”

To give him his due, my father didn’t try to argue or explain. He looked right at me, taking his medicine. I imagined that there were scars all over his body from South American torturers that didn’t hurt as much as the truth he was hearing.

“You want me to leave, son?”

“Not till this week is over,” I said. “Twill has to get out from under the mess he got into and it’s still a question whether or not I’ll survive till Monday. You stay a few days more and then you can get out of my life again.”